Losing Skills

 

Maybe it’s no big deal! After all, most people don’t like reading and don’t do it voluntarily as adults. Most jobs don’t require in-depth reading, and the availability of good-enough LLM tools promises to reduce the number of those that do. In that context, do we really “need” to spend valuable pedagogical time and energy attempting to give everyone the baseline skills to follow extended narratives and arguments and potentially to develop their own? Arguably we don’t. We can do without that, as a society, or at least with much less of that—because presumably we need at least some core of people who can still read and write and understand on their own, if only to check that the AI is properly calibrated.

But the smaller the circle is, the less the arts of reading and writing will be pushed forward, and the greater the chance of eventually breaking the chain. And in the meantime, millions of people who would have had the chance to develop the difficult but rewarding skills that have been foundational for—indeed, all but synonymous with—intellectual achievement for millenia… won’t. Many, perhaps even most, would have chosen not to develop or even use those skills in any serious way, but at least they would have been free to make that sad choice. In the scenario that seems to be approaching, they’re not even being given the chance. And this is happening without anyone deliberating or voting or even directly deciding that we as a society don’t want mass literacy. 

Spare Capacity | Drinking Buddies

Lithium

En passant: After the war, John Cade was made director of the Bundoora Repatriation Mental Hospital and moved his family into a house of the asylum grounds. The two hundred patients there included many manic-depressives and John became preoccupied by the “absolute failure” of psychotherapy to cure them. “Psychopathological explanations seemed to me to be singularly unconvincing,” he reflected, “and completely useless when it came to treatment or prevention of attacks.” He wanted to know the “essential nature” of the disease, and like many naturalists and herbalists and folk healers before him, he knew that the malady must come from some imbalance in the harmony of the body, in excesses or deficits or toxins.

In 1969: Forty-nine countries had approved the use of lithium, but the United States was not among them. Many years later, Cade himself would write that his cure was “made by an unknown psychiatrist, working alone in a small chronic hospital with no research training, primitive techniques, and negligible equipment.” Who could expect the Americans to care? In many official histories, American skepticism has been attributed to the lithia craze, to wariness around the substance in the decades after lithium had left so many Americans dead. But those with experience in natural remedies know the truth: the trouble was money. Lithium is found in water, in rocks, in soil, in the sea. It cannot be placed under patent. It has no commercial value. Even today, it can be made by pharmacists in-house, without the trade secrets of pharmaceutical conglomerates, without the true incentives of modern medicine.

Natural Medicine

 

Female Warriors

While some female Norse soldiers had been found before, she was the first high-status female warrior ever identified. Or was she? The second it was suggested Bj 581 was a woman, every conclusion drawn about her when she was thought to be a man was questioned.

Maybe the grave goods were heirlooms or an homage to her family, and not about her. Maybe there had been another, male body in the tomb, and it had been removed while hers and the horses’ were left undisturbed. Maybe the 19th-century excavation had mislabeled samples. Maybe while chromosomally female, the individual had been intersex or had lived as a transgender man. Anything rather than imagine a woman may have led armies.

We've been very wrong about Stone Age women

The Changing English Language

But as his post goes on, his language gets older. A hundred years older with each jump. The spelling changes. The grammar changes. Words you know are replaced by unfamiliar words, and his attitude gets older too, as the blogger’s voice is replaced by that of a Georgian diarist, an Elizabethan pamphleteer, a medieval chronicler.

By the middle of his post, he’s writing in what might as well be a foreign language.

But it’s not a foreign language. It’s all English.

None of the story is real: not the blogger, not the town. But the language is real, or at least realistic. I constructed the passages myself, working from what we know about how English was written in each period.

[...]

And verely this name dyd me ſore affright, for who was this Maiſter wherof he ſpake? And what maner of man was he, that his very name ſholde be ſpoken wyth ſuche reuerence and drede. I wolde haue fledde but he purſued me and by myn avys he was the ſwifter, for he caught me full ſoone.

How far back in time can you understand English? | Image by Paul Lehr

Classical paintings

There is a single explanation for the fact that the reconstructions do not resemble the statues depicted in ancient artworks, the fact that their use of color is un­like that in ancient mosaics and frescoes, and the fact that modern viewers find them ugly. It is that the reconstructions are painted very badly. There is no reason to posit that ancient Europeans had tastes radically unlike ours to explain our dislike of the reconstructions. The Greeks and Romans would have disliked them too, because the reconstructed polychromy is no good.

Were classical statues painted horribly?

