This complication of tales from the world of school isn’t all negative. I don’t want to overstate the problem. School is not hell for every child all the time. Learning occasionally happens. There are great teachers and classes, and so on. Some kids really enjoy it.
School is, however, hell for many of the students quite a lot of the time, and most importantly when this happens those students are usually unable to leave.
Also, there is a deliberate ongoing effort to destroy many of the best remaining schools and programs that we have, in the name of ‘equality’ and related concerns. Schools often outright refuse to allow their best and most eager students to learn. If your school is not hell for the brightest students, they want to change that.
Welcome to the stories of primary through high school these days.
Peter Gray reports on the Tennessee Pre-K experiment, where they subjected four year olds to 5.5 hours a day of academics five times a week. Not only did the control group (kids whose parents applied and got randomly rejected, so this was effectively an unblinded RCT) catch up on academics by third grade, the control group was well ahead by sixth grade, and the treatment group had a lot more rule violations and diagnosed learning disabilities. I think Peter’s conclusion that drill in Pre-K and kindergarten is actively bad is overreach, since the dose often makes the poison, but yeah focusing on drill that early seems terrible.
NYC officials consider virtual learning to reduce class size. It seems the law requires there be no more than 20 to 25 kids in a classroom depending on grade level. So the proposed solution is to get rid of some of classrooms entirely. Transparent villains happy to inflict torture upon children.
Scott Alexander asks, given Americans clearly do not know basic facts that were supposedly taught in school, but do remember things through cultural osmosis, what is even the point of school? If you learn via spaced repetition, isn’t school failing rather miserably at that? The unstated question there is if you actually wanted to teach things, wouldn’t you used spaced repetition, which schools don’t use in any systematic way. The answer to the puzzle, of course, is that school is not about learning.
David Bessis: The #1 reason why we fail to teach math: we present it as knowledge without telling kids it’s a motor skill developed by practicing unseen actions in your head. Passive listening is useless, yet we never say it. We’re basically asking kids to take notes during yoga lessons.
Math is about reconfiguring our brains and reprogramming our intuitions. By ignoring this, we effectively refuse to teach math. We teach the cryptic symbols and convoluted formulas, but we never teach the secret art of making intuitive sense of them.
I think he severely oversells it in the longer thread, but he has a good point. You learn math by doing, by messing around, by experimenting and playing. Math lectures are relatively a waste of time.
Even getting math thought at all is increasingly hard. Here’s governor Newsom, signing a law, SB 1410, explicitly to force Algebra I to be taught to eighth graders, and all he can do is require the Instructional Quality Commission to ‘consider including’ that it be offered. What happens when they consider it, and simply say no?
I do not see why any test would have an attendance requirement to count? Let the half that want to take it take it now, the other half can change their minds and study for a refresher when they realize they won’t graduate without it. At least if we don’t cave.
Alternatively, if the students can simply form a union and make the school cave, let’s see what else they want to do with that power, shall we?
Tracing Woodgrains: This thread is absolutely correct. Sometimes people treat “good schools” as black boxes where you put kids in and education pops out, with everything working well
But for many kids, their core memory of even “good schools” will simply be waiting idly. So much more is possible.
Simon Sarris: The schools in my town are fine. The high school has 10/10 score on GreatSchools and the others have high scores for academics
But the best public (and many private!) schools still do very little in terms of education and take up too much time. Most engaged parents could not only do more with less time, but do more interesting things, and have more help around the house as the kids grow, since they’re around much more of each day.
The curriculum at so many schools just has terribly low expectations of what a child should be learning. Looking at the english/lit curriculum here was glum. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was disappointing at “elite” colleges now, too.
I have higher expectations than that.
I went to excellent catholic schools for 12 years. I had a fine time. I liked all my teachers.
Still, my biggest childhood memory of school was just waiting. Waiting for everyone else to be done, waiting for the day to be over, waiting to be picked up. I think we can do better.
Matthew Yglesias: It’s mostly child care (for young kids) or prison (for teens) where the hope is that some learning takes place. You could teach much more efficiently but then the kids would have to go somewhere else.
Freia (QTing Lehman below): Public school isn’t just tailored to the average student, it’s designed to oppress and humiliate smarter kids with genuine curiosity and enthusiasm for learning.
Every smart kid has stories of trying to read under the desk to escape the monotony and having their book taken.
These kinds of kids are acing the exams, and unlike e.g. talking, reading under the desk bothers no one. confiscation is just punitive.
It’s hilarious that their justification is always “respect”, as if it’s not disrespectful to waste hours of kids’ lives w/ useless “teaching.”
In HS i skipped a year of math by reading a textbook & taking a placement exam. it took me ~40 hours over 10 days to teach myself the material—taking the class would have been >200 hrs. the amount of kids’ time we’re wasting is totally unconscionable.
Why does this continue to be true? One reason: A lot of people do not care about smart kids. Or they actively want them to suffer.
Charles Fain Lehman (1m views): I think we underrate how hard it is to provide education to a range of abilities at scale. If the smart kids are bored, that’s an okay outcome.
Most interventions don’t work at scale! School kind of does some stuff! That’s pretty good!
I also spent a lot of time waiting as a kid. That was good! I’m glad that I was forced to wait. It was an important lesson in how my edification is not the most important thing.
But ofc, this is exactly the fallacy. “Everyone should have their ideal outcome.” But they can’t under given constraints! The question is always how to optimize.
In other words, you.
Seriously, what the actual ?
Here’s a general response: if you think (as the qt does) that “so much more is possible,” provide me with an evidence-based intervention that a) reduces smart kids’ boredom and b) yields large increases in attainment. I’m happy to hear about them!
Okay, at least that is a form of the right question. I don’t know why it has to be ‘and’ here. If the smart kids are not bored, or it increases attainment, either one of those is super awesome on its own. So can we do either or both of these things, at scale, without actively damaging the other?
Yes. Obviously. ‘Evidence based’ requires someone collecting whatever you consider admissible evidence for your particular court, but here are some interventions that seem very very obviously like they do these things.
Magnet schools or tracking. Give them their own classroom with more advanced topics. Why do I even have to say this.
Allow grade skipping, both in individual subjects and overall. If you can pass the tests, you can move up. Obviously this will help with both issues. If you say ‘what about socialization if you aren’t stuck in classrooms with kids exactly your own age’ short of kids trying to skip 4+ years prior to high school then I will flat out piledriver you.
Let kids acing a class do other things when bored, and ideally skip the busywork too. This could not be simpler. If you are getting an A, and you want to read a book about something else, or do homework for another class, go ahead. If you want to be a jerk limit it to ‘educational’ things, sure, fine.
Let the kid stay home and learn from LLMs and textbooks, provided they keep passing your periodic tests. Seriously.
Let the kid take online college classes. Arizona State University’s are $25 each and some are done by children as young as 8. Others are often outright free.
There is mostly universal agreement that great teachers are much better than good teachers, who are much better than bad teachers. There is not agreement about how to find, create or enable the good and great teachers, or how to fire and avoid the bad ones.
Strangest of all, there is no agreement that we even should in theory be firing the bad teachers and hiring good ones. It’s easier said than done, but you have to say it first. There are even those who say ‘it is wrong to attempt to get your child in front of better teachers, that’s not fair,’ which is somehow not a strawman.
Noah Smith: Progressives claim test scores are about family wealth. Conservatives claim test scores are about IQ. But a lot of test scores are about the government’s ability to FIRE BAD TEACHERS AND HIRE GOOD TEACHERS.
The paper in question is ‘Early Mentors for Exceptional Students,’ which is a different topic than finding good teachers in general, but finds that exceptional teachers going the extra mile can massively increase the chances talented students will win honors, attend selective universities, and have the most valuable career paths. There are obvious concerns about selection effects, they did some work to minimize that but I’d still be wary.
Alex Tabarrok emphasizes that the highest marginal educational value is in mentoring the smartest and most talented kids to be all they can be. Having access to a mentor greatly increases the chance that our best talent truly excels. Roughly half of the potential top math students in the country stay unidentified. Alas, so many in education think that when exceptional students get a chance to excel further, this is at best a nice to have, and perhaps even bad because it ‘increases inequality.’
The broader point from Noah Smith is also important. If we believe teacher quality is valuable, why are we in so many ways not acting like that?
Which leads to the question, what factors predict teacher quality?
The paper examines a nationwide merit-based teacher-hiring system in Colombia that replaced experienced contract teachers with higher test-performing new teachers. The reform decreased students’ test scores and reduced college enrollment and graduation by more than 10 percent.
The paper examines the effect of a nationwide merit-based teacher-hiring system, which replaced experienced teachers with high-performing new teachers. The new teachers could choose where they would go, replacing old teachers.
From what I (read: me asking Claude questions) could tell, the policy did not in any way evaluate the teachers being replaced, or attempt to replace bad teachers rather than good teachers. The new teachers decided where to go based on what they wanted. So effectively, they were replacing either random teachers, or the teachers with more desirable assignments.
Thus, what we find here is that when we replace random existing teachers en masse with new teachers, and do so without using local knowledge and relying mostly on test scores (see Seeing Like a State) the reduction in experience and non-measured qualities overwhelmed the new teachers scoring higher on the tests.
The study goes too far when it suggests that test scores are uncorrelated with teacher quality. I don’t care what studies show here, that doesn’t make sense. But it can be one factor of many, and relying on it too much can still be actively worse than the previously used methods, as can sticking teachers into new locations they’re not familiar with, as can lack of overall experience, all at once.
If you want to do a reform like this, it has to go hand in hand with firing the bad teachers rather than random teachers, or you’re going to at least be in for a very tough transition.
It is important to realize that teachers are sometimes very wrong about basic things, and sometimes when you point this out they dig in. It is remarkable the extent to which some people refuse to believe this, and tell people that they are lying or remembering wrong.
from r/NoStupidQuestions: My son’s third grade teacher taught my son that 1 divided by O is 0. I wrote her an email to tell her that it is not 0. She then doubled down and cc’ed the principal. The principal responded saying the teacher is correct… What do I do now?
Tbh, I’m mildly infuriated but I’m wondering if I’m just overreacting? Should I just stop fighting this battle?
Andrew Hoyer: Ask them to enter 1 / 0 into a calculator and report back.
Andrew Rettek: People say this is fake, but as a high school senior I had two teachers and my principal tell me that 22/7 was irrational.
Magor: Well, pi is irrational. So every fraction with numerators and denominators that are integers is rational except for the one that’s pi.
Andrew Rettek: This was their reasoning, yes. My principal literally told me that he thought that 22/7 was the only non repeating fraction.
Elizabeth van Nostrand: One year I worked as assistant at summer school for 3rd graders. The teacher said echolocation worked because water was made of electricity, and columbus was financed by the wife of King James of Spain.
Schools in many places, including Palo Alto and Alameda, increasingly refuse to allow math acceleration. They flat out don’t let kids learn math at any reasonable pace, and this is allowed to continue in areas with some of the brightest student pools around. I wouldn’t mind too much if schools simply taught other subjects to the kids instead, it’s not like being way ahead in math is ultimately all that valuable and you can learn pretty easily on the computer anyway, but they’re flat out wasting hours a week of the kid’s time.
Andrew Bunner: Our district is as Niels describes. Our daughter got in trouble for working on her outside-school advanced math during class even though she finished the worksheet they were assigned.
Neils Hoven: The audacity of a student! To try to learn something while in school.
Benjamin Riley (Former deputy attorney general of California, founder of ‘Deans for Impact,’ self-described ‘influential voice in education’): It’s so weird this keeps happening to the children of the Tech Bro community. Will no one speak for them?
Niels Hoven: This is the former deputy attorney general of California and an influential voice in education, saying that if your child is stuck doing work below their ability, then you must be a Tech Bro and your child’s learning needs don’t matter.
