This article isn't really about AI. It's about how this blogger doesn't value high-school education beyond it serving as a day-care. Talking about AI is for dressing this up as a controversial hot-take for click-bait.
The root of the flaw in this thinking is a common assumption that school is designed to create drones for the workforce rather than to round out human beings. Giving youth an opportunity to be a part of a shared understanding and a shared culture that is rooted in the history of the previous generations.
This kind of essay is on par with a general theme of discrediting and devaluing teachers and school in English speaking countries that is reinforced by Hollywood and out of touch billionaires. It's not doing us any favours because kids pick up on this disdain and make if part of their own identities.
I'm even more convinced by this when I look at other things this person has asked GPT to write for them. Their core focus is on convincing people not to value traditional education so that they can sell their own competing product.
I'm not convinced staying in classrooms from ages 16-22 is actually conducive to a well rounded citizenry. USA must have the highest proportion of 4 year graduates in the world and look where it's got us. It's just more time to grow into your cliques and push off the real world while "preparing for the real world"
Source: John Taylor Gatto, Jonathan Kozol, Ken Robinson to some extent.
When I was in university I went on a trip to Shanghai and met a woman my age who started her career at 14, she was global head of marketing while I was still trying to pass calculus...
> USA must have the highest proportion of 4 year graduates in the world and look where it's got us
It doesn't.
> look where it's got us
Richest nation on earth. To be fair that's as much tied to population size, resources, colonial-style capitalist exploitation as it is to American Exceptionalism and a good education system. And the US is suffering from a worsening wealth redistribution problem. But that's only going to be solved with more and better education not less.
Thanks for the correction, I was late night scrolling and didn't want to look it up, but looks like we're behind UAE, Ireland, Switzerland, Singapore, Belgium.
I do want to push back that higher level of education attained equates to universally better outcomes, because there's opportunity cost to being in school into your twenties, not becoming a taxpayer, getting deep into debt only to become underemployed. Again, people I've met who entered work at a young age are plenty intelligent and more skilled in their field than peers who went to grad school. I don't know that schools increase your intelligence, just your credentials.
Well that and decades of being the only industrialized nation not carpet bombed in a world war we have been riding on that and being issuer the global reserve currency for decades.
> And the US is suffering from a worsening wealth redistribution problem. But that's only going to be solved with more and better education not less.
I'd love to hear how. I'm a firm believer in education, but saying we can fix the wealth gap by just educating our kids even more is like saying we can stop deforestation if only we had even sharper axes.
The wealthiest are the luckiest, but also the best at exploiting resources like an educated work force. I can't think of a single invention of our modern day that has lessened the wealth gap. (The last one that did was probably the guillotine, and even that was a small blip on the graph.) The latest invention AI, is only accelerating the widening of the gap, just like other inventions before it. Point being, just being smarter seems to only accelerate the gap, not fix it. Unless you know of some hidden inflection point coming up.
I do think having a good understanding of our political systems, etc is obviously important. And I suppose that would fall under the umbrella of education. But if we just pumped out more doctors, each doctor just gets a smaller slice of the doctor pie. Elon isn't magically going to get less money.
> a general theme of discrediting and devaluing teachers and school in English speaking countries that is reinforced by Hollywood and out of touch billionaires
It's the dumbest thing for a culture to do to itself. I'm often so incredulous I want to believe it was actually done by soviet-bloc propaganda to undermine the west.
Sharing ideas leads to feedback. People in their late 20s and early 30s are only just feeling like they are cementing their identities, so they seek validation.
It seems like the author is referring specifically to the style of choral music found in churches, although the same thing can be said about other choral genres like barbershop.
However, Backstreet Boys or many of the Korean idol groups do music that could be classified as choral that's highly accessible.
The main difference is drums. Music without drums or some rhythmic equivalent is less accessible.
