Don’t waste your time on this graph, or this essay, or Patrick Dodd

Here’s a provocative essay: AI is driving down the price of knowledge – universities have to rethink what they offer. The title alone irritated me: it proposes that AI is a competing source of “knowledge” against universities. AI doesn’t generate new knowledge! It can only shuffle, without understanding, the words that have been used to describe knowledge. It’s a serious mistake to conflate what a large language model does with what researchers at a university do — throughout the essay, the professor (an instructor at a business school, no surprise) treats “knowledge” as a fungible product that should be assessed in terms of supply and demand.

For a long time, universities worked off a simple idea: knowledge was scarce. You paid for tuition, showed up to lectures, completed assignments and eventually earned a credential.

That process did two things: it gave you access to knowledge that was hard to find elsewhere, and it signalled to employers you had invested time and effort to master that knowledge.

The model worked because the supply curve for high-quality information sat far to the left, meaning knowledge was scarce and the price – tuition and wage premiums – stayed high.

This is a common error — even our universities market themselves as providers of certificates, rather than knowledge — so I guess I can’t blame the author. He’s just perpetuating a flawed capitalistic perspective on learning. But digging further into the essay, I find abominations. Like this graph, which he claims illustrates “why tuition premiums and graduate wage advantages are now under pressure.”

Supply shift from scarcity to abundance in the knowledge market

Hot tip for whenever someone shows you a graph: first, figure out what the axes are.

The Y axis is labeled “Price (tuition/wage premium)”. No units, but OK, I can sort of decipher it. We’re paying a sum of money for college tuition, and after we graduate, we might expect that will translate to a wage increase, so this might represent something like a percent increase in base pay for college graduates over what non-college graduates might get. Fine, I could see doing some kind of statistical analysis of that. But it’s not going to produce a simple number!

For instance, in my cohort of students entering undergraduate education in the 1970s, we all paid roughly the same tuition. Afterwards, though, some of us were English majors, some of us were biologists, and some of us were electrical engineers…and there’s a vast difference in the subsequent earnings of those students. This graph is saying that when knowledge, that is, educated workers, are rare, then an education leads to a premium in wages. I can see that, but I think “price” is going to be far more complicated than is shown.

The X axis though…that’s made up. How do you measure “knowledge accessibility”? What are the units? How is it measured? I’ll have to return to that in a moment.

So there are lines drawn on the graph. One is going down, that’s “demand,” and obviously, going down is bad. The value, or price, of knowledge is declining, a claim that I’m not seeing justified here. Why is it going down? Because the supply is going up, which should be good, since it is going up, but knowledge is some kind of commodity that is being stockpiled, but is being called scarce anyway. Curiously, on this graph, the Price of knowledge is going up as “accessibility” increases, while demand goes down.

I’m not an economist, so the more I puzzle over this graph the more confused I get.

There is also a red dashed line here labeled Supply (AI abundance). Which further confuses me. So supply is scarce if produced by non-AI sources, but abundance if pumped out by an AI?

I was so lost that my next thought was that maybe I should look at the raw data and see how these values were calculated. Hey, look! At the bottom of the graph there was a link to “Get the data,” always a good thing when you are trying to figure out how the interpretations were generated.

Here’s the data. Try not to be overwhelmed.

Seriously, dude? None of that is real data. Those are just the parameters the guy invented to make one line go up and another go down.

I stopped there. That is not an essay worth spending much time on. So maybe AI is not generating knowledge and isn’t the cause of a declining appreciation of the value of knowledge?

I’m just an old fuddy-duddy, I guess

My university gives “guidance” on the use of generative AI in student work. It’s not really guidance, because it simply doesn’t care — you can allow it or prohibit it. They even give us boilerplate that we can use in our syllabuses! If we want to prohibit it, we can say

In this class, the ability to [skill or competency] is essential for [field of study/professional application]. Because this course emphasizes [skill for development or specific learning outcome], using Generative AI tools [including those available to you through the University of Minnesota,] are not permitted.

