Author Archives: David Truss

Agency, not information

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One of my favourite quotes comes from Derek Sivers,

“If more information was the answer, then we’d all be billionaires with perfect abs.“

I was reminded of this in a video shared with me yesterday morning, “Can Paper Stop Tyrants?“. In it the vlogger, Tad Stoermer, shares:

“Too many people are still talking as if words act on their own; As if law acts on its own; As if constitutions act on their own; As if conventions just magically act on their own. They don’t, people act…”

He sees the futility in people waiting for action against tyranny… which simply is not coming. Then he continues with something he was told by European literary scholar, Dr. Julia Holloway:

“Evil continues when people convince themselves that stopping it is somebody else’s job… What is missing in our time is not information, it’s agency. It’s the capacity to see suffering as real, and then understand that action is required. Her point was that a culture that devalues the humanities also devalues the habits of empathy and moral imagination that make action possible.”

We seem to live in an era of outrage, whereby there is some expectation that outrage itself is action. “Can you believe this is happening?” is not a statement that prevents something from happening at that point, or in the future. Yet, that seems to be the stance most people hold.

Outrage without action is a loud but impotent form of acceptance. 

It holds no agency, and does not promote change. When conventions are broken, it’s easy to be upset, but conventions are only conventions because good people hold them up as such… and it’s that ‘holding them up’ that just isn’t happening.

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*Update: I read this by Chris Williamson after posting, and it seems too fitting with this post not to share:

“The gap between words and actions has never been bigger.

You can be the least virtuous, meanest, most dishonest human on earth, but if you say the right things on social media, the world will be unaware.

No one stress tests the words coming out of most people’s mouths.

Which means that appearing good becomes more important than being good.

Performative empathy is more rewarded than genuine empathy.

Posting about mistreated groups is more incentivised than helping mistreated groups.

Words have become more important than actions, because you can tweet the words without needing to do the actions.

It’s the path of least resistance for everyone.

This isn’t me saying that you can’t do good whilst posting about it online.

But that many (maybe even most?) of the people who proselytise about how virtuous and caring they are, and how it’s everyone else who is evil/malignant/the enemy, are allowing their morality to stand on the shoulders of limited scrutiny.

Beware the people who only say good things, but don’t do good things.“

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Way more Waymo

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Here is a statistic from the company Waymo:

“In less than two years, the company’s average weekly paid robotaxi trips have grown tenfold, from 50,000 per week in May 2024 to 500,000 per week today.” Source: Waymo’s skyrocketing ridership in one chart

This is amazing growth. It’s not an isolated statistic. We are seeing this kind of growth in robotic focused manufacturing, and we are seeing it in the use of AI to do many jobs that humans used to do.

Are we ready for this? Are we ready for the gig economy to be eaten up by automation? Are we ready for not just blue collar but also white collar jobs to dwindle as AI takes over these jobs at an exponential rate? Are we ready for AI teachers, AI servants, AI drivers, AI delivery, AI accountants, AI lawyers, AI programmers, and AI in fields we thought would always need humans in them? Are we ready for way more of this kind of Waymo growth occurring simultaneously across many sectors?

We aren’t ready. Yet this is coming our way. It’s that simple.

Our responses in each case will be reactionary. For every current Waymo passenger there are probably a few potential customers thinking, ‘That’s scary, I’m not ready to put my life in the hands of a robot driver on the highway or the busy streets of downtown at rush hour.’ But those stats will dwindle. For every worker who thinks, ‘My job is safe, they’ll always need me,’ there are others who thought the same just a few years ago, and they are now looking for a job, often in a different sector than what they’ve been in.

Yes, there are limitations to this growth in some sectors. Yes, new jobs may come up that are uniquely human in nature. Yes, there are yet unharnessed opportunities for people to make a greater income (with less effort) in areas that they would not have imagined just a few months ago. It’s not all doom and gloom… but make no mistake, the exponential growth of AI powered advances will be drastically affecting all of our everyday lives sooner than most people realize. Waymo’s growth is emblematic of the kind of growth we will see in almost every aspect of our lives.

