Why have universities?

 

Bill Ackman reposted

Superman

@thesupermannx

Researchers proved AI has deleted every reason universities exist. Harvard University ran a controlled experiment pitting a custom AI against their own top-tier classrooms. And the results are going to collapse the higher education bubble. They took 194 undergraduates and split them up. One group learned physics in one of Harvard’s best hands-on, active-learning physical classrooms. Group work. Instructor support. The premium university experience. The other group went home and learned the exact same material with an AI tutor. The AI didn't just win. It embarrassed the institution. Students using the AI learned more than twice as much as the students in the elite Harvard classroom. They scored 30% higher on the final assessment. And they did it in less time. Let that sink in. A piece of software sitting on a laptop outperformed a world-class faculty in one of the most elite learning environments on Earth. Universities have always justified their exorbitant tuition with two things: access to elite knowledge and the physical classroom experience. This study just proved both of those moats are gone. When software can teach you complex physics twice as well as a $60,000-a-year institution, the math of higher education breaks permanently. The AI didn't just give the students answers. It used strict pedagogical guardrails. It guided. It questioned. It forced the students to do the cognitive work. It offered perfect, one-to-one tutoring, personalized to the exact moment a student misunderstood a concept. That level of attention is mathematically impossible to scale in a physical lecture hall. For a thousand years, the university was the only place to get a premium education. Now, it’s the bottleneck. If AI can double your learning speed for a fraction of the cost, what exactly are students taking on decades of debt to pay for?

Ron Shapiro

@freeseer165

·

1h

Harvard spent its reputation by propagating left-leaning learning experiences to high-paying students eager for the diploma, thinking of their prospects in the cultural and business environment. Harvard made a fatal mistake.

Read the wall - Ask someone why they think what they think.

 

Brivael Le Pogam

@brivael

Translated from French

Orwell had it all figured out in 1945. Animal Farm is often presented as a satire of Stalinism. That's true. But it's above all a book about something else, something far more universal and far more relevant today: what happens to a society when the majority of its members give up thinking. Reread it through that lens, and you'll see that every animal is an archetype we encounter every day. There are the sheep. They don't understand much about the debates, so they're taught a simple slogan: "Four legs good, two legs bad!" And as soon as a dissenting voice starts asking an awkward question during an assembly, the sheep start bleating the slogan, for minutes on end, until no one can think anymore. They're not malicious. They repeat. It's exactly what I was describing: people who don't know why they think what they think, but who repeat it loudly enough to drown out those who are trying to think. There is Boxer, the horse. The strongest, the most loyal, the hardest worker on the farm. His answer to every problem is always the same: "I will work harder." And when a doubt arises, he has a second one: "Napoleon is always right." Boxer gives everything to the system. He never questions it. And the day he is worn out, when his body can no longer keep up, the system sells him to the knacker. He's the most tragic character in the book, because he's the perfect product of an education that teaches execution without ever asking why. Millions of Boxers get up every morning today. There is Benjamin, the donkey. He knows how to read. He understands everything. He sees through the pigs' game from the start. But he says nothing, he shrugs his shoulders, "life will go on as it always has, that is, badly." Benjamin is the cynic. The one who has kept his critical mind but has given up acting. And he's perhaps the most guilty of all, because he knew. And then there are the pigs. Why are they the ones who take power? Not because they're stronger. Because they're the only ones who have truly learned to read, to write, to reason. The other animals never got past a few letters of the alphabet. So when the Seven Commandments posted on the barn wall start to change, at night, one word at a time, no one can prove it. The animals have a vague memory that it was different before. But they end up doubting their own memory rather than doubting the power. Until the day when only one commandment remains on the wall: "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." That's the fundamental lesson of Orwell. Power doesn't belong to the strongest. It belongs to those who think, against those who have given up thinking. A population that doesn't know how to question doesn't need to be chained. It chains itself, and it thanks the one who holds the chain. And that's where it gets dizzying today. We are entering the era of AI. The Boxers of our society, those we've trained for decades to execute, to produce, to not ask questions, are going to be replaced by machines that execute better than they do. The work for which they were drilled will disappear. And if we've never taught them to think, they'll have nothing left. Meanwhile, the barn wall has never been so easy to rewrite. The algorithms that decide what you see, the narratives served to you on a loop, the slogans bleated on social media to drown out all nuance. The wall changes every night, and most people no longer know how to read what was written the day before. The only defense against that isn't strength, or work, or loyalty. It's the ability to read the wall. To remember what was written. To ask why it changed. And to have the courage to say it out loud, even when the sheep start bleating. Don't be Boxer. Don't be the sheep. And above all, don't be Benjamin. Learn to read the wall.

