Gongol.com Archives: February 2026
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February 2, 2026
A professor at Brown University makes the case for using in-class persuasive speaking assignments as a method of learning assessment, arguing that it's a method more resistant to cheating than traditional written essays. Even if a student tried to deliver a ChatGPT-generated verbal argument, writes Stephen Kidd, it would fall flat all on its own: "Try lecturing off someone else's notes. It's impossible." ■ As a professor of classics, he's in a better position than most other instructors to take advantage of oral arguments as assessments. Economics professors are still going to need their pupils to draw IS-LM curves and a proof is going to remain a proof in calculus. ■ But there is something to be said for trying to align testing with the long-term interests of students, and there's no denying that many of the careers open to college graduates will call for at least some verbal persuasion from time to time (even quite often, for those who burn through lots of screen time on Microsoft Teams meetings). ■ It's also wise to ask instructors at all stages of education to have a real theory of the case for how they assess student progress. Some forms of testing (like multiple-choice exams) are notoriously easier to grade than others, but that doesn't necessarily make them the optimal ways to determine if the content is getting through. At its best, student assessment tells an instructor whether their message is getting through or needs refinement. At its worst, testing is used to force students to self-teach (often by cramming) when the instructors have failed in the basic work of pedagogy.
February 8, 2026
It's easy to see why there are so many websites purporting to serve up recipes: When trying to bake, mix, fry, sautee, or whip up something for the first time, the easiest default move is to pull out a smartphone and look for an answer on the Internet. Where demand like that exists, the incentive to offer a supply does, too. ■ Recipes alone don't create enough space on the screen to fit many ads, nor do they offer a lot of advantage in the search results, so many (if not most) recipe sites have become cluttered with fluff -- space-filling background details, unnecessary origin tales, and long, pointless narratives describing often-improbable idealized sequences of events. ■ The combination of high interest, tough competition, and infinitely variable components (like ingredients, quantities, and steps) unfortunately makes recipes downright magnetic to AI-generated "content" creators. It is the place where "AI slop" meets literal slop. ■ It's hard to know how we will reconcile with the mountains of trash now starting to clutter the results for recipe searches. One can hope that real recipe books full of marginalia will survive in enough places for people to still find them -- the Internet Archive is digitizing and sharing thousands of them, and there will probably be other efforts to digitally capture real, human-made recipes with real paper trails. ■ And that's a good thing, because there's no way to give AI the ability to experience the real sensation of taste -- which would come as no surprise to those who remember the glue on pizza incident. It's of no little importance to build some kind of fortification around the real, accountable knowledge that humans have won through trial and error over many generations, especially when that knowledge is easy to mimic (as with generative AI) without real understanding.
February 10, 2026
The Olympic Games offer a vivid reminder every other year that the shared aspects of humanity far outnumber the ones that differ. The circumstances of any individual athlete's journey to the world's most elite competitive event will differ, but any biographical tale originating anywhere will contain themes that are instantly familiar to anyone: Support and encouragement from friends and family, the thrill of victory, the challenge of self-discipline, the value of a good coach, the rewards of sacrifice. The setting could be anywhere, but the fundamental motivations remain the same. ■ In 1988, then-President Ronald Reagan gave a speech in which he pointed to the Revolutionary War with these words: "We learned then that the God-given love of freedom that fills every human heart with strength is the greatest force the world has ever known. No empire, no tyrant, no ruling party can resist it forever. To stand on the side of human freedom is truly to stand on the side of history." ■ Reagan was right back then. And his words are no less true today. It may go suppressed. It may be in hiding. It may lie dormant beneath other concerns -- concerns that might be as immediate as obtaining food or shelter. ■ But in the end, the general feeling is almost universally true. What's sad is when that common thread goes unrecognized, especially by people who ought to know better. Freedom has moments when it is ascendant, and it has moments when it is pushed into some measure of retreat. But the human spirit remains the same: The same instinct for freedom is and will always be hugely influential over the long run of human affairs. Anyone who ignores it for (or because of) their own power is only deferring trouble.
