Monthly Archives: January 2025

Your ‘B’ Game

Leave a reply

You can’t always bring your A game to everything. This is something we try to teach kids with a perfectionist streak. We run scrum projects where we give a clear ‘definition of done’. We encourage them to choose where best to focus their perfectionism, because trying to be perfect everywhere is debilitating, and students tend to get overwhelmed and not get everything done.

This is an aspect of the gifted student profile that can be both a superpower and also the Kryptonite that weakens the student. Perfectionism can be the thing that makes a student produce exceptional work, and it can be the reason they give up, or end up handing something in late, because while the project or assignment is good (even very good), it isn’t meeting a high or previous standard already achieved and so it’s just not good enough to complete, or sometimes even to try.

And so sometimes you need to teach kids to bring their ‘B’ game. Show us what you’ve got right now, because it’s probably good enough. Let’s see it? Great, you’ve met the outcomes, let’s move on. No, it’s not your best work, yes, if you put more hours into it, it could get a higher mark. If you want to improve it later… and if you have time… then go ahead, but why don’t we just focus on the next assignment now, and not fall behind again.

It sounds like easy advice to give, but to a perfectionist kid, this is hard work. What’s even harder though is expecting that you can bring your ‘A’ game to everything you do. Because this isn’t just debilitating as a student, it’s hard as an adult too.

When you’ve got more tasks on your ‘to do’ list than you can achieve; when email seems insurmountable; when meetings fill your schedule; and when getting one task done is taking time away from two or more other tasks, well then bringing your ‘A’ game is impossible. Sometimes you have to just embrace you ‘B’ game and give everything you do just enough to get it done… and save your ‘A’ game only for things that really matter.

Speed and collar colour

Leave a reply

Two things are happening simultaneously.

First, the advancements we see in AI are moving at an exponential rate. Humans don’t really understand how to look at exponential growth because everything in front of them moves faster than what they’ve already experienced.

How many years did it take from the time light bulbs were invented until they were in most houses? I don’t know, but it took a long while. Chat GPT was used by over 100 million people in less than 2 months. And the ability of tools like this are increasing in ability exponentially as well. It’s like we’ve gone warp speed from tungsten and incandescent lights to LED’s in a matter of months rather than years and years.

The other thing happening right now is that for the first time at scale, it’s white collar, not blue collar jobs that are being threatened. Accountants, writers, analysts, coders, are all looking over their shoulder wondering when AI will make most of their jobs redundant. Meanwhile, we are many years away from a robot trying to figure out and repair a bathroom or ceiling leak. Sure, there will be some new tools to help, but I don’t think a plumbing home repair person is something AI is threatening to replace any time soon.

These two things happening so quickly are going to change the future value in careers. Whole sectors will be reinvented. New sectors will emerge. But where does that leave the 20-year accountant in a large firm that finds it can cut staffing by 2/3rds? What careers are not going to be worth going to university for 4+ years for? The safest jobs right now are the trades, and while they too will be challenged as we get AI into autonomous humanoid robots, the immediate threat seen in white collar jobs are not the same for blue collar professions (as opposed to blue collar factory workers, who are equally threatened by exponential changes).

These changes are single-digit years as opposed to decades away… and I’m not sure we are ready to handle the speed at which these changes are coming?

Chess puzzles

Leave a reply

A few birthdays ago my youngest got me a Chess.com membership for my birthday. I’ve kept it up although I don’t play a lot of full games. I do have a student that challenges me occasionally, and he’s up 11 games to 10 against me. But mostly I do puzzles.

Chess is an amazing game of strategy and I’m blown away when I watch masters play. I can’t see 3 moves ahead much less 8, 10, or 14. For me, even knowing puzzles can usually be solved in 3 or 4 moves, I often end up making an error along the way.

I often have to click the ‘Analysis’ button, after solving a puzzle with an error along the way, to figure out why my error would not have worked. Even when I do get all the moves right, it doesn’t mean I saw the moves in advance. I’ll often try a move that to me makes the most sense, but not see the full solution yet.

But I do love the challenge, and I like that I can try a puzzle and I’m usually at the solution in less than 2 minutes. That’s more fun than a game that spans days, especially when I’m not making moves during the work day… so puzzles are my thing. I’m not necessarily good at them, but I’m slowly getting better.

