Is Our Children Learning? Apparently Not.

Plus, Sam Altman as ShamWow Guy, and more from this week...

So much going on these days, we’re throwing the regular Friday roundup format out the window. Recommended reads below, but first—

Let’s begin with the appalling news that “American Kids Are Getting Even Worse at Reading.” It’s hard to overstate the catastrophe of this trend, which began for the bottom half of test-takers pre-Covid, worsened with school closures, and shows no sign of reversing. After decades of extensive research, efforts at reform, increases in funding, deployments of technology, we just hit new lows. We are doing a worse job teaching kids to read than in 1990, and inequality between top and bottom is only getting wider.

At no point during this slide, so far as I can tell, have policymakers or the education establishment looked up from the hole they seem to be digging and thought, maybe we should stop? No, the fact that new-age techniques seem only to make things worse yields only calls for yet more newer-age techniques. The total failure of technology to deliver progress leads to the obvious conclusion that we need to bring even more technology into the classroom even faster. In parallel, as therapeutic trends place ever greater emphasis on social and emotional health that only continues deteriorating, someone somewhere has apparently dictated that the answer must be to emphasize it more and coddle better.

Now we seem poised to double down yet again, this time on AI as “the greatest education innovation ever.” That’s what Tyler Cowen called it, at a PR rally (sorry, workshop on AI economics) hosted by OpenAI that I attended earlier in the week. More on that in a moment, but the idea of AI as an ideal “teacher” continues to pop up, and strikes me as an especially bizarre conceit at the intersection of everything we are getting wrong about both education and AI. At Persuasion this week, Yascha Mounk similarly enthused that, “The ways in which AI can help you learn a language are incredible. You can have a conversation in the language you’re practicing with the world’s cheapest and most patient tutor.” Yes, yes, there are “challenges of design, pedagogy and user experience,” but “somebody will almost certainly fix these problems.”

Look, I don’t doubt that the Tyler Cowens and Yascha Mounks of the world can make great use of AI in their own learning. But educating Tyler and Yascha isn’t the challenge. And for the typical learner, let alone somebody who really struggles, the lack of technological tools is not the obstacle. Engagement, confidence, pedagogy, relationship… the things an educator actually has to get right have nothing to do with the “power of the model,” or its UX design, and no amount of coding will change that, just as none of the billions of dollars poured into education technology over the past 30 years appears to have achieved anything at all.

Not that the AI hype machine cares. It was quite an experience sitting in the DC conference room listening to Sam Altman and his team use various forms of the word “excited” what must have been several hundred times in two hours of dog-and-pony show for a wholly unimpressive preview of technology that seems already to have been demonstrated by other labs. The actual demo was “off the record” for no apparent reason, but I suppose I should respect that and wait until they release the products publicly to say more about them.

What I can say is that I don’t think I’ve heard someone so excited to share their excitement about something so exciting since the last time I watched the ShamWow guy. And indeed, my main takeaway was the startling realization that all the commentary from the “frontier labs” amounts to nothing but one long running infomercial. Because the hypothetical implications of artificial intelligence could be quite important, we seem to have assumed for no reason that the entrepreneurs and coders hawking their wares are in fact philosophers with something quite important to say. But I’m not sure why.

These guys are great engineers, geniuses even. But that doesn’t mean they have useful thoughts about political economy, or labor markets, or education, or government reform. To be clear, that’s not a case for credentialism—whatever they say should be evaluated on the merits; if they make good arguments, if their predictions hold up, they deserve respect on that basis. But “developed a really good LLM” is not an indicator that the things someone says are insightful. It is an indicator that the things someone says are likely geared to promote the LLM he developed.

And indeed, that seems to be the only throughline in the ideas they present. In the wake of the DeepSeek disruption, a number of people have noted that Sam Altman said in 2023, “It’s totally hopeless to compete with us on training foundation models.” That’s great marketing copy, but not great market analysis, as it turns out. More generally, it’s remarkably disorienting to see how easily the OpenAI team will slide back and forth, during a single presentation, between assertions that their technology will completely overwhelm human capabilities and alter human society (when promoting their technological prowess) and asserting that it is nothing but a useful tool that will improve people’s jobs (when promoting their cuddly social value that policymakers should embrace). These things cannot both be true! People who say both are not transmitting useful information to you.

BONUS RANT: Speaking of people not transmitting useful information, this comment last month from Adam Thierer, innovation policy analyst at R Street Institute, caught my eye: “while Washington scrambles to make bad industrial policy gambits work, the market evolves and delivers once again. Absolutely remarkable new American investments & competition in play in the chips and AI ecosystem. We don't need any more wasteful 'CHIPS Act 2' nonsense to win.”

His source for the insight is a Wall Street Journal story, “Amazon Announces Supercomputer, New Server Powered by Homegrown AI Chips,” which reports that, “Amazon, Google and Microsoft are building their own AI chips.”

