Writing on the intersection of AI, humans, education, and technology.
An introduction to Irreducibly Human: What AI Can and Can't Do
Irreducibly Human: https://www.irreducibly.xyz/The panic arrived in the wrong order.When ChatGPT went public in November 2022, schools declared a crisis. Students were cheating. Essays were being…
Read →A Practitioner's Guide for Experiential Learning
We spent twelve years teaching a generation to be slower, more expensive versions of machines that now fit in their pockets. The machines arrived. The students were not prepared for what their…
Read →Who builds the causal model of a system controls the decisions the system supports. The standard workflow gives that power to the wrong people.
Every causal model of an organization is also a political document. It decides which variables appear in the decision analysis, which interventions are worth simulating, which levers are visible to…
Read →The Machine Will Tell You It's Working. Someone Has to Ask Whether It Is.
There is a sentence buried in the middle of Salman Khan’s Brave New Words that should stop the reader cold, though it is not designed to. Khan is describing the first pilot deployment of Khanmigo in…
Read →A literary review essay — Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World, Christopher Steiner (2012)
Here is the thing Christopher Steiner’s book keeps circling without ever landing on: the problem was never the algorithm. The problem was always the person who stopped watching it.Automate This opens…
Read →Algorithms to Live By and the Intelligence No Proof Can Provide
There is a moment in the summer of 1997 when Mars Pathfinder, having traveled 309 million miles at 16,000 miles per hour to become the first rover to navigate another planet’s surface, simply stops…
Read →On Anaxagoras, the Aristotelian Correction, and What the Machine Proves About Both
The oldest philosophical argument about human intelligence is not dead. It has simply changed rooms.In the fifth century BCE, Anaxagoras of Clazomenae made a claim so subversive it got him charged…
Read →Causal Reasoning
You are standing in front of a vendor demo. The screen shows a causal AI platform — sleek, confident, color-coded. The presenter clicks a button. A causal effect estimate appears. A confidence…
Read →Proposed "What AI Can't Do" series of AI courses
Note on the What AI Can’t Do” series of AI coursesThe intelligent response to a forklift is not to practice lifting heavier objects.Machines are superhuman at arithmetic — not faster-than-average,…
Read →Finding the connections humans may miss, and charting the path forward as you take it
The traditional research reports you’ve relied on for decades are essentially history books.When you buy a report from a legacy firm, you aren’t buying a look at the present. You’re buying a polished…
Read →Teaching for Deeper Learning: Tools to Engage Students in Meaning Making Jay McTighe & Harvey F. Silver (2020) | ASCD
There is a moment in the introduction to Teaching for Deeper Learning — a moment that reveals, without quite intending to, the book’s central tension. Jay McTighe and Harvey Silver invoke Buckminster…
Read →Causal Intelligence for the Decisions That Actually Matter
The Living Models framework didn’t start as a book proposal or a research agenda. It started with an email.Someone reached out with a concrete problem: how do you build intelligence that actually…
Read →Building the Machine That Interviews the Expert
Part Three of the Living Model SeriesPart One: The Causal Brain: Living Models and the End of Backward-Looking AnalyticsThe interview begins before the first question is asked.By the time a strategy…
Read →Two decades of Knowledge Engineering research keep arriving at the same answer — and it has nothing to do with algorithms.
This is the second piece in the Living Model series. The first established why causal AI matters for organizational decision-making. This one examines the structural barrier that keeps it confined to…
Read →hypothetical.ai explores the creation of realistic real-time hypothetical scenarios
There is a particular kind of organizational suffering that does not announce itself as suffering. It looks like a Monday morning meeting. Someone opens a dashboard. The numbers from last quarter are…
Read →The three-stage sequence that educational reform keeps failing to complete
The three-stage sequence that educational reform keeps failing to complete — and why the taxonomy in Knowing Enough to Distrust the Machine is only Stage 1There is a cemetery in the literature of…
Read →Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans
Melanie Mitchell’s Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans is a scrupulously honest book about a field constitutionally prone to dishonesty about itself. Its central claim is correct:…
Read →Algorithms to Live By, Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths
There is a philosophical error at the heart of Algorithms to Live By, and it is the more insidious for being so beautifully concealed. Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths have written an unusually…
Read →The Ladder and the Hole Beneath It
The Book of Why is one of the most important methodological works of the past three decades. That sentence should be stated without qualification before the criticism begins, because what follows is…
Read →I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter
I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter is a beautiful, brave, and in one crucial respect evasive book. It is the most persuasive account yet offered of what a self is: a self-referential symbol…
Read →Knowing Enough to Distrust the Machine
There is a specific kind of student I have watched for ten years. They are fast. They retrieve facts with confidence. They format their work correctly. They produce, on demand, the answers that the…
Read →A new taxonomy of human intelligence — and why the curriculum you received is the wrong preparation for the machines you're already using.
