Today's links

• A perfect distillation of the social uselessness of finance: A final thought for the yule.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Droidflake; Spy Skymall; Malthus is a dope; Happy Public Domain Day 2025.
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

A perfect distillation of the social uselessness of finance (permalink)

I'm about to sign off for the year – actually, I was ready to do it yesterday, but then I happened upon a brief piece of writing that was so perfect that I decided I'd do one more edition of Pluralistic for 2025.

The piece in question is John Lanchester's "For Every Winner A Loser," in the London Review of Books, in which Lanchester reviews two books about the finance sector: Gary Stevenson's The Trading Game and Rob Copeland's The Fund:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n17/john-lanchester/for-every-winner-a-loser

It's a long and fascinating piece and it's certainly left me wanting to read both books, but that's not what convinced me to do one more newsletter before going on break – rather, it was a brief passage in the essay's preamble, a passage that perfectly captures the total social uselessness of the finance sector as a whole.

Lanchester starts by stating that while we think of the role of the finance sector as "capital allocation" – that is, using investors' money to fund new businesses and expansions for existing business – that hasn't been important to finance for quite some time. Today, only 3% of bank activity consists of "lending to firms and individuals engaged in the production of goods and services."

The other 97% of finance is gambling. Here's how Stevenson breaks it down: say your farm grows mangoes. You need money before the mangoes are harvested, so you sell the future ownership of the harvest to a broker at $1/crate.

The broker immediately flips that interest in your harvest to a dealer who believes (on the basis of a rumor about bad weather) that mangoes will be scarce this year and is willing to pay $1.10/crate. Next, an international speculator (trading on the same rumor) buys the rights from the broker at $1.20/crate.

Now come the side bets: a "momentum trader" (who specializing in bets on market trends continuing) buys the rights to your crop for $1.30/crate. A contrarian trader (who bets against momentum traders) short-sells the momentum trader's bet at $1.20. More short sellers pile in and drive the price down to $1/crate.

Now, a new rumor circulates, about conditions being ripe for a bounteous mango harvest, so more short-sellers appear, and push the price to $0.90/crate. This tempts the original broker back in, and he buys your crop back at $1/crate.

That's when the harvest comes. You bring in the mangoes. They go to market, and fetch $1.10/crate.

This is finance – a welter of transactions, only one of which (selling your mangoes to people who eat them) involves the real economy. Everything else is "speculation on the movement of prices." The nine transactions that took place between your planting the crop and someone eating the mangoes are all zero sum – every trade has an evenly matched winner and loser, and when you sum them all up, they come out to zero. In other words, no value was created.

This is the finance sector. In a world where the real economy generates $105 trillion/year, the financial derivatives market adds up to $667 trillion/year. This is "the biggest business in the world" – and it's useless. It produces nothing. It adds no value.

If you work a job where you do something useful, you are on the losing side of this economy. All the real money is in this socially useless, no-value-creating, hypertrophied, metastasized finance sector. Every gain in finance is matched by a loss. It all amounts to – literally – nothing.

So that's what tempted me into one more blog post for the year – an absolutely perfect distillation of the uselessness of "the biggest business in the world," whose masters are the degenerate gamblers who buy and sell our politicians, set our policy, and control our lives. They're the ones enshittifying the internet, burning down the planet, and pushing Elon Musk towards trillionairedom.

It's their world, and we just live on it.

For now.

(Image: Sam Valadi, CC BY 2.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Meta Is Considering Charging Business Pages To Post Links https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/meta-considering-charging-business-pages-to-post-links/808099/

• The original Mozilla "Dinosaur" logo artwork https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/12/the-original-mozilla-dinosaur-logo-artwork/

• A Local Self-Reliance Agenda for New York City: ILSR’s Memo to Mamdani https://ilsr.org/articles/memo-mamdani/

• Apple loses its appeal of a scathing contempt ruling in iOS payments case https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/12/epic-celebrates-the-end-of-the-apple-tax-after-appeals-court-win-in-ios-payments-case/

• The Internet’s Tollbooth Operators https://prospect.org/2025/12/10/internets-tollbooth-operators-wu-review/

• Barnum's Law of CEOs https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2025/12/barnums-law-of-ceos.html

• Google Starts Sharing All Your Text Messages With Your Employer https://archive.ph/wE2U7#selection-3936.0-3936.1

Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago Star Wars droidflake https://twitpic.com/3guwfq

#15yrsago TSA misses enormous, loaded .40 calibre handgun in carry-on bag https://web.archive.org/web/20101217223617/https://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/story?section=news/local&id=7848683

#15yrsago Brazilian TV clown elected to high office, passes literacy test https://web.archive.org/web/20111217233812/https://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jmbXSjCjZBZ4z8VUcAZFCyY_n6dA?docId=CNG.b7f4655178d3435c9a54db2e30817efb.381

#15yrsago My Internet problem: an abundance of choice https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2010/dec/17/internet-problem-choice-self-publishing

#10yrsago LEAKED: The secret catalog American law enforcement orders cellphone-spying gear from https://theintercept.com/2015/12/16/a-secret-catalogue-of-government-gear-for-spying-on-your-cellphone/#10yrsago

#10yrsago Putin: Give Sepp Blatter the Nobel; Trump should be president https://www.theguardian.com/football/2015/dec/17/sepp-blatter-fifa-putin-nobel-peace-prize

#10yrsago Star Wars medical merch from Scarfolk, the horror-town stuck in the 1970s https://scarfolk.blogspot.com/2015/12/unreleased-star-wars-merchandise.html

#10yrsago Some countries learned from America’s copyright mistakes: TPP will undo that https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/12/how-tpp-perpetuates-mistakes-dmca

#10yrsago No evidence that San Bernardino shooters posted about jihad on Facebook https://web.archive.org/web/20151217003406/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/12/16/fbi-san-bernardino-attackers-didnt-show-public-support-for-jihad-on-social-media/

#10yrsago Exponential population growth and other unkillable science myths https://web.archive.org/web/20151217205215/http://www.nature.com/news/the-science-myths-that-will-not-die-1.19022

#10yrsago UK’s unaccountable crowdsourced blacklist to be crosslinked to facial recognition system https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/12/pre-crime-arrives-in-the-uk-better-make-sure-your-face-stays-off-the-crowdsourced-watch-list/

#1yrago Happy Public Domain Day 2025 to all who celebrate https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/17/dastar-dly-deeds/#roast-in-piss-sonny-bono

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Hamburg: Chaos Communications Congress, Dec 27-30
  https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/infos/index.html

• Denver: Enshittification at Tattered Cover Colfax, Jan 22
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-live-at-tattered-cover-colfax-tickets-1976644174937

• Colorado Springs: Guest of Honor at COSine, Jan 23-25
  https://www.firstfridayfandom.org/cosine/

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Enshittification on The Last Show With David Cooper:
  https://www.iheart.com/podcast/256-the-last-show-with-david-c-31145360/episode/cory-doctorow-enshttification-december-16-2025-313385767

• (Digital) Elbows Up (OCADU)
  https://vimeo.com/1146281673

• How to Stop “Ensh*ttification” Before It Kills the Internet (Capitalisn't)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34gkIvYiHxU

• Enshittification on The Daily Show
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2e-c9SF5nE

• Enshittification with Four Ways to Change the World (Channel 4)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZQaEeuuI3Q

Latest books (permalink)

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

Upcoming books (permalink)

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: John Naughton (https://memex.naughtons.org/).

Currently writing:

• "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

• "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

In all of the debates about the value of AI-assistance in software development there's one depressing anecdote that I keep on seeing: the junior engineer, empowered by some class of LLM tool, who deposits giant, untested PRs on their coworkers - or open source maintainers - and expects the "code review" process to handle the rest.

This is rude, a waste of other people's time, and is honestly a dereliction of duty as a software developer.

Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work.

As software engineers we don't just crank out code - in fact these days you could argue that's what the LLMs are for. We need to deliver code that works - and we need to include proof that it works as well. Not doing that directly shifts the burden of the actual work to whoever is expected to review our code.

How to prove it works

There are two steps to proving a piece of code works. Neither is optional.

The first is manual testing. If you haven't seen the code do the right thing yourself, that code doesn't work. If it does turn out to work, that's honestly just pure chance.

Manual testing skills are genuine skills that you need to develop. You need to be able to get the system into an initial state that demonstrates your change, then exercise the change, then check and demonstrate that it has the desired effect.