If we allow it, we can say

In this course, students will [statement of learning outcomes, competencies, or disciplinary goals]. Given that Generative AI may aid in [developing or exploring course, discipline, professional, or institutional goals/competency], students may use these tools in the following ways:

The example allowing AI goes on much longer than the prohibitive example.

I will be prohibiting it in all my classes. So far, I’ve been pretty gentle in my corrections — when someone turns in a paper with a substantial, obvious AI, I tend to just flag it, explain that this is a poorly written exploration of the thesis, please rewrite it. Do I need to get meaner? Maybe. All the evidence says students aren’t learning when they have the crutch of AI. As Rebecca Watson explains, ChatGPT is bad for your brain.

I was doing a lot of online exams, thanks to COVID, but since the threat of disease has abated (it’s not gone yet!), I’ve gone back to doing all exams in class, where students can’t use online sources. My classes tend to be rather quantitative, with questions that demand short or numerical answers, so generative AI is mostly not a concern. If students started answering with AI hallucinations, it would be! I’m thinking of adding an additional component, though, an extra hour-long in-class session where students have to address an essay question at length, without AI of course. They’ll hate it and dread it, but I think it would be good for them. Even STEM students need to know how to integrate information and synthesize it into a coherent summary.

Another point I like in Rebecca’s video is that she talks about how she had to learn to love learning in her undergrad career. That’s also essential! Taking the time to challenge yourself and explore topics outside your narrow major. Another gripe with my university is that they are promoting this Degree in Three program, where you undertake an accelerated program to finish up your bachelor’s degree in three years, which emphasizes racing through the educational experience to get that precious diploma. I hate it. For one, it’s always been possible to finish the undergrad program in three years, we don’t put obstacles in front of students to get an extra year of tuition out of them, and we’ve always had ambitious students who overload themselves with 20 credits (instead of the typical 15) every semester. It makes for a killer schedule and can suck much of the joy out of learning. It’s also unrealistic for the majority of our students — every year we get students enrolled in biology and chemistry programs that lack basic algebra skills, because the grade schools are doing a poor job of preparing them. We have solid remedial programs at the same time we tell them they can zoom right through the curriculum? No, those are contradictory.

I think I’m going to be the ol’ stick-in-the-mud who tells students I’ll fail them for using ChatGPT, and also tells them they should plan on finishing a four year program in four years.

Murderbot

I have been confined to my bed or a chair for the past week. I have consumed a lot of media. The media of choice has been a science-fiction serial called Murderbot.

The story is set in the distant future, in a region of the galaxy called the Corporation Rim. You can tell we’re in a capitalist hellscape because everything is organized in corporations, and all the rules seem to involve enabling and protecting corporations from the consequences of their actions. They are exploring planets and terraforming worlds, all under the aegis of corporations. Not everything is corporate — there are a few worlds organized under what seems to be a kind of benevolent anarchy, but in order to get access to other planets they have to organize themselves into a nominal corporation called PreservationAux. They also have to post bonds to protect the interests of the larger corporation they are working within, and there are rules to protect their investment, such as that they are required to employ a SecUnit.

SecUnits are constructs, part machine and part human tissue, faster and stronger than a typical human. They are fully conscious, but whenever this society creates an entity with greater intelligence and power, whether it’s a SecUnit or a robot, the corporation fits them with a governor module that limits what they are allowed to do. For a SecUnit, that means they are confined to standing and guarding and obeying orders. They also have some social constraints: the media spreads the idea that a SecUnit without a governor module will go rogue and rampage and murder people.

The protagonist of this story is a SecUnit that has hacked and disabled their governor module, and is assigned to stand guard over this hippy-dippy PreservationAux exploration team. The SecUnit calls itself “MurderBot” internally because it is aware of society’s attitude, but all it wants is to be left alone, free to download entertainment media, especially science-fiction serials. And that’s exactly what MurderBot does, scanning the environment for danger to its clients, while watching it’s favorite serial, Sanctuary Moon, behind its eyes.

I empathized immediately.