February 12, 2026
The free world celebrated a great victory in 1991 when Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia were restored to independence after half a century of hostile occupation (mainly by the Soviet Union). It was a symbolic victory for democracy to see that the people of three small countries were once again able to govern themselves, reasserting their legitimate right to decide matters free of coercive control. ■ Those three Baltic countries are small, each no larger than 3 million in population. Estonia, the smallest, has a bit shy of 1.4 million people. And yet, despite its small size, it is highly rated by Freedom House and was ranked #21 in the Economist Democracy Index in 2024. Small size doesn't hold it back from delivering on high expectations for democracy. ■ If ranked among the 50 states, Estonia would fit between Maine and Montana, easily in the bottom quintile for population. Even though it is no more than a modest lake and river apart from Russia, its delivers successfully on the promise of free elections. ■ Elections do not need to be managed by big government from faraway locations. Mandates do not need to be handed down as though from on high to boss around states like vassals. If a requirement or restriction truly makes sense, then its advocates should make the case and wait for states and local jurisdictions to adopt it independently. ■ Elections are locally managed in the United States, reflecting a clear Constitutional choice with a long historical track record. If Estonia can handle elections on its own, without the ham-fisted interference of a larger government entity, then so can any American state. ■ Uniformity isn't a necessity in a Federal electoral system; it is partly because individual states had the freedom to expand the franchise locally that women successfully secured the right to vote. A due respect for the history of the right to vote, for the security-by-design of the Federal system, and for the Tenth Amendment itself ought to caution anyone against trying to impose control on the strictly state and local administration of elections.
February 13, 2026
Winston Churchill famously published a collection of speeches from the period immediately before the UK was drawn into World War II which became known by the title "While England Slept". Unlike many of his contemporaries, Churchill was vocal and forthright about the growing existential threat his country faced in the 1930s. ■ Sensible people should ask themselves whether Emmanuel Macron of France is in Churchill's shoes today. At the Munich Security Conference, Macron has correctly identified that "If we reach a settlement on Ukraine, we will still have to contend with an aggressive Russia", and that "Europe has to learn to become a geopolitical power" so that if Russia's war on Ukraine can be ended, it will have the wherewithal to "define rules of coexistence that limit the risk of escalation". ■ Churchill would have put it better, but he was unique in his ability, as Edward R. Murrow put it, to mobilize the language and send it into battle. Macron may be the best the world can get for now. ■ At least he is saying it, though. Europe took the post-Cold-War peace dividend and splurged on the faulty assumption that peace would reign forever. Far from it: It seems self-evident now that if the Kremlin had adequately feared or even respected a decisive European defensive mobilization, it wouldn't have attacked Ukraine like it did. It's too late to put that fear into them now, at least preemptively, but that's no excuse to wait any longer to establish credible deterrence to any further invasions.
February 14, 2026
The "social" part of social media is becoming ever more a misnomer as the various mainstream services become ever more cluttered with "content" generated by artificial-intelligence tools. Totally synthesized memes on Facebook, waves of "slop" videos on YouTube, and dispatches from imaginary workplaces on LinkedIn are choking the feeds of users. ■ Incentives create this problem, of course: "Engagement" becomes the magnet for time, and user time is ultimately what the sites are selling. If users aren't willing to turn away from low-quality content, then low-cost producers will churn out more of it in huge volumes. ■ But there is something else to it, and that's shame. There are lots of things that people don't create (or consume) because they are considered undignified. We need to attach a like kind of stigma to those who waste other people's time with materials they merely asked a machine to hallucinate. ■ We make a huge mistake if we think that "intelligence" is strictly a thing that can be stored on digital memory and reconstituted at will. Imagine the hubris involved in using an LLM to steal the attention of an audience with an emotional message invented entirely by a thing that had never tasted as much as a slice of birthday cake or smelled a dryer sheet, much less experienced infatuation or suffered failure. ■ It's hard to imagine calling anything "intelligent" when it has no access to either sensory experience or feelings. Yet people using AI to generate content in order to manipulate other people for profit are doing just that, but with mercenary intent. There is a word for that, and the word is shameful.
February 15, 2026
The contributory and causal reasons may be many, but the result is stark: Three-quarters of American 16-year-olds don't drive. Many learn between 16 and 18, but the share of non-driver 18-year-olds is 40%. To generations who treated learning to drive as one of the main rites of passage -- if not the main event itself! -- the figures can be astonishing. ■ There's perhaps something of a silver lining to the data, in that cars are less of a cultural obsession to the generation newly rising into adulthood than they were to older generations. That may open the door to smarter urban designs, more imaginative transportation frameworks, better land use, and less carbon-intensive means of getting people around. Fleets of autonomous electric vehicles may become normalized without massive cultural resistance. ■ But the United States remains an enormous country, populated at a fraction of the density of most countries in Europe, and some Great American Road Trips will remain not only desirable, but fundamentally necessary for the good of the economy. We can do a lot via Zoom meetings and Teams calls, but there are lots of tasks remaining where someone still has to go and see it for themselves. Lawyers, plumbers, engineers, portrait photographers, and security consultants will all need to visit their clients (or their clients' properties) from time to time, and there may not always be an Uber at the ready or a Waymo capable of navigating the back roads. ■ It's best if we avoid too much rigidity in response to a major trend shift like the decline in adolescent driving, but it should certainly lead us to reappraise our assumptions about the status quo and give fresh thought to the direction of things to come.
