Kranti Saran

Very pleased to share that the Philosophy Department at @AshokaUniv has started a doctoral programme; details here: ashoka.edu.in/programme/phd-…

Famously (there is a beautiful Works in Progress piece on this) in 2016, Geoffrey Hinton told an audience in Toronto that medical schools should stop training radiologists, since AI would soon outperform them at reading scans. Ten years later, there are more radiologists than ever, and they earn more than they did then. Hinton was right about the task, but he was wrong (so far!) on the future of the radiology profession. Times have never been better for them. The gap between those two claims, the difference between tasks and jobs, is the subject of a paper I have written with Jin Li and Yanhui Wu, and that we release today: "Weak Bundle, Strong Bundle: How AI Redraws Job Boundaries." (Very relatedly we are also finishing the first draft of our book "Messy Jobs" on AI and Jobs!! You will be the first to hear). We start from the observation that the growing literature on AI and labor markets measures the AI shock by task exposure: people count how many tasks AI can perform in a given occupation AI can perform, and infer that more exposure means more displacement. Eloundou et al. published a paper in Science in 2024 that started this literature, and many follow the same logic. The inference they make is that the more exposed tasks, the worse the outcomes. This is incomplete, because labor markets price jobs, not tasks. A radiologist does not just sell image classification, but does many other jobs: triages cases, communicates with other physicians, trains residents, makes the difficult decisions, and signs a diagnosis. The market buys a bundled service. The question AI poses is not whether it can do one task inside the bundle. The question is whether that task can be pulled out. Thread (1/3) dropbox.com/scl/fo/689u1g7…

John Taylor Gatto was named New York State Teacher of the Year. Upon receiving the award, he quit and spent the rest of his life writing devastating critiques of the educational system he had mastered. Gatto argued that regardless of the official curriculum, schools actually teach seven hidden lessons. The first is confusion. Students learn disconnected facts across dozens of subjects with no integration or meaning. The second is class position. Students learn their place in the social hierarchy. The third is indifference. Students learn that nothing is worth finishing because the bell always rings. The fourth is emotional dependency. Students learn to surrender their will to a chain of command. The fifth is intellectual dependency. Students learn to wait for experts to tell them what to think. The sixth is provisional self-esteem. Students learn that their worth depends on expert evaluation. The seventh is that they are always being watched and have no privacy. These lessons, Gatto argued, are the actual function of schooling. The explicit curriculum of reading, writing, and arithmetic is almost incidental. The real purpose is to produce passive, dependent, compliant citizens who wait for authorities to tell them what to do and think. Trad schooling amounts to thirteen years of training in being passive and dependent. I have seen this play out with hundreds of students. When I created Montessori middle schools in the San Francisco Bay Area, about half the students came up through Montessori elementary and about half came from public schools. When we opened, the Montessori kids immediately began doing their work, taking initiative, choosing what to tackle first. The public school students were lost. They would stare at their desks until we walked over and helped them plan their morning. It took at least a semester, sometimes a full year, before they could function in an environment that asked them to direct their own learning. These were not less intelligent children. They had simply been trained differently. For years, someone else had made all the decisions about what they would do, when they would do it, and how they would do it. When that structure was removed, they did not know how to operate. Agency is natural to children unless we train it out of them. When I coach parents on evaluating their children's education, I tell them to ignore grades entirely. The question is whether their children are taking initiative, being responsible, and becoming empowered moral beings. If a child is getting straight A's but has no initiative and no sense of personal responsibility, that child is being damaged by their education regardless of how it looks on paper.

Doing the reading is a superpower, and it's even better in a world where "no one" is doing the reading. (Inspired by a conversation I had with some college students.)

"Corporate culture and protest culture alike constantly demand the rhetoric of invention, transformation, revolution... We don’t always need a new brand or vision or advertising campaign; sometimes, our job is to conserve." chronicle.com/article/why-it…

Laura Loomer has been Robert Blackwilled.

Thanks to social media I never ever want to hear this again: “Here’s the thing nobody tells you…”

Students who took notes by hand scored ~28% higher on conceptual questions than laptop note-takers. Writing forces your brain to process and compress ideas instead of copying them.