Gallabytes: this happened *to me*. my parents are not remotely tech bros. they tried their best, put me in schools they felt were good, and those schools thought that the best way to enrich my math education was to make me teach the other kids. this WILL NOT HAPPEN to my children.
There are very few issues I’d emigrate over. mandatory public schooling is one of them, and things like this are why.
Mason: To understand tall poppy syndrome you have to fully accept that yes, they want your children cut down to size as well.
They do not feel that they have to hide this because they do not think it’s a bad thing. They think this is prosocial.
I suppose we now know what impact those deans want to have. Their issue is education. They are against it.
Niels Hoven: It’s fascinating to see “education thoughtleaders” who are not only unable to imagine the benefits of supporting high-achieving kids, they’re unable to imagine a world where it’s even possible!
I went to public school and took AP Calculus in 8th grade. For my entire school career, I was in group classes with kids no more than 2 years older than me, with the exception of 3rd-6th grade when I would do an hour of independent study during math class.
Every day when my 4th grader comes home, he asks how my conversations with his school are going because he’s tired of being taught material he already knows.
Don’t tell me that kids don’t want to be challenged, and don’t tell me that it’s impossible for us to do so.
Justin Baeder: The academic acceleration maximalists are honestly worse than the sports dads living vicariously through their kids and making them hate the sport.
Yes, you probably CAN push your kid to do 10th grade math in upper elementary school. But…why?
Of course, if you have a true prodigy and they want to go all in on something, go for it. Just recognize that you are choosing a very difficult path for your child and yourself. This is not normal or healthy parenting, and doesn’t lead anywhere your kid will want to go.
How dare you actually attempt to have your kid actually learn things? Just flat out.
But it gets even better than that, wait for it…
Justin Baeder: Let’s say your kid reads many years above grade level, as mine do and always have.
Guess what—that just means they run out of books to read faster than everyone else!
What’s the goal here? How does it benefit the child to pay $$$ to push them even farther out?
That’s right. You need to be careful. They’ll run out of books!
That’s why you need to smuggle them in.
Pamela Hobart: just another underappreciated yet tremendously brave teacher protecting an uppity 5yo from running out of books here in South Austin, what a relief.
Quoted Post: Kindergarten parents: If your child could read entering Kindergarten, are they reading in class yet?
We’ve been pretty disappointed and are curious if it is the teacher or public school.
At the beginning of the year our daughter was excited to learn but now she says she hates to read and do math. She asked the teacher to read harder books and was told “no” – this was from her teacher and her teacher justified it by saying she doesn’t know if she has comprehension yet (she does).
My daughter confirmed she read a lot in preschool and has only read once in Kindergarten (when she brought her own books from home) in school. My daughter says she doesn’t want to bring books from home anymore or read at home because her teacher hates reading. We are worried to make a big fuss because the teacher told us our daughter should be in GT and we don’t want to jeopardize that if we just have a bad teacher this year but we can’t see our daughter continue to hate learning, when she used to enjoy it.
She also just got settled with friends. And if it matters we are seeing problems in math too where the teacher is working on counting to 10 still but my daughter can add/subtract 100+ and knows some multiplication tables.
Foxyavelli: It’s somehow rare kids are being held back from learning but literally everyone who knows a smart kid in school or was that kid has an anecdote.
Faded Magnet: This happens a lot, and it’s not new. Similar happened to me as a kid, because I arrived at school already reading. I just read what I wanted at home and played along at school.
David Hines: “why are you homeschooling, David?” WELL —
Ian Miller: I tell my sister we need bad teachers because there aren’t enough good ones to meet the necessary demand. But the current crop of bad ones seem determined to prove me wrong.
How should we think about solutions that only help high achievers?
We should think of them as highly valuable. Instead, we see the opposite.
Niels Hoven: This article is typical of the toxic attitudes toward high achieving kids.
High achieving students are seen as “the kids who need it the least” as though they’re some kind of second-class citizen. If they learn quickly, it isn’t a success, it’s a problem to be solved.
So yes: A huge portion of those tasked with educating students is working to actively sabotage our best and brightest, and often the other kids too, thinking this is good and also gaslighting everyone involved about the whole process.
Kelsey Piper: Our schools are failing children. Some parents, mostly the rich ones, have the time and confidence to speak out about it. Then people go “oh it’s a whiny privileged people problem”. No. Your schools are also failing the children whose parents don’t know how to speak out.
Not that it’d be acceptable to deny kids a good education because their parents are whiny privileged people! That’d be a cruel and evil thing to do! But in fact what we’re doing is denying all kids a good education and then looking who objects.
And then going “oh it’s only the rich people who object so it’s only their kids who are being harmed so it’s fine”, which is just evil on so many different levels I can’t quite fathom it.
Entertainingly many of these same people hate private schools on the grounds that it’s bad when privileged parents opt out instead of advocating to make the schools better. damned if you do, damned if you don’t.ta
Some places used to have standards, including standards for admission, like Thomas Jefferson High School. Then they killed many such places, so RIP, with national merit semifinalists down 50% in a year despite increased class sizes. And the entire county went from 264 semifinal candidates to 191, showing that this is a real loss.
A lawsuit was allowed to go forward challenging NYC’s gifted programs as ‘segregation,’ including targeting Stuyvesant High School and Bronx Science. It asserts that testing for academic ability is ‘racial’ and discriminatory. The admission tests in question are very similar to the SAT. The whole thing is madness and an attempt at civilizational suicide. If there is a law that makes that kind of admissions test illegal, it is incompatible with civilization, and the law must be repealed.
The latest formerly exceptional school we have learned was intentionally destroyed in the name of ‘equity’ comes from Philadelphia. You see, it’s important not to ‘disadvantage’ some students, so we have to ensure we don’t accidentally give others an education, or admit more talented students over less talented ones. Same old story. Out with the old motto, ‘dare to be excellent.’ And that was for all practical purposes the end of Masterman.
The obvious answer is, then only give such programs to the high achievers. Having looked at the details here, it’s actually a relatively non-toxic version of the concern, noting that if 95% of students fail to benefit from or use such programs, then they’re not a solution for that 95%. Which would for now make them not a general solution.
And yes, that’s disappointing, although I expect rapid improvements over time. Also disappointing is to call such kids ‘those who need it the least’ as if the goal of mathematics education was to hit some minimum bar and then stop. But this article seems to stop short of making the case many ‘equity’ advocates actually make and even put into practice, that Niels is warning about here, which is to claim that the success of the best students is actively a problem to be fixed.
Ozy Brennan: a question for people concerned with educational equity: if schools aren’t flexible enough to serve children who are multiple grade levels ahead, how well do they serve children who are multiple grade levels behind? (badly. it’s badly)
I also agree, for these reasons and also for others including cultural ones, that parents should have a right to see the curricula that is being imposed by force upon their children in a public school, so they know what and how their children are learning. And that a school or teacher refusing to share this information, or the state supreme court saying you don’t get to see it is a five alarm fire. I don’t see how someone can say ‘no this is a secret, you have no right to that, and send your kids to school or we’re calling the cops’ and not notice the skulls on their uniforms.
The ultimate proof that school is not about learning is that we know school starts too early for teenagers to properly sleep and thus be ready to learn, we’ve known forever, and it is impossible to fix this.
Lomez: The dread of school could be mitigated by 75 percent by simply letting children sleep in. Teenagers need significantly more sleep; without adequate amounts, they can become depressed and irritable. When I am education czar, the children will get their sleep.
Danielle Fong: My co-founder presented a study showing that teenagers learn better if they can sleep in a little more. The school responded with, “Well, we can’t adjust it now; we have a contract with the bus drivers.”
Oh, so the school is for the benefit of the bus drivers?
Much like the port is for the benefit of the longshoremen and the polity is for the benefit of politicians, eh?
Abstract: Using a natural experiment which randomized class times to students, this study reveals that enrolling in early morning classes lowers students’ course grades and the likelihood of future STEM course enrollment. There is a 79% reduction in pursuing the corresponding major and a 26% rise in choosing a lower-earning major, predominantly influenced by early morning STEM classes. To understand the mechanism, I conducted a survey of undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory course, some of whom were assigned to a 7: 30 AM section. I find evidence of a decrease in human capital accumulation and learning quality for early morning sections.
Wait, a 7: 30 AM section? What fresh hell is that? When I was in college I did sign up intentionally for 9: 00 AM classes and given my sleep schedule that turned out fine, but the other kids clearly didn’t love it. A 7: 30 AM start time is nuts, such a thing should not exist, we need to amend the Geneva Conventions.
Still, the reduction seems extreme. 79% reduction in further classes is quite a lot if this was indeed a randomized trial. I presume some of it was the cultivation of hatred and aversion rather than pure lack of human capital. At this level, the classes at that hour are effectively non-functional. How can those involved not notice this? Why would anyone ever need (or want) to schedule a class that early? How many points are these kids attempting to take?
Legal battles continue (WSJ) over whether, if you decide to have charter schools at all, also allowing religious charter schools is then mandatory or forbidden. There does not appear to be middle ground. One of these violates the first amendment, the other does not, but it is not clear which is which. If it was mandatory, in some places charter schools would get a lot more support, and in other places they would get a lot less.
I do not think the government should be discriminating here, and imposing an effectively very large tax on those who want their children to go to religious schools, or any other kind of school, provided everyone has a local non-religious public school available. And frankly, a lot of the ‘non-religious’ public schools are effectively rather (non-traditionally, de facto) religious and have no intention of knocking it off, giving me even less sympathy.
Then there’s the step beyond that, those who appose privately funded private schools. People being mad that some pay for private school while also paying for everyone’s public school will never actually stop being weird to me, as will people who think this is super commonly done by people in the upper middle class purely for quality reasons.
Quinn: there’s this class of upper-middle/upper class urban yuppie that makes a big stink out of sending their kids to “public school” and man… I hate them. Yeah, your kid will go to your decent local K-5 and bolt when shit gets real, just like every aspirational underserved family.
Matt Bruenig: Reminder when approaching this discourse that 90% of children attend public schools, most of the rest attend so-so religious schools.
If ‘shit gets real’ in my local school, and I am being underserved, I do not know what that means, but it does not sound like a time to not be bolting? Yet most people do not have that option. Also, yes, it is very strange that the same person also thinks this:
Quinn: I want to see the urban public education system completely broken down and rebuilt from the bottom up. I do not hate that it exists; I hate how it is.
Again, seems like bolting conditions to me. If you are expecting parents to sacrifice their children on the alter of public pressure to improve failing schools, please speak directly into this microphone.
Politico: School choice programs have been wildly successful under DeSantis. Now public schools might close.
Chris Freiman: Netflix has been wildly successful. Now Blockbuster locations might close.
Politico does point to some concerns. If standard schools are losing interest, why then destroy the schools that are exceptional, as many places are somehow doing? That seems rather perverse.
Hopefully the Montessori school could reconstitute itself, but the ‘vote with your feet’ plan only works if you close the schools that lose feet, not the ones that keep them.
Andrew Atterbury: One proposal aiming to turn a popular Fort Lauderdale magnet school that focuses on the Montessori teaching method into a neighborhood school brought a crowd nearing 200 people in opposition at a recent town hall. There, dozens of audience members, a sea of blue “VSY’’ shirts representing Virginia Shuman Young elementary, contended the plan would cause an unnecessary “disruption” for a top-rated school.
…
“If your product is better, you’ll be fine. The problem is, they are a relic of the past — a monopolized system where you have one option,” Chris Moya, a Florida lobbyist representing charter schools and the state’s top voucher administering organization, said of traditional public schools. “And when parents have options, they vote with their feet.”
The data cited in Politico says that the decline in enrollment due to increased homeschooling is modestly bigger than the increase in private school attendance, some of whom are getting scholarships to do it. Home school as always has principle-agent issues where you worry if the education is happening, if you do not trust parents to want to educate their children.