Don’t believe the hype

Leave a reply

The open source DeepSeek AI model has been built my the Chinese for a few million dollars, and it seems this model works better than the multi-billion dollar paid version of Chat GPT (at about 1/20th the operating cost). If you watch the news hype, it’s all about how Nvidia and other tech companies have taken a huge financial hit as investors realize that they don’t ‘need’ the massive computing power they thought they did. However, to put this ‘massive hit’ into perspective let’s look at the biggest stock market loser yesterday, Nvidia.

Nvidia has lost 13.5% in the last month, most of which was lost yesterday.

However, if you zoom out and look at Nvidia’s stock price for the last year, they are still up 89.58%!

That’s right, this ‘devastating loss’ is actually a blip when you consider how much the stock has gone up in the last year, even when you include yesterday’s price ‘dive’. If you bought $1,000 of Nvidia stock a year ago, that stock would be worth $1,895.80 today.

Beyond that, the hype is that Nvidia won’t get the big orders they thought they would get, if an open source LLM (Large Language Model) is going to make efficient, affordable access to very intelligent AI, without the need for excessive computing power. But this market is so new, and there is so much growth potential. The cost of the technology is going down and luckily for Nvidia, they produce such superior chips that even if there is a slow down in demand, the demand will still be higher than their supply will allow.

I’m excited to try DeepSeek (I’ve tried signing up a few times but can’t get access yet). I’m excited that an open source model is doing so well, and want to see how it performs. I believe the hype that this model is both very good and affordable. But I don’t believe the hype that this is some sort of game-changing wake up call for the industry.

We are still moving towards AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, and ASI – Super Intelligence. Computing power will still be in high demand. Every robot being built now, and for decades to come, will need high powered chips to operate. DeepSeek has provided an opportunity for a small market correction but it’s not an innovation that will upturn the industry. This ‘devastating’ stock price losses the media is talking about is going to be an almost unnoticeable blip in stock prices when you look at the tech stock prices a year or 5 years from now.

It is easy to get lost in the hype, but zoom out and there will be hundreds of both little and big innovations that will cause fluctuations in stock market prices. This isn’t some major market correction. It’s not the downfall of companies like Nvidia and Open AI. Instead, it’s a blip in a fast-moving field that will see some amazing, and exciting, technological advances in the years to come… and that’s not just hype.

Propaganda machines

Leave a reply

It is fascinating to see Americans on TikTok discuss their experiences on the app RedNote. The main things that they are surprised about are related to learning more about other cultures, (particularly the American and Chinese), and seeing how the ‘others’ live. The Americans are shocked by things like grocery prices and the fact that America is one of the only countries in the world where medical bills can bankrupt you.

I lived in China for 2 years. I saw the way that country has embraced a form of capitalism that is tiered to markets in a way that wouldn’t work in many other parts of the world. While there I could walk into an almost empty, expensive mall where the purchase of one item would pay the salary of the three employees in the store for the entire day. I could then walk out of the mall into an outdoor market where I could buy much cheaper but still good quality knockoffs of the same items in the expensive stores. And then in the back alleys less than a block away are the cheap buyer-beware knockoffs and trinkets where you can get affordable items for any budget, but the quality is very suspect and you need to be savvy about purchases.

But rich or poor, there are places for any Chinese citizen to find items they can afford. And while there is a definite hierarchical class structure, with ‘haves and have-nots’, the vast majority of the have-nots are way better off than a significant number of people here in the Western world that live below the poverty line.

The fascination I have watching these Americans is that they are, in rather large numbers, recognizing that other countries are not the only ones that spit out pro-national propaganda. They are seeing with their own eyes that they are being fed propaganda too… like this TikTok post of woman reading warm new year’s wishes from a Chinese friend she met online.

There are simple kindnesses to foreigners that me and my family received in China that were totally unexpected. For instance, a young couple exiting an elevator so that my family of 4 could fit, or asking for directions and having someone walk two blocks in the opposite direction to make sure we got where we wanted to go. I generally don’t see this kind of thoughtfulness to strangers here in the West.

China is a socialist country with some odd rules, but it’s also one of the most capitalistic countries I’ve ever visited. The people do the best they can within the governing rules of their society, just like most Americans. And people coming together on an app and learning about each others cultures are a way of breaking down propaganda barriers that are put up to villainize or to ‘other’ countries that are seen as economic enemies.

Here is another TikTok where a comment by a Chinese RedNote user is being read aloud, sharing his view of America after spending time getting to know them on the app. I’ve seen dozens of videos similar to the four I’ve shared here. Most of them are from shocked Americans realizing, for the first time, that they have been living under a façade of American exceptionalism.

