Sunday School December 7th 2025

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

2025 State of the Secular States: See how your state protects religious equality.

Five of the world’s safest countries for 2025.

Religious Education ‘not suitable’ for Northern Ireland society, study suggests.

American religion continues its long fadeout.

World of Woo:  9 common vaccine myths.

Environment: Trump to repeal Biden-Era fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks.

The return of Blasphemy Laws from a Christian perspective.

Why do people ignore evidence, and what actually changes minds?

The biggest gaps in our understanding of cosmic history.

New DNA evidence suggests humans first entered Australia about 60,000 years ago.

Long Reads:

“Christian vs nonreligious” is a blunt dichotomy but because the U.S. military is now entirely volunteer-based, it draws disproportionately from more religious and socially conservative regions.

AI is destroying learning at university.

Age of the ‘scam state’: how an illicit, multi-billion-dollar industry has taken root in south-east Asia.

Cloning: Why Tom Brady will never get his dog back. How to print a human.

Sunday Book Club: The Emergent Mind: How intelligence arises in people and machines.

Some photographs taken last week.

While you are waiting for the kettle to boil……

Podcast: People are much more irrational than economists believe.

Coffee Break Videos: Are these videos real or AI slop? How Big Tech has convinced us to surveil ourselves and each other. Why humanity may have no choice but to go to Space. The frontline in Ukraine. How Antisemitism returned: From Medieval Europe to the Free Palestine Protests.

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

Have a great week everyone!

 

[jakelafortParticipant]

Holy cow Andy.

AI is destroying education. Hello Dumb Dumb.

That article reads like science fiction. To live in interesting times. The cultural equivalent of punctuated equilibrium is upon us. Poor players, sound and fury, strut and fret signifying nothing on crack. Fungible sponges through the ages betrayed by the few who resist the squeeze. Flying into the atmosphere, flying into outer space and then flying up our collective asssholes. An astral projection of stupidity.

Free speech and no speech so that business and ideology can imprint poor players.

AI docs, AI lawyers, AI cops, AI beurocrats, AI politicians or politicians reflecting the electorate reflecting AI.

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

@jakelafort – I disagree with the post above that AI is destroying learning. AI isn’t the end of higher education, but it does demand a serious overhaul of how we teach, assess, and value learning. Universities are suffering structural rot, and many have become expensive credential factories. If a single tool can automate the output of a degree, then the degree is measuring output, not learning. If universities double down on hollow credentialing instead of substantive understanding, then yes, their purpose will evaporate. But that failure is institutional, not technological.

AI is not plagiarism. Using AI is using a tool. Its misuse is to outsource thinking when really it should just augment cognition. Using a calculator isn’t “math plagiarism” or using Photoshop isn’t “art plagiarism”. ChatGPT is not “writing plagiarism”.  I think the real issue is that AI lets students skip the thinking process that assignments were designed to force. This exposes the weak design of the assignments rather than any ‘moral failing’ in students. I use it to peer-review my own thoughts. It is my sounding board, not my oracle. It is a form of cognitive extension rather than one of cognitive substitution.

Assignments that can be completed entirely by AI reveal nothing about the student but that’s the fault of the assignment setters and not the tools students use. AI didn’t break the system; it just exposed that the system wasn’t measuring thinking in the first place.

AI is the continuation of the same epistemic expansion that began the day someone looked through the first lens ground in glass. It is now part of the toolkit we have. It is not an evolution in education; it is a paradigm shift. (Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions). In the very near future co-thinking between humans and AI will simply be the norm.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Reg,

Five of the world’s safest countries for 2025

You gotta wonder about the criteria they use for these kinds of lists. They have to be as real as the criteria for the FIFA World Peace Prize. It is also noteworthy that Great Britain did not make this list composed by the BBC.

Singapore is not a very safe place if you bring or chew gum or propose to set up a gum lobby to change the law, when the legal system includes caning as punishment.

Ireland and Austria both have had violent internal strife surrounding issues of immigration and both have notorious histories with Antisemitism. And being neutral, how safe would Ireland and Austria be if Revanchist Russia won over Ukraine and decided to start gobbling up the rest of Europe?

New Zealand has been a famous destination for Lefty Peaceniks since the Sixties because it has no nuclear weapons, but New Zealand can only maintain that stance because it is under the umbrella of nations who haven’t given up theirs.