Data and privacy

 First up, a trip to the grocery store. You hop in your car, blissfully unaware that doing so results in numerification—the assignment of numbers to complex human acts. There’s an entire industry, projected to be worth half a trillion dollars by 2030, dedicated to collecting and selling the trails of data your car emits when it hits the road. Everything is tracked. Your location and speed. Your acceleration and braking patterns. The music you listen to along the way. Who you call from your car and for how long you speak. Many cars today produce around twenty-five gigabytes of data per hour. That’s roughly the size of all English-language Wikipedia articles—every hour.

Ruled by Numbers

Compliance

This is a pattern: no one wants to take a risk. Not elected officials. Not 19-year-olds picking college majors. Because in this economy, everything is compliance now. As the Italian philosopher Umberto Eco warned in his essay "Ur-Fascism," social systems don't collapse overnight. They erode through small surrenders, through the gradual normalization of compliance as a civic virtue.

There is compliance with markets, with political power, with the unspoken rule that you must always be optimizing: for income, access, or institutional favor. Majors aren’t educational pathways anymore. They’re compliance signals. Just like a tariff exemption. Or a congressional vote. 

Compliance Is the New American Dream 

Course Design

We’re supposed to take the plot of land, draw the roads, divide it into plots, and determine the shape of the house by the plot, and the layout of the rooms by the shape of the house.

Eventually, at some level, where you put your dining room table is determined by the needs of the road system. And that’s bad, because the roads have to be aware of the needs of your dining room table as well.

Top-down gives you consistency, but it doesn’t give you anything living structure. The magic actually comes about when you think — what does a RIVER OF WORK look like in Psychology 101?

It’s in the collision of the design pattern with the local need. We’re allowed to think through the pattern.

Design Patterns and the Coming Revolution in Course Design

Cars

TThere’s an open secret in America: If you want to kill someone, do it with a car. As long as you’re sober, chances are you’ll never be charged with any crime, much less manslaughter. Over the past hundred years, as automobiles have been woven into the fabric of our daily lives, our legal system has undermined public safety, and we’ve been collectively trained to think of these deaths as unavoidable “accidents” or acts of God. Today, despite the efforts of major public-health agencies and grassroots safety campaigns, few are aware that car crashes are the number one cause of death for Americans under 35. But it wasn’t always this way.

Murder Machines

Tank Man

Perhaps even more importantly, the internet itself breeds an ethos of transparency and healthy skepticism of power. The first generation that can’t remember a time before the internet is a generation that craves information, loathes censorship, and revels in exposing abuses of power. We seem to have reached a tipping point, at least in the developed world, where technology has surpassed and by all appearances will continue to outpace government efforts to contain information. It’s hard to envision a time when we won’t have an Anonymous, a Snowden, or a Manning who have the technical know-how and the ideology to bring abuse to light. And the internet generation generally sees that as something to celebrate.

The beautiful thing about all of this is that today, anyone can be Tank Man, at least metaphorically.

Be your own Tank Man | Dan Luvisi Art

Execution

Frantz Schmidt hanged his first thief when he was 19, on a June day in 1573. Either his father or another master executioner pronounced the hanging “executed adroitly,” concluding Frantz’s apprenticeship and certifying him as a master in his own right. Over the next four decades, Frantz would hang, behead, or otherwise kill 394 people, and flog, maim, and torture confessions out of hundreds more. He began as a traveling freelancer around Bavaria, and then, from 1578 until his retirement in 1618, served as the full-time executioner of the jewel of the Holy Roman Empire, the populous, prosperous, and cosmopolitan city of Nuremberg. In elaborate sentencing rituals behind closed doors, the patrician judge and jurors of Nuremberg’s “blood court” pronounced who should die and by what means. Before crowds of hundreds, it was Frantz and his assistants who carried out the punishments, embodying the legal authority of empire. For Frantz, there was no special skill in hanging someone: just tie the noose and push. Beheading, by contrast, required an exact position of the feet, eagle eyes and a steady hand, a fluid swing of the arm. One blow must neatly and completely sever the head, lest the crowd erupt in anger: in a few instances, spectators had responded to a miscarried execution by stoning the executioner himself to death. Frantz, then, took pride in his near-flawless record. In almost 200 beheadings, he required a second stroke only four times.