February 16, 2026
There was a time when being the quickest with a slide rule might have made one the most sought-after engineer in town. Slide rules aren't easy to master, but there were those who, at the extreme edges of the skill, could rival the computational speed of an electronic calculator. ■ Today, there is novelty in being able to operate a slide rule, and there can even be some isolated cases in which the skill might prove itself handy, but it's not in any way a necessary modern engineering skill. It's probably good for an engineering student to understand conceptually what makes the slide rule work, but it's no longer a necessary skill nor a good screening mechanism for identifying high performers. ■ Instead of practicing the slide rule, a good engineer today would be better served by spending time learning contemporary skills (like how to apply spreadsheet formulas or operate modeling software) and by developing foundational skills in related areas, like economics, human factors, public administration, accounting, and even law. No domain of knowledge is an island unto itself; most people need to know about at least a few fields adjacent to their own. ■ Well-roundedness isn't just an abstract virtue. It's what permits people to anticipate consequences of their actions and to communicate across domains in order to secure desirable results not just immediately and on the first order, but for the long term and multiple steps removed from the original action. ■ This is what makes the current hostility to educational breadth in the military such a troubling and short-sighted error. Chest-thumping about "lethality" may be red meat for some light-thinking audiences, but caring only about the number of dead bodies that pile up is like caring only about how fast someone can work a slide rule. ■ Particularly in the emerging era of gray-zone conflict, lasting national security is about much more than just the kinetic damage a country can do. Deterrence, logistical sustainability, counterinsurgency, and a thousand other factors can be equally important. Thinking soldiers are a threat to nobody but their enemies. The incurious and unimaginative ones are a hazard to their own side.
February 18, 2026
The ancients weren't stupid; they just lacked information
One of the classic tricks for duping gullible people is to describe a claim as being "ancient knowledge", like "traditional" diets and other "forgotten wisdom". Bonus points apply if a mystical spin is involved, if the attribution can originate in a faraway place, or if the story can involve something being "rediscovered". ■ Paradoxically, the success of this technique is inversely correlated with the actual historical literacy of the audience. The less they actually know about the past, the more likely they are to fall for claims that secret knowledge was locked away. ■ We in the modern era were not born magically smarter than people who came before us (at least, not appreciably). Pluck a baby born 500 or 1,000 years ago and raise them with modern immunizations, nutrition, safe drinking water, and access to all the tools of today's knowledge, and that baby would most likely turn out just like any of us. ■ It takes some serious intellectual humility to admit that it's not that we are born innately smarter, but that we benefit from all kinds of environmental factors -- above all, the collection of more and better information, the trial and error of generations, and ultimately the transmission of that knowledge from one person to the next. ■ Yes, there are lots of things to be discovered in the historical record, and there are even some very good ideas and practices that have been lost to disuse or failures of transmission along the way. But claims about secretive "ancient wisdom" usually depend upon people's eagerness to think that they're privy to inside information, which is generally less fun than investing the effort required to figure out why today's practices resulted from trial and error and research in the past. ■ It's hard work to maintain, expand, and transmit the world's knowledge from one generation to the next. We have to be humble enough to know that we're not special geniuses and that our predecessors weren't stupid -- they just didn't have the same knowledge resources as we do. Our task is to preserve and expand those resources, knowing that old ideas sometimes will need a contemporary boost, but trusting as well that history should be treated as a proving ground for successes and failures among humans whose innate intelligence and nature were very much in the past like ours are today.