But yes, if you do not zero out the very high social cost of regular schooling, home schools start to look a lot better. If the city gave us a budget equal to what it costs them to have our kids in schools, I would 100% be putting together a vastly better homeschooling program with that money.
Bryne Hobart: Discussions about school vouchers, homeschooling, etc. make me feel grateful that it’s legal for us to cook for our kids, even though neither my wife nor I went to culinary school. Things could be very different.
Microschools are an obviously great idea. The cost of private school is far in excess of the costs of hiring a teacher, renting a space and paying for plausible supply and other costs. You get the socialization benefits of school, and the flexibility and customization to not do the awful parts, and as a society we get to try different stuff.
Also, home schooling and stay-at-home parent are expensive, and now you can spread that cost around along with its benefits.
Getting rid of trivial inconveniences can help quite a lot in such cases. Instead of having to go through rezoning, the school will often find space it can use for free.
Matt Bateman: Microschools are an extremely good and natural format for schooling and the only reason they aren’t much more common is because of unnatural blockers.
“Hey maybe we should pool our children and resources around the best and most willing educator in our community” is an obvious and ancient approach to organizing schooling and it’s quite strange that we today have managed to greatly disincentivize it
Politico: Florida Republicans, led by Gov. Ron DeSantis, want to let tiny private schools open in libraries, movie theaters, churches and other spaces where they can fit makeshift classrooms.
…
Florida’s policy change appears small; it allows private schools to use existing space at places like movie theaters and churches without having to go through local governments for approval.
But it could have a dramatic impact. This shift gives these private schools access to thousands of buildings, opening the door for new education options to emerge without them having to endure potentially heavy rezoning costs.
Primer, a company poised to act as a support system for such schools, is backed by Sam Altman. The man’s past investments often have excellent taste and speak well of his values. I’d be curious what he has invested in this year, after the events of November.
Scientific American used to be a magazine my family subscribed to that contained cool articles about science. Now it is… something else.
The latest example of this is Scientific American’s hit piece on home schooling. Eric Hoel has a thread and a post detailing the situation. The part about educational results is misleading but reasonable. Then they start in on accusations of ‘abuse.’
That is the part where, after using a child that was not home schooled as justification for a moral panic, they cite a 36% rate of homeschooled children being reported for alleged abuse to show how horrible it is.
We estimate that 37.4% of all children experience a child protective services investigation by age 18 years.
As Hoel notes, focusing on withdraws from school only, and other details, suggest that the base rate of abuse for home school is potentially substantially below normal. At worst, it is normal.
The good argument against home school is it requires a large investment of time and resources by the parents, so most families cannot afford to do it. Obviously, if you can get your child consistent 1-on-1 (or e.g. 4-on-1) attention and a customized path of study then that’s great, and will only get better now that AI tools are available.
Instead, the actual thesis of many against homeschooling, when they’re not making up things like the claims earlier in this section, is flat out that parents are not qualified to teach their children. And that those who claim that they could teach their own children things like how to read or write or do arithmetic are therefore ‘big mad’ and also presumably flying in the face of education and The Science.
Waitman Beorn: The Home Schooling Crowd is big mad. lol But also, how insulting is it to teachers who literally train specifically to teach kids of a certain age a specific subject that Ashton and his trad wife think they can do it just as well in the playroom of their log cabin mansion?
Charles Rense: I read the replies, and they were for the most part polite and reasonable in their disagreement. The only one who’s “big mad” is you.
Polimath: How insulting to the academic institutions is it that parents with little or no training end up educating their kids better than the teachers who literally train specifically to teach kids?
Austin Allred: Anti-homeschooling folks often have expectations of school teacher qualifications that are just wildly out of touch with reality.
Jake McCoy: Dr. Waitman admitting he couldn’t teach 2nd grade math is not a great look for him.
Prince Vogelfrei: People say smug shit like this while not doing the tiniest bit of research on homeschooling outcomes which beat public schooling in every standardized test category. California makes everyone do tests, we have the data. But what does the truth matter when superiority is to be had.
Most people do not care about results, they care about process – particularly a process which ensures no one can really be blamed and avoid the messiness that ensues
It is beyond absurd to think that an average teacher, with a class of 24 kids, couldn’t be outperformed by a competent parent focusing purely on their own child. The idea that if you don’t specifically have an ‘education degree’ that you can’t teach things is to defy all of human experience and existence. Completely crazy. And yet.
Austen Allred: The conventional view any time you dare to suggest there might be a more optimal way to learn than the existing school system.
I love that it’s a he that ends up on this hypothetical stripper pole at 16.
Kelsey Piper answers questions about her private tiny home school. Parents typically teach a weekly class, student/teacher ratio is 4:1 to 6:1, full price is $1200/month/child. All reports I’ve heard are quite good, but of course talent involved is off the charts.
They assigned kids two hours of math a day. I am confused why that is needed, if you train in math reasonably less than half of that should be plenty. I get that history and music are secondary priorities, but cutting them out entirely seems like a mistake, although honestly art can go. I also don’t see how most children could focus like that. I know mine would have no hope no matter how hard I tried. In general, why so much time in a chair doing school-style work? I don’t understand how that helps.
Of course all of it is obsolete now. If you have access to Gemini Pro 1.5 and Claude Opus, all previous learning techniques are going to look dumb.
The constant refrain I hear is ‘but what about socialization?’ Which seems crazy to me, and I love this way of putting it.
Violeta: Re: the socialization issue with homeschooling
I asked my 16yo daughter who went back to high-school this year “do you wanna continue next year?”
“I don’t think I’m ready for the isolation of sitting 6h with people only of my exact age and an adult speaking at us for 90% of the time, I need to socialize more.”
There are far better ways to get socialization. What socialization you do get in school, from what I can tell, is by default horribly warped in deeply unhealthy ways. Most of the value is essentially ‘you might make a friend at all, and then interact with them outside of school in your few hours of freedom.’ There are better ways to find friends.
Aella summarizes her home school experience, listing pros and cons of the type she experienced. The cons are that parents control what you learn and who you see, and your social skills and knowledge base are different from other kids. The pros are you don’t waste massive amounts of time instead learning at your own pace, you don’t get stratified by age and you dodge a lot of toxic dynamics in normal schools.
Her description of her three months in normal high school instruction, where everything is checking off a box and no one actually cares, tells you that yes it can be otherwise, we should be horrified by our defaults. If your soul has not yet been crushed and you show up most of the way through the process, the soul crushing engine becomes impossible to miss.
If you are a parent, presumably ‘choose what to teach’ is pro rather than a con, and you will choose something reasonable. So the only cons are having quirky socialization touchstones rather than the insane ones we get in primary and high school, which all mostly gets overridden anyway? Yeah, choice seems very clear if everyone involved can handle and invest in the process.
The exact opposite method is illustrated in this video, the concept of never making a child do anything they do not choose to do on their own. As several people here note, this is the ‘homeschool with no effort by doing actual nothing’ method, and by default it is absolutely be an excuse for negligence. It can also be done right, via noticing what children actually want and ensuring they find it and helping steer them, which requires work as active as other methods.
Michael Gibson asks a good question, but the opposite might be even better?
Michael Gibson: Why do kids hate school? If you don’t have an answer to that question then you’re not even in the conversation, let alone the debate.
Rebel Educator: The tragedy inside America’s K-12 schools.
Here’s another question. Why do kids love school?
Notice that teachers are saying that 95% (!) of their kids love Kindergarten (I can’t imagine they’re paying close attention, given my anecdata and this very different poll even if its sample is biased, but perhaps normies be norming), they still believe 74% love fourth grade, and even at the trough 37% are supposedly loving Grade 9.
If you force kids into a fixed location and subject them to strict control and force them to work at arbitrary stuff for roughly half of waking hours, these would be very good rates of loving the results, if the teachers are describing the kids remotely accurately. Consider that if you ask people if they ‘love’ their job, that’s going to score rather lower. We’re doing some things very wrong, but we must also be doing some things very right.
In relative terms this reaction seems roughly right? You start out with ‘hang out with other kids and mostly do fun things,’ which plausibly kids do mostly enjoy, then they turn it into progressively more sitting still for lectures and progressively more homework and busywork and wear you down for years. Then as high school progresses you start to get a bit of flexibility back and the world lets you do things like walk on your own or select classes or do actual work, so things improve a bit.
Richard Hanania: In South Korea, 84% of five year-olds and 36% of *two year-oldsattend private tutoring schools. What causes a culture to go this far off the rails? This is genuinely horrifying.
Again, not for every child all the time, even in a ‘normal’ school.
But for many children, it mostly makes them miserable while wasting their time.
And I’d boldly claim that this is not good.
And I disagree with Tracing Woods in that actually they can articulate this pretty damn well most of the time.
Tracing Woods: I hated school starting in first grade. I wanted to go faster, wanted more interesting work, wanted something better. I kept wanting this and kept leaping at any available alternative through twelfth grade. Kids can’t fully articulate their desires. But they know.
Kelsey Piper: I’m not going to say “kids are 100% accurate at identifying the best learning environment for them”. But they will absolutely tell you “I hate school” if they hate school. They will tell you by begging you to quit your job and homeschool them, by telling you it’s okay if that means the family ends up homeless, we can set up a tent in the lot on the corner. They will tell you by pretending to be sick, and by really being sick.
If they love their school, they tell you that too. They will tell you by begging you to take them in to their school on weekends. They’ll spend Christmas break complaining that school isn’t in session. They’ll say to you thoughtfully ‘I do really love my summer camp, but it makes me sad to be missing out on school’.
If you’ve decided your five or six year old is too stupid to be worth listening to, you may miss the signs they’re in a really bad situation that is harming them a lot – and you’ll definitely be teaching them that their education is not something in which they are active participants, not something where their perspective is valued, not something where their experiences even matter.
I also hear a lot of people say ‘if you let them choose, won’t they just choose whatever school is easiest and has the most toys?”. No. They won’t. One family at our microschool literally had their child do a side by side comparison by attending public school and the microschool for a period of time and then choosing where they wanted to go. The child loved the amenities that the public school offered – it had way more funding! It was big enough to have a soccer team!
But they were desperately bored. They said that everything the teacher said, they already knew. They spent all day being told to be quiet while the teacher said boring things. And they didn’t want that.
Almost everyone was supportive, with many similar stories. Then there was one person who spoke up to say that kids saying they are miserable is fine, actually.
Ed Real (Teacher): Vomitous drama queen tripe. In Kelsey’s fantasy world, people are secretly wondering “why isn’t my kid begging for me to homeschool them? What’s wrong with me?”
Kelsey Piper: I think you may have misread. I was saying that children do beg their parents to homeschool them sometimes. If your children aren’t, that’s a good thing!
Ed Real: Oh, no, I understand what you’re saying and it’s designed to get parents to worry if their kids aren’t soooooooooo engaged with their school life that they’re DEMANDING more! In fact, a kid begging for homeschool or private school or whatever needs to be squelched routinely.
Kelsey Piper: Do you think that kids are never miserable in their school environment and are only pretending to desperately seek alternatives, or do you think that they are miserable but that the correct way for parents to respond when their children are miserable is ‘squelching routinely’?
EdReal: I think your inability to distinguish between misery and a kid whining that he’s miserable is a very big part of your delusion. Absent criminal neglect or abuse, “miserable” is not the word to use about a child’s state of mind. Not seriously, anyway.
Especially since you’re claiming these kids are “miserable” for academic reasons. I mean, social reasons, bullying, sure. But academic? Please.
And yes, I’m saying you are positing such children to make other parents envious.
Scott Alexander: I was miserable at school and begged my parents to home school me. I still endorse this 30 years later, and my parents (who refused at the time) in retrospect agree. I can’t figure out if you’re denying my existence or saying that because I was a child my feelings didn’t matter.
Ed Real: Neither. I am saying that “miserable” is not an accurate description of your state of mind. You were a bright kid who felt you could do better. Oh, well. Pretty obvious you didn’t suffer career-wise.
