UnConference, Sustainability: Invite, last call, Fri Sep 15
School: what to unlearn
Theatre: life learning, no short cuts
Polis, AI future: Chatham House DSI, VTaiwan
AI, Imbue: AI company raises $200m at $1bn valuation, Kanjun podcast
Architecture: re-use or re-rebuild. Arguments for re-use
Architecture: Arguments public good and easy use
Links: climate scenarios, Indie films, death stats, UK AI safety
“The most damaging thing you learned in school wasn't something you learned in any specific class. It was learning to get good grades.” argues Paul Graham
As one of my sons moves on to secondary school, I have been reflecting on what we should be learning or not learning at school. My thinking on schooling has developed over the last decades.
I’m minded on the arguments between progressive (follow curiosity) and formal (knowledge and facts foundational), Piaget and Dewey (perhaps suggesting no solo extreme school is wholly viable). I’ve had podcast conversations with primary school teachers and home education advocates.
I see the research on foundational pedagogy (Direct Instruction) especially in Africa that has shown strong results (Bridge International Academies, paper here)
During and “post” pandemic, it seems to me in UK that schools are offering and providing much more than only educational learning. This FT essay piece examining a school in Oldham over a year, in a poor part of England highlighted the community and social value in school - from providing free hot meals - and the intersection with other areas (housing, poverty, wifi in McDonald’s when there is none at home). (I have gift articles if you don’t have FT access)
But, Paul Graham, I think, is mostly talking about elite or middle class education. He argues:
When I was in college, a particularly earnest philosophy grad student once told me that he never cared what grade he got in a class, only what he learned in it. This stuck in my mind because it was the only time I ever heard anyone say such a thing.
For me, as for most students, the measurement of what I was learning completely dominated actual learning in college. I was fairly earnest; I was genuinely interested in most of the classes I took, and I worked hard. And yet I worked by far the hardest when I was studying for a test.
In theory, tests are merely what their name implies: tests of what you've learned in the class. In theory you shouldn't have to prepare for a test in a class any more than you have to prepare for a blood test. In theory you learn from taking the class, from going to the lectures and doing the reading and/or assignments, and the test that comes afterward merely measures how well you learned.
In practice, as almost everyone reading this will know, things are so different that hearing this explanation of how classes and tests are meant to work is like hearing the etymology of a word whose meaning has changed completely. In practice, the phrase "studying for a test" was almost redundant, because that was when one really studied. The difference between diligent and slack students was that the former studied hard for tests and the latter didn't. No one was pulling all-nighters two weeks into the semester.
Even though I was a diligent student, almost all the work I did in school was aimed at getting a good grade on something.
To many people, it would seem strange that the preceding sentence has a "though" in it. Aren't I merely stating a tautology? Isn't that what a diligent student is, a straight-A student? That's how deeply the conflation of learning with grades has infused our culture.
Is it so bad if learning is conflated with grades? Yes, it is bad. And it wasn't till decades after college, when I was running Y Combinator, that I realized how bad it is.
And:
Anyone who cares about getting good grades has to play this game, or they'll be surpassed by those who do. And at elite universities, that means nearly everyone, since someone who didn't care about getting good grades probably wouldn't be there in the first place. The result is that students compete to maximize the difference between learning and getting good grades.
As someone who arguably gained some of the best grades you can get (scholarship to Westminster, top first at Cambridge), the more I think about this, the more I agree for a certain and large group of capable people. I see an echo of this recently in early 20-somethings I meet in Finance/London.
They are very capable, but they are looking for the “growth hack for life”, a cheat code for work and living. A pattern or a formula you can follow that is like “memorise many essay plans and be able to answer test questions.”
In that sense, school nudges you in the wrong direction by making the grade achievement so important and conflating it with life success. I was lucky on two counts. First, as my parents made a very big deal on how travel and being in the world was important learning and that school was not going to give me that learning. Second, I fell into art and theatre (although I had been influenced by art (visual because of a painter friend, pottery due to a kind primary teacher). In particular, among so many other things, theatre showed me (without realising it) that there is no “growth hack” for theatre.
You rehearse, you direct, you perform. Rehearsals (and writing) are what the techbros are calling deep work. Putting on a satisfying play for an audience is not a hackable test.