If possible I like to reduce these steps to a sequence of terminal commands which I can paste, along with their output, into a comment in the code review. Here's a recent example.

Some changes are harder to demonstrate. It's still your job to demonstrate them! Record a screen capture video and add that to the PR. Show your reviewers that the change you made actually works.

Once you've tested the happy path where everything works you can start trying the edge cases. Manual testing is a skill, and finding the things that break is the next level of that skill that helps define a senior engineer.

The second step in proving a change works is automated testing. This is so much easier now that we have LLM tooling, which means there's no excuse at all for skipping this step.

Your contribution should bundle the change with an automated test that proves the change works. That test should fail if you revert the implementation.

The process for writing a test mirrors that of manual testing: get the system into an initial known state, exercise the change, assert that it worked correctly. Integrating a test harness to productively facilitate this is another key skill worth investing in.

Don't be tempted to skip the manual test because you think the automated test has you covered already! Almost every time I've done this myself I've quickly regretted it.

Make your coding agent prove it first

The most important trend in LLMs in 2025 has been the explosive growth of coding agents - tools like Claude Code and Codex CLI that can actively execute the code they are working on to check that it works and further iterate on any problems.

To master these tools you need to learn how to get them to prove their changes work as well.

This looks exactly the same as the process I described above: they need to be able to manually test their changes as they work, and they need to be able to build automated tests that guarantee the change will continue to work in the future.

Since they're robots, automated tests and manual tests are effectively the same thing.

They do feel a little different though. When I'm working on CLI tools I'll usually teach Claude Code how to run them itself so it can do one-off tests, even though the eventual automated tests will use a system like Click's CLIRunner.

When working on CSS changes I'll often encourage my coding agent to take screenshots when it needs to check if the change it made had the desired effect.

The good news about automated tests is that coding agents need very little encouragement to write them. If your project has tests already most agents will extend that test suite without you even telling them to do so. They'll also reuse patterns from existing tests, so keeping your test code well organized and populated with patterns you like is a great way to help your agent build testing code to your taste.

Developing good taste in testing code is another of those skills that differentiates a senior engineer.

The human provides the accountability

A computer can never be held accountable. That's your job as the human in the loop.

Almost anyone can prompt an LLM to generate a thousand-line patch and submit it for code review. That's no longer valuable. What's valuable is contributing code that is proven to work.

Next time you submit a PR, make sure you've included your evidence that it works as it should.

Tags: programming, careers, ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, ai-ethics, vibe-coding, coding-agents

Gather round my pilgrims, for today I shall recount the tale of Soupsgiving.

Soupsgiving is my annual tradition of Th*nksgiving, but everything is Soup. It’s simple. Souper simple.

Unlike Th*nksgiving, a colonist propaganda holiday if you really think about it, Soupsgiving is a nondenominational, anarchist festival of nourishment that transcends cultures, as well as a souper douper great time.

The First Annual Soupsgiving: The Genesis.

It all began on a dark and snowy night, in a brownstone on the Upper East Side of New York City. I was living with a dozen other 20-somethings, many of whom had gone home for the holidays, and us stragglers huddled together to weather this cold and dark winter.

My housemate Emily and I brainstormed the most fucked-up twist we could put on Thanksgiving, and decided upon an all-liquid theme.

Coincidentally, our roommate Nancy had some temporary stress-induced face paralysis, which made her unable to feel her jaw. So soup was the perfect meal for her. We did not plan this, but let’s say that we did. It was a Soupsgiving miracle.

This was also the first extended conversation I had with Mehran (who I would later raise as a god-figure). A few hours prior to Soupsgiving, Mehran was helping another housemate Josh book a same-day flight to go on a date with a girl in another state. As a token of his gratitude, Josh gave Mehran a handful of gummies, and Mehran immediately took all of them. This caused him to become high out of his mind, a state in which he was either giggling or zonked out, his eyes watering with tears. It was quite the first impression.

Among all these characters and peculiar circumstances was one very normal person Emily had met a few days prior and then invited. I don’t believe we ever heard from her again.

I had planned to make a soup-themed dessert, and figured pumpkin pie was the move, as it’s essentially a baked soup. I put marshmallows on top of the pie, thinking this would toast them crème brûlée style, however, it instead made the pie catch on fire. Upon witnessing this inferno, I immediately shut the oven door and googled what to do, turns out that just closing the door and leaving it in there was the correct move.

