I got a tip yesterday from an anonymous US army officer that the US government was about to break new ground in authoritarian dumbassery. The officer had logged into his work computer in the morning, and got a popup:

GenAI.mil. Victory belongs to those who embrace real innovation, not the antiquated systems of a bygone era. It’s time to deliver efficient, decisive results for the warfighter. I want YOU to use AI.

Then he clicked on the “close” button and it played a video from defense secretary Pete Hegseth, telling you how much AI is the future: [Twitter]

The future of American warfare is here. And it’s spelled AI.

… At the click of a button, AI models on GenAI can be utilized to conduct deep research, format documents, and even analyze video or imagery at unprecedented speed.

The popup also had a link to genai.mil/launch — which didn’t work.

GenAI.mil was giving an error message yesterday, but now has a nice splash page saying it’s for internal use only and you should join the army for access.

The logo, like all chatbot logos, looks like a butthole. The stylised text font looks somewhere between the ‘70s NASA worm logo and one of the Starship Troopers movie fonts. Hegseth is the guy who saw Starship Troopers and didn’t realise it was a satire of guys like him.

The actual chatbot is an instance of Google Gemini, running on a secured cloud with restricted access for unclassified work. The press release is titled “The War Department Unleashes AI on New GenAI.mil Platform” and has a lot of Hegseth talking like a game trailer: [press release]

Gemini for Government is the embodiment of American AI excellence, placing unmatched analytical and creative power directly into the hands of the world’s most dominant fighting force.

… Their achievement directly embodies the Department’s core tenets of reviving the warrior ethos, rebuilding American military capabilities, and re-establishing deterrence through technological dominance and uncompromising grit.

Google’s press release was a bit less bombastic and somewhat longer on specific claimed uses: [press release]

summarizing policy handbooks, generating project-specific compliance checklists, extracting key terms from statements of work, and creating detailed risk assessments for operational planning.

There’s one small problem you or I might spot immediately — chatbots are most famous for making stuff up. Chatbots don’t summarise text — they shorten it. Chatbots miss important details, especially anything unusual, and they reverse meanings.

That’s tolerable precisely as long as quality doesn’t matter. If you’re absolutely sure nobody will read this document, AI is just the thing.

But this is the military, so it’s not like details matter or lives are on the line if you’re out in the field and get a sheet of instructions that are completely detached from reality.

Just as long as the AI industry gets the golden prize, the final stage of capitalism — a defense contract!

If anyone goes to trial for, say, war crimes? The chatbot told me. I was just following orders. I hear that one works every time.

• Video — podcast

The United States exported fast-food culture to the Philippines. Over the decades—and notably since 1998, when the first Jollibee restaurant opened in the San Francisco Bay Area—the Philippines has been serving it back. In this piece, Atlantic staff writer Yasmin Tayag trace’s the Filipino fast-food giant’s global rise: its parent corporation now operates more than 1,800 locations around the world, and has over 10,000 stores under 19 other food and coffee brands. Tayag especially highlights Jollibee’s expansion in North America, the way it adapts its flavors for a “mainstream” audience, and the warmth and joy the brand aims to deliver alongside its tasty menu.

Culinary ambitions ran in the family. Tanmantiong’s father had cooked at a Chinese temple in Manila before opening a restaurant in the southern city of Davao. In 1975, Tan Caktiong borrowed family money to open two Manila franchises of Magnolia, a popular Filipino ice-cream company established by a U.S. volunteer Army cook. With college graduation and a wedding imminent, Tan Caktiong figured that ice cream was as good a way as any to make a living. But before long, he started serving burgers too, bringing on his sister to develop recipes and Tanmantiong to manage operations. He renamed his restaurants Jollibee, which captured the family’s business ethos: Employees should work as hard and harmoniously as bees, but unless they’re happy, that kind of effort is “not worth it,” Tanmantiong said. Jollibee’s burgers were soon outselling the ice cream.

Of all the stupid ideas that have emerged in recent years, there may be none worse than the insistence that unwelcome words are the same as violence. This false perception equates physical acts that can injure or kill people with disagreements and insults that might cause hurt feelings and potentially justifies responding to the latter with the former. After all, if words are violence, why not rebut a verbal sparring partner with an actual punch? Unfortunately, the idea is embedded on college campuses where a majority of undergraduate students agree that words and violence can be the same thing.

