Daniel Metcalf

“How we must live is determined by our answers to the fundamental questions of our origin, purpose, and destiny.” - Herman Bavinck in Reformed Ethics, Volume 1

@annielcrawford @JoshDaws “Every time people imagine AI working really well to teach someone something, it seems most are imagining a motivated and functional human who wants to learn and knows how to learn…” Have you considered a counter example in @AlphaSchoolATX

This is a false dichotomy akin to asking whether you would rather your child be slowly poisoned by lead or asbestos. Education is not merely the transfer of information, or even skills. It is the formation of a soul through the enculturation into a living and human tradition. This is not something a robot can do. A teacher with too many kids in the classroom, if all those kids came from healthy, functional families, would be far better. There is no other answer apart from the formation of children within healthy family based communities. No amount of technology is ever gonna provide a solution for a society that gives up on that foundation. Every time people imagine AI working really well to teach someone something, it seems most are imagining a motivated and functional human who wants to learn and knows how to learn… in other words someone who is already educated.

This is getting dunked on by the right, but ask yourself what's better for students. A teacher with too many kids in the classroom, teaching to the lowest common denominator? Or a personalized 1-on-1 education? AI makes the latter possible.

@tim_evans @NotionHQ It’s a shame then. I feel like the capabilities of the AI subscription have hit a ceiling, and they are pivoting to a model that makes them more money, yes, but doesn’t deliver the same immediate value to individual consumers.

@_danielmetcalf @NotionHQ They use Notion credits.

Meet Database Agents. A team of li’l librarians in your database — keeping it up to date automatically using context from the page, your workspace, and the web. No more “we’ll update the database later.” Starting to roll out on Biz + Enterprise.

@dokimazete @BMcGrewvy It is, but it’s the good kind. Have a book to read? Good friction would require you to actually read it (though AI could help). Have a book to write? Parsing through hours of transcripts in seconds is potentially a good kind of cognitive offload.

@BMcGrewvy Is this cognitive offloading…?

One acceptable use of AI for me is summarizing long transcripts (though bugs can still creep in). Interestingly, even when it's a very accurate detailed summary, I still find there's no substitute for reviewing the original transcript and making my own notes.

There were Four Horsemen of the Modern Apocalypse: Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, Freud. Each one worked to turn the world upside down from a divinely ordered cosmos to a materially evolved chaos. - Marx gave us a material foundation for the evolution of society - the will to social power - Darwin gave us a material foundation for the evolution of life - the will to biological power - Nietzsche gave us a material foundation for philosophy - knowledge as the will to power - Freud gave us a material foundation for the self - the will to pleasure Enlightenment rationalism failed: its ultimate consequence was the transformation of every fundamental aspect of humanity into a form of arbitrary will. And with no transcendent moral order to harmonize our various individual wills, reality has been transformed into a landscape of absolute violence, each individual will in a zero-sum competition for the advancement of self at every level of human being: material, social, psychological, and epistemological. This will to power is now high-tech, fueled by a growing global AI egregore. Meanwhile, inspired by the Inklings, a counter-culture of neo-medievalists are out here re-building human, sacramental ways of thinking and living again. It really is Belbury vs. St. Anne's right now. Time to dig my Arthurian robes out of the closet and brew some mead. Time to medieval-maxx, eh @AHomelyHouse?

@David_Fairchild Hear from the man himself x.com/_danielmetcalf…

@David_Fairchild A little known book by Francis Schaeffer “Who is for Peace” is well worth the read

What could possibly go wrong? #skynet

@wagraham The beauty of AI. How did it feel to outsource your thinking? Didn’t feel like using your powers of induction to solve the problem? 👆 that was a joke. Nice job. Great use of AI and its abilities to augment human capacities.