You’d think, from Thierer’s comment, that these companies are actually, you know, building chips. The federal government sunk all those billions of dollars into luring chip builders TSMC and Samsung to American soil, and Amazon, Google, and Microsoft just sprinted right past to build their own cutting-edge chip fabs. Foolish policymakers!

But no, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are designing chips, like NVIDIA designs chips, and AMD designs chips. The U.S. has always been and still is the leader in designing chips. How do they make the chips? Well, as the Journal explains, “Amazon fabricates its silicon directly through Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.”

Twenty seconds of searching confirms further that the Microsoft chips are “manufactured on a 5-nanometer TSMC process,” while for Google:

The final design is sent off for manufacturing at a fabrication plant, or fab — primarily those owned by the world’s largest chipmaker, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, which makes 92% of the world’s most advanced semiconductors.

When asked if Google has any safeguards in place should the worst happen in the geopolitical sphere between China and Taiwan, Vahdat said, “It’s certainly something that we prepare for and we think about as well, but we’re hopeful that actually it’s not something that we’re going to have to trigger.”

Protecting against those risks is the primary reason the White House is handing out $52 billion in CHIPS Act funding to companies building fabs in the U.S. — with the biggest portions going to Intel, TSMC, and Samsung to date.

All those companies recognizing the critical importance of cutting-edge chip fabrication, all currently dependent on a company in Taiwan to actually make anything… that’s not exactly an argument against CHIPS. Thierer joins an august group of commentators who seem remarkably determined to keep their CHIPS critiques as far as possible from the real world. One thinks of economist Gordon Hanson calling TSMC’s emergence in Taiwan “something of an accident” or the Journal’s Andy Kessler suggesting that rather than use industrial policy, “ask nicely and maybe Apple and Alphabet would prepay for domestic-made processors and machine-learning chips as well.” These are the actual arguments folks. You can learn a lot from their quality.

WHAT ELSE SHOULD YOU BE READING?

No room here for much commentary on your one thing to read this week, but there is still one thing of particular importance: This excellent statement on “A Future for the Family: A New Technology Agenda for the Right,” which I was delighted to join as a signatory. Apropos of the education discussion above, it says, “Our laws and regulations must seek to form a technological order that provides a functional economic role for the household, protects human sexuality, rewards marriage, enriches childhood, preserves parental and communal authority, enables the practice of liberty, and ennobles our common life.”

• Bonus link: Two of the statement’s authors, Brad Littlejohn and Clare Morell, published an more in-depth treatment of the theme at The New Atlantis, “Stop Hacking Humans.”

At UnHerd, Alexander Nazaryan tackles a topic about which I’d been thinking a lot myself, and had even begin jotting some notes for an essay. Time saved! Read his instead: “How Lawfare Destroyed Liberalism.”

It brings to mind this Financial Times column from Janan Ganesh that I highlighted a few months ago, which noted that “Tim Walz is the first person on either the top or bottom half of a Democratic presidential ticket since 1980 who did not attend law school.” As Ron Burgundy would say, “I’m not even mad. That’s amazing.”

The problem is that the legal profession trains people to think in a very funny way. This gets lauded as “thinking like a lawyer” but, outside the profession, this is usually a terrible way to think. The hallmark of thinking like a lawyer is the belief that whoever can craft the most clever argument gets to define reality. In the adversarial process of litigation, that turns out mostly to be true. If you are the better lawyer, the judge will side with you, and your client wins. The contract says what you say it says. But when it comes to democratic politics, this is fairly insane and leads to pathological behavior.

As I observed, watching university presidents flounder last year in their efforts to explain why their obsessive efforts at diversity, equity, and inclusion did not extend to protecting Jewish students, “The conduct of these ‘leaders’ is incomprehensible. The smiles and smirks reflect an elite culture where linguistic tricks and clever lawyering are substituted proudly for morality and rationality.” Bad approach.

In other news, a couple of good reads on interesting cultures within both Left and Right in the new Trump era:

• Gulag Humor Is Now Everywhere in D.C. | Ashley Parker, The Atlantic

• Last Boys at the Beginning of History | Mana Asfari, The Point

And perhaps relatedly, I really appreciated these thoughts from Musa Al-Gharbi, in “Trump Changes Nothing”:

As I show in the book, this is the modal consequence of “Great Awokenings.” In periods when symbolic capitalists, our institutions and our outputs grow especially political, the main thing we actually achieve is backlash against “our” causes, organizations and institutions – often driven by the very people we view ourselves as advocates for and representatives of (in the 2024 election, for instance, GOP gains were driven by less affluent and less educated people, religious minorities, young people, women and non-whites, even as highly-educated and affluent whites went the other direction).

