The education system has been killing critical thinking for decades. Why start trying to save it now?
this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2026
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I keep seeing this, but I think people forget what things were like before we had a formalized education system. They were not good. The modern system can certainly be improved, but it has overall improved upon itself essentially since its inception. I'm not sure if there's some kind of golden age of US education people are imagining, or they're just pointing out current flaws, but it really is (unfortunately or not) the best it's ever been.
Been saying this forever, AI didn't kill the education system, it just highlighted its inadequacies and failure with higher sensitivity
Linda McMahon: "boy do I have good news for you!"
The people who invented all the stuff that led to this (not grifters like scam altman) such as diffusion, backpropagation, transformers, perceptrons, embeddings, etc all went to university. Lots of papers that they wrote.
Maybe universities failed to teach those geniuses about ethics or civics.
That's really not fair to universities or the inventors. Knowledge is not inherently evil, and things that have far reaching positive impacts can be used for nefarious purposes. Modern society has perverse incentives, but individuals adding to a corpus of humanity's knowledge are not the ones at fault.
Ethics/civics would only be useful if you saw this as a possible outcome. Most of us are just looking to solve problems and make everyone's lives easier.
i think people who worked on llms either thought their work would geniunely make world better, or they are "just following orders" people.
LLMs do a really good job interpreting natural language inputs and deciphering the meaning behind it. The issue is they're being presented as a fully fleshed out analytical machine that can replace entire job roles instead of the interpretation layer towards other processing they should be used as. The grifters are selling something as someone it very much is not
Amen, Professors. Amen.