Blog 1: Starting Small
5/18/25
In the spirit of keeping the old internet, I felt that a blog component was necessary. I didn't want to be boxed in to only the stuffy academic-lite content. I don't want to give the impression that scientific communication or commentary is an equivalent task a peer-reviewed article. The not-so-subtle quirk of internet discourse is that we've enable a lopsided playing field for uninformed "hot takes" and expertise. Uninformed takes gets to be openly expressed in the town squares of the internet, but expertise gets locked away behind [pay-]walled gardens. Now of course, research articles are designed to be peer-to-peer, academic-to-academic, pretentious-asshole-to-pretentious-asshole. The language involved can often be particular, and there seems to be a misconception that academics are trying to be opaque or just write in fancy-pancy terminology for the fun of it. There are good reasons for these specific terms. Certainly, many of the conventional technical writing choice can make for an unpleasurable reading experience (something I'm struggling with right now). Some articles can be difficult to follow, and researchers can also misinterpret each other's work too. We aren't infallable.
Not to romantize earlier forms of education, but the Prussian education system (adopted by the United States and most of the world) has been a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand, I do think it provides a general level of education and that the populace should be educated. On the other, within a capitalistic system I don't think the metrics of testing and grading will be sufficient markers of knowledge. LLM usage by students really just accelerated the underlying issues that educators have known about for decades. Administrations will continue to ignore these issues or offload the solution to educators and continue to pretend that there will somehow be infinite growth to their institutions. (One glance at the population size of Gen Z versus Millennials should have already answered that question, but what do I know?) I don't inherently blame the students for wanted an easier time in school. However, it is short-sighted. These tools are designed to replace workers. More specifically, these tools are designed to replace them from even getting the opportunity to enter the work force. People don't understand that the Luddite movement was not just people hating new technology, it was a workers' movement. I sincerely worry for these students, and I continue to worry about the general population's ability to receive good information. Misinformation and disinformation had already ran rampant on the internet even before the explosion of "AI." The stratification of society will only deepen.
It's not all doom and gloom. I'm a strong believer that people do want to learn. People do want to have meaning and purpose in their lives. Corrupt systems tend to cannablize themselves and fall apart. I don't know if they'll ever disappear, but I think researchers (and experts in general) have a responsibility to rebuild the trust lost. I want to nudge people towards a more empathetic and informed worldview.
Anyway, it's been a while since I've messed around with HTML, so I've opted for a template. I've changed a few things here and there, but in the future I'd like to integrate a tagging system for the blog and the essays. This would make it easier to navigate in the future.