sdsaga12

> "Let’s break down what it takes to create just one course – say, an introductory course on core pre-algebra concepts:

- 50+ core concepts to teach - 20+ problems per concept - → ~1,000+ individual problems per course

That last number kept us up at night. You can’t just explain a concept once and move on. You need enough variations to let learners truly master each idea, enough edge cases to build real understanding, and enough of a ramp in difficulty to create that perfect learning curve.

Designing the right game and sequence of concepts, so that learning feels like flow, is the fun part. But then you need to make a thousand carefully calibrated problems. And that part is a lot less fun – and it takes a long time."

This seems like a practical and appropriate use of LLMs. It reminds me of a similar application I heard about recently from a friend who teaches language classes using ChatGPT or equivalent to generate dozens of example sentences to teach specific grammar rules.

I find it refreshingly limited in scope compared to many projects that aim to outsource the creative process altogether rather than focusing on automating the legitimately menial and repetitive tasks.

Ah, I'd been thinking it must be a device somehow related to manufacturing bullets (but how? was the question) -- it hadn't occurred to me that it could mean the pointy tips of bullets themselves. And thank you for the book recommendation.

What are "bullet points" as named in this article? It's difficult to find anything on Google not referring to the typographical symbol of the same name.

Context: "Archaeologists also found a hammer, tweezers, pliers, keys, knives, bullet points, and a completely preserved 14th century gauntlet, in addition to fragments of its counterpart worn on the other hand."

"Enshittified" is a valuable contribution to the lexicon.

I second the recommendation for Nongbri's "Before Religion". It definitely improved my understanding of what it is we even mean / have meant by "religion".

For a more evolutionary understanding of religion, I'd recommend Joseph Henrich's "The WEIRDest People in the World" and "The Secret of our Success".

Finally though certainly not least importantly, I'd recommend Iain McGilchrist's "The Master and His Emissary" and "The Matter with Things". Both touch on how it is we see and understand the world and how the current default perspective differs from those of other times and places.

What is bland is universal, what is universal is bland.

Isn't this true of all new strains of all contagious pathogens? They are constantly undergoing change. We estimate low probability that mutated viruses or bacteria descended from strains we are familiar with will have dramatically more harmful long-term effects, but we don't actually know for certain that any given year's new strains won't have very different risk profiles until much later. We can make probabilistic models based on historical data, but they are unavoidably vulnerable to underestimating the risk of black swan events.

One could argue that certain features of covid make it riskier with regard to long-term effects, but that is not a proposition that is well developed in the public conversation, especially by proponents of the zoonosis hypothesis. The lab origin hypothesis with its accompanying assumptions of serial passage and direct gene modification would in my eyes strengthen the case that covid's long-term effects were less likely to conform to historical data on other viral infections, though interestingly the intersection of those who find the lab origin more convincing with those who have serious concerns about long-term harms is a pretty small set.

What type and size company do you work for? And how did you find it?

That sounds like a pretty ideal scenario to me, but I'm not sure how to go about finding similar positions.

Thanks for the question -- it's important to grapple with even though it can be very uncomfortable and answering it is basically one can of worms after another. If you entertain it seriously, it really gets down to the philosophical roots of how to treat others from different moral systems and worldviews.

I don't think this is a problem any society has ever elegantly solved, definitely not permanently, and I think it's a distinct possibility that a solution that feels "clean" the way good software design can is not possible.

Abstractly, a culture consists of core tenets that it considers literally unquestionable. For most of history, this list of tenets would include things like the existence of a god or gods, the moral imperative to respect the rulers, the prohibition of things that were thought to harm the group such as murder, theft, or adultery, and so on. More recently in the Western world, we might include things like "women are equal to men" or "people of all races are equal".

It is very difficult to defend these types of propositions and values in any sort of universal or non-self-referential way.

Even things we assume to be moral universals in the Western world like the sanctity of the individual (bodily integrity, freedom of conscience) or the importance of intent in our judgment of wrongdoing (manslaughter vs. murder) are, if you examine the historical and anthropological record, not actually universal at all. (Check out The WEIRDest People in the World by Joe Henrich if you're curious about these specific points.)