And this part of the story brings up an interesting question:

lifelong Kiwi Mischa Mannix-Opie, director of client experience at relocation firm Greener Pastures.

What is Mischa Mannix-Opie’s theme song?:

Is it this:

Or this:

After all, it takes Mannixes to make a world safe for Opies.

[jakelafortParticipant]

Reg,

I suppose it depends on how we view the proximate cause of its ruination. Having read that article it aligns with how some ivy league students can get to that point without ever reading a book. Further, universities have adopted terrorist professors of propaganda and sytmied free speech creating an environment in which broad and diverse viewpoints collide only in theory. Monolithic professorial pap and political pistons substitute for education.

Or as you succinctly say it is an institutional failing. More broadly it is human nature succumbing to business interests and to groupthink. And i guess we can view human culture as tending towards discovering solutions to problems that make the work easier. So in restrospect the institutional failure is not surprising. AI is the tool to advance in science and understanding. Expands horizongs immeasurably.

Completely on board that AI can be a wonderful adjunct or tool to cognition. It would be interesting to know whether critical thinking has declined in university students. I suppose the greater ignorance of today’s youth compared to yesteryear’s “rote learners” might make fertile ground for empty minds. Even so the great majority have neither the temperament nor the inclination to think outside the group.

[jakelafortParticipant]

Enco,

“Hello Dum Dum.” Do you get the reference?

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

Yikes, I remember watching Mannix……and Frank Cannon too. That’s his name and he is a private investigator. Now I want a lollipop!

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

Many universities have become revenue-maximizing businesses, visa mills and research output farms. They have become corporations and this has diluted standards. They are no longer hostile to sacred cows and are willing to deplatform anyone who might upset them emotionally. Dissenting views are punished and a student’s “lived experience” trumps evidence. Research seems to be  interpreted through predetermined narratives. Ok, not everywhere but certainly in the humanities and certain areas of social science.

STEM is holding the line against ‘wokeism’ because the universe (still) doesn’t care about ideology.

The “woke turn” didn’t emerge because universities got too progressive. It emerged because universities got too bureaucratic and lost their ‘mission clarity’ on education and allowed moral grandstanding to fill the void. The good thing, imo, is that AI will accelerate the collapse of degree mills and Universities will recover only when they remember why they exist: to pursue truth, not to manufacture credentials, and not to preach ideology.

Now say after me: “Attica! Attica!”

• This reply was modified 1 month, 2 weeks ago by  Reg the Fronkey Farmer. Reason: fixed a few typos

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

Jake – Barney Fife? We are all caught in this circus together….

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

Yes Jake, I agree with “it depends on how we view the proximate cause of its ruination.” 

The proximate cause depends on which lens you pick up. AI isn’t the culprit here, it’s the accelerant. It exposes the cracks and widens them, but it also widens the horizons for anyone who does think. The tragedy is that the number who engage critically has always been small, and mass education never changed that. Today’s students aren’t uniquely foolish; they’re simply more tightly coupled to the group-mind because they are infected by the algorithms of social media. Yesterday’s conformity came from the tribe while today’s comes from the feed. The students don’t come to university “empty” and willing to learn. They come in “preloaded”, expecting to be validated. It’s no longer ‘group-think’. To coin a phrase…it’s ‘feed-think’. The algorithm isn’t just showing them content. It’s training them!

If feed-think is the water, universities are the aquarium. The fish didn’t poison it. The universities filtration system failed.

Now say after me: Smash the system!! Lol.

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

I wonder which university this boy will attend?

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Jake,

“Hello Dum Dum.” Do you get the reference?

The Great Gazoo referred to Fred and Barney with that greeting on The Flintstones.. And if Gazoo came to us today, the greeting would be no different, especially with Creationists who think The Flintstones was a documentary.

• This reply was modified 1 month, 2 weeks ago by  TheEncogitationer.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Reg,

Kojack was the one with the lollypop, though Cannon could put away that and more.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Reg,

In all fairness, I should have added that the Nobel Peace Prize became as meaningless as the FIFA Peace Prize when Yassir Arafat got it after practically inventing air piracy and Barack Hussein Obama got the Nobel as a participation trophy.

Even Nobels for hard sciences have been ruined by recipients who get out of their lane e.g. Linus Pauling, Francis Crick, William Shockley.

All this means Trump is aiming pretty low and hitting just where he’s aiming.

[Author]

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