Jason Spencer

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.

Schools should go back to pen-and-paper only (and everyone knows it).

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.

Good - Teacher provided notes Better - Student typed notes on laptop Best - Student writes notes by hand

🚨 SAM ALTMAN: “We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter.”

Sam Altman said people saying “please” and “thank you” to ChatGPT costs OpenAI tens of millions of dollars a year in compute. 67% of Americans do it anyway. Run the math on why. A 2024 Waseda University study tested LLM responses across politeness levels in English, Chinese, and Japanese. Impolite prompts produced measurably worse outputs: more bias, more errors, more refusals. Moderate politeness consistently beat both extremes. The mechanism makes sense once you see it. Polite prompts pattern-match to higher-quality training data. When you write “Could you help me structure this analysis?”, the model pulls from professional, well-reasoned text. When you write “give me the answer,” it pulls from Reddit. Google DeepMind’s Murray Shanahan explained it simply: the model is role-playing a smart intern. Treat the intern like a colleague, you get colleague-quality work. Bark orders, you get minimum-viable compliance. Now look at the cost side. OpenAI handles over a billion queries daily. Each GPT-4 query uses roughly 2.9 watt-hours, ten times a Google search. But OpenAI just raised $40 billion at a $300 billion valuation. Tens of millions in politeness tokens is a rounding error on a rounding error. 67% of users do it anyway, and 55% of them say it’s because it’s “the right thing to do.” They’re maintaining a behavioral habit that governs every other interaction in their life. The parent who teaches their kid to say please to Alexa isn’t doing it for Alexa. They’re doing it because the alternative is raising someone who learns that being rude gets faster results. Telling 900 million people to stop saying thank you so OpenAI can save 0.01% of operating costs is the most engineer-brained optimization take on the internet. You’re training yourself to treat every interaction as a transaction. And that habit doesn’t stay in the chat window.

We are sending our kids to school to memorize facts that AI can retrieve in 0.3 seconds. We're grading them on essays that AI writes better than their teachers. We're preparing them for jobs that won't exist by the time they graduate. The entire education system is training humans to compete with machines at what machines do best. That's not education. That's sabotage. The schools that survive will teach thinking, not memorizing. Creating, not repeating. Discerning, not obeying. Every other school is a museum that doesn't know it yet.

We are sending our kids to school to memorize facts that AI can retrieve in 0.3 seconds. We're grading them on essays that AI writes better than their teachers. We're preparing them for jobs that won't exist by the time they graduate. The entire education system is training humans to compete with machines at what machines do best. That's not education. That's sabotage. The schools that survive will teach thinking, not memorizing. Creating, not repeating. Discerning, not obeying. Every other school is a museum that doesn't know it yet.

Chicago has a public school with space for 912 kids, yet only 28 students are enrolled. The school is 97% empty. It spends $93,787 per student. It's staff to student ratio is 1:1. ZERO of the kids are proficient in reading.