He says: “You can try to complete a million checkboxes but you will forget all of them, or you can find a stream and spend the day sitting with it, and make a real memory.” I am perpetually burdened by all the books I haven’t read and the books I haven’t finished, but then I remember that this is the exact impulse that takes away from any one book truly moving me.

“Metrics are useful because they compress information,” Nguyen told me. “They are dangerous, because they compress information.”

The Library Card Fallacy is the mistaken notion that the purpose of education is to transfer information from teacher to student, and thus that schools and teachers are subject to disruption when any technology comes around that democratizes access to information. The trouble with this theory is that information has been very broadly available for a hundred years or more

That’s why I call it the Library Card Fallacy: if it was true that education was about access to information, then anyone with a library card would become educated. But that’s just not what education is about. Education is about being challenged to learn things you don’t particularly want to and about creating an incentive structure that forces you to do so. The much-ballyhooed prediction that Google would create a nation of busy little autodidacts has clearly not come to pass.

Look around you. How many people are spending their free time learning? And even among the people who are, how many of them are learning things that are genuinely boring and frustrating to learn, instead of what’s fun to learn?

if LLMs have done one thing for me, it’s to force me to recognize just how little the average person gives a shit and just how willing the great mass of humanity is to slip into apathy and decline. But I do have hope for individuals, the exceptional and talented people who really give a shit.