More inexplicable than the persistence of capital punishment is the rest of America’s carceral iceberg. In the 1970s, the United States not only revived the death penalty but also embarked upon a penal experiment without world-historical precedent in a democracy. This complicated and interlocking array of state and federal laws, programs, and construction projects has vastly increased the number of prisons, the number of people sent there, and the number of years they stay. By 2008, for the first time in history, one in a hundred American adults was either in prison or jail. The numbers have since declined slightly, but remain very high in both historical and international perspective. With 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States holds 25 percent of its prisoners, often in brutal and sanity-threatening conditions that most Americans would not hesitate to label torture if they encountered them somewhere else.

Progress and Execution

Voluntourism

A voluntourist is someone like Jack, who wishes to combine exotic vacation travel with volunteer work. For anyone interested in being one, a dizzying array of choices awaits, from building schools in Uganda or houses in Haiti to hugging orphans in Bali. In all of them, the operational equation is the same: wealthy Westerners can do a little good, experience something that their affluent lives do not offer, and, as in Jack’s case, have a story to tell that places them in the ranks of the kindhearted and worldly wise.

As admirably altruistic as it sounds, the problem with voluntourism is its singular focus on the volunteer’s quest for experience, as opposed to the recipient community’s actual needs. There is a cost associated with such an endeavor. A 2010 report by the Human Sciences Research Council, based in Pretoria, South Africa, analyzed the thriving AIDS orphan tourism business in South Africa.

Under this program, well-to-do tourists sign up to build schools, clean and restore riverbanks, ring birds and act as caregivers to AIDS orphans for a few weeks. This led to the creation of a profitable industry catering to volunteer tourists. The orphans’ conditions are effectively transformed into a boutique package in which “saving” them yields profits from tourists. The foreigners’ ability to pay for the privilege of volunteering crowds out local workers.

The White Tourist's Burden

MST3K history

When they told me, my only objection was that he was kind of like me—a white doughy guy from the Midwest. But it worked out great. They stuck with the formula really closely. I think they did a really good job.

It began getting difficult when USA Network started exercising more control over the Sci-Fi Channel. And then we picked up these fucking production executives from the network. We had these bitter, dry, humorless trolls in charge of our show. And they were giving us notes. And they were insisting on our having a story arc. What the hell do you want with a story arc? This is a puppet show.

Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Definitive Oral History of a TV Masterpiece

Surveillance and Language

To Orwell, this threat was not merely that loose and imprecise writing fails to convey one’s real meaning. His more immediate fear was more fundamental: that reliance on vague, “ready-made phrases” would, over time, conceal one’s real meaning even from oneself. Orwell understood that when a population stops “hunting about” for words—when it instead regurgitates the limited vocabulary of those in power—it stops truly thinking. “The fight against bad English,” Orwell wrote, “is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.” Far from it—it is “a necessary first step toward political regeneration.”

The government’s mass-surveillance apparatus, and the secret legal gymnastics that purportedly justify it, is a chilling expression of Orwell’s worst fears.

Dragnet Surveillance and the English Language

Vegetarian ancestors

Most primates have the capacity for eating sugary fruit, the capacity for eating leaves and the capacity for eating meat. But meat is a rare treat, if eaten at all. Sure, chimpanzees sometimes kill and devour a baby monkey, but the proportion of the diet of the average chimpanzee composed of meat is small. And chimps eat more mammal meat than any of the other apes or any of the monkeys. The majority of the food consumed by primates today–and every indication is for the last thirty million years–is vegetable, not animal. Plants are what our apey and even earlier ancestors ate; they were our paleo diet for most of the last thirty million years during which our bodies, and our guts in particular, were evolving. In other words, there is very little evidence that our guts are terribly special and the job of a generalist primate gut is primarily to eat pieces of plants. We have special immune systems, special brains, even special hands, but our guts are ordinary and for tens of millions of years those ordinary guts have tended to be filled with fruit, leaves, and the occasional delicacy of a raw hummingbird.

Human Ancestors Were Nearly All Vegetarians

Schooling

Compulsory schooling has been a fixture of our culture now for several generations. It’s hard today for most people to even imagine how children would learn what they must for success in our culture without it. President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan are so enamored with schooling that they want even longer school days and school years. Most people assume that the basic design of schools, as we know them today, emerged from scientific evidence about how children learn best. But, in fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

Schools as we know them today are a product of history, not of research into how children learn. The blueprint still used for today’s schools was developed during the Protestant Reformation, when schools were created to teach children to read the Bible, to believe scripture without questioning it, and to obey authority figures without questioning them. The early founders of schools were quite clear about this in their writings. The idea that schools might be places for nurturing critical thought, creativity, self-initiative or ability to learn on one’s own — the kinds of skills most needed for success in today’s economy — was the furthest thing from their minds. To them, willfulness was sinfulness, to be drilled or beaten out of children, not encouraged.