Keller Scholl: It is always striking to me that one of the most common nightmares is being back in school, under the control of people like this poster, and this is not seen as a failure of schools.
Mike Blume: Teachers on [Twitter] doing a fucking fantastic job of making me want to entrust my children to their institutions.
Rohit: People forget their own schooling, I think. Things I did to show school was boring:
Repeatedly said school was boring.
Skipped all classes.
Created a pro and con list on why I should spend all my time in the library.
Read advanced textbooks for fun.
Not taking children seriously is wrong.
I think that if a child tells you they are miserable at school, chances are they are miserable at school. And yes, of course I speak from experience. Do people doubt that being constantly bored, for hours every day, is insufficient?
As in:
In class I’d pass the time Drawing a slash for every time the second hand went by A group of five Done twelve times was a minute But
I mean, yes, that is pretty miserable. Stop pretending it isn’t. Or that it doesn’t matter when a particular teacher is very much not Shameika, so long as you ‘turn out okay.’
There are plenty of other reasons that school can become a five alarm fire you need to get away from (e.g. Fiona Apple also notes ‘I wasn’t afraid of the bullies and that just made the bullies worse.’) But boredom and wasted time is enough.
You can do so much more, and we should treat failure to excel where it was possible similarly to how we (should and used to but increasingly also don’t) treat failure to stay at grade level for average students.
Daniel Buck: We need to quit wasting the time of gifted students and make it easier for them skip grades.
How many spend their days twiddling their thumbs after finishing the days work in minutes, waiting for their classmates? Or worse, getting conscripted to be the teacher’s errand runner?
I actually think being the teacher’s assistant is far better than thumb twirling, especially if the thing you assist with is the actual teaching. Still not ideal.
Matt Bateman: People are so used to talking about minimum acceptable outcomes in education that they truly have no idea how high-variance educational outcomes can and should be.
The top quartile of students can skip grades. The top 2 percent of students can do an entire multiyear curriculum in *weeks*.
As Nuno Sempere says, there are obvious problems with ‘kids decide when they get to drop out of regular school.’ At minimum, there need to be highly credible costly signals sent, rather than simply expressing a preference. Kids often have to be told to do things they don’t want to do. And you want a credible signal of how much they don’t want to be there, not one designed to get them what they want.
I have a very strong commitment, that if this kind of misery around school appears and is sustained, then that is that. Especially if they successfully locate and point out this statement.
Democracy mostly works, to the extent it works, because when things are truly terrible, people get mad and then they Throw the Bums Out. Like the children miserable at school, we do not know what we need, but we know when conditions are miserable and it is time for a change.
Also it is insane how many people use the argument Kelsey Piper talks about below, and do so with a straight face. Indeed the comments contain many people condemning Kelsey Piper as bad for not sacrificing her children on some symbolic alter.
Kelsey Piper: I also get really irritated by “you should send your kids to bad public schools because people like you doing that is what makes them into good public schools”. I’m willing to make a lot of sacrifices for my community. Wronging my kids isn’t one of them.
I am happy to donate to local classrooms in need of supplies (I do make those donations). I am happy to volunteer in local classrooms if they need me. I am not happy to condemn my kids to unhappiness, and I frankly don’t think I have the right to do so.
They deserve some input into where they spend 40 hours a week and they want it to be in a safe environment with challenging academic work and individualized curriculum and support in pursuing their ambitions.
And again.
Kelsey Piper: The weirdest and most horrifying thing about the school choice discourse was the apparently universal assumption, on left and right, that the only thing that matters about schools is student population. On the left the takeaway was that by removing a child from a school you wronged the school; on the right the takeaway was that there is no hope for general improvements in education, just the hope that you can be better than other people at securing a place for your children in the schools with “high quality” children.
A lot of the families I know of that took their kids out of a local public school did so because their child wasn’t learning to read. Their child wasn’t learning to read because they needed phonics-based reading education and the school did not offer it. Now it was third grade and the child was badly behind, fed up with the whole concept of reading, had lots of bad habits around bluffing and faking it, and felt deeply ashamed of themselves. That family would have been much much better served by a school with the identical student body, but a better reading instruction program.
I talked recently to another parent whose school had a problem with parents fleeing for private schools. The principal of the school forbade students from doing ahead-of-grade-level work, including checking out ahead-of-grade-level books from the library. The problem wasn’t the student body. The problem was this rule.
Interruption to highlight that yes this is a thing. There are schools where they are very strict about not allowing students to get more of an education than they are supposed to get. No books that are too advanced. It is a crime against humanity, and I mean that.
Kelsey Piper: When I was in third grade at a public school, the teacher called up my mom to try to tell her that I would not be allowed to take advanced math, because the teacher thought it wasn’t healthy for girls to take advanced math. My mom objected and I got into advanced math, but I had a miserable year under that teacher, who kept me inside on detention every day on various pretexts (I’d never gotten in trouble before or since). The classmates were not the problem. The problem was the teacher.
When I was in tenth grade, the school inexplicably assigned a person who didn’t know Calculus to teach the Calculus class. He identified the smartest boy in the class on the first day and told that boy to teach us all. He did his best.
Another reason kids frequently struggle at school is because the school starts at 8am. Those kids would thrive at a school that started at 10am. Their parents often wish they had that option, but they don’t.
Interruption number two: Oh my yes, and this effect can be rather large.
Kelsey Piper: I understand that there’s a lot of research to the effect that peer effects on education are much more reproducible than teacher effects on education. And certainly ‘who attends the school’ predicts test scores more strongly than ‘are the teachers any good’. But I think somehow we have jumped from that to a deranged insistence that the only thing that can be good or bad about a school is the student body, which carries implicitly an insistence that schooling is fundamentally zero-sum, that there are no wins that do not come at someone else’s expense, that to desire your child be happy is to desire someone else’s child suffer.
When I say a school is bad, I mean ‘it does not teach reading’. I mean ‘it does not allow students to work ahead at their own pace’. I mean ‘the teacher was hostile to my child’. I mean ‘the teacher was sexist’ or ‘the teacher was incompetent’ or ‘the teacher was not sober’ or ‘the teacher was not familiar with the material’. Bullying and unsafety are ways a school can be bad for kids, but not only is it not the only way, in the cases I’ve run into it’s usually not even in the top three reasons why a child is miserable at school.
When I say a school is good, I mean that kids spend their time doing work that they’re bought in on, work that matters to them, work they care about, work that’s challenging and interesting. I mean that they want to be there. I mean that the adults who teach and mentor and support them are trustworthy and trusted.
Under the worldview where all we can do is shuffle student bodies, school choice is suspect, probably just another way for some people to profit at the expense of others. But under the worldview where schools vary in quality and in which traits they possess, school choice (if implemented justly) is obviously a good idea. It’s a good idea in two ways. The first is a form of accountability which isn’t about test scores. Schools where the teachers are miserable bullies will lose students to other schools that do better at hiring. Schools that don’t serve their students will lose out to ones that do.
The second advantage is that children are different from each other! Some want to start at 8am because they drive their parents nuts by being up since 5 anyway. Some need to start at 8am for their job. But some work night shifts or have late risers and job flexibility and benefit from a late start. Some kids do well in orderly quiet classrooms; some do well with hubbub and flexibility. Some kids care a lot if the school allows them to work ahead, and some don’t. School choice allows people to self-sort around what works for their child.
It’s obviously not a panacea. We know that because we’ve had school choice in various forms for a while now and I observe a distinct lack of panacea around here. Incentives to solve education only get you so far if no one knows how to solve education. The well-intentioned focus on testing introduced the most painful costly clear-cut Goodharting I’ve seen in any industry. And any system that involves parents taking action will benefit the kids with active and involved parents, and practically all processes benefit the wealthy because that’s in a very fundamental sense what wealth means.
But once you acknowledge that schools can be good or bad because of policies and teachers and curriculums, and that schools can be different in ways that make them a better or worse fit for a child, and that we’re not playing some relentlessly depressing zero-sum game where every benefit for any child is extracted from some other child, I think the question becomes “what would a good policy regime here look like?”.
One thing that I am very grateful about California is that you can just start your own school, pretty straightforwardly. There are no state fees; the legal requirements aren’t even that onerous. You and a few of your friends can get together and see if you can build something that’s good for your kids, and if it is, you can open it up to more kids. This does not just reshuffle the kids. It makes it possible to do better. And when you have an unsolved problem, like how to provide just, high quality education to every child everywhere, it’s really valuable to open up the possibility of inventing and iterating and finding something better.
And – if a child is miserable, their misery matters. If your child is miserable, you need to help them. Even if the studies show they’ll be fine as an adult, this is a human being, over whom you have power, to whom you have duties, and they do not only matter for their future trajectory. http://GreatSchools.com will not tell you whether your child’s school is good or bad for them, but your child will. Please listen.
Sarah Constantin: “surely nobody would criticize Kelsey for putting a ton of work into founding a goddamn school to make sure her kids got a good education, that’s like motherhood and apple pie”
oh no.
It is indeed literally motherhood, and a central part of it. And yet.
Many times, in many ways, they make it hell. On purpose.
Then they justify that because you need to be ready for more hell, and say that overrides everything else in life.
Wes: Exhibit A in why I hate school. This is from Roxie’s preschool. They don’t let the kids inside until 9am, so if they show up early, kids will often play on the playground right next to the entrance. This is now banned. The reason is “the morning transition time is very important in order for the students to begin their day ready to learn.”
This is the petty tyranny of school administrators. They have the authority to make rules, so they do whatever is most convenient for them, and always default to “don’t let the kids have any fun.” Kids enjoying themselves is seen as a threat to the educational environment. IN PRE SCHOOL. It just gets worse as the kids get older. It’s not just the kids who associating learning with being bored and uninterested – it’s the adult too. So apparently they need a ten minute “transition time” to stop having fun and get ready to go be bored in class.
Outdoor playtime is now referred to as “gross motor time” because kids can’t just play. It has to have some pedagogical purpose.
Phase I study showed vaccine was safe and spurred immune responses in older people.
An electron micrograph of norovirus. Credit: Getty| BSIP
In an early clinical trial, an experimental norovirus vaccine given as a pill produced defensive responses exactly where it counts—in the saliva of older people most vulnerable to the explosive stomach bug.
The results, published this week in Science Translational Medicine, are another step in the long effort to thwart the gruesome germ, which finds a way to violently hollow out innards wherever people go—from restaurants to natural wonders and even the high seas. It’s a robust, extremely infectious virus that spreads via the nauseating fecal-oral route. Infected people spew billions of virus particles in their vomit and diarrhea, and shedding can last weeks. The particles aren’t easily killed by hand sanitizers and can linger on surfaces for up to two weeks. Exposure to as few as 10 virus particles can spark an infection. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, norovirus causes an average of between 19 and 21 million cases of acute gastroenteritis in the US every year, leading to 109,000 hospitalizations and 900 deaths. This racks up an economic burden estimated to be $2 billion to $10.6 billion.
Vaccine design
For most, the gut-busting bug is miserable but usually over in a few days. But older people—especially those with underlying medical conditions—are vulnerable to severe outcomes. About 90 percent of people who die from a norovirus infection are people age 65 or older who live in long-term care facilities.
For this reason, researchers have aimed to design a vaccine that’s sure to be effective in older people, who typically have weaker immune responses just from the aging process. But, of course, this makes the already daunting task of developing a vaccine yet harder—and norovirus poses some specific challenges. For one, there aren’t a lot of good laboratory models and animal systems to run norovirus experiments or test candidate drugs. For example, healthy mice infected with a mouse version of norovirus don’t develop any symptoms (lucky critters). Then there’s the fact that norovirus isn’t one virus; it’s many. There are 49 different genotypes of norovirus, which have been categorized into 10 “genogroups.” It’s unclear if protection against one genotype or genogroup will help protect against the others, and if so, by how much.
