My reading is coalescing around certain themes: technology, knowledge and beer. Amazingly there are more crossovers than you might first imagine.
I’m enjoying Power and Progress by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson. The MIT economists craft a compelling argument about how technological advancement does not automatically lead to social progress. Instead it depends on the societal vision for how the technology should be harnessed and who it should benefit. While initially a technological development typically benefit their creators or owners, it is possible for a more inclusive vision, but such a vision requires the public at large to be the authors of the vision rather than it remaining the purview of the tech-owning elite.
Acemoglu and Johnson’s book is incredibly timely given the rapid emergence of artificial intelligence into the public consciousness. While Power and Progress addresses questions on how society should approach the potential benefits of AI, Simon Winchester’s wonderful Knowing What We Know looks at related issues around where AI leaves people. In a disturbing passage at the beginning of the book, Winchester asks:
“If our brains – if we, that is, for our brains are the permanent essence of us – no longer have need of knowledge, and if we have no need because the computers do it all for us, then what is human intelligence good for? An existential crisis looms: If machines will acquire all our knowledge for us and do our thinking for us, then what pray, is the need for us to be?”
Knowing What We Know, Simon Winchester (2023), p7
What I find especially worrying is there are too many people, troublingly people of influence, who seem to think that AI is an excuse to throw the knowledge baby out with the bathwater. This is not a new argument though, AI is just the latest opportunity for the educational policy faddists to waffle about ’21st century skills’ and vacuous ‘learning to learn’ mumbo jumbo, where somehow we can educate people to be educated and miraculously prepared for lifelong learning without any need for knowledge-content at all.
I would speculate that if you take these superficial faddists to task they would quickly refute that they are content-free, spilling out all manner of spurious examples of how you can develop character and intellect, but in doing so they would be skating around the reality that there has to be knowledge, they just don’t want to acknowledge it. Rather, they are ignoring any sort of need to organise that knowledge and moreover ignoring the benefits of organising that knowledge into subject disciplines.
As I’ve posted previously, even ChatGPT reckons this content-free view of education is flawed. Knowledge makes you a more skilled user of AI: you can write better inputs (so-called ‘promptcraft’) and you can sense-check outputs to avoid the garbage which AI still has a tendency to generate. And even with AI on my side, the content-free crowd are ignoring all of those other qualities of knowledge which AI cannot replace: critical thinking, creativity and the sheer sense of satisfaction and self-respect you get from possessing knowledge and the sense-making which that knowledge allows.
I was really pleased to have the opportunity to speak about these ideas to students and parents as part of an IB Theory of Knowledge expedition. I’ll try and publish the speech at some point soon, maybe with a little commentary to show the knowledge behind my words.
Around the high-brow reads about tech and knowledge, I’m still enjoying my craft beer adventures which I’m pursuing between book covers as well as at bars. I’ve got three rather wonderful, even if a little overlapping, books on the subject:
- Josh Bernstein’s The Complete Beer Course (2nd edition, 2023).
- Randy Mosher’s Tasting Beer (2nd edition, 2019).
- Mark Dredge’s Beer: A Tasting Course (2022).
As I say, there is a fair amount of overlap, but each book has some really nice touches. Bernstein really does present his material as a hands-on course with tasting recommendations throughout. Mosher’s book is heavier on content, but as a result offers fantastic context on all things beer. Dredge’s book is the most visual and probably offers more recommendations than Bernstein, albeit with a lighter touch treatment on what to expect from each of the suggestions.
The next addition to the beer section on my bookcase is Jeff Alworth’s Beer Bible, which is going to be the longest book that I have on the topic.
I still check in to The Marginalian and never cease to be impressed with the breadth and depth of what Maria Popova covers. My favourite post from the last week was a review of Andy Clark’s The Experience Machine, looking at how our brains are constantly making predictions on what our senses are perceiving, so much so that our expectations heavily influence how we experience the world around us. I love stuff about cognition, as an interesting topic in itself and for its relevance to teaching.
Another of my favourite writers is ex-Guardian columnist Oliver Burkeman. One of his helpful ideas is that we should treat potential reading content as a river rather than a pile. We have to accept that have to let the vast majority go by and we should only focus on the samples we choose to try. Somewhat ironically this idea was shared in Burkeman’s newsletter and it is the growing distribution of newsletters which adds to the mighty river of content.
I dread to think how many daily newsletters I now get from media outlets: The Economist, The New Yorker, The Atlantic and The Washington Post. Plus only slightly less regular arrivals from The New York Times and The Guardian. Those are just the ones I’ve signed up for. What is interesting is that I access most of the content that I read from those outlets via their newsletter and probably more pieces than those which I read in the print editions which I receive.
Commonplace 