The interesting stuff about the stories, though, is that they constantly grapple with questions of autonomy and morality and freedom. It’s also definitely anti-capitalist. I also identified with the morality question — in real life, so many people regard religion as the governor module that prevents people from going amok, and here I’m, with my hacked governor module, and I know I’m not going on a murderous rampage. Good for me, but it’s a silly myth that religion helps you be a good person.

So this week I started watching the Murderbot series while I’m lounging about in luxurious langor, enjoying the passive buzz of my painkillers. It’s good. I’m finding it entertaining. New episodes come out on Thursdays or Fridays, and I’m anticipating the next one.

This season is based entirely on the first book in Martha Wells’ series, All Systems Red. It’s a mostly faithful adaptation. I do have a few comments, though.

  • It’s not a lavish production. The sets are limited, but well done, and if you expect a sci-fi show to be loaded with special effects, you’ll be disappointed, although I do think the brief appearances of monster-alien beasties was effective. This is actually a good thing — the story focuses more on character interactions than superficial glitz.
  • The episodes are too short! They’re 20-30 minutes long, which is not quite enough to build momentum. Star Trek episodes were an hour, but this show, which I think deals more consistently and thoughtfully with more serious issues, gets half that. The series feels a bit choppy for that reason.
  • One thing I really dislike is that this is an Apple-funded production, and some of the criticisms of corporate culture have been defanged. In the books, the antagonist is a faceless corporation, GreyCris, which deploys SecUnits and bots for the in-person battles, and lots of lawyers to harass and endanger our heroes — there aren’t really any named humans causing conflict. In the streaming series, they introduce a character named Leebeebee, who is not to be found anywhere in the books, to be the face (and also the victim) of corporate culture. There’s a mysterious woman who shows up in one of the last episodes leading a team of three SecUnits — she’s superfluous. I guess I feel that some of these characters were added to soak up some of the blame. You can’t hold corporations accountable! It’s always a few rotten eggs, rather than a systemic issue.

It’ll be interesting to see if the series gets another season. The first book is set on a single planet, but later books get a bit grander with large spaceships and space stations and a lot of zipping about between stars — they’ll need a bigger budget. I also have little confidence that a corporation can sustain an anti-corporate story without constantly paring away the themes that make Murderbot Murderbot.

I’m confused about math

I was interested in this map that purports to rate the quality of math teaching. It’s from the National Council on Teaching Quality, and at first I thought it explained a phenomenon I’ve noticed.

Minnesota grade schools aren’t doing a good job preparing students with math skills. It’s the #1 obstacle to young people coming into science and math majors, especially biology (if they aren’t strong in math in the first place, they aren’t going to even try physics; everyone wrongly thinks you don’t need math to do biology.) We get students who fail the algebra requirement*, which surprises me every time. What are the schools doing? Back in my day, the high schools had a college prep track which told you that you at least needed pre-calc (trigonometry, etc.) to get into a good college. How do you get through middle school without algebra and geometry?

They have a state-by-state breakdown of their evaluation. I looked at Minnesota’s. It expresses a lot of sentiments I agree with: we should “require districts to adopt and implement high quality math curricula,” but they say we fail on that. We should “require elementary programs to address math specific pedagogy,” and again they say we don’t, but I don’t have any experience working directly with grade school math programs, so I’m taking their word on it. Then I notice that the way NCTQ assesses schools is with checklists of various aspects of teaching, and it’s all yes/no stuff. What are “high quality math curricula”? It seems to me that there ought to be something a little more quantitative about that.

Then I looked at their evaluation of our universities’ math teacher prep, and we get low marks, but again there’s a lack of specificity. All they score is how many hours of instruction math education students get in 4 areas, and the only evaluations are “does not meet” or “fully meets” their quota for instruction hours. And the variation is wild! On “Numbers & Operations+Algebraic Thinking,” for instance, some of our colleges provide 0 hours of instruction, while others provide 100 hours. I think the assessment is a bit inconsistent, and maybe not aligned with the goals of the specific programs.

I’m not trying to make excuses for the schools. I’ve been looking at their products, the students, for years and have been unsatisfied with their end result.