Most Believe Words Can Be Violence

"Ninety one percent of undergraduate students believe that words can be violence, according to a new poll by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression [FIRE] and College Pulse," FIRE announced last week. "The survey's findings are especially startling coming in the wake of Charlie Kirk's assassination—an extreme and tragic example of the sharp difference between words and violence."

The survey posed questions about speech and political violence to undergraduate students at Utah Valley University, where Kirk was murdered, and at colleges elsewhere—2,028 students overall. FIRE and College Pulse compared the student responses to those of members of the general public who were separately polled.

Specifically, one question asked how much "words can be violence" described respondents' thoughts. Twenty-two percent of college undergraduates answered that the sentiment "describes my thoughts completely," 25 percent said it "mostly" described their thoughts, 28 percent put it at "somewhat," and 15 percent answered "slightly." Only 9 percent answered that the "words can be violence" sentiment "does not describe my thoughts at all."

It's difficult to get too worked up about those who "slightly" believe words can be violence, but that still leaves us at 75 percent of the student population. And almost half of students "completely" or "mostly" see words and violence as essentially the same thing. That's a lot of young people who struggle to distinguish between an unwelcome expression and a punch to the nose.

Depressingly, 34 percent of the general public "completely" or "mostly" agree. Fifty-nine percent at least "somewhat" believe words can be violence.

In 2017, when the conflation of words and violence was relatively new, Jonathan Haidt, a New York University psychology professor, worried that the false equivalence fed into the simmering mental health crisis among young people. He and FIRE President Greg Lukianoff wrote in The Atlantic that "growing numbers of college students have become less able to cope with the challenges of campus life, including offensive ideas, insensitive professors, and rude or even racist and sexist peers" and that the rise in mental health issues "is better understood as a crisis of resilience."

Conflating Words and Violence Encourages Violence

Telling young people who haven't been raised to be resilient and to deal with the certainty of encountering debate, disagreement, and rude or hateful expressions in an intellectually and ideologically diverse world plays into problems with anxiety and depression. It teaches that the world is more dangerous than it actually is rather than a place that requires a certain degree of toughness. Worse, if words are violence it implies that responding "in kind" is justified.

"At a time of rapidly rising political polarization in America, it helps a small subset of that generation justify political violence," Haidt and Lukianoff added.

Sure enough, last week Gallup reported that "age is the strongest predictor of attitudes toward political violence, with young adults aged 18–29 more likely than other age groups to say that it is sometimes OK to use violence to achieve a political goal." Thirty percent of respondents 18–29 say it is "sometimes" acceptable to use violence to achieve political goals, compared to 21 percent of those 30–44, 13 percent of those 45–59, and 4 percent of people 60 and older.

And yes, acceptance of political violence has changed over the tears. For those 18 to 29, it was 22 percent in 1970 and 21 percent in 1995. For 30-to-44-year-olds, it was 16 percent in 1970 and 15 percent in 1995. The percentage remained largely unchanged for those 45–59 and dropped for people over 60.

Kirk was assassinated by, allegedly, a 22-year-old who strongly disliked what the conservative activist had to say. The incident is a real-life example of the dangers of conflating speech and violence. It's not acceptable to respond to words you don't like with physical force.

There's a Silver Lining—Sort of

That said, there is encouraging news. The percentage of college undergrads who say it is at least "rarely" acceptable to shout down speakers to prevent them from speaking on campus has dropped to 68 percent from 72 percent last spring. Forty-seven percent of students say it is at least rarely acceptable to block other students from attending a campus speech, down from 54 percent in the spring. And 32 percent find it acceptable to use violence to stop a speech, down from 34 percent.

But sentiments can be overshadowed by high-profile incidents like assassinations. "Because of what happened to Charlie Kirk," 45 percent of students are "less comfortable" expressing their views on controversial political topics during in-class discussions, notes FIRE in its findings. And neither sentiments nor comfort in self-expression have universally shifted.

"Moderate and conservative students across the country became significantly less likely to say that shouting down a speaker, blocking entry to an event, or using violence to stop a campus speech are acceptable actions," writes FIRE. "In contrast, liberal students' support for these tactics held steady, or even increased slightly."