In short, this Chinese run App is breaking down cultural biases and introducing a more global perspective between two cultures that have been fed miss-and-disinformation about each other. The propaganda machines are falling apart, and world views are becoming a little more worldly.

To Prove or Improve?

Leave a reply

It was a simple question asked in a meeting of BC online schools.

“Are we using data to prove or to improve?”

Is it about accountability or improvement? What does the data teach us about our practice? How does it affect our future outcomes and where we focus our support and funding?

What is the real value of collecting data, and how is it best used to inform our practice?

The false AGI threshold

Leave a reply

I think a very conservative prediction would be that we will see Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) in the next 5 years. In other words, there will be AI agents, working with recursive self-improvement, that will learn how to do new tasks outside the realm of its training, faster than a human could. But when this actually happens will be open for debate.

The reason for this is that there isn’t going to be some magical threshold that AGI suddenly passes, but rather a continuous moving of the bar that defines what AGI is. There will be a working definition of AGI that puts up an artificial threshold, then an AGI model will achieve that definition and experts will admit that this model surpasses that definition, but will still think the model lacks some sufficient skills or expected outputs to truly call it AGI.

And so over the next 5 years or so we will have far more sophisticated AI models, all doing things that today we would define as AGI but will not meet the newest definition. The thing is that these moving goal posts will not be adjusted incrementally but rather exponentially. What that means is that the newer definition of AGI is going to include significantly greater output expectations. Then looking back, we will be hard pressed to say “this model’ was the one or ‘this day’ was the day that we achieved AGI.

Sometime soon there will be an AI model put out into the world that will build its own AI agent that starts a billion dollar company without the aid of a human… but that might happen even before consensus that AGI has been achieved. There will be an AI agent that costs lives or endangers lives with its decisions made in the real world, but that too might happen before consensus that AGI has been achieved.

Because the goal posts will keep moving while the technology is on an exponential curve, we are not going to have a magic threshold day when AGI occurred. Instead, in less than 5 years, well before 2030, we are going to be looking back in amazement wondering when we passed the threshold? But make no mistake, that’s going to happen and we don’t have an on/off switch to stop it when it does. This is both exciting and scary.

‘unable to distinguish’

Leave a reply

Carl Sagan wrote, ‘The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark’ in 1996, almost 30 years ago. When I read this quote from the book it really resonated with me. Carl Sagan saw what was coming.

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”

The line, “unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true”, seems to me the most chilling insight. It’s like gut instinct, a failing intuition, and biased sources of information all get weighed heavier than fact… and truth is a construct people create in their minds. The capital ‘T’ Truth seems to be constantly up for debate, and somehow a well researched theory loses validity when it is contrasted by conspiratorial ‘facts’ shared on social media with a little background, spooky mood music. As if these two sources of information deserve equal consideration.

Here’s a news flash… they don’t. And the fact that so many people are unable to distinguish the difference is both alarming and scary.

First Choice, or Last Resort

Leave a reply

As the principal of our district online school I hear a lot of stories about kids not wanting to attend school anymore, and so they are looking to try online learning. A former, retired principal of a nearby online school, Brad Hutchinson, had a quote about this. He said that, “Online learning is a school of first choice and last resort.”

When a student takes an online course because they want to: they want to upgrade, or they want to create room in their school schedule for another elective, then our success rates are very good. When a student comes to us as a last resort because nothing else is working for them, our success rates are awful.

It’s so hard as a principal. Every time they come as a last resort they, or their parents, believe this is the best choice. But a kid who won’t attend school, or won’t do work for a teacher who is right in front of them, is very unlikely to do school for a teacher that is on the other end of an online course, and not in their faces reminding them of the work that needs to be done.

We try. We offer supports. We even occasionally see some initial results. Then we don’t see anything. Another powerful quote about online learning came from a former ministry employee, Tim Winkleman, and this is one that I say a lot, “No pace is not a pace.”

When nothing is being done, when students choose not to proceed, or feel they can’t, then that’s simply not progress. It’s hard to be a school of last resort where regular attendance is not expected. It’s hard to see students give up on trying when they feel like this is their last chance to find success in school. It’s also really hard to tell a kid or a parent who is desperate to avoid other school options that this is a bad option to try.

There have to be some better last resort options out there for kids who struggle to attend school regularly… I just don’t know what those options are?