Currently, there are several norovirus vaccines in the works, at various stages with various designs. The one published this week is being developed by a San Francisco-based company called Vaxart and uses a proprietary oral delivery system. The pill includes a deactivated virus particle (an adenovirus), which can’t replicate in people but can deliver the genetic blueprints of two molecules into cells lining our intestines. One of the genetic blueprints it delivers tells the intestinal cells how to manufacture a protein found on the outside of norovirus particles, called VP.1. Once manufactured in the intestines, VP.1 can train the immune system to identify invading norovirus particles and attack them. The other genetic code included in the vaccine is for what’s called an “adjuvant,” which is basically a booster molecule that helps rev up immune responses.
While several other vaccines in the works are delivered by injections, producing systemic responses, the idea of the pill is to build up immune responses to norovirus directly where it invades and attacks—the mucosal lining of the digestive tract, including the mouth and intestines. There is some preliminary data suggesting that having antibodies against norovirus in saliva correlates with protection from the virus.
Good news
Vaxart has previously published Phase I trial data showing that its pill is safe and well-tolerated in healthy adults ages 18 to 49. The study, published in 2018, also indicated that the pill generated “substantial” systemic and mucosal antibodies against norovirus.
For the new study, Vaxart did a repeat Phase I trial with 65 older people—ages 55 to 80, broken into groups of 55 to 65, and 66 to 80. The participants were randomly assigned to get either a placebo (22) or a low (16), medium (16), or high (11) dose of the vaccine VXA-G1.1-NN, which targets one genotype of norovirus. Again, the vaccine was safe and well-tolerated. There were no serious side effects. The most common side effects were headache and fatigue, which were reported at about the same rates among the placebo and vaccinated groups.
Further, detailed examination of the participants’ immune responses showed not only systemic response, but responses in distant mucus membranes. In the blood, two types of antibodies (IgA and IgG) increased by several fold after vaccination compared with the placebo group. The group with the largest responses was the one that received the high dose.
A test that acts as a surrogate for neutralizing antibody responses to norovirus indicated that the antibodies spurred by the vaccine could block the virus. Additional tests found that cellular immune responses were also activated and that the systemic responses result in protection in places far from the intestines—namely the mouth and nose. Saliva tests and nasal swabs found significant jumps in secreted IgA against norovirus.
Immune responses were strongest in the first two months after vaccination and diminished over time, but some persisted for nearly seven months. When the scientists looked at differences between the two age groups (55–65 and 65–80), they didn’t see significant differences, suggesting the vaccine was equally effective in the older group.
Overall, the scientists at Vaxart concluded that the vaccine “has the potential to inhibit infection, viral shedding, and transmission.”
“Overall, VXA-G1.1-NN administration in older adults led to robust and durable immunogenicity detected both in circulation and multiple mucosal sites, an exciting outcome considering that diminished cellular and mucosal immunity are typical in older populations,” they wrote.
Not so good news
The outlook isn’t entirely rosy, though—there is some bad news. While immune responses rose in statistically significant measures during this small early-stage trial, it’s unclear if that equates to real-life protection. And there’s some good reason to be wary. In 2023, Vaxart released results of a challenge study, in which 141 brave souls (76 vaccinated and 65 given a placebo) were deliberately exposed to norovirus to see if the vaccine was protective. The results were weak: 53 placebo-group members (81.5 percent) became infected with norovirus, as determined by a PCR test looking for genetic evidence of the virus in their stool—and so did 76 vaccinated people (60 percent). That worked out to the vaccine offering only a 29 percent lower relative risk of getting infected. Looking at whether infected people developed symptoms of acute gastroenteritis, the vaccine had a protective efficacy of about 21 percent: 34 vaccinated people (48 percent) versus 37 placebo-group members (57 percent) developed symptoms.
While the study was a disappointment, Vaxart wasn’t ready to give up, arguing that the challenge study used large-dose exposures that people wouldn’t encounter in the real world.
“We use lots of copies of virus to ensure a high infection rate. In nature, 10 to 15 copies of virus is generally enough to give certain susceptible individuals disease,” James Cummings, chief medical officer at Vaxart, said in an investor call reported by Fierce Biotech at the time. “Field efficacy generally goes up, because the amount of inoculum that is causing disease that will be seen in the field is far lower than what is seen in the challenge study. My projection is that we would see an improvement in the decrease of [acute gastroenteritis] with our vaccine.”
Even a slight boost in efficacy could make the vaccine seem worthwhile. A 2012 modeling study suggested that even a vaccine with 50 percent efficacy could avert up to 2.2 million cases and save up to $2 billion over four years.
For now, we’ll have to wait to see what future trial data shows. And Vaxart’s vaccine isn’t the only one in the pipeline, nor is it the furthest along. Moderna has a norovirus vaccine in a Phase 3 trial, which is a larger study that will look at efficacy. But, while the trial is just beginning, Moderna noted in a financial update in February that the trial has been put on hold by the Food and Drug Administration due to a possible neurological side effect in one participant.
“The trial is currently on FDA clinical hold following a single adverse event report of a case of Guillain-Barré syndrome, which is currently under investigation,” Moderna reported. “The Company does not expect an impact on the study’s efficacy readout timeline as enrollment in the Northern Hemisphere has already been completed. The timing of the Phase 3 readout will be dependent on case accruals.”
Beth is Ars Technica’s Senior Health Reporter. Beth has a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and attended the Science Communication program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She specializes in covering infectious diseases, public health, and microbes.
Brother laser printers are popular recommendations for people seeking a printer with none of the nonsense. By nonsense, we mean printers suddenly bricking features, like scanning or printing, if users install third-party cartridges. Some printer firms outright block third-party toner and ink, despite customer blowback and lawsuits. Brother’s laser printers have historically worked fine with non-Brother accessories. A YouTube video posted this week, though, as well as older social media posts, claim that Brother has gone to the dark side and degraded laser printer functionality with third-party cartridges. Brother tells Ars that this isn’t true.
On March 3, YouTuber Louis Rossman posted a video saying that “Brother turns heel & becomes anti-consumer printer company.” The video, spotted by Tom’s Hardware, has 163,000 views as of this writing and seems to be based on a Reddit post from 2022. In that post, Reddit user 20Factorial said that firmware update W1.56 caused the automatic color registration feature to stop working on his Brother MFC-3750 when using third-party cartridges.
“With the colors not able to be aligned, the printer is effectively non-functional,” 20Factorial said. The Redditor went on to say that when asked, a Brother customer service agent confirmed that “the printer is non-functional without genuine toner.”
Rossman created a Wiki page breaking down the reported issues, including “printers continue to function with third-party toner but print at degraded quality unless OEM toner is installed.” He also noted that Brother printers automatically update when connected to the Internet and that Brother doesn’t offer older firmware versions to users.
Brother’s response
Brother denied to Ars Technica that it intentionally bricks printer functionality when users install third-party toner or ink. In a statement, the company said:
A surprise find in my inbox this morning: news from Volkswagen about a pair of new electric vehicles it has in the works. Even better, they’re both small and affordable, bucking the supersized, overpriced trend of the past few years. But before we get too excited, there’s currently no guarantee either will go on sale in North America.
Next year sees the European debut of the ID. 2all, a small electric hatchback that VW wants to sell for less than 25,000 euros ($26,671). But the ID. 2all isn’t really news: VW showed off the concept, as well as a GTI version, back in September 2023.
What is new is the ID. EVERY1, an all-electric entry-level car that, if the concept is anything to go by, is high on style and charm. It does not have a retro shape like a Mini or Fiat 500—VW could easily have succumbed to a retread of the Giugiaro-styled Golf from 1976 but opted for something new instead. The design language involves three pillars: stability, likability, and surprise elements, or “secret sauce,” according to VW’s description.
The ID. EVERY1 is the antithesis of the giant SUVs and trucks that have come out of Detroit these past few years.
“The widely flared wheelarches over the large 19-inch wheels and the athletic and clearly designed surfaces of the silhouette ensure stability,” said VW head of design Andreas Mindt, confirming the inability of modern designers to stay away from huge wheels.
“The slightly cheeky smile at the front is a particularly likable feature. A secret sauce element is the roof drawn in the middle, usually seen on sports cars. All these design elements lend the ID. EVERY1 a charismatic identity with which people can identify,” Mindt said.
It really is a small car—at 152.8 inches (3,880 mm) long, it’s much shorter than the smallest car VW sells here in the US, the Golf GTI, which is a still-diminutive 168.8 inches (4,288 mm) in length. Like the slightly bigger ID. 2all—which is still much shorter than a Golf), the ID. EVERY1 will use a new front-wheel drive version of VW’s modular MEB platform. (Initially introduced for rear- or all-wheel-drive EVs, MEB underpins cars like the ID.4 crossover and ID. Buzz bus.)
OpenAI’s recent transparency on safety and alignment strategies has been extremely helpful and refreshing.
Their Model Spec 2.0 laid out how they want their models to behave. I offered a detailed critique of it, with my biggest criticisms focused on long term implications. The level of detail and openness here was extremely helpful.
I have strong disagreements with several key assumptions underlying their position.
Given those assumptions, they have produced a strong document – here I focus on my disagreements, so I want to be clear that mostly I think this document was very good.
This post examines their key implicit and explicit assumptions.
In particular, there are three core assumptions that I challenge:
AI Will Remain a ‘Mere Tool.’
AI Will Not Disrupt ‘Economic Normal.’
AI Progress Will Not Involve Phase Changes.
The first two are implicit. The third is explicit.
OpenAI recognizes the questions and problems, but we have different answers. Those answers come with very different implications:
OpenAI thinks AI can remain a ‘Mere Tool’ despite very strong capabilities if we make that a design goal. I do think this is possible in theory, but that there are extreme competitive pressures against this that make that almost impossible, short of actions no one involved is going to like. Maintaining human control is to try and engineer what is in important ways an ‘unnatural’ result.
OpenAI expects massive economic disruptions, ‘more change than we’ve seen since the 1500s,’ but that still mostly assumes what I call ‘economic normal,’ where humans remain economic agents, private property and basic rights are largely preserved, and easy availability of oxygen, water, sunlight and similar resources continues. I think this is not a good assumption.
OpenAI is expecting what is for practical purposes continuous progress without major sudden phase changes. I believe their assumptions on this are far too strong, and that there have already been a number of discontinuous points with phase changes, and we will have more coming, and also that with sufficient capabilities many current trends in AI behaviors would reverse, perhaps gradually but also perhaps suddenly.
I’ll then cover their five (very good) core principles.
I call upon the other major labs to offer similar documents. I’d love to see their takes.
This is the biggest crux. OpenAI thinks that this is a viable principle to aim for. I don’t see how.
OpenAI imagines that AI will remain a ‘mere tool’ indefinitely. Humans will direct AIs, and AIs will do what the humans direct the AIs to do. Humans will remain in control, and remain ‘in the loop,’ and we can design to ensure that happens. When we model a future society, we need not imagine AIs, or collections of AIs, as if they were independent or competing economic agents or entities.
Thus, our goal in AI safety and alignment is to ensure the tools do what we intend them to do, and to guard against human misuse in various forms, and to prepare society for technological disruption similar to what we’d face with other techs. Essentially, This Time is Not Different.
Thus, the Model Spec and other such documents are plans for how to govern an AI assistant mere tool, assert a chain of command, and how to deal with the issues that come along with that.
That’s a great thing to do for now, but as a long term outlook I think this is Obvious Nonsense. A sufficiently capable AI might (or might not) be something that a human operating it could choose to leave as a ‘mere tool.’ But even under optimistic assumptions, you’d have to sacrifice a lot of utility to do so.
It does not have a goal? We can and will effectively give it a goal.
It is not an agent? We can and will make it an agent.
Human in the loop? We can and will take the human out of the loop once the human is not contributing to the loop.