As a consequence, 84 percent of Utah Valley students say the country is headed in the wrong direction when it comes to people's ability to freely express their views. At other colleges and universities, 73 percent feel the same way (almost identical to the feeling of the public at large). It should be noted, however, that the news is more positive when students are asked about their own campuses; 53 percent say their own schools are headed in the right direction.

These students are headed into a world in which many of their peers see little difference, if any, between words and violence. They adhere to this position even after Kirk was murdered for, almost certainly, what he had to say. And they do so in an environment of surging political violence.

Americans worry that the country is becoming less friendly to free expression. But the insistence of too many people that words and violence are the same thing is a big part of the problem.

The post Survey: 91 Percent of College Students Think 'Words Can Be Violence.' That Could Feed Real Violence. appeared first on Reason.com.

Hey there - this is where I write on special Wednesdays about edtech and math education. Today that means:

• Letting you know how the AI + education debate in Washington, D.C. went on Monday a/k/a 🤓 nerd fight night 🥊.

• Sharing two of the fantastic ideas for teaching slope you all shared in response to last week’s newsletter.

On Monday, four of us—

1. Shanika Hope, Google

2. Alex Kotran, AI Education Project

3. Jake Tawney, Great Hearts Academies

4. Me

—argued about the motion, “Maximizing School Improvement by 2035 Means Integrating AI into Classrooms Today,” in Washington, DC, at an event hosted by the American Enterprise Institute. We all had three minutes for our opening remarks. Here is what I prepared.

Look—I’m not made of stone. I love the motion and wish it were true, this idea that we made a massive technological breakthrough three years ago and now we can improve schools like never before. I wish it were true. There are a few reasons why I don’t think it is.

The first is the work we have asked schools to do in 2025. We have asked schools to help kids read, write, do math, and be nice to each other all at a time when hormones are flying around the room like pinballs, in a country that has some of the highest child poverty rates of the developed world, at a time when kids are walking to school scared that they or their friends or their loved ones are going to get jumped out on by some dude in a mask dragging them to God knows where. It’s a hard job at a hard time. I tried it last week. I tried to teach slope of a line to eighth graders in East Oakland, wonderful kids in the Fruitvale neighborhood. Ask me how well that went. Kids have a lot more on their mind than math right now.

The second is to understand the tight resources we have given schools to do that job. Financial resources are tight, obviously, but I’m talking also about time. We give schools 180 days to turn 3rd graders into 4th graders. We give schools four days for teachers to get out of class, get together, and learn something new. And perhaps most importantly, administrators have limited reserves of social capital. You can’t go to your school board, your parent community, ten times a year and say, “Okay, we’re going to try something new, something big, everybody get on board.” You can do that once, maybe. Opportunity costs are high. Saying yes to one thing means saying no to ten other things by definition. So that one thing needs to have absolutely bulletproof evidence that it’ll help your school help kids learn to read, write, do math, and be nice.

So my third reason is that in 2025, after three years of trying, the evidence that AI can help schools do that work is extremely weak. I know you have seen the same happy headlines I have or the profiles of schools doing something novel with AI. But scratch even a millimeter beneath the surface of those studies and stories and you’ll find some very weak evidence. You’ll find weak controls, where the control group gets nothing, as it should, and the experimental group gets AI, as it should. But they also get something extra—extra time, extra tutoring, extra rich parents. Elsewhere, you’ll find positive results for AI but they’re in a basket full of point solutions that don’t congeal in any obvious way into a school improvement plan. Still other studies run the other direction, like the MIT study this summer, where kids who used AI to support their essay writing were effectively de-skilled, experiencing diminished cognitive activity and unable to recall the arguments they’d made, compared to students who didn’t use AI.

For those reasons—hard job, limited resources, high opportunity costs, weak evidence in favor of AI, my recommendation is we wait. We take a beat. We take the next bus. We wait for stronger evidence and then move. For now, if you want to maximize school improvement, it’s an easy call to wait rather than integrate AI.

