I recently spoke to several educators about the challenges facing them in the classroom. I walked away from both conversations shaking my head. Each of them are good people, want to be good teachers, and the system has simply brainwashed them into a sense of Victorian-era stasis that I don’t think we’ll ever get through.
The teachers identified ChatGPT as the most insidious force workign against education in the classroom. Neither of them had a paid subscription to the service and had only spent 3 hours combined using the tool, and yet they think its the bugbear of the American education system today.
Whereas the teachers who get are using ChatGPT to show kids how the creative process works, and where humans can perform better and faster using tools, others are worried about plagiarism and laziness left to take hold. I’m not saying that the latter isn’t possible and even happening now, but the solution to that problem will never be ignoring it’s source.
I think and write a good bit about the education system and so I queried them on some things that are so patently obvious as to be basic components of thought regardint the topic for me:
Homework. There is not a single peer reveiwed study that has concluded that homework has any probative value for students, at all. Homework was the invention of the Victorian era education stystem (which we still follow), because there wasn’t enough time at school to complete pedagogy for each member of the class, and to introduce practice alongside it. The teachers then made the decision that since they couldn’t send the teaching responsibilities home, they had to send the practice responsibilities home. If it ever worked, it doesn’t work now. Both of these teachers told me how valuable homework was in THEIR classes.
Anxiety. Since the introduction of the Iphone 4 (the first smartphone with a selfie camera), the rates of Anxeity, Depression, Suicide and Self-Harm have skyrocketed among children (especially girls) the ages of 10-14. Having the entire internet on your phone, feeling the peer pressure of social media, and being connected 24/7 during the most formative social development years has wreaked havoc on our children. Both of these teachers paid lip service to the existence of the problem and saw absolutely no way it could be addressed at school, relegating it solely to the home for redress.
Self-Paced Learning. Students excel when they are allowed to choose the pace at which to complete the work they’ve been assigned. Every brain learns diffrent material at a different pace and building systems that encourage those to go fast and far with their passsions while bringing up the rear on things they don’t love, produce the most well-rounded and successful student. This is at the core of the Montessori method, and these two teachers knew nothing of the undelrying lessons or much about the system itself. One of them asked me “Isn’t that for hippies?”
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.
There were two amazing announcements in the world of biotech this last two weeks.
First, Isomorphic Labs, a cutting edge enterprise under the aegis of Alphabet Inc. (parent of Google), is bringing the power of AI to biomedical and genetic research. Leveraging the compute power of AI models, Isomorphic is able to synthesize billions of permutations of drug interactions and side effects in the human body. This is a quantum leap to drug developers, cutting down the time to bring new medicines to market. The core advancements introduced two weeks ago has to do with discoveries in protein folding and interaction modeling. This discovery is poised to dramatically expedite drug discovery processes by providing more precise simulations of molecular behavior, diminishing the time and cost associated with experimental validation.
Second, Ohalo, just emerged from stealth status after investing $50 million on using gene editing to improve agricultural productivity. Effectively, by hacking the genome of various food-supply plants, their technolgy can increase yields. Recently, they announced significant breakthroughs in their work with gene-edited potatoes. By combining genetic traits from different varieties of potatoes, Ohalo has created new potato varieties that are more nutritious, more plentiful, and resistant to diseases. This process, known as "Boosted Breeding," allows the new potato plants to inherit the best traits from both parent plants (instead of just 50% from each, like in humans), which can significantly increase yields and reduce the environmental impact of farming. These advancements come on the heels of positive regulatory reviews from the USDA, which have cleared Ohalo's gene-edited potatoes for sale without additional regulatory oversight. By improving crop yields and reducing the need for extensive farming resources, Ohalo aims to revolutionize agriculture and contribute to solving global food challenges.
Personally, I no longer invest in any biotech company where the FDA has approval leverage. The FDA is one of the most corrupt institutions in the Federal Government, with employees using a revolving door to go in and out between the regulator and the companies they regulate. Additionally, the goalposts for meeting testing and reproting requirements are not standard among companies, nor even among FDA regions. The organization doesn’t operate in a modern regulatory framework at all, and has an ethos of playing God by “protecting” the American consumer. The administratiogn should have been split in two 40 years ago with the idea of bringing drugs to market faster, and keeping food safe for consumers. Other countries do a much better job and aren’t so subject to regulatory capture.
“Perhaps if you stopped pouring your depth into people too shallow to hold it you would stop findng yourself in puddles on the floor.”
— Liz Phair
Computing advances continue apace, of course. We’ve just added a position in an early stage chip technology manufacturer called Frore Systems. Fore’s patented AirJet tehcnology is the world’s first solid-state chip for active device cooling, delivering 2x improvement in device performance while operating in silence. Its compact size and unique capability enabling the design and production of faster, quieter, thinner, lighter, and dustproof devices. In effect, the creators have managed to build a small jet-engine on the super-miniture scale that produces on demand cooling to chipsets inside of devices. Think of laptops who don’t burn your legs, phones that don’t get too hot when running multiple processes, and bluteooth radios who can keep a battery charge for 8x as long because the battery is kept chilled.
The company has won innovation awards at the last two CES shows in Vegas, and has begun talks with all of the major consumer electronic brands. Incorporating their chipsets into each of these devices will mean massive savings for the power grid in years to come since we simply won’t need to burn fossil fuels to cool our devices any longer. Our investment is early into the company and we have high hopes that we will see great profits on this position.
“Live life as if it is rigged in your favor.”
—Rumi