OpenAI builds AI agents and features in ways designed to keep humans in the loop and ensure the AIs are indeed mere tools, as suggested in their presentation at the Paris summit? They will face dramatic competitive pressures to compromise on that. People will do everything to undo those restrictions. What’s the plan?
Thus, even if we solve alignment in every useful sense, and even if we know how to keep AIs as ‘mere tools’ if desired, we would rapidly face extreme competitive pressures towards gradual disempowerment, as AIs are given more and more autonomy and authority because that is the locally effective thing to do (and also others do it for the lulz, or unintentionally, or because they think AIs being in charge or ‘free’ is good).
Until a plan tackles these questions seriously, you do not have a serious plan.
What I mean by ‘Economic Normal’ is something rather forgiving – that the world does not transform in ways that render our economic intuitions irrelevant, or that invalidate economic actions. The document notes they expect ‘more change than from the 1500s to the present’ and the 1500s would definitely count as fully economic normal here.
It roughly means that your private property is preserved in a way that allows your savings to retain purchasing power, your rights to bodily autonomy and (very) basic rights are respected, your access to the basic requirements of survival (sunlight, water, oxygen and so on) are not disrupted or made dramatically more expensive on net, and so on. It also means that economic growth does not grow so dramatically as to throw all your intuitions out the window.
That things will not enter true High Weirdness, and that financial or physical wealth will meaningfully protect you from events.
I do not believe these are remotely safe assumptions.
AGI is notoriously hard to define or pin down. There are not two distinct categories of things, ‘definitely not AGI’ and then ‘fully AGI.’
Nor do we expect an instant transition from ‘AI not good enough to do much’ to ‘AI does recursive self-improvement.’ AI is already good enough to do much, and will probably get far more useful before things ‘go critical.’
That does not mean that there are not important phase changes between models, where the precautions and safety measures you were previously using either stop working or are no longer matched to the new threats.
AI is still on an exponential.
If we treat past performance as assuring us of future success, if we do not want to respond to an exponential ‘too early’ based on the impacts we can already observe, what happens? We will inevitably respond too late.
I think the history of GPT-2 actually illustrates this. If we conclude from that incident that OpenAI did something stupid and ‘looked silly,’ without understanding exactly why the decision was a mistake, we are in so so much trouble.
We used to view the development of AGI as a discontinuous moment when our AI systems would transform from solving toy problems to world-changing ones. We now view the first AGI as just one point along a series of systems of increasing usefulness.
In a discontinuous world, practicing for the AGI moment is the only thing we can do, and it leads to treating the systems of today with a level of caution disproportionate to their apparent power.
This is the approach we took for GPT-2 when we didn’t release the model due to concerns about malicious applications.
In the continuous world, the way to make the next system safe and beneficial is to learn from the current system. This is why we’ve adopted the principle of iterative deployment, so that we can enrich our understanding of safety and misuse, give society time to adapt to changes, and put the benefits of AI into people’s hands.
At present, we are navigating the new paradigm of chain-of-thought models – we believe this technology will be extremely impactful going forward, and we want to study how to make it useful and safe by learning from its real-world usage. In the continuous world view, deployment aids rather than opposes safety.
In the continuous world view, deployment aids rather than opposes safety.
At the current margins, subject to proper precautions and mitigations, I agree with this strategy of iterative deployment. Making models available, on net, is helpful.
However, we forget what happened with GPT-2. The demand was that the full GPT-2 be released as an open model, right away, despite it being a phase change in AI capabilities that potentially enabled malicious uses, with no one understanding what the impact might be. It turned out the answer was ‘nothing,’ but the point of iterative deployment is to test that theory while still being able to turn the damn thing off. That’s exactly what happened. The concerns look silly now, but that’s hindsight.
Similarly, there have been several cases of what sure felt like discontinuous progress since then. If we restrict ourselves to the ‘OpenAI extended universe,’ GPT-3, GPT-3.5, GPT-4, o1 and Deep Research (including o3) all feel like plausible cases where new modalities potentially opened up, and new things happened.
The most important potential phase changes lie in the future, especially the ones where various safety and alignment strategies potentially stop working, or capabilities make such failures far more dangerous, and it is quite likely these two things happen at the same time because one is a key cause of the other. And if you buy ‘o-ring’ style arguments, where AI is not so useful so long as there must be a human in the loop, removing the last need for such a human is a really big deal.
Alternatively: Iterative deployment can be great if and only if you use it in part to figure out when to stop.
I would also draw a distinction between open iterative deployment and closed iterative deployment. Closed iterative deployment can be far more aggressive while staying responsible, since you have much better options available to you if something goes awry.
I also think the logic here is wrong:
These diverging views of the world lead to different interpretations of what is safe.
For example, our release of ChatGPT was a Rorschach test for many in the field — depending on whether they expected AI progress to be discontinuous or continuous, they viewed it as either a detriment or learning opportunity towards AGI safety.
The primary impacts of ChatGPT were
As a starting gun that triggered massively increased use, interest and spending on LLMs and AI. That impact has little to do with whether progress is continuous or discontinuous.
As a way to massively increase capital and mindshare available to OpenAI.
Helping transform OpenAI into a product company.
You can argue about whether those impacts were net positive or not. But they do not directly interact much with whether AI progress is centrally continuous.
Another consideration is various forms of distillation or reverse engineering, or other ways in which making your model available could accelerate others.
And there’s all the other ways in which perception of progress, and of relative positioning, impacts people’s decisions. It is bizarre how much the exact timing of the release of DeepSeek’s r1, relative to several other models, mattered.
Precedent matters too. If you get everyone in the habit of releasing models the moment they’re ready, it impacts their decisions, not only yours.
This is the most important detail-level disagreement, especially in the ways I fear that the document will be used and interpreted, both internally to OpenAI and also externally, even if the document’s authors know better.
It largely comes directly from applying the ‘mere tool’ and ‘economic normal’ assumptions.
As AI becomes more powerful, the stakes grow higher. The exact way the post-AGI world will look is hard to predict — the world will likely be more different from today’s world than today’s is from the 1500s. But we expect the transformative impact of AGI to start within a few years. From today’s AI systems, we see three broad categories of failures:
Human misuse: We consider misuse to be when humans apply AI in ways that violate laws and democratic values. This includes suppression of free speech and thought, whether by political bias, censorship, surveillance, or personalized propaganda. It includes phishing attacks or scams. It also includes enabling malicious actors to cause harm at a new scale.
Misaligned AI: We consider misalignment failures to be when an AI’s behavior or actions are not in line with relevant human values, instructions, goals, or intent. For example an AI might take actions on behalf of its user that have unintended negative consequences, influence humans to take actions they would otherwise not, or undermine human control. The more power the AI has, the bigger potential consequences are.
Societal disruption: AI will bring rapid change, which can have unpredictable and possibly negative effects on the world or individuals, like social tensions, disparities and inequality, and shifts in dominant values and societal norms. Access to AGI will determine economic success, which risks authoritarian regimes pulling ahead of democratic ones if they harness AGI more effectively.
There are two categories of concern here, in addition to the ‘democratic values’ Shibboleth issue.
As introduced, this is framed as ‘from today’s AI systems.’ In which case, this is a lot closer to accurate. But the way the descriptions are written clearly implies this is meant to cover AGI as well, where this taxonomy seems even less complete and less useful for cutting reality at its joints.
This is in a technical sense a full taxonomy, but de facto it ignores large portions of the impact of AI and of the threat model that I am using.
When I say technically a full taxonomy, you could say this is essentially saying either:
The human does something directly bad, on purpose.
The AI does something directly bad, that the human didn’t intend.
Nothing directly bad happens per se, but bad things happen overall anyway.
Put it like that, and what else is there? Yet the details don’t reflect the three options being fully covered, as summarized there. In particular, ‘societal disruption’ implies a far narrower set of impacts than we need to consider, but similar issues exist with all three.
Human Misuse.
A human might do something bad using an AI, but how are we pinning that down?
Saying ‘violates the law’ puts an unreasonable burden on the law. Our laws, as they currently exist, are complex and contradictory and woefully unfit and inadequate for an AGI-infused world. The rules are designed for very different levels of friction, and very different social and other dynamics, and are written on the assumption of highly irregular enforcement. Many of them are deeply stupid.
If a human uses AI to assemble a new virus, that certainly is what they mean by ‘enabling malicious actors to cause harm at a new scale’ but the concern is not ‘did that break the law?’ nor is it ‘did this violate democratic values.’
Saying ‘democratic values’ is a Shibboleth and semantic stop sign. What are these ‘democratic values’? Things the majority of people would dislike? Things that go against the ‘values’ the majority of people socially express, or that we like to pretend our society strongly supports? Things that change people’s opinions in the wrong ways, or wrong directions, according to some sort of expert class?
Why is ‘personalized propaganda’ bad, other than the way that is presented? What exactly differentiates it from telling an AI to write a personalized email? Why is personalized bad but non-personalized fine and where is the line here? What differentiates ‘surveillance’ from gathering information, and does it matter if the government is the one doing it? What the hell is ‘political bias’ in the context of ‘suppression of free speech’ via ‘human misuse’? And why are these kinds of questions taking up most of the misuse section?
Most of all, this draws a box around ‘misuse’ and treats that as a distinct category from ‘use,’ in a way I think will be increasingly misleading. Certainly we can point to particular things that can go horribly wrong, and label and guard against those. But so much of what people want to do, or are incentivized to do, is not exactly ‘misuse’ but has plenty of negative side effects, especially if done at unprecedented scale, often in ways not centrally pointed at by ‘societal disruption’ even if they technically count. That doesn’t mean there is obviously anything to be done or that should be done about such things, banning things should be done with extreme caution, but it not being ‘misuse’ does not mean the problems go away.
Misaligned AI.
There are three issues here:
The longstanding question of what even is misaligned.
The limited implied scope of the negative consequences.
The implication that the AI has to be misaligned to pose related dangers.
AI is only considered misaligned here when it is not in line with relevant human values, instructions, goals or intent. If you read that literally, as an AI that is not in line with all four of these things, even then it can still easily bleed into questions of misuse, in ways that threaten to drop overlapping cases on the floor.
I don’t mean to imply there’s something great that could have been written here instead, but: This doesn’t actually tell us much about what ‘alignment’ means in practice. There are all sorts of classic questions about what happens when you give an AI instructions or goals that imply terrible outcomes, as indeed almost all maximalist or precise instructions and goals do at the limit. It doesn’t tell us what ‘human values’ are in various senses.
On scope, I do appreciate that it says the more power the AI has, the bigger potential consequences are. And ‘undermine human control’ can imply a broad range of dangers. But the scope seems severely limited here.
Especially worrisome is that the examples imply that the actions would still be taken ‘on behalf of its user’ and merely have unintended negative consequences. Misaligned AI could take actions very much not on behalf of its user, or might quickly fail to effectively have a user at all. Again, this is the ‘mere tool’ assumption run amok.
Social disruption
Here once again we see ‘economic normal’ and ‘mere tool’ playing key roles.
The wrong regimes – the ‘authoritarian’ ones – might pull ahead, or we might see ‘inequality’ or ‘social tensions.’ Or shifts in ‘dominant values’ and ‘social norms.’ But the base idea of human society is assumed to remain in place, with social dynamics remaining between humans. The worry is that society will elevate the wrong humans, not that society would favor AIs over humans or cease to effectively contain humans at all, or that humans might lose control over events.
To me, this does not feel like it addresses much of what I worry about in terms of societal disruptions, or even if it technically does it gives the impression it doesn’t.
We should worry far more about social disruptions in the sense that AIs take over and humans lose control, or AIs outcompete humans and render them non-competitive and non-productive, rather than worries about relatively smaller problems that are far more amenable to being fixed after things go wrong.
The ‘mere tool’ blind spot is especially important here.