My comrade Jake Tawney argued that these tools would inhibit the formation of novice learners and novice teachers alike. In their arguments for the motion, Alex Kotran and Shanika Hope argued that:

• Kids will need AI skills for full US economic participation

• AI is being used outside of school, often poorly, and schools need to help kids learn to use it well

• AI will enable teachers to do better work than ever before, planning, differentiating, personalizing, preventing burnout, etc.

The debate was decided by a vote from the audience before and after the debate. The winner was whichever side most increased their share of the vote.

We won, which was fun of course, and the conversation kept everyone dancing, trying to stay on message, trying to answer the question we wished we’d been asked without seeming too obvious about it.

Jake and I counter-argued that many of the claims about the value AI offers teachers or students were dreams about the future rather than descriptions of the present. It is also a particularly unfortunate time to suggest that “we know what kids will need for economic participation in ten years,” given we are in the weakest labor market that software development has ever seen, ten years after telling every 12 year-old they needed to learn to code. That effort has gifted the private sector an oversupply of software developers who now have double the unemployment rate of art history majors.

If I had to guess what persuaded the audience to join us against the motion, it was our focus on “maximizing school improvement today.” In my closing argument, I said there were a bunch of motions I thought we’d all agree on, including the need for responsible experimentation, the need for dreaming expansively about what technology might offer kids. But maximizing school improvement today means taking seriously what a school most wants to improve, which is a kid’s ability to read, write, do math, and be nice, and applying the research we know works today. I suspect that approach gave some audience members permission to think AI is quite neat but also that 2025 is not the year that AI comes off the bench to maximize school improvement.

Mathematical Mailbag

I expressed difficulty last week keeping students thinking on a conceptual level about slope when the operations (“subtract, subtract, divide”) are so close at hand. Here are a couple of your very interesting responses.

Linda, offering an anchor activity that students can refer back to time and again as they try to make sense of new, related ideas:

1. I asked [students] if they realized that if you build stairs in your house that are too steep, it would be “illegal” because it could be dangerous. And that less steep stairs can be inefficient because they might take up too much space in a house.

2. I then gave each pair of students 12 identical Lego bricks.

3. I asked them to make 3 stair cases, using 4 bricks each, of different steepness.

4. After checking their stairs, I had them lay the 3 cases sideways on paper and had them trace it.

5. I then had them determine and record the rise and run of each of the stair cases. I checked those too.

6. Finally, they were to connect the top to the bottom and draw that line with a ruler. At that point, I asked them to record, “What do you notice about the lines you just drew and the slopes of the stairs?” We had conversations including the fact that some people’s stairs sloped downward to the right and others up. So, we also made that connection to positive and negative slope. Some noticed that larger slopes signified steeper stairs (and lines). In following days, when students were working on slope we would refer back to our “Lego stairs” to conceptualize what was going on.

Michael Hayashida, via email, illustrating how to help students understand the need for the measure known as slope:

Here’s something that seems to work in my freshman (somewhat remedial) math classes. All the kids have portable whiteboards.

“Draw me a set of axes and then draw a line that’s really steep.”

“Hold up the whiteboards - anyone have a line with the same steepness as someone else?”

“Ok, draw me a line that’s only medium steep.” They compare again.

“Ok, for mathematicians, this is a problem. They want precision - so that everyone draws a line with the same steepness when I give the instruction. To do that, you need to be able to put a number on steepness. Like... if I call for a line with a steepness of 5, then everyone draws a line with the same steepness. For the next minute, talk to your partner and see if you can come up with a way to measure steepness with a number.”

We share out. Sometimes kids will come up with an angle measurement method - kinda cool.

“Ok, this is actually a solved problem - mathematicians have already agreed on a way to measure steepness. Check this out - everyone put your marker on a lattice point - doesn’t matter which one. Now go over 1 and up 2 and put a point there. Do it again. Do it again. Connect the points. Hold them up - does everyone have lines with the same steepness? Ok, mathematicians call this a steepness of 2.

<Do the same thing, but with a slope of 0.5. Then 2.5.>

“This is how mathematicians decided to measure steepness - it’s what the y is changing by as x goes up by 1. They use a different word than steepness though - they call it slope”.

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Early in evolution, we animals lost the ability to manufacture nine of the 20 building blocks needed to make proteins. Herbivores evolved an impressive array of tricks to ensure their dietary needs are met.