School is a prison

Execution and crazy people

Certainly there were other details that made the crime uniquely memorable. For one thing, Andre had cut out the children's hearts and returned home with the organs in his pockets. For another, he was careful to use three different knives so that the blood from each body would not cross-contaminate, thereby ensuring that the demons inside each of them would die. He then stabbed himself in the chest, but he did not die as he had hoped. In fact, he was well enough to leave a message on his wife's parents' phone explaining that he thought he was in hell, and he managed to confess to the police what he had done before they took him in for emergency surgery.

The entire episode had biblical overtones—Andre had convinced himself that his wife was Jezebel, his son the Antichrist, and her daughter just plain evil. In short, the case had enough spectacular aspects to keep the most jaded of court watchers buzzing for months, but it was the eyeball issue that garnered most of the attention. And that was only the beginning.

How Crazy Is Too Crazy to Be Executed?

Dr. Hook

I'm not saying this little live DVD by a largely forgotten band is better than the abovementioned films by the likes of Scorsese, Godard, Pennebaker, and Bogdanovich. What I am saying, though, is that none of these films has provided me with the same feeling of entertainment verging on sheer life-affirming joy as has Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show: Live, and that none has so consistently reminded me what playing music onstage should, at its very highest point, feel like.

I want to explain why to you but, before writing another word, I'd like to promise you something: At no point will I make any kind of postmodern bid to revise the 1970s rock canon to place Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show anywhere remotely near its creative center. A strained case could be made I guess, but to make such a case would involve a kind of pretense that is the direct antithesis to the music of Dr. Hook, which is possibly the most unpretentious rock music ever recorded. Furthermore, I promise to make no attempt to paint Dr. Hook as anything other than what they were: a down-and-dirty Jersey bar band whose tunes more often than not crossed the line into novelty rock, an outlet for the pop-lyrical efforts of countercultural humorist and children's author Shel Silverstein, and, later, a banal disco band specializing in workmanlike ballads such as "When You're in Love with a Beautiful Woman."

“Dennis, We’ve Been Crying Too Much”: Dr. Hook and the Untold Story of the Best Rock Movie Ever | Part Two

Worth reading, post-Super Bowl

What happened next was the strangest encounter of Lemming’s 28-year career as a football scout. Michael Oher sat down at the table across from him. . .and refused to speak. “He shook my hand and then didn’t say a word,” Lemming recalled. (“His hands — they were huge!”) Lemming asked a few questions; Michael Oher just kept staring right through him. And soon enough Lemming decided further interaction was pointless. Michael Oher left, and he left behind blank forms and unanswered questions. Every other high-school football player in America was dying for Lemming to invite him to play in the U.S. Army All-American Bowl. Michael Oher had left his invitation on the table.

What never crossed Tom Lemming’s mind was that the player he would soon rank the No. 1 offensive lineman in the nation, and perhaps the finest left-tackle prospect since Orlando Pace, hadn’t the faintest notion of who Lemming was or why he was asking him all these questions. For that matter, he didn’t even think of himself as a football player. And he had never played left tackle in his life.

The Ballad of Big Mike

Fake girlfriend

Upon receiving the news of the two deaths, Te'o went out and led the Fighting Irish to a 20-3 upset of Michigan State, racking up 12 tackles. It was heartbreaking and inspirational. Te'o would appear on ESPN's College GameDay to talk about the letters Kekua had written him during her illness. He would send a heartfelt letter to the parents of a sick child, discussing his experience with disease and grief. The South Bend Tribune wrote an article describing the young couple's fairytale meeting—she, a Stanford student; he, a Notre Dame star—after a football game outside Palo Alto.

Did you enjoy the uplifiting story, the tale of a man who responded to adversity by becoming one of the top players of the game? If so, stop reading.

Manti Te'o did lose his grandmother this past fall. Annette Santiago died on Sept. 11, 2012, at the age of 72, according to Social Security Administration records in Nexis. But there is no SSA record there of the death of Lennay Marie Kekua, that day or any other. Her passing, recounted so many times in the national media, produces no obituary or funeral announcement in Nexis, and no mention in the Stanford student newspaper.

Manti Te’o’s Dead Girlfriend, The Most Heartbreaking And Inspirational Story Of The College Football Season, Is A Hoax