Consider all the AI war videos. The philosopher @rinireg warned us back in 2019 about what the proliferation of deepfakes would mean: nytimes.com/2019/06/10/opi…

‘One time magnanimity’? A professor is arrested for a social media post and now nine months later, the GOVT says it’s closing the case out of ‘magnanimity’? And the SC instead of pulling up the Haryana police for exceeding their authority chooses to lecture the professor on his writing! Bananaistan! 😡

That one neuron connects to about 7,000 others. Your brain has 86 billion of them. Do the math and you get somewhere around 100 trillion connections inside your head. More connections than stars in 1,500 galaxies. And each connection point is way more complicated than anyone expected. A Stanford lab found that every single connection contains about 1,000 tiny switches that can store memories and process information at the same time. So your brain is running roughly 100 quadrillion switches right now, while you read this sentence. The wild part is the power bill. Your brain runs on 20 watts. That’s less energy than the light in your fridge. The world’s fastest supercomputer needs 20 million watts to do the same amount of raw calculation. A million times more power for the same output. We’re still nowhere close to understanding how any of this works. In October 2024, a team of hundreds of scientists finished mapping every single connection in a fruit fly’s brain. Took six years and heavy AI help. That fly brain had 140,000 neurons. Yours has 86 billion. Google and Harvard also mapped a piece of human brain last year, a speck smaller than a grain of rice. That speck alone contained 150 million connections and took 1,400 terabytes to store. The lead scientist said mapping a full human brain at that detail would produce as much data as the entire world generates in a year. A tiny worm had its 302 brain cells mapped back in 1986. Almost 40 years later, scientists still can’t fully explain how that worm’s brain keeps it alive. Your brain has 86 billion of those cells, each one wired to thousands of others, each wire packed with a thousand switches, all of it humming along on less power than a lightbulb.

“Can you jump on a call?”

From the philosopher and soldier J. Glenn Gray’s “The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle” (1959):

Wake me up when AI solves university reimbursement paperwork.

A CS professor at a mid-tier state university just sent me their internal placement data Fall 2023: 89% of their graduates had offers by graduation. Average starting salary $94k Spring 2024: 71% placement rate. Average dropped to $78k Fall 2024: 43% placement rate. Those who got offers averaged $61k Spring 2025: 31% of graduates employed in software roles six months out This semester? 19% placement rate and falling Faculty meeting last Tuesday got heated when the department chair suggested "pivoting curriculum toward AI collaboration skills" One professor stood up and said "we're teaching students to build the systems that eliminate their own jobs" The career fair last month had 12 companies show up. Half were MLMs and insurance sales Students keep asking why they're learning data structures when the job postings all say "3+ years experience with LLM integration" Professor told me the hardest part is the parent meetings "My daughter took out $140k in loans for this degree and she's working at Starbucks" Meanwhile the university is still running ads promising "94% job placement rates in high-growth tech careers" The disconnect is crushing everyone involved Faculty knows the industry has fundamentally shifted but the marketing department is still selling the 2019 dream These kids mortgaged their futures for careers that evaporated while they were in class

@PhilipPanass Deleted as someone has already replied.

Sudipto Kaviraj reportedly held job-quotas under the Mandal Commission as akin to supporting the demolition of the Babri Masjid on like grounds of historical injustice. Does anyone have the India Today source—fwiw, their archives are online—that has been cited by K. Balagopal?

Every educator needs to keep this Flannery O'Connor gem in a back pocket for the next time a student complains about the relevance or boringness of an older book... “And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.”

Yes, the US attacks took a lot of gallium.

The US Navy has extensive sonar surveillance capability in the Indian Ocean. Just search for Surveillance Towed Array Sensor System Low Frequency Active (SURTASS LFA) deployment in the Indian Ocean.

Pascal: "Can there be anything more ludicrous than a man having the right to kill me because he lives over the water and his king has a quarrel with mine, even though I have none with him?"

Muted a number of accounts who are mindlessly retweeting without having done even minimal fact checking — which invariably shows there is no evidence for what the retweet asserts.