Brivael Le Pogam

@brivael

Translated from French

When I observe the world, the people around me, one thing strikes me: we live in a society where the majority of individuals have lost the ability to have a critical mind. Not intelligence. The ability to think for oneself. Most people live their lives within frameworks they haven't chosen. Dogmas thought up by others, long ago, for reasons they ignore. Go to school, find a permanent job, buy an apartment, take out a twenty-five-year loan, wait for retirement. Not because they've reflected and decided it's their path, but because it's the path. The one everyone takes. The one no one questions. They see life as a succession of boxes to check, a stack of choices to pile up, as if there were a known goal, validated somewhere, and all you had to do was follow the instructions. As if life were a game where someone else had already written the rules and the winning conditions. Try it. Ask someone why they think what they think. About politics, about money, about work, about the meaning of their life. And dig deeper. Ask why a second time, then a third. In the vast majority of cases, after two or three levels, there's nothing left. No reasoning, no foundation. Just a phrase heard somewhere, an article skimmed diagonally, the opinion of those around them, the mood of the times. People are, on average, passive. They repeat what they hear. They absorb more than they produce. They consume opinions the way they consume content: quickly, without digesting, and thinking those opinions are their own. I'm not saying this with contempt. I'm saying it because I think it's not their fault. The reason, in my view, is simple: modern school has destroyed a part of human nature. What defines humanity is creation. It's the ability to imagine what doesn't yet exist, to look at the world as it is and wonder why it isn't otherwise. Every child is born with that. A four-year-old asks hundreds of questions a day. They want to understand why the sky is blue, why we die, why they have to go to bed. They question everything. And then they enter the system. We have to remember where this system comes from. The mass schooling we know was designed in the 19th century, in the wake of the Prussian model, at a time when nations needed disciplined populations. People capable of obeying, executing, repeating. Plowing fields, holding a spot on an assembly line in a factory, marching in step in an army. The bell that marks the end of effort, the rows, the grades, the unquestioned authority, the right answer that must be regurgitated. Everything has a purpose if the goal is to produce doers. And it worked. Perfectly. We've produced entire generations of people who know how to follow orders, and very few who know how to write them. The problem is that the world this system was designed for is disappearing. We're entering an era where everything that's execution, everything that's repeatable, predictable, compliant, will be handled by AIs. The tasks we taught humans to do like machines will be done by machines. Better, faster, for almost nothing. So what remains? What remains is exactly what school has spent decades extinguishing. The ability to question everything. The ability to go back to the foundations, to the philosophy of things. To ask not "how do I do this" but "why do we do this," and "should we do it differently." To start from a blank page rather than an order. In the world that's coming, the right answer will be worth nothing: any AI will give it to you in a second. What will be worth everything is the right question. And the right question never comes from someone who's learned not to ask. Doers will be replaced. Thinkers will be amplified. The true revolution of AI isn't technological. It's philosophical. It will force us to become again what we were before we were taught to obey. The good news is that this ability never disappeared. It's just dormant. Every time you ask "why" one more time than what's socially acceptable, you wake it up a little. Start now. The world won't wait.