There is a specific kind of student I have watched for ten years. They are fast. They retrieve facts with confidence. They format their work correctly. They produce, on demand, the answers that the…
Read →Why capability may not be the problem
There is a specific moment when an institution reveals what it actually believes about the people it serves. It is not the moment of the announcement — the press release, the partnership ceremony,…
Read →How K-12 AI bans don't protect vulnerable students — they abandon them.
The school, which exists precisely to interrupt the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage, has instead become its instrument.That sentence is what this debate is actually about. Not ChatGPT,…
Read →A Fortune piece makes a genuinely important argument about screen time and learning. Its framing undermines it.
Science journalism commits a specific kind of harm when it mistakes a compelling argument for a proven one — and it rarely announces itself. It arrives in verb choices, in headline framings, in the…
Read →What 500,000 Clinical Trials Reveal About the Future of Medicine
You are smaller than you think you are. Or rather, the things that are killing you are smaller than you think—and so, increasingly, are the things designed to stop them.A nanometer is one-billionth…
Read →Why the feeling of understanding is the most seductive obstacle in learning — and what cognitive science says to do instead.
The nod is a lie. Not anyone’s fault — not the student’s, not the teacher’s. It’s built into the same cognitive architecture that makes us efficient thinkers and unreliable narrators of our own…
Read →On What Happens When the Teaching Actually Lands
There is a particular kind of loneliness in teaching that nobody warns you about. Not the loneliness of the empty office hours, or the late-night grading, or the semester that ends and the students…
Read →Why Most Corporate Training Is Designed to Protect the Organization, Not Develop the Employee
There’s a question worth sitting with before any discussion of learning metrics: Who is this training actually for?Not who it claims to be for. Not who it should be for. Who it is actually,…
Read →The sad case of Scooter the Tutor
There is a category of failure that educational technology almost never discusses. Not the system that crashes on launch day, or produces no measurable effect, or gets abandoned quietly when the…
Read →Why Context Matters
There is a particular kind of failure in educational technology—quiet, well-documented, and almost never discussed—that tells you more about learning than any success story. It is the failure that…
Read →Goodell, Kolodner, et al. (2023) | Routledge
PART 1: SECTION-BY-SECTION LOGICAL MAPPINGINTRODUCTION: What Is Learning Engineering?Core Claim: Learning engineering is a distinct professional practice—not merely instructional design under a new…
Read →Development in the Age of Abundance
There is a moment, familiar to anyone who has sat through a mandatory corporate training module, when the screen goes dark between slides and the progress bar at the bottom reads 47% complete. You…
Read →Aravind Balaji at Northeastern
There is a sentence buried on page 2 of Aravind Balaji’s first research publication that stops you cold. After proposing a quantum-enhanced architecture for graph neural networks—a system that could,…
Read →Why the Room Matters More Than the Curriculum
Consider what a mathematics classroom actually is. Not what the curriculum says it should be, not what the teacher intends it to be—but what it is, as experienced by a thirteen-year-old who already…
Read →When automation eliminates the apprenticeship before the apprentice arrives, we must ask who education is actually preparing people for.
There is a theory of learning so old it predates the university: you learn by doing, and the doing happens alongside someone who already knows. The medieval guild called it apprenticeship. The law…
Read →When the tools you're required to master are the tools designed to replace you, efficiency becomes indistinguishable from erasure.