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Update: This video on LinkedIn is worth sharing here.

Turn your BS Detector fully on

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I remember when I used to look to the news for objective truth. I believed the role of a reporter was capital ‘T’ Truth, and their job was to remove as much bias as possible. I’m not sure if that ever existed, but we are now at a point where that idea is dead and buried. It seems like every news outlet is intentionally choosing a biased starting point before reporting what they share.

Maybe this isn’t new, but the level to which this seems obvious right now is alarming. One of the problems is the willingness of politicians and even executives to blatantly lie. Because then even the choice to be objective and just share the news becomes a choice to share misinformation. If a newscast willingly shares a quote that is an obvious lie or exaggeration, and does not share commentary on the lie, then ultimately they are promoting the lie.

We know from research that hearing wrong information repeatedly will make us more likely to believe it. So even a ‘non-biased’ reporting of misinformation is a kind of dose of that misinformation seeping into our brains as a potential truth. And so we are being hit with misinformation in two different ways. The first is intentional: overly biased news that fully intends to sway our opinion. The second is an attempt at being non-biased but ultimately sharing lies.

What we are left with is a need to have our bullshit detectors fully on at all times. I’m frequently left wondering if something is true or not? If the repotting is based or not? I often get my news from social media, and I end up having to spend time verifying the source or confirming the information shared. Just yesterday I saw some outlandish quotes that I thought were satire, and when I went to the actual source, I found out they were true. In this case it was the message and not the reporting that was outlandish. In other cases it’s not necessarily a misquote, but a real quote taken out of context. And then there are outright intentional lies being created and shared.

To me, this loss of trust in news media is scary. I am left wondering how many people actually take the time to check sources, rather than just believe the news that fits their narrative and beliefs, and discredit things that don’t fit with their beliefs? We seem to be in a sort of post Truth era where we either question and verify everything we hear, or we just accept that news is just a fiction dancing around the truth.

It leaves me feeling like I’ve got to keep my BS detectors fully on at all times.

Meaning in the Universe

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I love this quote by Brian Cox,

There’s only one interesting question in philosophy. The interesting question is, what does it mean to live a finite, fragile life in an infinite, eternal universe? I think the answer is, paradoxically, whilst we are definitely physically insignificant, I’ve just said that the Earth is one planet, around one star, amongst 400 billion stars, in one galaxy amongst two trillion galaxies, in a small patch of the universe, right?

So we’re definitely small, you can’t argue with that, we’re just specks of dust. But if you think about what we are, we’re just collections of atoms. Our bodies were made in stars, right? So it’s all cooked over billions of years. And we’re in this pattern that can think, you have a means by which the universe understands and explores itself, which is us. And that sounds unlikely when you put it like that, that you can have a few things that were cooked in the hearts of stars, you stick them together in a pattern and suddenly it has some ideas and starts writing music.

There aren’t any other worlds where this happened, certainly in our galaxy. So it could be that this planet, notwithstanding its physical insignificance, is the only place where anything thinks.

Think about it… think about consciousness and thinking… without thought the entire universe has no meaning. And so, while we live on an insignificant planet, in an insignificant solar system, in an insignificant galaxy, in an insignificant part of the universe… we might also be the only significant part of all existence, or at the very least, in our own, known part of the universe.

We are simultaneously insignificant and potentially the most significant thing in the universe. Without consciousness there is no meaning to the universe, and while there might be a lot of evidence of life beyond our solar system, there is no guarantee the these other life forms have achieved the level of consciousness of humans.

This makes me question my own assumptions about consciousness and free will. I’ve previously said in my post, ‘Consciousness and Free Will’:

1. I don’t think consciousness is fundamental.
And;
2. Consciousness comes from an excess of processing time.

But maybe my first premise doesn’t need to be true for my second one to be true. Maybe consciousness is fundamental, but we need excess processing time in order to tap into it?

Maybe consciousness is essential to the existence of the universe, because without it, why should the universe even exist? If that question doesn’t create at least a little existential angst, I’m not sure what would?