At the end of our feast, my co-conspirator Emily summed the night up beautifully: “I’m sleepy from soup and the adrenaline from the fire has worn off.”

And so, from a group of misfits, that cold and snowy night, a beautiful tradition was born.

The Second Annual Soupsgiving: Soupburbia.

Soupsgiving II took place when I was living in Mountain View, and it was rather un-momentous. As one would expect of a celebration in the suburbs.

However, there was no oven fire this year, so that was a marked improvement from the previous.

The Third Annual Soupsgiving: Mega.

For the Third Annual Soupsgiving, a vision came to me in a dream. Megatable. Three long tables, aligned together as one, adorned with soup. A nice sit-down Soupsgiving.

I looked into renting chairs, and it was very expensive. So I figured I’d do Amazon rentals (buy them then return them after). Sorry Jeff. But also, I think you can take the hit.

This year, I introduced a Soupsgiving competition. Attendees were instructed to dress interpretively as their favorite soup, and the winner would be crowned the Soupiest Soupy Soup Boy of the Soup Party. Some people got confused and thought the competition was based on the soup they brought, which was ridiculous.

The winner of the Soupiest Soupy Soup Boy of the Soup Party was Jonathan, and I knighted him accordingly.

I also made alcoholic soup (mulled wine).

Towards the end of Soupsgiving, we combined all the remaining soups into Mega Soup. At first the mixture of different noodles, vegetables, and other chunky ingredients made for a rather unpleasant texture. Then Cool Alex blended Mega Soup together, double-strained it, added garnish with a flourish, and presented It before us. It honestly wasn’t bad. So we had a ritual Consumption Of The Mega Soup where we gathered around and in unison slurped from straws together. The sound of collective slurping haunts me to this day. It was beautiful.

In the aftermath of Soupsgiving, I returned all the folding chairs to Amazon, and this was a huge bitch to deal with. But t’was small sacrifice to pay for the glory of Mega Table, the legacy of Mega Soup, the knighting of the inaugural Soupiest Soupy Soup Boy of The Soup Party, etc.

The Fourth Annual Soupsgiving: The Souposium.

By the time the Fourth Annual Soupsgiving came around, I had run out of soup puns to include in the invite, so I just shoehorned “soup” into a bunch of words in a nonsoupsical way. I refuse to s(t)oup to repeating soup puns.

I figured, we were more mature now. Four years more mature. The time had come for a formal, classy affair. The Souposium. Black tie. And everyone looked sooo cute in their formal wear!

Since this was a distinguished event, we obviously had to drink the soup out of soupagne glasses. No bowls!! No spoons!! Such are the implements of cowards.

I made everyone prepare a presouptation, reminding them several times. For those who nonetheless neglected to come prepared, I assigned them a slam poem about soup written by one of eight AI models.

Some of the best presouptations included:

• A saucy soup-themed erotica

• Reading an excerpt from chapter 15 in Moby Dick, titled “Chowder”

• Performing the song “Soup” by Remi Wolf

• Playing banjo and singing “Jambalaya”

• The thesis “How soup is responsible for decline of society through video games”

Having instated the Soupiest Soupy Soup Boy tradition at last year’s Soupsgiving, I figured that this year, we’d have pageant rules for passing on the title. The voting system was a constitutional monarchy, with everyone casting a vote, but me making the final call.

Sam and Greta (or as you may know them, “Thomas the Spank Engine” and “Jane Goodgirl” from Strippers for Charity) were crowned the Soupiest Soupy Soup Boys of the Fourth Annual Soupsgiving, and Jonathan passed on the crown.

After the presouptations concluded, as the projector was already set up, guests started heckling me to play youtube videos, so I let them do that while we mingled.

This year’s Soupsgiving was the best yet, and it warmed my heart like a simmering soup to have all my friends enthusiastically join in on the bit.

Although most of my stupid little parties for my silly little friends are one-time affairs, like a perpetual stew, no Soupsgiving is the same. And tradition is important, honorable. Sometimes.

Anyways, I hope you and your loved ones stay warm and soupy this holiday soupson.

For paid Soupscribers, I offer a preview of next year’s Soupsgiving theme: The Disouptation, the souperb soup-related challenge from this year’s Souposium, and various consouperations of what constisoups a good party.

