tokyokevin: Kevin Ryan in Tokyo

Kevin putting it out there

  • Reasoning and/or AI?

    Mike Caulfield blogs about reason and reasoning and surprisingly doesn’t care how AI got there, and who is still doing the work. Google and Perplexity have launched Deep Research engines, AI help for regular research. He talks about SOK (State of Knowledge) and the next step up SSOK (Statements about SOK), which often include references to the knowledge (links or quotes from other work).

    “A question sometimes comes up at this point — well, look at all the work you had to do when you verified this. Isn’t it actually you who is doing the reasoning?

    This question doesn’t really understand cognition well. In a sense, it’s always me doing the reasoning.”

    Is it really research if the cognitive process is being somewhat replaces with AI? I think it is. It just becomes quicker, and more a filter than an engine itself. Worth thinking about.

  • Cool Biomass Visualization

    Multi-step explanation of how much living stuff is on earth (biomass) and then compares that to man-made stuff (technomass). Eye opening. Via Kottke.

  • Al is making us stupid

    Research by Microsoft (pdf) shows tech industry users show a reduction in critical thinking as use of AI increases.

  • Fake Research

    The Whole Earth Catalog was vetted. Not so for many journals.

    Is caused by an evaluation process much like Google’s PageRank, where a paper is rated by how many links there are to and from it. That’s how over 400,000 research articles in the last 20 years are probably fake, created by Paper Mills. From Nature.

  • Attention Attention Attention

    Remember when it was Location, location, location? With the Attention Economy we are the ones getting mined (that’s a polite word for it), especially now, with social media up on the inauguration dias. I’m sure the tech bros and the president figure they can outwit each other, but us users are going to pay either way.

    Chris Hayes, legacy media (MSNBC) newscaster, has a new book out about attention. It’s on my list. Here is an interview at another legacy media outlet, the NYTimes.

    I am now basing my grades and interactions in my classes on what I call Attention Units; 20 minutes, a previously normal maximum for “attention span” measured for university lectures. This dates back about a decade when I was teaching with Howard Rheingold’s book in my Digital Media course at University of Tokyo.  Net Smart covers 5 parts of online digital life, the first being Attention. Then I jumped over most of that section, but gradually have come to realize it was the most important. Thus I have upgraded that into my learning and teaching.