khalid_salad

New response from scratch because I manically edited the shit out of my old one. Sorry for linking the wikipedia page there

you were clearly referring to the same thing I was and I didn't take the appropriate time to understand your reply. I apologize.

The backlash I am familiar with is that students would learn how to identify the place value of something ("the 3 in 220134₅ has value 3 * 5¹") but not be able to do actual arithmetic (3 * 5 = ?). Basically "why are my kids learning this abstract stuff about numerals or set theory when they can't even remember their times tables?" That is my primary issue with it

it is not good pedagogy. Abstraction should come after a student has learned the foundational material. They aren't professional mathematicians, and treating them as such (beginning with abstract definitions, as we do) is bad pedagogy.

I am sure there was some pushback in the form of "this is too hard", but I don't know how much of that kind of pushback occurred. I also would not necessarily blame it on the intelligence of parents. I can imagine a sort of shellshock when your 10 year old comes home with abstract mathematics that you never learned or only learned in high school or at the undergraduate level. And I can similarly understand the outrage when you expect your child to learn foundational skills in school, only for those to be skipped in favor of a high-minded appeal to "real understanding" (in my experience, this is a theme in US education

don't memorize basic arithmetic because you can just consult your calculator; don't memorize facts because you can just look them up).

I do not know what the curriculum was before new math, but I would be very surprised if they exclusively taught arithmetic in all of K-12 before the 1950s. I haven't confirmed this, though.

I do think it is good pedagogy to pepper in motivations for abstract concepts early. Have a student evaluate 1723 * 16 via the standard algorithm and separately have them perform

1000 * 16
700 * 16
20 * 16
3 * 16
now add em up and think about why you get the same answer

tl;dr I think it was more "why are my kids learning this shit before they learn to multiply" than "I have no idea how to help my kid with their homework." Anecdotally, the latter is not something I have experienced (when I taught K-12), even when the material was abstract and something the parents couldn't help with.

Some highlights from my high school AP (Advanced Placement) English class:

1. teacher insisting that you can't split an infinitive in English, but can't explain why this bullshit rule was made up in the first place
   • also something about "up with which I will not put" because god forbid you know what you're talking about
2. some inappropriate discussions about abortion
3. we watched the 1931 frankenstein movie after "reading" shelley's novel, but didn't relate it to the book in any way^1^
4. we read some shitty short story, which turned into a shitty movie, and then the teacher kept relating back to the film when discussing the themes of the book
5. at some point they were like "choose your own novel to read and analyze" and we didn't really do analysis, and the novel selection was
   • dan brown's shitty novels about the dude who deciphers symbols or whatever (it was the one with anti-matter)
   • one of ayn rand's pieces of shit
   • i don't remember what else, but there were definitely no classics
6. we had to write college entry essays for the teacher to "critique." i wrote mine about how math fucking rules. the teacher decided it was too technical (despite there being no actual math in it), so they gave it to their partner (an engineer) to read

I doubt this was legal

and came back to tell me how well-written it was^2^

my high school education was probably considered decent. don't even get me started on "whole language learning" and "new math" and the insipid pseudoscience plaguing our certification programs while our populace treats our teachers like shit

1: Also, this movie was nearly a century old when we watched it and my class got mad at me for spoiling it.
2: it wasn't written well

so like one-half-thousand days

AI alignment is literally a bunch of amateur philosophers telling each other scary stories about The Terminator around a campfire

I love you, David.

I hate LLMs so much. Now, every time I read student writing, I have to wonder if it's "normal overwrought" or "LLM bullshit." You can make educated guesses, but the reasoning behind this is really no better than what the LLM does with tokens (on top of any internalized biases I have), so of course I don't say anything (unless there is a guaranteed giveaway, like "as a language model").

No one describes their algorithm as "efficiently doing [intermediate step]" unless you're describing it to a general, non-technical audience

what a coincidence

and yet it keeps appearing in my students' writing. It's exhausting.

Edit: I really can't overemphasize how exhausting it is. Students will send you a direct message in MS Teams where they obviously used an LLM. We used to get

my algorithm checks if an array is already sorted by going through it one by one and seeing if every element is smaller than the next element

which is non-technical and could use a pass, but is succinct, clear, and correct. Now, we get^1^

In order to determine if an array is sorted, we must first iterate through the array. In order to iterate through the array, we create a looping variable i initialized to 0. At each step of the loop, we check if i is less than n - 1. If so, we then check if the element at index i is less than or equal to the element at index i + 1. If not, we output False. Otherwise, we increment i and repeat. If the loop finishes successfully, we output True.

and I'm fucking tired. Like, use your own fucking voice, please! I want to hear your voice in your writing. PLEASE.

1: Made up the example out of whole-cloth because I haven't determined if there are any LLMs I can use ethically. It gets the point across, but I suspect it's only half the length of what ChatGPT would output.

LaTeX user high five…?

I need to finish crying over all my underfull hboxes, can we high-five in the evening?

I write -- for "en dash" and --- for "em dash" and I end up looking like an asshole in emails a lot. However, they appear to work correctly here:

en: -- en: --
em: --- em:

Also, Gnome Characters can be useful, though I have been looking for a good replacement.

This community is for those willing to bring wisdom and compassion into the world. It is not for those easily duped by what they find in their minds or online.

no red flags there

edit to add: Emphasis in original

Hundred Rabbits is an artist collective that documents low-tech solutions with the hope of building a more resilient future. We live and work aboard a 10 m sailboat named Pino in remote parts of the world to learn more about how technology degrades beyond the shores of the western world.

oh so they make video games?

if you use TeX as much as i do, you learn that "begging the program to behave differently" is pretty viable

python, what are you doing?"

idk, I'm written in C, it does things push and pull values from the stack, have you tried assembly, it's faster