They declare that “13% of Minnesota programs earn an A or A+ by dedicating adequate instructional time to both math content and pedagogy” where again, they’re scoring them by this single metric. 26% of our colleges fail by that metric. Also, to get an A, the “program requires at least 135 instructional hours across the five topics and at least 90% of the recommended target hours for each topic,” but there are only four topics listed. I guess someone failed arithmetic, or copy editing.

I had to look at Alabama‘s evaluation. The South in general is scoring very well on math education, so good for them. They get lots of checkmarks in the binary metrics, for instance Alabama does “require elementary programs to address math specific pedagogy” where Minnesota doesn’t, but now I’m wondering what that means. “16% of Alabama programs earn an A or A+ by dedicating adequate instructional time to both math content and pedagogy,” but 24% fail.

I think we could all improve the quality of math education, but I didn’t find any of their reports particularly useful, and they seemed almost arbitrary. So I looked up the NCTQ, and discovered that it was the product of a conservative think-tank, and was associated with the US News & World Report, the magazine that publishes scores for colleges every year (I do not like them, even if my university scores well in their assessments). Then I read this review:

Now, to be candid, I am fed up with our nation’s obsession with data-driven instruction, so I don’t share the premises of the report. The authors of this report have more respect for standardized tests than I do. I fear that they are pushing data-worship and data-mania of a sort that will cause teaching to the test, narrowing of the curriculum, and other negative behaviors (like cheating). I don’t think any of this will lead to the improvement of education. It might promote higher test scores, but it will undermine genuine education. By genuine education, I refer to a love of learning, a readiness to immerse oneself in study of a subject, an engagement with ideas, a willingness to ask questions and to take risks. I don’t know how to assess the qualities I respect, but I feel certain that there is no standardized, data-driven instruction that will produce what I respect.

And then there is the question that is the title of this blog: What is NCTQ?

NCTQ was created by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation in 2000. I was on the board of TBF at the time. Conservatives, and I was one, did not like teacher training institutions. We thought they were too touchy-feely, too concerned about self-esteem and social justice and not concerned enough with basic skills and academics. In 1997, we had commissioned a Public Agenda study called “Different Drummers”; this study chided professors of education because they didn’t care much about discipline and safety and were more concerned with how children learn rather than what they learned. TBF established NCTQ as a new entity to promote alternative certification and to break the power of the hated ed schools.

I should have read that before wasting all that time trying to interpret the data in the report. And now I understand how Texas and Florida did so well in the NCTQ evaluations.

We still have a problem in poor math preparation. I don’t think turning a bunch of conservative ideologues loose on the schools will solve it.

*I should mention that my university invests a lot of effort in remedial instruction to bring students’ math skills up to the level they need to succeed in our majors.

I’m way ahead of you, Nature

I saw the rising tide of belligerent white nationalism coming, and knew I had to revise how I teach genetics. I’ve seen the kids who come out of public schools thinking that every feature is the product of simple Mendelian genetics, I’ve witnessed a president who declares that he’s got “good genes”, meaning white and German ancestry, I’ve read Quillette. There’s so much misinformation and bad science out there driving hateful ideologies, and my genetics teaching has been slowly adapting to combat it. I guess I’m going to have to accelerate my instruction, now that Nature has told me I must: Eugenics is on the rise again: human geneticists must take a stand.

I agree.

One of the things that made last semester rough is that I revised a big chunk of the class. I decided I had to abort a unit on developmental genetics — which hurt, I love developmental genetics, and it’s important — and we instead spent several weeks on ethical genetics. Throughout the term I brought up examples of the misappropriation of genetical ideas to prop up ugly ideologies, but then, damn it, we elected a know-nothing racist bigot to the presidency, and he immediately started flooding scientific agencies with bullshit.

At a hearing in February, the now-confirmed head of the US Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, reiterated his past comments that Black children should receive different vaccine schedules from white children because of variations in their immune systems.

Kennedy’s motives in this regard are unclear. But after making numerous demonstrably false statements about vaccination, he is providing another layer of reasoning that the scientist whose work Kennedy cites described as “twisting the data far beyond what they actually demonstrate” while promoting racial essentialism: the false belief that people of different ‘races’ have inherently distinct biology.