Are we beings that became conscious so that we can add meaning to the entire universe, or is the universe somehow dependent on consciousness and we are simply living beings capable of tapping into this on some fuzzy frequency? A fuzzy frequency which also clouds our minds with a desire to seek beliefs that make sense of a consciousness far too great for us to truly understand?  Be it religion or physics, we are meaning seekers, and we might just be the most important meaning seekers in the entire universe.

 

The corner staircase

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I’ve always had this vision of building my own house. I have no experience with architecture, I struggle to build IKEA furniture, and lack basic handyman skills… but I’ve always wanted to design my own dream home. One feature I envision is a staircase in an all-glass corner of the house. It’s kind of a double spiral staircase, and it is designed such that both at the top and the bottom, you walk towards the corner to go both up and down the stairs, and they turn at the halfway point. At the top, you just walk towards the corner and then have a choice of turning either to the left or right. Essentially, you go down about 5 or six steps to a landing where the spiral splits both ways, going away from the corner and along the side walls.

At the bottom of the steps, the first 2 steps create a half circle or crescent, going completely across the corner. Then the stairs spiral left or right with a railing that is only about 6 inches above and behind the second step at the center, and then spirals up with the steps to railing hight by the 4th or 5th step. This creates an empty space on the inside of the spiral, behind the first 2 steps. In this space, underneath the stairs that are coming  down from the floor above, there is a waterfall and then a fish pond in the void behind the spirals.

One more feature is that the wall behind the waterfall has 2 possible positions, one is just less than 90º and the other is just a bit more than 90º. This allows the waterfall to either be a true falls, with water splashing as it lands in the pond, or it can be subtle with water silently sliding down the wall into the pond. So, it’s a wonderful, natural background noise when you want it, but also a subtle trickle when you’d like quiet.

I’ve tried drawing it, but can’t seem to get it right. The AI image I created here is a start of the idea, although not completely what I envision. I’ve tried many times to tweak this image, or use other tools, but I lack the descriptive skills to really get what I want. Still, this would be one feature I’d love to have if I was ever given the chance to design my own house.

Reimagining Schools

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Since November I’ve been connecting, every few weeks, with Will Richardson and a group of educational leaders from around BC, Canada in a professional development session run by the BCPVPA (BC Principals and Vice Principals Association) called ‘Reimagining Schools: Confronting Education‘. Right off the bat, Will shared some framings:

• Everything is nature
• We’re not facing “problems” to be solved. We are in a predicament.
• Our predicament stems from the fact that we are out of relationship with each other and all living things on the planet. All of our challenges flow from this disconnect.
• Education is complicit in creating these challenges.
• Collapse is not new. What’s new is that systemic privilege is no longer a buffer.
• Our personal challenge is to face reality or “sit with the shit” and not run from complex, difficult questions.

There are a few deep thoughts that have brewed from these sessions, and yet oddly enough the two most impactful things came from outside the sessions.

First a conflict within me. Will shared a post on LinkedIn where he said,

“I think it’s telling that for all of the conferences and presentations and talks and essays and “achievements” that people post and discuss here, only about 2% of them seem to make any note of the fact that they are happening while:

~ecological limits are being breached
~social trust is eroding
~ AI is reshaping cognition
~ politics are destabilizing
~ inequality is deepening
~ biodiversity is declining at alarming rates

I mean, without using those contexts as a lens for our gatherings or our teaching or writing, what is the actual relevance that we can claim, not just around education, but around living life on the planet in general?

It’s either denial or ignorance. Or maybe it’s concern that if we ground our work in those lenses, no one will show up or read or listen…”

I commented:

“I’d push back a bit and ask what is the conference about?

There’s a cognitive dissonance that is invited when the mind has to weigh these things AND also take in information that people are going to a conference to learn about.

I’m seeing your question play out on social media where people are being called out for not being political and sharing their political stance… on a channel where politics is never discussed.