Read more

In a recent interview, Hollis Robbins said,

General education requirements are the worst. They are taught by the least seasoned faculty members, everybody hates them… They do a great disservice to most students who don’t need a general education. This is where I think AI is most disruptive, because AI is general education… AI should deliver that and leave the specific knowledge, the expertise to the last two years of school… [Why spend tuition money] on what you can get for free? (timestamp 25:40-26:54)

For someone who regularly decries the use of the first-person plural as cowardly generalization, Robbins sure does generalize about the seasoning of professors, what everybody hates, and what most students need. I’ll stick with the first-person singular: I couldn’t disagree with her more.

I may not be quite as seasoned as Robbins, but it’s close. I teach four courses per semester, and the majority of these are general education courses. I’ve taught gen ed classes to thousands of students. Sometimes it is drudgery, but it also can be very gratifying to see the light come on in their eyes as a topic or an argument lights a spark. In general I don’t hate teaching gen ed; like any course, it really depends on who signs up and how good the students are that semester.

Even people at the top of the food chain are known to teach gen ed (to be clear, I am in no way putting myself in their league). Richard Feynman delivered his famous Lectures on Physics to a required freshman class at Caltech. Steven Pinker has repeatedly taught Psychology 1 at Harvard. But that’s not a reasonable expectation. What should brand-new PhDs teach? Just grad students? Senior-level courses only? The industry consensus is that novice teachers need to hone their chops in freshman courses. If people feel like debating that, fine. Keep in mind that there’s an argument to be made for having the best teachers at every level, and teaching ability is going to be a Gaussian distribution.

So what’s good about general education?

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Undergrads change their majors. A lot.

This study says that a third of undergrads change their majors at least once in their first three years. A more recent claim is 80% do. I’m not sure where the latter data comes from exactly, so I am less confident in it, but it may reflect a longer tracking period. A reasonable Fermi estimate is about half of all undergrads switch majors at some point.

In addition, about one out of every seven freshmen is undecided; that is, they come to college with no major declared at all. This means a mid-sized university with a freshman class of 2000 has nearly 300 new students without a major. Faculty are then pressured by the admin to get the undeclared students to commit to a major by their sophomore year, since that improves both the retention rate and the five-year graduation rate. There’s nothing nefarious about this—we want the students to succeed and get their degrees. If they mess around for three years jumping majors or taking random classes, they are much less likely to graduate.

How are students going to figure out what major they want? Remember, they probably don’t have any idea how to even formulate their query or what the options are. Very few high schools have philosophy, sociology, psychology, or anthropology courses, which means most students have zero (or close to zero) idea of what those fields are all about. So how would they get AI to teach them? They wouldn’t even know what to ask. They don’t know what they don’t know.

I can’t help but wonder if Robbins is imagining herself or other faculty—smart people who knew what they wanted to do and what they were good at from an early age and couldn’t wait to go do it. It’s easy to forget that most students are not like that.

Making students take a smorgasbord of gen ed courses gives them a taste of lots of different disciplines. Some of these will resonate and be a hit. I’ve had plenty of philosophy majors who came to college with no idea of what philosophy is, take Intro, and decide this is the greatest thing ever. My colleagues in other fields have had the same experience.

Adults change their careers. A lot.

I am in no way insulting job training. Being a welder, an electrician, a chef, a nurse are all fine and worthy occupations. It is risky, though, because hyper-narrow job training gives you the skills to do that one thing. If you love it and want to do it the rest of your life, all good. But if that’s all you know, it does make it harder to shift careers.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that Americans change jobs 13 times between the ages of 18-58. Calculating the number of times they change careers is more difficult because “changing careers” is not well-defined. If a fiction novelist starts writing non-fiction biographies, is that a new career? If you are promoted from bench scientist into management, is that a new career? Nevertheless, a commonly cited range is that Americans have 3-7 distinct careers over their lifetimes.

Gen ed is not some form of job training, and it is not meant to be. However, some grasp of other fields, perspectives, and ways of thinking provides other tools. Knowing what else is out there, and how some knowledge of economics would be useful, or how you could utilize an historical perspective, or having a bit of appreciation for other cultures, has value. Higher ed isn’t here to slot people into their one and only lifetime job. Real education hands you a Swiss Army knife: a variety of tools for a variety of tasks. Gen ed shows students what’s in the knife.

