What it Takes in Education: Demythologising Education

Dave (my dear friend), many thanks. It is an extraordinary video and message for our times. I appreciate very much participation in our common passion: education. You know, it is a factor of common humanity, as much as the technocrats and bio-dispositionists want to work to undermine the remaining defences of comprehensive and compatibilist educationalists. It is interesting that examples are immediately mathematical. It is difficult for the common population to be able to imagine, let alone understand, the educational failures in technology for the humanities and broader social science.

We are already in a major failure in technology for the humanities and broader social science from the hype of a conceptual application, called “General A.I.” To take a mathematical example:

“His team drilled down on GPT’s math issues and discovered that it was decent at computation but easily bullied. If a user told GPT that 5 + 7 = 90, it would shrug and agree. This was largely because OpenAI’s original idea of a helpful assistant was one that’s always subservient — which makes a lot of sense when you have cutting-edge tech, and you don’t want to freak out your users. But in an educational context, second-guessing humans is kind of the point.”

The quote comes from Josh Tyrangiel’s article, “Opinion An ‘education legend’ has created an AI that will change your mind about AI”, in The Washington Post. The point is the “second-guessing” for that is what the hoi polloi thinks will be a great substitute for education. And our socio-political system makes it very difficult for persons of the hoi polloi to take up a program of education.

*****

The image is linked to a page of my work on education, technology, and worldview.

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Neville Buch

Professional Historian at Professional Historians Association (Queensland) Inc.

Neville Buch (Pronounced Book) Ph.D. is a certified member of the Professional Historians Association (Queensland). Since 2010 he has operated a sole trade business in history consultancy. He was a Q ANZAC 100 Fellow 2014-2015 at the State Library of Queensland. Dr Buch was the PHA (Qld) e-Bulletin, the monthly state association’s electronic publication, and was a member of its Management Committee. He is the Managing Director of the Brisbane Southside History Network.

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