Choate Academic Tech
@ChoateAT
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Wallingford, CT
Joined April 2016
A Harvard student told me something I can't stop thinking about. When they go to the library, every single screen has ChatGPT open. Homework that used to take hours now takes minutes. But then they talk to alums who say entry-level roles are basically gone. The jobs they
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The earliest known example of ‘brain rot’ comes from Henry David Thoreau in his 1854 book “Walden.” “While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?”
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One of the saddest things to me is the cultural decay cycle in our new age of virality. Sub-cultures that took years to form through meaning are essentially destroyed within days or weeks. If you think about it, a niche culture builds their own language, symbols, aesthetics or
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Why your child always pick video games over homework - Expert psychologist explains!
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“AI is the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our society and our descendants will be digging it out for generations” - @doctorow, speaking truth and taking no prisoners.
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This is going to revolutionize education 📚 Google just launched "Learn Your Way" that basically takes whatever boring chapter you're supposed to read and rebuilds it around stuff you actually give a damn about. Like if you're into basketball and have to learn Newton's laws,
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this is wild — it really is those damn phones! I did something like this early in the summer and found similar benefits. also wild: the implication here that ADHD ages your attention ability by about 40 years
2 weeks without smartphone internet significantly improved sustained attention. The effects were similar to being 10 years younger.
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"Bloom studied the training backgrounds of 120 world-class talented individuals across 6 talent domains: piano, sculpting, swimming, tennis, math, & neurology. And what he discovered was that talent development occurs through a similar general process, no matter what domain"
@oldbooksguy "Developing Talent in Young People" by Benjamin Bloom (published 1985). That's the same Bloom as Bloom's two-sigma problem, Bloom's taxonomy, etc. This guy is one of the most influential scientists in the history of education ... yet, relatively few people know about Developing
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For thousands of years, Theravāda Buddhism—an ancient tradition with origins in India—has described what is considered the highest meditative attainment, called nirodha samāpatti, regarded as deeply connected to nirvana/enlightenment. For the first time, we have been able to use
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This book articulates something I’ve fought for my whole career: goals and team metrics lead to mediocre outcomes. Actually novel work must be exploratory.
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As ChatGPT becomes a go-to tool for students, we’re committed to ensuring it fosters deeper understanding and learning. Introducing study mode in ChatGPT — a learning experience that helps you work through problems step-by-step instead of just getting an answer.
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If you go to AIs for emotional advice, they will drive you insane if you are vulnerable. If you ask AIs to teach you facts and you check their references, you can, for now, learn pretty fast! A good use of modern AIs is tutoring -- if you know the tutor sometimes lies.
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An attempt to explain (current) ChatGPT versions. I still run into many, many people who don't know that: - o3 is the obvious best thing for important/hard things. It is a reasoning model that is much stronger than 4o and if you are using ChatGPT professionally and not using o3
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The mere presence of your phone reduces cognitive capacity. Even when it's turned off, face down on your desk... Your brain is actively working to resist picking it up. This "brain drain" effect leaves fewer resources for actual thinking.
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There is a field experiment showing this exact effect. Introducing GPT tutors increases performance by *a lot*--students seem to be picking up the material much faster--but when GPT is removed those who had access perform *much worse* compared to those w/o access. 1/4
I'm teaching databases this semester at Berkeley. My students all seem unusually brilliant. Not many go to office hours, and not too many folks post on the course forum asking project questions. Weirdly, the exam had the lowest recorded average in my 10 semesters teaching it.
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I think of humans a bit like instruments that are being played by the environment around them
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We cannot "build" intelligence in silicon any more than we can build it in cells. I think @drmichaellevin's intuition is spot-on here, and we should approach the science of intelligence with far more humility than we presently do... When you plant a seed in the ground, you
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Do not start with fundamentals. This is an awful approach to learning. Start with so-called "advanced" topics and ask questions until every term/concept is understood. This is the correct, rigorous, scientific way to learn, because the advanced topics are embedded in larger,
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After using Deep Research for a while, I finally get the "it's just slop" complaint people have about AI art. Because I don't care much about art, most AI art seems pretty good to me. But information is something where I'm much closer to a connoisseur, and Deep Research is just
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