Writing on what AI can and can't do and what that means for education.
Educational reform doesn't fail because ideas are wrong — it fails because naming something feels like finishing it, and we let that feeling stand.
The three-stage sequence that educational reform keeps failing to complete — and why the taxonomy in Knowing Enough to Distrust the Machine is only Stage 1There is a cemetery in the literature of…
Read →Melanie Mitchell diagnosed AI's real limits with precision — then refused to follow her own argument to where it leads.
Melanie Mitchell has written the most honest book about artificial intelligence that does not say what it should. Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans is rigorous, careful, and…
Read →Algorithms to Live By makes a beautiful case that human problems resemble computational ones — and quietly skips the step that would determine whether resemblance is enough.
Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths are unusually honest practitioners of a genre that rewards dishonesty. Most popular science books of this kind take a powerful formal result, sand off its…
Read →Judea Pearl built the tools to make causal claims mathematically rigorous — and a framework that only works once you already know the answer to the hardest question.
For a hundred years, science asked: what correlates with what? It asked this not out of laziness but out of philosophical conviction. The founders of modern statistics — Galton, Pearson, Fisher —…
Read →Douglas Hofstadter has written the most persuasive account of what a self is — and a book that cannot bring itself to answer why a self should feel like anything at all.
Douglas Hofstadter is braver than most philosophers. He looks directly at grief, at mortality, at the question of what survives when someone you love stops existing. He does not flinch. He builds an…
Read →The ratio inverted while nobody was watching — and the profession that spent a century optimizing for procedural execution now runs on the one thing it never bothered to train.
It is nine in the morning on a Tuesday. You have not written a single line of code. By five o'clock, you will have written forty-five minutes' worth. The other seven hours will disappear into…
Read →Universities have spent decades perfecting instruction in the one cognitive skill that artificial intelligence now owns — and the tiers that still matter have no address in the curriculum.
There is a hierarchy of human cognition. At the bottom sits pattern recognition: the ability to see structure in data, apply learned templates, retrieve and recite. Above it lives causal reasoning —…
Read →The cost of producing a lie has reached zero. The cost of disproving it hasn't moved.
On September 25, 2025, the Government Accountability Office dismissed bid protests filed by Oready, LLC and called it an abuse of process. The filings were formatted correctly. The Bluebook citations…
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