Donald Clark
47.3K posts
Donald Clark
@DonaldClark
CEO, Speaker, Blogger, Author 40+ yrs in online learning. AI for Learning - https://t.co/u4COVGsLfl AI and Productivity - https://t.co/IIf3GCXY6m
Brighton UK Katılım Mart 2007
7.8K Takip Edilen15.7K Takipçiler
This sort of things never happens in Cambridge 🧐
Adrian Hilton@Adrian_Hilton
Oxford Union. As if this morass couldn't get murkier, the President-Elect for Michaelmas 26 has been removed for giving out membership cards to commit mass voter fraud. Catherine Xu was the first ever Saïd Business School (EMBA student) to be elected president, now suspended as a member and permanently barred from holding any Office in the Society. The election has been annulled and will be re-run.
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@Davidfzc @C_Hendrick Not much. In truth, they were rarely used, pedagogically, in school classes. That's why it is a bit of a hysterical reaction.
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@DonaldClark @C_Hendrick Counter argument. What's the benefit of letting kids use phones in class for behavior and focus?
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Do test scores improve after phone bans? Not really.
- High schools gain a little. Middle schools lose a little. The average is close to zero.
- Behaviour worsens before it improves when phones are removed.
- Phone bans hurt wellbeing at first, then modestly help, but the effects are not large or transformative.
Bottom line: Lockable phone pouches reduce phone use and initially disrupt behaviour and wellbeing, but ultimately produce near zero overall effects on academic achievement.
tom-dee.github.io/files/w35132.p…
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Birth rates started falling in 19th c and a series of events accelerated this ; lower child mortality (so need fewer children), rising wages (less need for more children), now the unpopular part - contraception, education (kept in school for longer and longer, especially female education, as women married later and had fewer children. This led to two income family - more money - need less kids, if any at all. Social media is late to this game. AI, I'd wager, has zero effect.
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I was ready to tee off on this guy but it turns out he makes a very legitimate argument.
It *is* unnatural for mammals to just not mate. In nature, it’s an empirical sign of distress. And we *have* outsourced a significant percentage of our organic interpersonal fabric to synthetic third parties.
The facts are fairly transparent when you put it that way: we have fundamentally changed how we communicate and interact, and we are observing a clear indicator for distress at the population level. A bit of a dark epiphany moment there.
wanye@xwanyex
I’m sorry, I know this bums a lot of you out, because you’ve built your personality on being to pro-market, pro-technology guy, but technology is just very clearly making us less happy
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@JonhernandezIA Quite wrong. It's largely free and used by many for its utility.
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📁 Scott Galloway, NYU Stern marketing professor, says AI no longer feels like progress.
It feels like a transfer of power.
For the rich, it is innovation, rising portfolios, and the future.
For the middle class, it is higher electric bills, job anxiety, and wealth they cannot touch.
The promise was intelligence for everyone. The feeling now is different a machine enriching those already on top.
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@AaronBastani It's not geography, it's class. SNP, Plaid & Reform appeal to working class voters as they address their concerns & do no speak down to them as if they are deluded fools.
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Very little on Tories, Plaid, SNP or even Reform.
It really is true: the Labour machine really does think that everyone outside the M25 simply doesn’t matter.
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Constant attacks on a party with 5 MPs because they’ll win a few London authorities.
And, after all, London is the only place Labour really cares about.
They’ve genuinely given up on trying to govern the country. Amazing achievement after 2 years.
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Most know this. What's interesting is his identification of the cause of the erosion? He clearly says faculty & scholars. That demands a solution, the weeding by the system, of its corrosive elements - courses, faculty and student political power.
Heterodox Academy@HdxAcademy
🎓 Where academia went wrong, in under 60 seconds. Vanderbilt Chancellor Daniel Diermeier keynote address set the tone at HxA's recent conference:
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@stefanauer_hku Not convinced by the now dated Julian Jaynes Bicamerality. Neuroscience says this is unlikely.
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@DonaldClark Here is one of the best takes on AI applying Luhman’s system theory youtu.be/9X1CQlrwgDI?si…
YouTube
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The book is brilliant and Hassabis is obviously a genius, but he doesn’t understand Kant. Is it something that’s well known? I mean it’s fair enough that Hassabis didn’t have enough time for continental philosophy, but has anyone pointed out how misguided his take on Kant is?