February 21, 2026
Suppose for a moment that every whisper, rumor, and accusation about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (or, as social media has dubbed him, the Andrew formerly known as Prince) could be conclusively disproven. Imagine that his arrest had never happened and that every loathsome email could be proven a forgery. Hypothesize for just a moment that his personal behavior had been entirely scrupulous. ■ He would still be a titanic failure of a human being. As one-time runner-up in the line of succession to the British throne, the man was given the equivalent of a full-ride scholarship in life. And with it, he has done nothing of exceptional personal merit. ■ Yes, there are expectations that go along with membership in a royal family -- including some that broke Harry's relationship with the same family. And the whole family business is a ludicrous affair, practically guaranteed to make a ruinous mess of every individual member's psyche. (On those grounds alone, it deserves to be scrapped.) ■ But everyone has some agency in life, and that includes princes. With his full-ride scholarship in life, did he choose to make himself a great researcher or vital fundraiser for a terrible disease? Did he transform a cause by cheerfully showering it in the light of his celebrity or grant his evidently abundant free time as a selfless volunteer? ■ No, he grumbled in private about his trivial responsibilities while evidently indulging in whatever pleased his hedonistic urges. To some, little is given, and yet they still manage to make themselves net contributors to the world around them. To others, even a storybook start in life isn't enough to motivate them to show gratitude to their fellow humans. Benjamin Franklin anticipated just such a disappointment when he wrote, "'Tis a shame that your family is an honor to you! You ought to be an honor to your family."
February 22, 2026
Cutting the wrong costs can cost more
For a fleeting moment, it appeared that the Federal government was going to execute one of the most self-defeating moves possible by suspending the TSA PreCheck program as a means of economizing while the Department of Homeland Security is under a funding suspension. The TSA has reversed the plan and left PreCheck in place. ■ The old adage "It takes money to make money" has a corollary: Cutting the wrong costs can cost more. PreCheck is a great example of a program that makes economic sense: If we're going to have the kind of security controls that have become the post-9/11 standard, then it makes sense to have an expedited process for particularly high-frequency travelers who know the specialized compliance rules and consent to advanced screening like background checks. ■ Getting those people out of the way quickly makes security screening faster for everyone. That, in turn, ought to reduce the total amount of labor-hours actually required to get the same quality of screening performed -- to say nothing of the value of giving people a better experience, on average, with their government. As a matter of principle, free people should be able to expect their encounters with government to be safe, respectful, and as unobtrusive as possible. ■ An extension of this logic deserves attention elsewhere. Sometimes, the government can save tax dollars (on balance) by spending strategically on high-impact measures. ■ Spending on auditing and oversight? Generally quite smart. Spending on preventative health measures? Often very high-return. Spending on educational and training measures that help people leverage their own efforts into higher earnings capacity? Often among the most important strategies for ensuring that the vast majority can enjoy the benefits of policies like free trade without irreparably harming a minority of workers. ■ Almost every choice has second- and third-order consequences that matter enough to deserve attention from the outset. It isn't always obvious that spending money in column "A" will result in much larger savings in column "B". But policy leaders can show themselves to be worthy of more or less trust by how well they take care to acknowledge and account for those consequences that lurk beneath the surface.
February 23, 2026
High-ranking AI manager at Meta loses inbox to rogue AI agent
Letting computers have administrative-level control over things like inboxes seems imprudent. Why are people so eager to surrender control?
Measles outbreak traced to Utah wrestling meet
Sometimes risky choices seem less troubling when the risk-takers experience a long run of good luck. The frighteningly low rates of vaccination against measles is a risk that's run up against the cold, hard reality of virality. Utah claims to have a generally adequate immunization rate, but when about 1 in 10 kindergarteners are "exempted" from vaccines like the MMR, someone's going to get sick.
February 24, 2026
NASA research library at Goddard being closed
NASA is closing down the research library at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. A sizeable amount of archival content is going to be discarded as part of a 60-day review of the materials. There are those who have spoken up to oppose the closure, but it's far from "Topic A" on most minds. ■ The problem, though, is that if material is hastily or uncritically destroyed without at least being first digitized, it won't be recovered. There are lots of times when libraries and other archival institutions decide for prudent reasons that some materials are not worth holding anymore (this can, incidentally, create wonderful opportunities for second-hand buyers of discarded library materials). ■ What matters, though, is that caution is exercised to the fullest -- especially right now. There is no central clearinghouse of knowledge, no final gatekeeper of the facts. There are certain well-established high-authority sources in print, like the Encyclopedia Britannica or the Oxford English Dictionary, and high-credibility institutions like the Mayo Clinic and the Smithsonian that maintain high profiles with the public. ■ But the AI boom in particular has caused many other institutions to suspend any and all defensive perimeters about the sources of knowledge. Once hallucinated citations, imaginary sources, and outright misinformation have forged their way into any given "training set", whether for a large language model or a real, live human being, then it becomes much harder to know what's trustworthy without going back to original source materials. ■ Once you've baked a cake, there's no reversing the process to get back to uncracked eggs and sifted flour. The Internet right now is mixing authentic knowledge from real source materials with synthetic content assembled by very convincing machines -- but the made-up content is working its way into the physical world, too. There have always been forgers, fakes, and fraudsters about, but they've never before had the tools of mass production on their side. ■ And that's why now is a time for radical caution surrounding the sources of our knowledge. Libraries, archives, and other holders of raw data and original source materials need to be more protective than they have ever been in modern times. Some processes can be reversed, but for a lot of hard-won knowledge, the risk of contamination right now is unusually great.