The US Declaration of Independence is a classic example of this. It asserts: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

If you don't also find those truths self-evident, all following reasoning based on their axiomatic status might very well seem wrong to you. What if you contest the existence of a creator? What if you contest the idea of innate equality of rights and dignity? What if you contest the focus on rights rather than obligations? Or what if you assert the existence of a different creator who explicitly singled out one tribe as the most holy, righteous, intelligent, etc.?

Because the core tenets of a culture are to some extent arbitrary and thus susceptible to replacement with a different set (like Christianity displacing paganism or atheistic rationalism displacing Christianity), there is a strong inclination to defend a particular set of tenets by making questioning them a taboo. That's the underlying purpose of the concept of heresy and its accompanying social shaming.

Unlimited viewpoint diversity does actually threaten the continued existence of a culture if its defenders are not able to meet the arguments of its critics in a way they and their audience find compelling. If you say "I think gays shouldn't marry because it goes against God's will" and your audience mostly thinks "I don't believe your God exists, so that's an absurd argument", you won't convince very many people and soon people will stop adhering to a core tenet of your culture, perhaps eventually leading to the death of that culture altogether.

In the Western tradition, the probing of a culture's foundational values and assumptions has been the domain of philosophy at least as far back as Socrates being sentenced to death or exile for showing impiety toward the gods of Athens and corrupting the city's youth by prompting them to ask questions that must not be asked.

So what does this rambling mean for toleration of viewpoint diversity?

Its absence can prolong injustice (abolitionists faced lots of censorship in the 19th century) and undermine scientific and creative inquiry (see Socrates, Galileo, McCarthyism, etc.). At the same time, its presence leaves all of your holy cows, carpenters, and civil rights vulnerable to ideological attack.

Those are two difficult tensions to reconcile.

I come down on the side of erring toward more viewpoint diversity because I think it encourages reflection into why you hold the values you do and teaches you to defend them vigorously or, sometimes, change them to something you find more compelling.

This isn't something everyone wants to do all the time everywhere, though, so I understand not wanting your company's Slack to devolve into constant philosophical debate or even less productive forms of disagreement.

I think we've been running into such trouble with this recently because many of the existing implicit boundaries separating parts of our culture were washed away by the great cultural homogenization of the internet and especially social media platforms. It used to be more possible to have fierce debates on university campuses about contentious issues without that instantly bleeding over into industry, non-profits, schools, knitting clubs, etc.

It's like Douglas Adams wrote: "the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."

Sometimes boundaries are healthy.

The best answer I've encountered is moving in the direction of a more federal system in which cultures can live as they think best AND individuals in each culture are empowered to move to different cultures if they don't like where they are.

This is not a perfect solution, though, because it still requires the universal enforcement of certain moral propositions, like people should have the right to their own body and mind and choice of home. Those propositions would not have been accepted in slave-holding societies or even recent collectivist societies like the USSR, which prohibited its citizens from emigrating without permission. This is, realistically, an iterative improvement that would only apply to cultures that already accept foundational Western moral attitudes.

Hear hear.

If your conception of diversity doesn't include viewpoint diversity, you are operating within a prejudicial, small-minded, small-hearted, and regressive framework. If you belive the most salient details about a person can be read from their appearance, you are a bigot.

This cuts every which way, but many want to pretend it's not true for their own biases. This includes seeing someone with blue hair and a pronouns pin and writing them off immediately just as much as seeing an old white man with a camo mouse pad and assuming the worst.

Don't do either of these.

You'd be surprised what differences can be bridged if you approach those different from yourself with patience, love, and toleration.

Remember, it's not really toleration if there aren't some things about someone that are legitimately hard for you to accept. It's not an impressive moral feat to extend welcome to those who you already felt were on your side.

My personal bias here tends toward reflexive dislike of DEI stuff because it feels cult-y to me, but the message of toleration it's rooted in (even if that's not always practiced by its proponents) is obviously the only alternative to fighting over whose values will be imposed on everyone else.

At some point, it's federalism live-and-let-live or it's war, kinetic or memetic.