The other main difference is not in accessibility, but economics. Is cheaper and easier to make a band with only one featured vocalist, so most professional bands do this. It's what people hear, and therefore what they identify with and therefore what they go out of their way to listen to.
There is, actually, a not insignificant repertoire of secular choral music although it’s lost a lot of its popularity. The liner notes for one collection of Aaron Copland’s music made a comment about how it was strange that Copland had written very little choral music given its indigenous popularity in the US in the first half of the twentieth century.
But yes, solo vocalists have been the primary mode of vocal music in English-speaking culture which presented a challenge in creating post-Vatican II liturgical music which was intended to echo the local culture (something that Dennis Day noted in his book, Why Catholics Can’t Sing). Folk and rock both tend not to work well as a format for congregational music although the former works better in my opinion. Certainly, I don’t buy Day’s argument that the obvious liturgical choice is old-school hymnody (I lean more towards incorporating more of Black gospel instead).
I wouldn’t call the various harmony-based groups like Backstreet Boys or K-Pop as choral music. What makes choral music choral is the fact that there are multiple voices singing each part in the piece.
No I wouldn't class the artists as choral artists at all, I'm just pointing out that there are examples of polyphonic singing with multiple voices in pop music, it's just that it's usually accompanied with a rhythm section. Pieces that feature choral singing can be very accessible, although acapella music usually isn't. But take the example of Pentatonix someone mentioned earlier (which isn't really choral singing either because of the lack of voice doubling). What makes them accessible is that they use beat-boxing to provide the rhythm line for the punters.
What about groups like the aforementioned Pentatonix and The Harvard Opportunes. They are quite literally multiple voices singing each part in the piece.
I would be interested to hear some examples to see if that would change my understanding. I am expecting to hear things that are very upbeat and rhythmic though.
It doesn't have drums or their approximation, but Saunder Choi's "The New Colossus" is a very rhythmic and emotional work. The words are from Emma Lazarus' poem engraved on a plaque on the Statue of Liberty.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RUtWfSNRRY
Another rhythmic piece that comes to mind is Wild Embers by Melissa Dunphy, setting the words of Nikita Gill, who started off as an Instagram poet. Lots of videos of this one, I'm picking one at random: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCSjvGPERKQ
Another piece by Melissa Dunphy, "Dancing in Buses" is from American DREAMers. It begins with a nod to reggaeton, and tells the story of a kid crossing the border, with the bus coming under gunfire.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcfNiHDefBw
This is pretty much a living folk choral tradition. Maybe a bit influenced by classical church choral singing, but definitively its own thing in both vocal style and arrangement style.
In our Alpine region there is a long tradition of male choruses singing folk songs about mountain life and tales through rich harmonizations of pieces.
An example from coro SAT:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQZyZggh3SQ
That's a cool project, but learning music via music theory is a bit like trying to learn English via grammar theory. It's backwards, and out of the hundreds of musicians I've met, I've never met one that walked that path.
Strong recommendation: Hire a teacher. Even with experience playing four instruments, and when I decided to learn another, I still hired a teacher.
One of my goals for this years was to get a jazz teacher, specifically for guitar.
A layoff killed that goal for the foreseeable future.
Theory has helped me practice like I think you're supposed to. More structured,
more analysis. It also tickles the same part of the brain the certain comp sci topics do.
I think it came from wanting to learn how to improv, and then wanting to make my own songs. So I make a few tracks a week, of different genres, depending on what I'm interested in at the time. I've seen improvement, and I take notes about what I learned/what works.
To be fair, there is a massive percentage of non-productive jobs that are mostly security guards for goods and locations, and many inefficient roles related to ticket clipping, inefficient distribution and marketing that all stimulate the economy without being productive.
It's like how when you buy something now you need to take a photo and email it to your local police station to prove you weren't buying drugs or something.
I know, imagine what would have happened to society if people unwinded after a long day of work in their own home with weed, or if they drank coffee every morning. /s
To me its more about the intent and actions. If you figured out how to hack something, and possibly leave a note for the admin to fix their systems, thats one thing.