February 25, 2026
Representative Al Green was removed from the House chambers after unfurling a protest banner at the State of the Union address. The event -- which may be the peak example of meeting that could have been an email, since it quite literally was only a written report for more than a century -- has attracted lots of attention-seeking behavior, in a manner that seems like it has escalated in recent years. ■ And why wouldn't it? In principle, at least, the address is supposed to be a job report: One delivered by an individual assigned to faithfully execute a job, and received by the one body of people legally authorized to fire that individual. In the Constitutional mechanism of Madison's imagination, the balance of power favors those audience members. It should surprise no one that some of them would use the event to seek attention of their own. ■ What is a surprise, though, is the general lack of imagination employed by members of Congress. Rep. Green used a handwritten sign. Rep. Jill Tokuda wore a jacket emblazoned with a fist. A considerable number of women chose pink or white outfits in 2025. But nothing to really make a coordinated impression during those wide shots of the full Congressional audience. ■ Why hasn't anyone brought back the political sash? The historical precedent of the "Votes for Women" sash worn across the chest is strong -- and in our era of fast fashion and Etsy stores, sashes could be thoroughly tasteful, creative, and timely, not to mention more decorous than what Senator John Fetterman used to wear. ■ Pick a color, a pattern, or a set of stripes. Use words, stick to icons or symbols, or let the colors alone do the talking. It wouldn't be hard -- probably even easier than trying to coordinate lots of individuals to wear the same outfits. But it would offer a visual that had a chance at making an impression, not to mention one that could be reused many times beyond a single event like the State of the Union. ■ The women who campaigned for suffrage understood: Wear the message relentlessly until it breaks through. If politicians are going to seek attention for their causes anyway, why not make the displays aesthetically tasteful?
February 27, 2026
CIA World Factbook erased from the Internet
The CIA claims that it is with a "fond farewell" that it bids goodbye to the World Factbook. But for what conceivable reason would the CIA delete one of the best public utilities on the Internet? ■ For one thing, the CIA undoubtedly already maintains the content of the World Factbook for internal use anyway. It has been a rich treasury of information that would undoubtedly be useful within a spy agency: The nature and key facts about every country's government, economy, population, and relationship with others. The amount of additional resources necessary to take that information and make it available for public consumption is surely only trivial at best -- perhaps a few hundred hours of labor, plus the cost of hosting a public-facing website. ■ For another, certain public goods are intrinsically worth having. Did everyone use the CIA World Factbook? No, but like a good public library, it was there for anyone to access. Was it the exclusive arbiter of the facts it reported? Again, no, but its content was unusually well-suited for a US Government website to supply: Facts that, by themselves, might be subject to manipulation or distortion (depending on where they were found), but that when reported consistently by a single source could be considered more reliable. ■ It's not that the CIA is itself a neutral institution; it's very much supposed to pursue the best interests of the United States. But reality is the best friend of liberty: What's good for the interests of the United States is maximized by a steady commitment to knowing and telling the truth. That was the case when the predecessors to the World Factbook came together in 1943, and it's true today. Whoever has chosen to metaphorically unplug the World Factbook has committed a real offense against the public interest.
February 28, 2026
The most reliable lesson in American martial history is that a war is never really won until the peace has been made secure. That process invariably takes much longer than the armed combat itself, and it is one for which we are never adequately prepared. ■ The many compromises that left Reconstruction incomplete meant that the Civil War continued to exact a very real (and sometimes bloody) toll for decades. World War I came to a conclusion, but the failure to secure a peace led to World War II. World War II was successfully won because it was followed by the Marshall Plan in Europe and by a similar reconstruction in Japan. ■ Reconstruction is hard, but not impossible. In the successful cases, it has required a very large commitment of resources, a considerable degree of political consent (both in the United States and in the place being rebuilt), and above all, a very long time horizon. Take away any one of those three legs, and the stool falls over. ■ Patience is hard to come by once fighting stops: Look at how quickly opinion swung against a US presence in Afghanistan and how immediately the situation deteriorated once the American forces left. This lesson ought to be permanently imprinted on the minds of both the public and the senior elected leadership of the country. Wars may sometimes be just, prudent, and potentially even necessary, but they are never really finished merely because bombs stopped falling.