There needs to be a balance, we can’t stick our head in the sand, but we also can’t pretend (and I do intentionally mean pretend) that acknowledging major issues of global concern are equivalent to somehow authentically addressing them… and topically addressing them when our topic isn’t directly affected by them is to me worse than not mentioning them. It can be a distraction without gain to the intended message.”

Will responded:

“Dave Truss So, I’ll push back a bit on the push back. 🤣

I don’t think it’s a “calling out” as much as it is a reminder. And I don’t disagree that just naming them authentically “addresses” them, but it does provide a different lens for whatever question is in front of us at that moment. Every topic is affected by them. Every one.

Modernity wants to separate everything out into pieces and ignore the interconnectedness of the whole. This is the world we live in right now. It’s all entangled.”

The comment conversation continued, and is worth reading, but doesn’t add to my conflicted feelings about this. On the one hand I completely agree with Will, if we aren’t bringing a contextual lens to what we are sharing, we are somehow missing the interconnectedness of some of the things we should most value and care about. But on the other hand, I’m sitting in a place right now where just two days ago I wrote about being ‘Intentionally disconnected‘ because paying attention to the rather disturbing world events right now feels like too much. I ended the post saying, “for now I lack the capacity to engage. It seems like a futile activity that will anger and upset me, with no gain. It is rare for me to actively choose to be uninformed, but right now is one of those times.”

Therein lies the conflict. I agree with Will, yet I don’t think I’m the only one who isn’t ready to face the harsh realities of the predicaments we are in… especially when I’m trying to learn something new. I think for our students it’s the same. The last of the framings above is, ‘Our personal challenge is to face reality or “sit with the shit” and not run from complex, difficult questions.”

I get it, I really do. But when I’m at a conference or when a student sits in a class, do we really need to ‘sit in it’? Do we need to connect everything we do to the predicaments we live in? Do we need this lens to permeate what we are learning? If I channel my inner Will Richardson I think I’d ask myself, ‘But what value is the learning if it isn’t addressing the predicaments we are in?’ … Again, I’m left conflicted.

For example, can I teach students about using AI in an ethical way and not mention the cost of the energy drain? Is mentioning this once enough or should that be the bigger lesson? Do I need to bring the dire state of the world into every lesson, predicament after predicament? Is this even healthy? Maybe I’m just too stuck in the current educational context to see the bigger picture? I really don’t think that these sessions answered this for me, and yet I feel I have a deeper understanding of the need to confront hard truths… and ensure that what we choose to teach be taught with a lens of a world in environmental, political, and social challenges. Will shared the following quote in one of our sessions:

“If we fully accept the world as it is—in all its harsh realities— then we can develop the very qualities we need to be in that world and not succumb to that harshness. We find our courage, morality, and gentle, nonaggressive actions by clear seeing and acceptance. As we accept what is, we become people who stand in contrast to what is, freed from the aggression, grasping and confusion of this time. With that clarity, we can contribute things of eternal importance no matter what’s going on around us—how to live exercising our best human qualities, and how to support others to discover these qualities in themselves.”
~ Margaret Wheatley “So Far From Home”

The second insight I’d like to share came after our first session. Will invited any of us who could stay on to do so. During that after-session conversation I mentioned that I was retiring. The topic of my school, Inquiry Hub, came up and I mentioned that I was proud of what our team has been able to do, transforming the learning outside of the traditional high school box. And yet, I was disappointed that our little school has not had a greater impact on the rest of the district. Will responded saying something like, ‘Dave, if you were able to do that, you would be a unicorn because I haven’t seen that happen yet.’

That simple statement had an unburdening effect on me. It is sad, yet it comforted me. For the past 13 years my small team of teachers and I have created a very special place for self-directed learners to have some true agency over what they are learning, while still providing an opportunity for them to meet all the requirements they need for their post high school ambitions. It has been an amazing ride, and the fact that it didn’t really spread beyond our walls isn’t something that should weigh on me as I head into retirement. The test of my leadership will show if the school thrives after I’m gone.