One might think the core “trust the science” constituency would defer to the abundant evidence that symbolic capitalists’ attempts at influencing politics through their work rarely produce the desired outcomes and, perhaps, they would refrain from distorting their work into (likely counterproductive) moral, political and cultural “interventions.” But alas, that is not the world we live in.

Instead, the first time Trump was elected, large numbers of scientists, engaging as scientists, took part in “March for Science” demonstrations which implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) positioned “science” in opposition to being a conservative, Republican or Trump supporter. As political scientist Matt Motta later showed, these demonstrations did nothing to undermine support for Trump. Their main effect was to reduce trust in scientists.

This result should not have been surprising: the evidence is overwhelming that people don’t like politicized science. Even when constituents agree with the message, scientists engaging in politics tends to lower public trust. Citizens want scientists to help illuminate issues of public concern – but by acting as “honest brokers” providing information to help contextualize or evaluate competing claims and considerations, thereby empowering people to make their own decisions (rather than serving as “epistocrats” dictating to people what they should think or feel and how they should behave).

Finally, on a point near and dear to my heart, philosophy professor Jacob Berger had a great essay in the Wall Street Journal, “Why MAGA Folks Should Read Marx.” Conservatives in recent decades have struggled to acknowledge the existence of real problems, fearing that if we agree something is wrong we will have to agree on a foolish progressive solution. But denying problems is bad politics and bad policy, and has denied conservatives the opportunity to apply their principles effectively. You’re much more likely to end up with progressive solutions when progressives are the only ones offering solutions at all. As Berger notes:

On the surface, the 19th-century philosopher and 21st-century conservatives seem to hold opposing worldviews. While Marx marvels at the free market as the greatest engine of development the world has known, he argues that capitalism inevitably fails to guarantee a good life to hardworking people. The American right, on the other hand, has long championed free enterprise, viewing any intrusion by government into business as a menace.

In the Trump era, however, the ideological divide isn’t so straightforward. Both Marx and today’s populists aim to harness similar instincts to empower ordinary people. Of course, no mainstream politician seriously entertains Marx’s proposal for the abolition of private property in favor of public or collective ownership of the means of production. But a growing movement in the GOP, led by Vice President JD Vance among others, is deeply critical of certain features of capitalism. These economic populists propose policies such as an increased minimum wage, tougher enforcement of antitrust measures and limits on foreign investment.

Marx’s ideas have led to some of human history’s worst tragedies when translated into Leftist solutions. But capitalism is not perfect, and it’s a very good thing that conservatives are now beginning to pay attention to the flaws, and apply their own (better!) instincts to addressing them.

AND THIS WEEK IN COMMONPLACE

Now that Commonplace is running at full speed, it’s hard to even mention let alone give deserved attention to everything we’re publishing. But I’ll try to still provide a rundown each week, which should also serve as a reminder that you should just be following @commonplc and visiting commonplace.org every day.

This Week’s Features:

Pro-Life Laws Didn’t Kill These Women | Leah Sargeant - The liberal media has widely misrepresented recent maternal deaths by claiming that they were caused by recent pro-life laws passed since Dobbs. A survey of the facts show that these claims are false, and they put the lives of other women at stake.

How Shoplifting Got So Bad | Nic Rowan - You may have seen the security theater at your local CVS to prevent theft, but if you bargain shop online, there’s a good chance you have bought stolen goods.

This Week’s Commentary:

What Women Want | Ivana Greco - Policymakers want women to join the workforce to boost America’s economic metrics. Ignore them.

One Speech, Two Speech; Red Speech, Gold Speech | Matt Mehan - The sharp contrast between Trump’s Inaugural Address and Biden’s ‘Red Speech.’

Red States: Rich in Votes, Poor in Power | Aaron Renn - Blue city boardrooms hold more sway over red state policies than their own voters do.

To Protect Syria’s Christians, The U.S. Must Clear the Path for Economic Recovery | Marlo Slayback - Sanctions relief could help preserve one of Christianity’s oldest communities.

America’s ‘Golden Age’ Requires Energy Dominance | David Cowan - Encouraging AI proposals will require vast amounts of energy we’re currently leaving in the ground.

American Greatness Depends on Strong Families | Brad Wilcox and Chris Bullivant - Three policies to help the parents who swept Trump into power.

There’s No ‘American-Owned TikTok’ | John Mac Ghlionn - A U.S. buyer won’t neutralize the app’s national security threat.

A Family-First Technology Policy | Jared Hayden and Michael Toscano -Conservatives leaders chart a new course on tech.

And This Week on The American Compass Podcast:
Leah Sargeant joins me to discuss her Commonplace feature on the media-driven misinformation around the effects of pro-life laws, and how conservatives can support mothers and their babies during pregnancy and after birth.

Well, this ran a little long, we’ll try to tighten things up next Friday. For now…

Enjoy the weekend!