Long-term relationships, meaningful careers, building products or companies that people value these are not hackable tests they require different skills and efforts. Schools and the people you meet there still do and can teach you these things. I think I agree with Graham that we should unlearn that grades and being good with tests are what produces this.
Riffing back to the problems of poverty. I have the FT essay on the Oldham school, but I also have Tara Westover’s memoir. An essay piece on the money part is here:
A curious thing happens when you offer up your life for public consumption: People start to interpret your biography, to explain to you what they think it means. At book signings, in interviews, I’m often told that my story is uplifting, that I am a model of resilience, an “inspiration.” Which is a nice thing to be told, so I say thank you. But every so often someone takes it a bit further, and says something to which I do not have a response. I’m told, “You are living proof of the American dream, that absolutely anything is possible for anybody.”
But am I? Is that what the story means?
After being tired, here’s what I remember most about being poor: a pervasive sense of costly trade-offs. Of course you had to take the maximum number of credits, because tuition was expensive; of course you had to pick up that second job, that extra shift, that third side hustle raking leaves or mowing lawns or shoveling snow. The only question I ever asked was how soon could they pay.
The architecture of my life was defined by money, meaning its absence, right down to the alarm blaring at 3:40 a.m. The night shift paid a dollar more, $6.35 an hour instead of $5.35. Never mind that my roommates blasted music until midnight, so that on a typical night, I got around three hours of sleep; never mind that I was dozing through my lectures, or that I spent the entire winter with a raspy cough and string of unexplained sinus infections. It was a dollar more! The math was straightforward and decisive.
My college ambitions nearly came to an abrupt end in my sophomore year. Blinding pain in my lower jaw turned out to be a rotting nerve. I needed a root canal and $1,600 to pay for it. I decided to drop out. My plan was to hitch a ride to Las Vegas, where my brother was working as a long-haul trucker, and to get a job working at the In-N-Out Burger across the street from his trailer.
Then, a leader at my church pulled me aside and insisted that I apply for a Pell Grant, a federal program that helps poor kids pay for college. Days later a check arrived in the mail for $4,000. I had never seen that much money, could not wrap my brain around the amount. I didn’t cash it for a week, afraid of what possession of such a sum might do to me. Then the throbbing in my jaw motivated me to take a trip to the bank.
I don’t see any simple or easy answers here. There is no point having all these amazing qualities, if your basic level of poverty prevents you from opportunity. Link to PG end.
I’m excited by the possibilities of new forms of governance and decision making as I’ve written before. Polis seems really interesting to me. Chatham house are running this with Audrey Tang’s (Taiwan minister) group on AI and democratic input. Give it a go:
…we are excited to share the first invite to an experiment our Digital Society Initiative are running. We’re calling it Recursive Public – it’s a collaboration with vTaiwan and supported by OpenAI to begin providing some kind of democratic input and oversight as AI shapes society.
We’re starting with a conversation - What should be on the agenda when talking about AI? - as we build up to the UK AI Summit to understand where the AI community wants to go next.
You can sign up here, to receive a link to the deliberation page. You can also access it through the website using the password arcana. Once you’re signed up, we will keep you informed of the state of the discussions as the community grows.
The conversation takes place on pol.is, a powerful tool through which you can submit your thoughts, statements and priorities on the future of AI, and see what others in the space are thinking. Try it out - vote agree, disagree or pass - then submit a statement of your own. If there is a question you are grappling with that would benefit from an international conversation, add it in.
The statements that you can create, or that you can agree/disagree/pass are really interesting in themselves, and worth signing up to just to read. Check it out.
I did a podcast with Kanjun a few months ago. Her AI company raised $200m on a $1bn+ valuation. I hope her and her team build and solve these AI problems.
More in the podcast, and what her company does here.
Another week, another article from my planner / architect friend, Hana Loftus. This time she argues for the re-use of buildings (rather than knock down and build again) despite the difficulties.