I replaced my USB-C ports on my 2020 M1 MacBook Air. I ran into two problems: (1) the battery plugin was tougher to put back in than I expected (I had to rock it into place; (2) I didn't originally connect the USB-C board properly (no click into place). So my computer did not start. I used Claude to diagnose the problem. And I fixed it. I spent $12 on the UCB-C board I spent $18 on tools to open up the MacBook

@johnandrewwords Framed “The art of misreading:{insert your quote tweet here}”

At least in some important ways, Christian metaphysics is magical. The irony is that Daws has assumed a sort of disenchanted materialism that’s at odds with historical and biblical Christianity. It’s the position of a “buffered individual” as if the written word and its value is devoid of human virtue. It’s treating the written word as indifferent to the humanity that created it. As if human creative work carries no meaning beyond its material output. As if the relationship between creator and creation is irrelevant. As if all that matters are the pixels on the screen or the ink on the page. That’s a metaphysical reduction of Christianity, not an attack on some kind of fantasy magic. Basically, human work has meaning beyond the material output. Offloading that work or seeing inhuman work as equal is not Christian.

NEW: Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood is coming to YouTube, getting its own page. It’s the first time the show will be on-demand for free. Fred Rogers Productions tells me the page is coming this summer. axios.com/local/pittsbur…

@JoshDaws Not only if we had a @Logos CLI to match!

I've been reading most books on Kindle for 15 years. Now my digital assistant has access to all 11,328 highlights across 15 years and hundreds of books. This is what I mean when I talk about giving AI the right tools. "Give me everything I've highlighted about the church growth movement from David Wells."

As the fatherhood guy at my local pregnancy resource center, I approve this message.

@JoshDaws @dokimazete As such, who just trusts what a junior employee or assistant gives them? If their work turns out good on the first try, all the better, but otherwise, iterate, ask good questions, think critically from your knowledge base, check their sources, etc

Every concern here assumes AI is primarily an information source. That's the most rudimentary way to use it. Stop thinking of AI as a source of truth. Start thinking of it as a junior employee you can put to work. It’s an agent not an oracle. You are the boss.

@appenz @zachtratar @howard @meetgranola Give them another look. They now have an MCP and a CLI.

@zachtratar @howard @meetgranola I used to be 100% on Notion, but getting data out used to be incredibly painful and I migrated away from it. For agents, the standard is Markdown files in a folder hierarchy. Notions sort of supports markdown and has a desktop meeting notes in beta. Still an awkward fit.

Sorry to see Granola @meetgranola going closed. They encrypted their local db, no local and no cloud API. In a world where notes are managed by agents, the app now has zero value. Any recommendations for good alternatives? What are you switching to?

@appenz @meetgranola @NotionHQ meeting notes

@dani_avila7 @antigravity when smart switching coming? You’re pretty generous with flash but I don’t want to babysit the switching process. Let the system dynamically switch between models when it requires it.

Did you know about the opusplan model in Claude Code? /model opusplan It's a hybrid alias that automatically uses Opus in plan mode for complex reasoning, then switches to Sonnet for execution. Best of both worlds: Opus thinks, Sonnet builds

"Alas, must I rock the baby, wash its diapers, make its bed, smell its stench, stay up nights with it, take care of it when it cries, heal its rashes and sores?…O God, because I am certain that you have created me as a man and have from my body begotten this child, I also know for a certainty that it meets with your perfect pleasure. I confess that I am not worthy to rock the little babe or wash its diapers. Or to be entrusted with the care of the child and its mother. How is it that I, without any merit, have come to this distinction of knowing I am serving your creature and your most precious will? O how gladly will I do so, though the duties should be even more insignificant and despised. Neither frost nor heat, neither drudgery nor labor, will distress or dissuade me, for I am certain that it is thus pleasing in your sight." Martin Luther

Most of fatherhood is cleaning after your children.

Thank you for your time. I apologize, but I can’t engage here all day. The arguments have been made and are clear enough. You’re a reader well equipped for the essential homework in my absence— I’ll leave you with what I’ve given you. Read something might lead to some fruitful discussion? I’ll be happy to engage as I have more time.

@_danielmetcalf I really don’t have time to read everything that everyone sends me. But I am very happy to have conversation with people here. Please feel free to make the arguments concisely in your own words. I’m here for dialogue, not homework.

And one could say that the clankerphiles are afraid of being left behind, afraid of a weak economy, afraid of contentment, afraid of death. But let’s not play the stupid game of Bulverism, where we claim that you only believe X because of Y psychological or sociological circumstance. Let us a reason together toward what is true, regardless of our feelings about it. I am not afraid. I’m interested in the truth, because I have tasted and seen that it is truth which sets us free.