The missing fourth category, or at least thing to highlight even if it is technically already covered, is that the local incentives will often be to turn things over to AI to pursue local objectives more efficiently, but in ways that cause humans to progressively lose control. Human control is a core principle listed in the document, but I don’t see the approach to retaining it here as viable, and it should be more clearly here in the risk section. This shift will also impact events in other ways that cause negative externalities we will find very difficult to ‘price in’ and deal with once the levels of friction involved are sufficiently reduced.
There need not be any ‘misalignment’ or ‘misuse.’ Everyone following the local incentives leading to overall success is a fortunate fact about how things have mostly worked up until now, and also depended on a bunch of facts about humans and the technologies available to them, and how those humans have to operate and relate to each other. And it’s also depended on our ability to adjust things to fix the failure modes as we go to ensure it continues to be true.
I want to highlight an important statement:
Like with any new technology, there will be disruptive effects, some that are inseparable from progress, some that can be managed well, and some that may be unavoidable.
Societies will have to find ways of democratically deciding about these trade-offs, and many solutions will require complex coordination and shared responsibility.
Each failure mode carries risks that range from already present to speculative, and from affecting one person to painful setbacks for humanity to irrecoverable loss of human thriving.
This downplays the situation, merely describing us as facing ‘trade-offs,’ although it correctly points to the stakes of ‘irrecoverable loss of human thriving,’ even if I wish the wording on that (e.g. ‘extinction’) was more blunt. And it once again fetishizes ‘democratic’ decisions, presumably with only humans voting, without thinking much about how to operationalize that or deal with the humans both being heavily AI influenced and not being equipped to make good decisions any other way.
The biggest thing, however, is to affirm that yes, we only have a chance if we have the ability to do complex coordination and share responsibility. We will need some form of coordination mechanism, that allows us to collectively steer the future away from worse outcomes towards better outcomes.
The problem is that somehow, there is a remarkably vocal Anarchist Caucus, who thinks that the human ability to coordinate is inherently awful and we need to destroy and avoid it at all costs. They call it ‘tyranny’ and ‘authoritarianism’ if you suggest that humans retain any ability to steer the future at all, asserting that the ability of humans to steer the future via any mechanism at all is a greater danger (‘concentration of power’) than all other dangers combined would be if we simply let nature take its course.
I strongly disagree, and wish people understood what such people were advocating for, and how extreme and insane a position it is both within and outside of AI, and to what extent it quite obviously cannot work, and inevitably ends with either us all getting killed or some force asserting control.
Coordination is hard.
Coordination, on the level we need it, might be borderline impossible. Indeed, many in the various forms of the Suicide Caucus argue that because Coordination is Hard, we should give up on coordination with ‘enemies,’ and therefore we must Fail Game Theory Forever and all race full speed ahead into the twirling razor blades.
I’m used to dealing with that.
I don’t know if I will ever get used to the position that Coordination is The Great Evil, even democratic coordination among allies, and must be destroyed. That because humans inevitably abuse power, humans must not have any power.
The result would be that humans would not have any power.
And then, quickly, there wouldn’t be humans.
They outline five core principles.
Embracing Uncertainty: We treat safety as a science, learning from iterative deployment rather than just theoretical principles.
Defense in Depth: We stack interventions to create safety through redundancy.
Methods that Scale: We seek out safety methods that become more effective as models become more capable.
Human Control: We work to develop AI that elevates humanity and promotes democratic ideals.
Shared Responsibility: We view responsibility for advancing safety as a collective effort.
I’ll take each in turn.
Embracing uncertainty is vital. The question is, what helps you embrace it?
If you have sufficient uncertainty about the safety of deployment, then it would be very strange to ‘embrace’ that uncertainty by deploying anyway. That goes double, of course, for deployments that one cannot undo, or which are sufficiently powerful they might render you unable to undo them (e.g. they might escape control, exfiltrate, etc).
So the question is, when does it reduce uncertainty to release models and learn, versus when it increases uncertainty more to do that? And what other considerations are there, in both directions? They recognize that the calculus on this could flip in the future, as quoted below.
I am both sympathetic and cynical here. I think OpenAI’s iterative development is primarily a business case, the same as everyone else’s, but that right now that business case is extremely compelling. I do think for now the safety case supports that decision, but view that as essentially a coincidence.
In particular, my worry is that alignment and safety considerations are, along with other elements, headed towards a key phase change, in addition to other potential phase changes. They do address this under ‘methods that scale,’ which is excellent, but I think the problem is far harder and more fundamental than they recognize.
Some excellent quotes here:
Our approach demands hard work, careful decision-making, and continuous calibration of risks and benefits.
…
The best time to act is before risks fully materialize, initiating mitigation efforts as potential negative impacts — such as facilitation of malicious use-cases or the model deceiving its operator— begin to surface.
…
In the future, we may see scenarios where the model risks become unacceptable even relative to benefits. We’ll work hard to figure out how to mitigate those risks so that the benefits of the model can be realized. Along the way, we’ll likely test them in secure, controlled settings.
…
For example, making increasingly capable models widely available by sharing their weights should include considering a reasonable range of ways a malicious party could feasibly modify the model, including by finetuning (see our 2024 statement on open model weights).
Yes, if you release an open weights model you need to anticipate likely modifications including fine-tuning, and not pretend your mitigations remain in place unless you have a reason to expect them to remain in place. Right now, we do not expect that.
It’s (almost) never a bad idea to use defense in depth on top of your protocol.
My worry is that in a crisis, all relevant correlations go to 1.
As in, as your models get increasingly capable, if your safety and alignment training fails, then your safety testing will be increasingly unreliable, and it will be increasingly able to get around your inference time safety, monitoring, investigations and enforcement.
Its ability to get around these four additional layers are all highly correlated to each other. The skills that get you around one mostly get you around the others. So this isn’t as much defense in depth as you would like it to be.
That doesn’t mean don’t do it. Certainly there are cases, especially involving misuse or things going out of distribution in strange but non-malicious ways, where you will be able to fail early, then recover later on. The worry is that when the stakes are high, that becomes a lot less likely, and you should think of this as maybe one effective ‘reroll’ at most rather than four.
To align increasingly intelligent models, especially models that are more intelligent and powerful than humans, we must develop alignment methods that improve rather than break with increasing AI intelligence.
I am in violent agreement. The question is which methods will scale.
There are also two different levels at which we must ask what scales.
Does it scale as AI capabilities increase on the margin, right now? A lot of alignment techniques right now are essentially ‘have the AI figure out what you meant.’ On the margin right now, more intelligence and capability of the AI mean better answers.
Deliberative alignment is the perfect example of this. It’s great for mundane safety right now and will get better in the short term. Having the model think about how to follow your specified rules will improve as intelligence improves, as long as the goal of obeying your rules as written gets you what you want. However, if you apply too much optimization pressure and intelligence to any particular set of deontological rules as you move out of distribution, even under DWIM (do what I mean, or the spirit of the rules) I predict disaster.
In addition, under amplification, or attempts to move ‘up the chain’ of capabilities, I worry that you can hope to copy your understanding, but not to improve it. And as they say, if you make a copy of a copy of a copy, it’s not quite as sharp as the original.
I approve of everything they describe here, other than worries about the fetishization of democracy, please do all of it. But I don’t see how this allows humans to remain in effective control. These techniques are already hard to get right and aim to solve hard problems, but the full hard problems of control remain unaddressed.
Another excellent category, where they affirm the need to do safety work in public, fund it and support it, including government expertise, propose policy initiatives and make voluntary commitments.
There is definitely a lot of room for improvement in OpenAI and Sam Altman’s public facing communications and commitments.
There’s little that Internet denizens love more than a snazzy personality test—cat videos, maybe, or perpetual outrage. One trend that has gained popularity over the last several years is personality quizzes based on so-called ambiguous images—in which one sees either a young girl or an old man, for instance, or a skull or a little girl. It’s possible to perceive both images by shifting one’s perspective, but it’s the image one sees first that is said to indicate specific personality traits. According to one such quiz, seeing the young girl first means you are optimistic and a bit impulsive, while seeing the old man first would mean one is honest, faithful, and goal-oriented.
But is there any actual science to back up the current fad? There is not, according to a paper published in the journal PeerJ, whose authors declare these kinds of personality quizzes to be a new kind of psychological myth. That said, they did find a couple of intriguing, statistically significant correlations they believe warrant further research.
In 1892, a German humor magazine published the earliest known version of the “rabbit-duck illusion,” in which one can see either a rabbit or a duck, depending on one’s perspective—i.e., multistable perception. There have been many more such images produced since then, all of which create ambiguity by exploiting certain peculiarities of the human visual system, such as playing with illusory contours and how we perceive edges.
Such images have long fascinated scientists and philosophers because they seem to represent different ways of seeing. So naturally there is a substantial body of research drawing parallels between such images and various sociological, biological, or psychological characteristics.
For instance, a 2010 study examined BBC archival data on the duck-rabbit illusion from the 1950s and found that men see the duck more often than women, while older people were more likely to see the rabbit. A 2018 study of the “younger-older woman” ambiguous image asked participants to estimate the age of the woman they saw in the image. Older participants over 30 gave higher estimates than younger ones. This was confirmed by a 2021 study, although that study also found no correlation between participants’ age and whether they were more likely to see the older or younger woman in the image.
Google’s AI ambitions know no bounds. A new report claims Google’s next phones will herald the arrival of a feature called Pixel Sense that will ingest data from virtually every Google app on your phone, fueling a new personalized experience. This app could be the premiere feature of the Pixel 10 series expected out late this year.
According to a report from Android Authority, Pixel Sense is the new name for Pixie, an AI that was supposed to integrate with Google Assistant before Gemini became the center of Google’s universe. In late 2023, it looked as though Pixie would be launched on the Pixel 9 series, but that never happened. Now, it’s reportedly coming back as Pixel Sense, and we have more details on how it might work.
Pixel Sense will apparently be able to leverage data you create in apps like Calendar, Gmail, Docs, Maps, Keep Notes, Recorder, Wallet, and almost every other Google app. It can also process media files like screenshots in the same way the Pixel Screenshots app currently does. The goal of collecting all this data is to help you complete tasks faster by suggesting content, products, and names by understanding the context of how you use the phone. Pixel Sense will essentially try to predict what you need without being prompted.
Samsung is pursuing a goal that is ostensibly similar to Now Brief, a new AI feature available on the Galaxy S25 series. Now Brief collects data from a handful of apps like Samsung Health, Samsung Calendar, and YouTube to distill your important data with AI. However, it rarely offers anything of use with its morning, noon, and night “Now Bar” updates.
Pixel Sense sounds like a more expansive version of this same approach to processing user data—and perhaps the fulfillment of Google Now’s decade-old promise. The supposed list of supported apps is much larger, and they’re apps people actually use. If pouring more and more data into a large language model leads to better insights into your activities, Pixel Sense should be better at guessing what you’ll need. Admittedly, that’s a big “if.”
At Mobile World Congress, Google confirmed that a long-awaited Gemini AI feature it first teased nearly a year ago is ready for launch. The company’s conversational Gemini Live will soon be able to view live video and screen sharing, a feature Google previously demoed as Project Astra. When Gemini’s video capabilities arrive, you’ll be able to simply show the robot something instead of telling it.
Right now, Google’s multimodal AI can process text, images, and various kinds of documents. However, its ability to accept video as an input is spotty at best—sometimes it can summarize a YouTube video, and sometimes it can’t, for unknown reasons. Later in March, the Gemini app on Android will get a major update to its video functionality. You’ll be able to open your camera to provide Gemini Live a video stream or share your screen as a live video, thus allowing you to pepper Gemini with questions about what it sees.
Gemini Live with video.
It can be hard to keep track of which Google AI project is which—the 2024 Google I/O was largely a celebration of all things Gemini AI. The Astra demo made waves as it demonstrated a more natural way to interact with the AI. In the original video, which you can see below, Google showed how Gemini Live could answer questions in real time as the user swept a phone around a room. It had things to say about code on a computer screen, how speakers work, and a network diagram on a whiteboard. It even remembered where the user left their glasses from an earlier part of the video.