There is a particular cruelty in being required to train the thing that will replace you. Not the cruelty of malice—no executive at Block, Inc. woke up last Thursday thinking about how to humiliate…
Read →Think! Before It's Too Late
There’s a metaphor in Think! Before It’s Too Late that does more work than Edward de Bono probably intended. The rear left wheel of a motor car, he writes, can be absolutely perfect — flawlessly…
Read →John Dewey (1916) | Project Gutenberg
PART 1: SECTION-BY-SECTION LOGICAL MAPPINGCHAPTERS 1–4: Education as Life, Social Function, Direction, and GrowthCore Claim: Education is not preparation for life but a form of life itself. It is the…
Read →Jay McTighe & Harvey F. Silver (2020) | ASCD
PART 1: SECTION-BY-SECTION LOGICAL MAPPINGPREFACECore Claim: The book achieves Buckminster Fuller’s four design criteria: purpose, functionality, user approval, and beauty (defined as “simple and…
Read →Why the tools for transformative learning already exist — and who's already using them
The Mathematics of ExclusionConsider what $17 buys. A high schooler whose father rebuilt his life after years of addiction sits down with a monthly subscription and produces a publishable analysis of…
Read →On building Wilkes, a field report system for Homes of Hope India
What Gets Built in Five HoursThis morning there was a meeting. By afternoon there was a tool.That compression — meeting to prototype in five hours — is either the promise of AI development or its…
Read →A Critical Practitioner’s Guide to Artificial Intelligence in Learning Environments
Preface: Writing in PublicThis book began as a Substack post.That fact matters more than it might seem. It means the argument you’re about to read has already been tested — not in the controlled…
Read →Between the laboratory and the classroom, someone has to go first.
The Problem With ProofThere is a particular kind of intellectual cowardice that disguises itself as rigor. It says: we cannot act until the studies are complete. It says: correlation is not…
Read →The machine watches you learn. You should watch it back.
You’re being watched.Not by your teacher. Not by your classmates. By the textbook itself.It tracks which sections you reread. Which questions you answer wrong. Which examples you skip. Then it…
Read →On Van Damme & Fadel's Technologies Smarter, Humans "Dumber"? (2026)
There is a king in Plato’s Phaedrus who refuses a gift. Theuth, the Egyptian god of invention, arrives bearing writing—the technology of memory, the externalization of thought—and presents it to King…
Read →Notes on Exploring the Assistance Dilemma in Experiments with Cognitive Tutors
The computer knows you’re stuck.You’ve been staring at the algebra problem for forty seconds. You made one attempt. It was wrong. The system logged your error, updated its probability estimate of…
Read →An Instructional Policy Suite for the Assistance Dilemma
The SOCRIT protocol makes a compelling case for Socratic prompting—withhold the answer, force the student to generate reasoning, escalate only when they’re genuinely stuck. But Socratic resistance is…
Read →A review of Is ChatGPT a Boon or a Bane for Learning? Experimental Evidence Across Task Formats and Chatbot Designs
NOTE THE ORIGINAL PAPER:Li, Andy Tao and Liu, De and Ye, Teng, Is ChatGPT a Boon or a Bane for Learning? Experimental Evidence Across Task Formats and Chatbot Designs (January 15, 2026). Available at…
Read →The machinery works fine — until it doesn't, and then you can see exactly what it was doing all along.
CHAPTER SUMMARIESPreface: The Musical SpeciesSacks opens with Arthur C. Clarke’s alien overlords, puzzled by humanity’s devotion to “meaningless tonal patterns.” The preface establishes music as…
Read →My notes on the great book by Douglas R. Hofstadter (1979)
A Note on What You’re ReadingWhat follows is not the review.That matters. A reader encountering these pages without warning might mistake them for a finished argument — might read the…
Read →The Machine That Learned to Teach
LINK: https://rdcu.be/e4tifImagine you are failing a physics class.Not struggling. Failing. The professor’s voice is a metronome counting down to a grade that will matter for years. The textbook sits…
Read →How to Stop Writing Prompts That Answer Their Own Questions
SOCRIT is a structured protocol for diagnosing and transforming educational prompts that mistake answer-delivery for genuine inquiry. It works by running any submitted prompt through nine evaluation…
Read →Possible projects for Humanitarians AI Fellows
THIS ARTICLE IS FOR HUMANITARIANS AI VOLUNTEERS CONSIDERING LEARNING ENGINEERING RESEARCHYou’re reading a textbook evaluation that catalogs intelligent education systems. But embedded in each chapter…
Read →When Measuring Conformity to Wikipedia Becomes "Proficiency Assessment"
The number is stark: 0.80. That’s how closely BERT—a neural network trained on Wikipedia—agrees with human experts rating spoken English proficiency. Not “somewhat aligned.” Not “moderately…
