nonfiction
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Essay
Curricula in mathematics and the sciences optimize for procedural fluency — the half of what they teach that decays once the student stops being a student. What survives twenty years on is conceptual residue, generated only as an accidental byproduct of the curriculum’s intended work. The asymmetry compounds across generations of teachers and produces a population unable to do the work that civic life requires of it.
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Essay
As we approach AGI, the increase in the ability of Artificial Intelligence models to infer a robust specification from a sparse prompt will lead to a devastating trend of homogeneity. We argue that this is the primary concern regarding the interaction of AI and human intelligence, rather than blanket claims that “AI reduces human cognitive ability.”
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Essay
A compendium of years of informal, empirical experiments aimed at extending the efficacy of Anki beyond rote memorization to more intricate levels of learning.
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Essay
Notes from Underground is widely admired as a cornerstone of literature, culture, and philosophy. This paper develops the argument that the primary philosophical undercurrent is a rejection of logic and science as end-alls in modern life, traced through comparison with the more explicitly articulated works of Dostoevsky’s contemporaries and successors: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Shestov, Ellul, Sartre, Camus, Husserl, and Arendt.