If you figure out how to hack something, and your first thought is to trash / destroy the system, thats the crime.
So personally:
> "where Stanley, at 15, bragged about fucking up servers" is more damning to me then the actual hacking part.
I disagree. I definitely have the curiosity to break into things all the time. There's a difference between unlocking a car, leaving a note saying "I unlocked your car" and locking it again, and unlocking it to crash it.
That's not as innocuous as you put it. From Godfather's horse head to the Bibilical story of Saul's robe, that can have a very different meaning and feeling.
I don't know how to explain that the feeling of solving a puzzle is a "rush of power". If it weren't, you'd be equally happy fiddling with a pile of puzzle pieces and making no attempt to solve it as you were to searching for a solution.
There isn't anything inherently unethical about enjoying power, but neither is it in any way virtuous.
This comment redefines the "power" as it's defined above, in particular by forgetting that it's "over others":
> I think both of those things do give people that rush of power and control over others.
That was presumably unintentional; I just wanted to point out that it's a different philosophical topic.
I don't strictly disagree with the idea but it's not the same as saying that someone solving a sudoku is doing it for the sake of having power over the puzzle's creator and/or the curator of the book/app that included the puzzle. It seems more likely that they're doing it instead because when they would solve puzzles in the past they would get a hit of dopamine, which taught them that solving puzzles is rewarding. I think this seems to fall under "rush of power" per this meaning but it's not "rush of power and control over others" per the initial one.
I still disagree. You're making a false dichotomy that there can be either "rush of power" or "nothing". Instead, I feel a sense of achievement at a job well done. To say that that's "power" requires stretching some definitions.
You can take the position of "achievement isn't a feeling of power" if you'd really like to, in which case I simply say find and replace all prior uses of "feelings of power" with "feelings of achievement" and the argument still stands. I'm happy to use whatever definitions you want. Taking joy from your success in doing things (whether you refer to it as achievement or power) is simply not an valid ethical justification when it is at the expense of violating other peoples right to control of their possessions.
I don't know that the argument stands with "feelings of achievement". I agree that you can't justify a moral infringement by taking pleasure in it, but upthread you were trying to distance the motivation from virtuous ones like curiousity and activism. Being driven by achievement is absolutely a virtue. I'd argue it's the same virtue that drives curiousity, and you've essentially just said exactly that ("the feeling of solving a puzzle is a 'rush of power'" s/power/achievement).
> I don't see it. What I see is post-hoc rationalisation to justify lust for a feeling of power and control over others.
There's always two sides to a medal. I think that the executive branches of government - across the Western world - suffer from lethargy caused because barely anyone in public service is willing to question, much less stretch or even bend, the rules in power.
A government obviously cannot be purely made out of rulebreakers and, frankly, toddlers and imbeciles. We see this in the current US administration. But it cannot be made out of "we always did it this way" people either, because that's how you end up with systems and processes that are so hopelessly fossilized that no one even understands why these systems are the way they are.
I'm talking about the virtues that you've just tried to paint on people that practice breaking into other peoples computers for fun.
It seems like what you are looking for is a discussion about whether or not it it is ethical for bureaucrats and elected officials ought to circumvent or ignore their countries democratic processes and laws.
I'm sure there are some ethical justifications for doing this in some hypothetical situations, but really I'm not sure it's as useful to be discussing hypotheticals rather than specifics in this space.
> It seems like what you are looking for is a discussion about whether or not it it is ethical for bureaucrats and elected officials ought to circumvent or ignore their countries democratic processes and laws.
What was the saying, three felonies a day? Society doesn't work out when people behave like role models all day long, the economy would grind to a standstill. That's why you get stuff like "shadow IT" and whatnot. Processes tend to grow ("scope creep") and no one is interested in cutting the crap.