Donald Clark@DonaldClark
Just finished a big, fat book ‘The Infinity Machine’, about Demis Hassabis. Put aside any tropes you have about tech-bros… he’s smart, driven, humble, brilliant, Liverpool season ticket holder, indifferent to material things and obsessed with AI…. and has a Nobel Prize. Easily the single, most important man in AI in the UK, if not the world. These are the voices one needs to listen to, like Hinton, Karpathy and Sutskever, as they built this tech and who genuinely want to use it for good. If you read only one book on AI, read this. You’ll get all the perspectives; the people, players, insights into the technology (not one thing but many), how businesses have to pivot, the sheer intensity and pace of development, the successes and failures. So it has been good to get a little bit of Heligoland time to think. Hassabis is a polymath and brings philosophy and psychology to the AI table, as comfortable in quoting Kant and Spinoza, as Einstein and Feynman. This has allowed him to think big and invent tech that really does change the world. AlphaFold saved a billion years of research in protein structures, now free to the world. His work is now the beating heart of Google. Most of the people he works with are ‘doers’, having ducked out of formal education or academe. He himself missed entire years of school. Both of the other founders of DeepMind left University before finishing their Degrees. His experience in getting things done (or not) in the NHS is sobering, even after developing world class solution in retinal scans and cancer screening (Ch 11). His background, like Hnton, was in neuroscience, which allowed him to see the limitations of the brain and human-only experience. This is why he has a single goal – AGI, the word ‘General’ matters, as he wants us to be able to solve problems and make life easier for all and so in reading this book, you’ll see that AI is not LLMs alone but comes in a range of flavours. For him, AI is as important as fire or language. It is a Copernican revolution of the mind, where we must recognise, just as we recognised that the earth is no longer the centre of the Universe, that we also are no longer the centre or standard for intelligence.
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@0Beanie05923291 Elitist view of writing, which is largely for communication, often simple and mundane; not the showboating of Berry's old-school, preachy prose, a man who simply hates modernity.
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@elladorn_ Met a few at an adult conference over two years. Nice, super-curious kids but seemed to lack relaxed social interactions. Not at all street-wise and not sure they would last 2 minutes on a football field. Liked them but it worried me. Just some first impressions.
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I know the destinations are good but I'm curious re how Michaela students do once they're actually at university. At this point you should be developing independence/autonomy/responsibility and this doesn't seem super promising
Tom HB@hb_history
🚨 A letter to Year 11 families at Michaela Community School states that children who do not attend weekend and holiday revision sessions will “spend time in Referral” They must also attend in full school uniform
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Quite extraordinary turn of events..... shows the massivegulf between political rhetoric and the reality on the ground....
ScotFax@scotfax
wingsoverscotland.com/binfire-of-the… Scotland is a ‘family squabble’ away from being a right wing led country. Don’t give me your ‘oh we’re so progressive compared to the English.’
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@McBrideLawNYC I am not impressed with a lawayer who hasn't even bothered to look at the evidence.
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I am not sold on the AI craze. Not by a long shot.
ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok have the analytical depth of a sharp intern and the memory of someone with Alzheimer's who smokes an ounce a day.
I am not impressed.
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@techczech I make this point at the start of most talks I give. These constraints are largely fixed in humans but can be improved by degree in AI (variety of techniques), as human cognitive constraints are biologically bounded, whereas AI constraints are engineered.
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The one fundamental difference between how LLMs and humans deal with their respective context windows is that LLMs can pay attention to 200-300 never-before-seen instructions, while humans can only do this for 3-4.
That's why humans need a lot more learning in new environments. In this sense, in-context learning is equivalent to human learning even if it does not persist.
But that's only within the scope of minutes or hours of human time. Over time, human limit on learning new environments is much higher so that they can in effect follow what to the LLM would be 1000s of instructions.
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@ReemAmirIbrahim Slam together two disparate statements and create a Centre... not sure the LSE knows much about either to be honest.
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@BrexitStewart When your meaning in life comes from an accident of birth, you shouldn't gloat about it...
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@airesearchtools No one cares. There's a tsunami of qualitative research published every week, most of goes unread.
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Just when I thought AI was gaining acceptance in research.
Today I came across this, published a few months ago.
Signed by 419 researchers from 32 countries.
Who reject the use of AI in qualitative research.
I’m pretty surprised.
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@AaronBastani Took a man from, of all place, Brighton.... which is as far away from Scotland as you can get without getting wet.
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To paraphrase Mark Fisher, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine a club outside of Glasgow winning the Scottish premier league title.
And yet….
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@vitt2tsnoc WE have a 3 day week in many professions - it's a nightmare. " I am not in the office until... please..."
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@MushtaqBilalPhD Did Enclyclopaedia Brittanica in 1768 have an adverse effect for 250 years?
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Google has had a negative effect on our memory.
We don't remember where exactly a certain piece of information is. But we know how to access that information.
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AI is going to have a similar effect.
We'll not think about how to accomplish a certain task. Instead, we'll know how to get AI to accomplish it.
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