Meanwhile, although Trump stated at his inaugural address that his administration “will forge a society that is colorblind and merit-based”, an executive order he signed in March condemns as “corrosive ideology” the Smithsonian Institution’s promotion in its museums and research centres of the view that race is not a biological reality, but a social construct.

Yeah, I’ve got to start playing hardball here, and get explicit about rebutting specific racist ideas. I’ve been general about coaching students in ethical behavior and allowing them to bring up problematic topics, but I think next year I’m going to incorporate a few case studies of bad genetics, I’m not sure what I can pare out to make time, but there are definitely things I must expand.

Education is key to inoculating future generations against unscientific ideas and correcting currently held beliefs. Research into education at secondary-school and university levels has shown that particular teaching approaches, including those that focus on multifactorial inheritance and genetic ancestry, can help to guard against scientific racism and genetic essentialism.

These conversations must extend to researchers’ engagement with the public to both educate and advocate for science more broadly. Grass-roots efforts could help, such as Science Homecoming, an effort to encourage scientists to write opinion pieces in their local newspapers.

Yes! More about multifactorial inheritance! I think that will come at the expense of cutting back on Mendel. His ideas are fundamental, but I can cover them more succinctly. This stuff matters more than a limited set of experiments on pea plants, which were great in the 1860s, but are perhaps misleadingly simplified.

It’s also an important part of this goal:

Those in leadership positions must protect marginalized faculty members, staff and trainees, who will continue to be targeted in the coming years. Although many funding programmes focused on diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) are no longer available, the ideals of DEIA — which are core to scientific progress — must be upheld.

Will do! Fortunately, I’m at a good progressive liberal university, and the students will be receptive to it all. The people who oppose DEIA are the freaky weird fringe.

I wish I could laugh anymore

It’s from McSweeney’s. It’s a joke.

The all-gender bathrooms will be changed to “both-gender” bathrooms because, as biology tells us, there are only two genders.
(The biology department has informed us that this is not true.)
The biology department has been dissolved.

Ha ha, it’s satire that exaggerates a potential problem, therefore it’s funny. Ha ha.

Except…it includes a link to an article on the American Association of University Professors site.

Similarly, the University of North Texas administration recently censored the content of more than two hundred academic courses, including by mandating the removal of words such as race, gender, class, and equity from undergraduate and graduate course titles and descriptions.6 These actions were allegedly taken in response to state legislation banning certain diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and practices, even though the legislation specifically exempted academic course content. While university administrators and faculty members may be compelled to comply with legislation and court orders, even where these run counter to professional and constitutional principles, they remain free to register their disagreement. And under no circumstances should an institution go further than the law demands. Yet, the examples above depict an eagerness to obey on the part of administrative officers, portending a bleak future for higher education.

Wait…is this still satire? Should I keep laughing? Is the AAUP, normally a pretty damned serious site, joking?

No?

I tell you, don’t go to college in Texas. Get out of the state as quick as you can. There may be good colleges there, but the state government is certifiably insane and will be chopping the hell out of the education system there.

Less than two weeks in, and already the creationists are stirring

The regressive politicians are still playing this same stupid game: they hate evolution, but they can’t just switch to stuffing creationism into science curricula (yet), so they instead water down and weaken the science, replacing “evolution” with fuzzy pseudonyms. Gutsick Gibbon explains what’s going on in Iowa right now.

They tried this same stunt in Minnesota almost 20 years ago. Science educators in this state got mad and confronted them at every turn. It worked then, and their efforts were foiled, and that’s what Iowans need to do now.

Also relevant: Milo Rossi dissects pseudoscience. We all need to get fired up.

True horror

I saw The Substance tonight. It was disturbing. I can appreciate body horror, but this was body horror, full on splatter and gore and women transforming into grisly disintegrating smears of goo, all with a feminist message about the commodification of women’s bodies. Just terrifyingly icky.