Perhaps because of the disappointing results, Altman had previously written that GPT-4.5 will be the last of OpenAI’s traditional AI models, with GPT-5 planned to be a dynamic combination of “non-reasoning” LLMs and simulated reasoning models like o3.
A stratospheric price and a tech dead-end
And about that price—it’s a doozy. GPT-4.5 costs $75 per million input tokens and $150 per million output tokens through the API, compared to GPT-4o’s $2.50 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens. (Tokens are chunks of data used by AI models for processing). For developers using OpenAI models, this pricing makes GPT-4.5 impractical for many applications where GPT-4o already performs adequately.
By contrast, OpenAI’s flagship reasoning model, o1 pro, costs $15 per million input tokens and $60 per million output tokens—significantly less than GPT-4.5 despite offering specialized simulated reasoning capabilities. Even more striking, the o3-mini model costs just $1.10 per million input tokens and $4.40 per million output tokens, making it cheaper than even GPT-4o while providing much stronger performance on specific tasks.
OpenAI has likely known about diminishing returns in training LLMs for some time. As a result, the company spent most of last year working on simulated reasoning models like o1 and o3, which use a different inference-time (runtime) approach to improving performance instead of throwing ever-larger amounts of training data at GPT-style AI models.
OpenAI’s self-reported benchmark results for the SimpleQA test, which measures confabulation rate. Credit: OpenAI
While this seems like bad news for OpenAI in the short term, competition is thriving in the AI market. Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet has demonstrated vastly better performance than GPT-4.5, with a reportedly more efficient architecture. It’s worth noting that Claude 3.7 Sonnet is likely a system of AI models working together behind the scenes, although Anthropic has not provided details about its architecture.
For now, it seems that GPT-4.5 may be the last of its kind—a technological dead-end for an unsupervised learning approach that has paved the way for new architectures in AI models, such as o3’s inference-time reasoning and perhaps even something more novel, like diffusion-based models. Only time will tell how things end up.
GPT-4.5 is now available to ChatGPT Pro subscribers, with rollout to Plus and Team subscribers planned for next week, followed by Enterprise and Education customers the week after. Developers can access it through OpenAI’s various APIs on paid tiers, though the company is uncertain about its long-term availability.
Requiring Steam in order to play Half-Life 2 led to plenty of grumbling from players in 2004. But the high-profile Steam exclusive helped build an instant user base for Valve’s fresh distribution system, setting it on a path to eventually become the unquestioned leader in the space. The link between the new game and the new platform helped promote a bold alternative to the retail game sales and distribution systems that had dominated PC gaming for decades.
Requiring SteamOS to play Half-Life 3 would definitely lead to a lot of grumbling from players. But the high-profile exclusive could help build an instant user base for Valve’s fresh operating system, perhaps setting it on the path to become the unquestioned leader in the space. A link between the new game and the new platform could help promote a bold alternative to the Windows-based systems that have dominated PC gaming for decades.
Not another Steam Machine
Getting players to change the established platform they use to buy and play games (either in terms of hardware or software) usually requires some sort of instantly apparent benefit for the player. Those benefits can range from the tangible (e.g., an improved controller, better graphics performance) to the ancillary (e.g., social features, achievements) to the downright weird (e.g., a second screen on a portable). Often, though, a core reason why players switch platforms is for access to exclusive “system seller” games that aren’t available any other way.
Half-Life 2‘s role in popularizing early Steam shows just how much a highly anticipated exclusive can convince otherwise reluctant players to invest time and effort in a new platform. To see what can happen without such an exclusive, we only need to look to Valve’s 2015 launch of the Steam Machine hardware line, powered by the first version of the Linux-based SteamOS.
Valve offered players very little in the way of affirmative reasons to switch to a SteamOS-powered Steam Machine in 2015.
Credit: Alienware
Valve offered players very little in the way of affirmative reasons to switch to a SteamOS-powered Steam Machine in 2015. Credit: Alienware
At the time, Valve was selling SteamOS mainly as an alternative to a new Windows 8 environment that Valve co-founder Gabe Newell saw as a “catastrophe” in the making for the PC gaming world. Newell described SteamOS as a “hedging strategy” against Microsoft’s potential ability to force all Windows 8 app distribution through the Windows Store, a la Apple’s total control of iPhone app distribution.
When Microsoft failed to impose that kind of hegemonic control over Windows apps and games, Valve was left with little else to convince players that it was worth buying a Windows-free Steam Machine (or going through the onerous process of installing the original SteamOS on their gaming rigs). Sure, using SteamOS meant saving a few bucks on a Windows license. But it also meant being stuck with an extremely limited library of Linux ports (especially when it came to releases from major publishers) and poor technical performance compared to Windows even when those ports were available.
Given those obvious downsides—and the lack of any obvious upsides—it’s no wonder that users overwhelmingly ignored SteamOS and Steam Machines at the time. But as we argued way back in 2013, a major exclusive on the scale of Half-Life 3 could have convinced a lot of gamers to overlook at least some of those downsides and give the new platform a chance.
A little push
Fast forward to today, and the modern version of SteamOS is in a much better place than the Steam Machine-era version ever was. That’s thanks in large part to Valve’s consistent work on the Proton compatibility layer, which lets the Linux-based SteamOS run almost any game that’s designed for Windows (with only a few major exceptions). That wide compatibility has been a huge boon for the Steam Deck, which offered many players easy handheld access to vast swathes of PC gaming for the first time. The Steam Deck also showed off SteamOS’s major user interface and user experience benefits over clunkier Windows-based gaming portables.
The Steam Deck served as an excellent proof of concept for the viability of SteamOS hardware with the gaming masses.
Credit: Kyle Orland
The Steam Deck served as an excellent proof of concept for the viability of SteamOS hardware with the gaming masses. Credit: Kyle Orland
Still, the benefits of switching from Windows to SteamOS might seem a bit amorphous to many players today. If Valve is really interested in pushing its OS as an alternative to Windows gaming, a big exclusive game is just the thing to convince a critical mass of players to make the leap. And when it comes to massive PC gaming exclusives, it doesn’t get much bigger than the long, long-awaited Half-Life 3.
We know it might sound ludicrous to suggest that Valve’s biggest game in years should ignore the Windows platform that’s been used by practically every PC gamer for decades. Keep in mind, though, that there would be nothing stopping existing Windows gamers from downloading and installing a free copy of the Linux-based SteamOS (likely on a separate drive or partition) to get access to Half-Life 3.
Yes, installing a new operating system (especially one based on Linux) is not exactly a plug-and-play process. But Valve has a long history of streamlining game downloads, updates, and driver installations through Steam itself. If anyone can make the process of setting up a new OS relatively seamless, it’s Valve.
And let’s not forget that millions of gamers already have easy access to SteamOS through Steam Deck hardware. Those aging Steam Decks might not be powerful enough to run a game like Half-Life 3 at maximum graphics settings, but Valve games have a history of scaling down well on low-end systems.
Valve’s leaked “Powered by SteamOS” initiative also seems poised to let third-party hardware makers jump in with more powerful (and more Half-Life 3-capable) desktops, laptops, and handhelds with SteamOS pre-installed. And that’s before we even consider the potential impact of a more powerful “Steam Deck 2,” which Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais said in 2023 could potentially come in “the next couple of years.”
Time for a bold move
Tying a major game like Half-Life 3 to a completely new and largely untested operating system would surely lead to some deafening pushback from gamers happy with the Windows-based status quo. An exclusive release could also be risky if SteamOS ends up showing some technical problems as it tries to grow past its Steam Deck roots (Linux doesn’t exactly have the best track record when it comes to things like game driver compatibility across different hardware).
The Lenovo Legion Go S will be the first non-Valve hardware to be officially “Powered by SteamOS.” A Windows-sporting version will be more expensive
The Lenovo Legion Go S will be the first non-Valve hardware to be officially “Powered by SteamOS.” A Windows-sporting version will be more expensive Credit: Lenovo
Despite all that, we’re pretty confident that the vast majority of players interested in Half-Life 3 would jump through a few OS-related hoops to get access to the game. And many of those players would likely stick with Valve’s gaming-optimized OS going forward rather than spending money on another Windows license.
Even a timed exclusivity window for Half-Life 3 on SteamOS could push a lot of early adopters to see what all the fuss is about without excluding those who refuse to switch away from Windows. Failing even that, maybe a non-exclusive Half-Life 3 could be included as a pre-installed freebie with future versions of SteamOS, as an incentive for the curious to try out a new operating system.
With the coming wide release of SteamOS, Valve has a rare opportunity to upend the PC gaming OS dominance that Microsoft more or less stumbled into decades ago. A game like Half-Life 3 could be just the carrot needed to get PC gaming as a whole over its longstanding Windows dependence.
Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper.
Astroscale’s US subsidiary won a $25.5 million contract from the US Space Force in 2023 to build a satellite refueler that can hop around geostationary orbit. Like the ADRAS-J mission, this project is a public-private partnership, with Astroscale committing $12 million of its own money. In January, the Japanese government selected Astroscale for a contract worth up to $80 million to demonstrate chemical refueling in low-Earth orbit.
The latest win for Astroscale came Thursday, when the Japanese Ministry of Defense awarded the company a contract to develop a prototype satellite that could fly in geostationary orbit and collect information on other objects in the domain for Japan’s military and intelligence agencies.
“We are very bullish on the prospects for defense-related business,” said Nobu Matsuyama, Astroscale’s chief financial officer.
So, can Astroscale really do all of this? In an era of a militarized final frontier, it’s easy to see the usefulness of sidling up next to a “non-cooperative” satellite—whether it’s to refuel it, repair it, de-orbit it, inspect it, or (gasp!) disable it. Astroscale’s demonstration with ADRAS-J showed it can safely operate near another object in space without navigation aids, which is foundational to any of these applications.
So far, governments are driving demand for this kind of work.
Astroscale raised nearly $400 million in venture capital funding before going public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange last June. After quickly spiking to nearly $1 billion, the company’s market valuation has dropped to about $540 million as of Thursday. Astroscale has around 590 full-time employees across all its operating locations.
Matsuyama said Astroscale’s total backlog is valued at about 38.9 billion yen, or $260 million. The company is still in a ramp-up phase, reporting operating losses on its balance sheet and steep research and development spending that Matsuyama said should max out this year.
“We are the only company that has proved RPO technology for non-cooperative objects, like debris, in space,” Okada said last month.
“In simple terms, this means approach and capture of objects,” Okada continued. “This capability did not exist before us, but one’s mastering of this technology enables you to provide not only debris removal service, but also orbit correction, refueling, inspection, observation, and eventually repair and reuse services.”
For most modern players, the worst thing about a video game classic like Portal is that you can never play it again for the first time. No matter how much time has passed since your last playthrough, those same old test chambers will feel a bit too familiar if you revisit them today.
Over the years, community mods like Portal Stories: Mel and Portal: Revolution have tried to fix this problem with extensive work on completely new levels and puzzles. Now, though, a much simpler mod is looking to recapture that “first time” feeling simply by adding random gameplay modifiers to Portal‘s familiar puzzle rooms.
The Portal Randomized demo recently posted on ModDB activates one of eight gameplay modifiers when you enter one of the game’s first two test chambers. The results, while still a little rough around the edges, show how much extra longevity can be wrung from simple tweaks to existing gameplay.
Make special note of that “gravity changed” note in the corner.
Not all of the Portal Randomized modifiers are instant winners. One that adds intermittent darkness, for instance, practically forces you to stand still for a few seconds until the lights flip back on (too slowly for my comfort). And modifiers like variable gravity or variable movement speed have a pretty trivial effect on how the game plays out, at least in the simplistic early test chambers in the demo.