Hana argues:
Working with existing buildings is undoubtedly more difficult, and often more expensive, than building from scratch. It is complex, requires real design imagination and actual technical skills, so is unsuited to the detail-lite process of design-build, the preferred procurement approach of lazy project managers. It was a botched, cut-price attempt to upgrade an existing building using flammable materials that led to the horror of the Grenfell Tower fire, but this was not an inevitable consequence of retrofitting. The work of French architects Lacaton & Vassal, among others, shows how it is possible to reclad tower blocks in a way that makes them more beautiful, more functional, more fire-safe and less energy-intensive. If the legacy of Grenfell is to stop the improvement of post-war social housing in its tracks and to tear down and rebuild instead, the wrong lessons will have been learnt.
The shortlist for the RIBA’s new Reinvention award shows that, when clients employ teams with the right skills and don’t try to cut corners, we can restore, repurpose and reinvigorate all manner of buildings for present and future needs. But the current system is a contradictory mess of rules. Cheap and shoddy conversions of non-listed buildings fly under the radar due to ‘permitted development’ rules that actively dissuade developers from improving the appearance of the buildings they convert in this way. Householders who wish to improve the energy efficiency of older homes face a bewildering array of barriers and are frequently knocked back on heritage grounds. And politicians and think tanks decry the architectural ‘mistakes of the recent past’ and declare a crusade against anything made of concrete, deemed ‘modern’ or, worse still, ‘brutalist’ – one commentator even going so far as to call for a ‘Demolition Commission’ to rid the country of these apparent eyesores – while simultaneously bending over backwards to preserve the buildings that conform to their narrow definition of beauty.
On an adjacent matter, Sam Hughes argues that architecture is a public background art, which means most of it should be “easy” and vernacular.
My guess Sam and Hana would maybe disagree on much, although I can see a design code / pattern book agreement that could be made between the arguments.
On “easy” architecture, this is Sam’s argument:
Architecture is a public art, a vernacular art, and a background art: it is created by a huge range of people, and experienced involuntarily by an even wider one. This means that we need architectural styles that are as accessible as possible, to the full range of people who live with what we build, and to the full range of builders who create it. Some ‘traditional’ styles might well be useful in achieving this, but it is not their being traditional that matters: any style with broad and deep appeal will do just as well
Links:
On renewable energy transition:
RMI argues: This is the pivotal decade in the energy transition because change is driven by prices and flows.The technology revolution is the key driver. Renewable technologies enjoy learning curves and exponential growth, which has already led to peak fossil fuel demand.
This is the decade of change. Solar and EVs will rise to dominate sector sales by 2030. Renewables will hit price tipping points in every major area of energy demand. Energy efficiency will double as it follows technology up the S-curve.
Climate: From Zeke Hasufather et al:
Emissions scenarios serve as a key basis for future climate projections. In a new preprint we propose a set of Representative Emissions Pathways (REPs) to use in the upcoming IPCC AR7 cycle: Please read and contribute comments to this initial proposal! Link here.
Arts: Indie film maker, Richard Linklater:
With a changing culture and changing technology, it’s hard to see cinema slipping back into the prominence it once held. I think we could feel it coming on when they started calling films “content” — but that’s what happens when you let tech people take over your industry. It’s hard to imagine indie cinema in particular having the cultural relevance that it did. It’s hard to imagine the whole culture is going to be on the same page about anything, much less filmmaking. We can be self-absorbed and say it’s just about cinema, but it’s really all of our modern cultural life. You could say the same things about reading books. A lot of young people can’t really read a book, because they’re just on their phones.
Some really intelligent, passionate, good citizens just don’t have the same need for literature and movies anymore. It doesn’t occupy the same space in the brain. I think that’s just how we’ve given over our lives, largely, to this thing that depletes the need for curating and filling ourselves up with meaning from art and fictional worlds. That need has been filled up with — let’s face it — advanced delivery systems for advertising. It’s sad, but what can you do? I also don’t want to go through life thinking our best days are behind us. That’s just not productive. So, in your own area, you just have to persist and do what you can on behalf of the things that you believe in. You have to believe that everything can change and that things can go back to being a little better. Isn’t that what we all want for everything these days, from democracy on down? Can’t we just go back to being a little better?
In an interview for his new film (Hollywood reporter)
UK AI safety. Thread from Ian Hogarth:
https://twitter.com/soundboy/status/1699688880482500684?s=20
Updated death stats (World in data):
https://ourworldindata.org/causes-of-death
Thanks for reading this week. Be well.
I think you would like Naomi Fisher's substack
https://naomicfisher.substack.com/