Education is (partly) curation

A great deal of what the faculty do is curation. If I send a student into the library, how will they know what to read? To look up? To study? What’s outdated, what’s foundational, what’s cutting edge? They won’t. I tell them. The faculty curate. The average high school graduate wouldn’t even know what questions to ask AI about fields that were not high school classes.

AI provides information, not understanding. That comes from directed, guided doing. Gen ed is not memorizing a bunch of trivia that you could just as easily look up on Google or ask ChatGPT. Proper gen ed provides perspectives on information. Suppose a student is interested in history. Should they understand the sweep of history as driven by great men and women? As relentless class warfare? As oppressors and the oppressed? As the inevitable unfolding of the world spirit? As the march of progress? As a continued fall from the golden age of antiquity? In game theory terms? A typical 18-year-old plopped in front of an LLM wouldn’t even know what to ask or how to analyze an answer if they did ask.

I have some doubts about Jared Peterson’s project (for example, why can’t qualitative decision points be reduced to quantitative ones tractable by rational decision theory?) but he does use this handy chart:

First and second-year students don’t have much information about disciplines not covered in high school, probably don’t have a frame of reference for contextualizing any information they do have, and if they do have a frame they don’t yet have the critical skills to adjudicate among multiple frames. These are all things the faculty are here to provide.

How is AI going to do that? Well, two of my books, including my intro to philosophy textbook, were pirated by Anthropic to train Claude. I know this because I was contacted to be part of a class-action lawsuit brought by authors against Anthropic. So maybe down the road Claude could teach my Intro class, but wouldn’t it be better for students to just get it from me instead? The actual author and subject-matter expert?

A four-year degree is testimony of education

Studying only one thing is either job training or monomania. That is fine, but not the same thing as becoming an educated citizen, which requires at least some well-roundedness. A bachelor’s degree is ideally testimony of that education. Community colleges are the ones offering two-year degrees, typically explicitly vocational in nature. Most colleges and universities have committed themselves to the idea of four-year degrees as the marker of being college-educated.

Now, I think in the future there will be a lot more options. I expect more short-term certificate programs, or brief courses of study designed for narrow purposes. Some schools are doing this already, and traditional colleges should be flexible and open-minded about this kind of thing. But completing a couple of intensive six-week seminars is not the same thing as becoming a well-rounded, broadly educated person. Gen ed isn’t something to “get out of the way;” it’s an integral part of that education.

Everybody wants to skip right to knowing karate. But gen ed and all our introductory courses teach them that they first have to learn to wax on, wax off, paint the house, and sand the floor.

Robbins imagines that students will be so self-motivated that they will go get two years of “free AI education” on their own initiative, when the reality is that faculty struggle to get them to show for required classes that the students have paid for. Far more likely is that overconfident students will just jump ahead, naively assuming they are ready to do the crane kick, and get flattened. I am—and the rest of the gen ed-teaching faculty are—here to be their Mr. Miyagi and make sure they win in the end.

If you have a remote position open, your challenge is not attracting the correct candidate, it’s filtering out the bad ones, because you’ll have hundreds or thousands of them.

This my favorite technique:
Add a programming knockout question to the application process that is so simple to solve that only* unqualified developers will not do it manually.

Here’s the question:

result = 0
for x in [3,3,5]:
    if x >= 3:
        result = result - x
    else:
        result = result + x

What is result?

The logic of course is that for a good programmer it would be more of a hassle to copy, open an interpreter or ChatGPT, paste it, run it, then answer, than just run the code in their head.

I used a very similar question while I was CTO at MonetizeMore. Interesting things happened:

50% of candidates got the AI/Interpreter answer.

47% Answered the question correctly.

3% Answered incorrectly.

A few candidates resubmitted the application after getting the answer wrong (we didn’t tell them), one of those candidates was a great hire.

One candidate posted the incorrect question to a forum, and got an answer. So when subsequent candidates Googled the incorrect question, they got the wrong answer.

—

*I should say this method is not perfect, and you’ll get false negatives, but I see it more as doubling your ability to process candidates, or reducing in half your recruitment time.

School districts from Utah to Ohio to Alabama are spending thousands of dollars on these tools, despite research showing the technology is far from reliable.

(Image credit: Beck Harlan)