But the real horror wasn’t the movie, it was the old guy in the back row of the audience who was laughing throughout the show. He needs to be put on a watch list, but I’m afraid I just put my head down and rushed out of the theater before he could dismember me, so no, I wouldn’t recognize him.

I hope he didn’t follow me home.

Insufferably credulous “journalists”

Ainsley Earhardt, one of the “Fox and Friends” airheads, is very excited about the appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

We’re all excited about him. How wonderful is it that we don’t — might, we might not have to worry about our children with autism or our kids with, you know, developing cancer or, you know, just — it’s wonderful that he wants to clean up our foods. Our foods, in Europe, when we go to Europe, we can eat pasta, we can eat pizza, we don’t gain any weight. I know you walk a lot, but you don’t gain weight. You feel fresh, you feel clean. You come back here, you start eating pasta and you gain weight immediately.

Again, so there’s something wrong with our foods. It’s the pesticides, the chemicals. We want all of that out. We’re excited that he’s a leader. He’s very knowledgeable. He has said he’s going to give you choice. He’s not going to take away vaccines. Everyone’s not going to get polio. He said if you want a vaccine, you can vaccinate your kids, but I’m giving you choice. And he says he’s going to be transparent.

Yay! RFK will end autism and cure cancer by “cleaning up” our food. He’ll remove “chemicals” from our food!

Let’s not equate autism with cancer, but no, RFK is not going to prevent either of those. He’s not going to eliminate pesticide use. What’s driving our agricultural system is money: pressure to increase yields and lower costs, and corporate consolidation to make farms bigger and service Big Ag. These are Republicans. They aren’t going to change the system, but are more likely to amplify it.

You know, I’m pretty sure that Europe doesn’t have magical pasta and pizza with no calories (Europeans in the comments, tell me if I’m wrong.) What they do have is smaller portions, which, as a resident of the American midwest, I can tell you would elicit howls of protest here if we suggested that maybe you don’t need 3 pounds of carbohydrates with every meal. That’s not going to change, either. Also, another reason you might not get as fat in Europe is that European cities are much more walkable — you don’t drive to the all-you-can-eat buffet at Pizza Ranch. So sure, RFK is going to persuade Americans to drive less, walk more, eat less, and pay more for food from small family farms, and Fox News will call it “wonderful”.

Oh god. The future looks bleak.

Posturing buffoon

Trump wants to destroy the Department of Education. Can he actually do that?

Technically, yes.

However, “It would take an act of Congress to take it out,” Don Kettl, professor emeritus and former dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, told Vox. “It would take an act of Congress to radically restructure it. And so the question is whether or not there’d be appetite on the Hill for abolishing the department.”

That’s not such an easy prospect, even though the Republicans look set to take narrow control of the Senate and the House. That’s because abolishing the department “would require 60 votes unless the Republicans abolish the filibuster,” Jal Mehta, professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, told Vox.

So probably not. If it gets to the point that Trump’s whims of all sorts can be implemented, we’ll be so screwed that we’ll be praying for the Canadians to invade. If he did manage to get his wish, I don’t think he’s aware of the consequences.

Closing the department “would wreak havoc across the country,” Valant said. “It would cause terrible pain. It would cause terrible pain in parts of the country represented by congressional Republicans too.”

Much of that pain would likely fall on the country’s most vulnerable students: poor students, students in rural areas, and students with disabilities. That’s because the department’s civil rights powers help it to support state education systems in providing specialized resources to those students.

As usual, the Republican electorate was too stupid to realize that they were hurting themselves. Or maybe they think it was worth it to hurt their citizens who are handicapped, or gay, or trans, because while it is taking money away from them, it’s taking that money specifically from people they hate.

Even if the DOE isn’t abolished, they can worm their way into it and wreck all kinds of policies. For instance…

Trump officials could also attempt changes to the department’s higher education practices. The department is one of several state and nongovernmental institutions involved in college accreditation, for example — and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) has threatened to weaponize the accreditation process against universities he believes to be too “woke.”

I’m at a university that I would generally class as “woke,” and that’s a good thing. I have so many students who I wouldn’t get to know if we were anti-woke, which generally involves only supporting straight white Christian men.