Read →The Architecture of Adaptation: How “Teaching with AI” Builds a Framework for Educational SurvivalThe Opening MachineryThe book opens with Marie Curie’s call to understand rather than fear—a choice…
Read →Part 1: Chapter-by-Chapter Logical MappingIntroduction: What is Learning Engineering?Core Claim: Learning engineering is a distinct professional practice combining learning sciences, human-centered…
Read →The Economist Podcast, September 20, 2025
We Don't Need No (AI) Educationhttps://www-economist-com.ezproxy.neu.edu/podcasts/2025/09/20/we-dont-need-no-ai-education?utm_campaign=shared_articlePART 1: Section-by-Section Logical MappingSection…
Read →The Economist, December 4, 2025
PART 1At Home and at School, AI Is Transforming Childhood https://www-economist-com.ezproxy.neu.edu/briefing/2025/12/04/at-home-and-at-school-ai-is-transforming-childhoodSection 1: Introduction — The…
Read →Sutton & Barto – Complete Chapter Analysis + Technical Review
Part 1: Chapter-by-Chapter AnalysisPreface & Chapter 1: Introduction (pp. xiii–22)What it explains: The second edition expands coverage to bootstrapping methods, off-policy learning, and deep…
Read →On Association, Causation, Simulation, Judgment—and Why They're Parallel Competencies, Not Rungs
You open a conversation with an AI system and ask it to reason about a firing squad. A court issues an order. A captain signals two soldiers. Either bullet kills the prisoner. You pose the…
Read →How Cialdini's Six Principles of Persuasion Reveal the Architecture of Human Decision-Making and What That Means for Instructional Design
Chapter 1: Weapons of Influence — The Mother Turkey and the ShortcutCialdini opens not with theory but with a puzzle: why did turquoise jewelry sell better when its price was accidentally doubled?…
Read →When Neuroscience Meets Absolutism—Dissecting the Evidence Against Educational Technology and the Implementation Gap Its Author Won't Acknowledge
PART ONE: Chapter-by-Chapter Logical MappingPrologue: The Luddite WarningCore Claim: The Luddites weren’t technophobes but defenders of human practices threatened by industrial tools—a warning…
Read →How Science Distinguishes Real Effects from Mere Association When Randomized Experiments Are Impossible
Chapter-by-Chapter SummariesChapter 1: The Effects Caused by TreatmentsThe opening chapter confronts us with George Washington’s death—not from his sore throat, but likely from his doctors bleeding…
Read →How Intuition Manufactures Certainty
Part One: The Architecture of Two MindsChapter 1: The Characters of the StoryKahneman opens not with theory but with invitation: look at an angry face, multiply seventeen by twenty-four, and discover…
Read →The Mathematics of Why
Pearl’s Revolution and Its DiscontentsThe prohibition lasted nearly a century. From the 1890s, when Francis Galton discovered correlation and promptly abandoned his search for causation, until the…
Read →A paper by Hayato Tomisu, Junya Ueda and Tsukasa Yamanaka
THE COGNITIVE MIRROR: Section-by-Section AnalysisABSTRACT: The Promise of Pedagogical InversionThe abstract opens with a diagnostic claim—that generative AI in education has fostered “cognitive…
Read →When Precision Meets the Imprecise Human
Chapter-by-Chapter SummariesIntroduction: The Scoreboard ProblemChristian opens with Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts in 1943, establishing neural networks as logical systems, then jolts forward to…
Read →A response to "Ed tech is profitable. It is also mostly useless"
Picture this: You’re sitting in a Kansas middle school in 2022, watching Principal Inge Esping make a bet. The district has approved IXL, adaptive math software on the state’s recommended list. It…
Read →Why the Most Important Chart in AI Measures the Wrong Thing
I saw the graph on a Tuesday morning, already viral across Substack and X/Twitter. A clean line, ascending vertically, showing how quickly AI could now complete software engineering tasks. “The most…
Read →What Anthropic's CEO Actually Meant
What the CEO Actually MeantOn February 5, 2026, Elon Musk amplified a tweet to his 50+ million followers: “Anthropic CEO: Software engineering will be completely obsolete in 6-12 months.”The tweet…
Read →Why the best AI tutors know when to refuse answers—and what 2,500-year-old philosophy teaches us about machine learning
You type a question into the machine. The cursor blinks. Three seconds later, the answer arrives—complete, confident, formatted in clean paragraphs with bullet points for emphasis.You feel satisfied.…
Read →Here is the conductor’s secret: she is not there to make the orchestra sound good. She is there to take responsibility when it sounds bad.
You are sitting at your desk at 9 AM on a Tuesday morning in 2025, and you have not yet written a single line of code. You will not write much today. By 5 PM, when you close your laptop, you will…
Read →Why Universities Need Their Skunk Works
I. The Supertanker ProblemPicture a container ship at full speed in open water. Three football fields long, laden with 20,000 containers, moving at 25 knots. The captain spots an iceberg. He orders a…
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