Overall, I really enjoyed the sessions with Will, and with the other educational leaders from across BC. I appreciated the experience of sitting in the discomfort of knowing things must change in education and sitting in the predicament rather than cherrypicking shallow solutions and discussing them like we were solving all the world’s problems. I encourage educators to follow Will on his journey to confront education and reimagine schools and join one of his cohorts of educators on similar journeys of discovery.

Is Artificial Intelligence Reducing Our Intelligence?

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Joe Truss shared a great article with me, ‘The hidden cost of letting AI make your life easier‘, by Shai Tubali on Big Think. Towards the end of the article, Shai shares this:

“[Sven Nyholm’s] deeper worry is not that AI will outperform humans, but that it will appear to do so, especially to non-expert eyes. “Current forms of AI threaten meaningful activities,” he argues, “because they look far more intelligent than they are.” This appearance invites trust. People begin to treat AI as an oracle, mistaking an impressive engineering achievement for understanding. As misplaced confidence grows, judgment weakens. Skills develop less fully. Capacities are handed over too easily, and with them, forms of meaning that depend on effort.

Nyholm links this directly to the value of processes, including confusion, detours, and lingering with complexity. He punctures the idea that everything should be fast and efficient. Speed may feel pleasant, he concedes, yet it undermines patient thinking and reconsideration. He points to an Anthropic advertisement promising a paper completed in a single day: brainstorming in the morning, drafting by noon, polishing by afternoon. What disappears in this vision is the slow work of searching, getting lost, following the wrong thread, and returning with insight. “Many ideas,” Nyholm says, “come from looking for one thing and finding something else instead.” When AI delivers tidy, unified answers, it spares us that work. In doing so, it risks weakening our capacity to break complex problems into parts, examine assumptions, and think things through with precision.”

AI reduces the productive effort and struggle that makes both learning and understanding stick. Accessing information is profoundly different than understanding information, and directs the learner towards an answer instead of a learning process. This article reinforced some ideas I’ve already shared.

In ‘Keeping the friction‘ I said, “Decreasing the challenge doesn’t foster meaningful learning. Reducing the required effort doesn’t make the learning more memorable. Encouraging deeper thinking is the goal, not doing the thinking for you.”

And in ‘What’s the real AI risk in education?‘ I said, “Real learning has a charge to it, it needs to come with some challenge, and hardship. If the learning experience is too easy, it won’t be remembered. If there isn’t enough challenge, if the answers are provided rather than constructed, the learning will soon be forgotten. Remove being stuck, struggling, and failure, and you’ve removed the greatest part of a learning experience.”

I see this in my own learning. There are times I sit and read a full article, like the one shared above, but there are other times that I don’t bother and just throw a long article into an LLM and ask for a bulleted summary of the key ideas. However, I remember articles I read far better than articles where I only read the AI summaries.

How deep would my learning and understanding be if I only went as far as to read AI summaries? How much will my confidence and my belief in understanding grow, without the depth of knowledge to support my confidence and understanding? Would I be creating a kind of false fluency in topics where I lack true depth of understanding?

The convenience of using AI might not just be changing how we learn, it might be changing what we believe learning is… Perceiving learning as having access to information rather than having a deep understanding of a topic that needed to wrestle with to be truly understood. In this way, the convenience of using AI to think for us might just be reducing our intelligence.

Appreciate the tiny wins

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Tiny wins are often hard to see. They don’t seem significant, but they accumulate.

James Clear explains in Atomic Habits that 1% better daily will compound into becoming 37 times better in a year.

You don’t go heavier on a lift in the gym, but you eke out a couple extra reps.

You walk into a coffee shop and get right to the counter before a rush of people that have to line up behind you.

You hit almost every green light on your way home from work.

You actually enjoy a meal that sounds too healthy to be tasty.

You write a single sentence and suddenly your muse has arrived.

We don’t always see them, we rarely celebrate them, but the tiny little things that we can choose to pay attention to and appreciate can be the highlight of the day… or the precursor to more wins, big and small, in the future.

What’s the real AI risk in education?

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I read a great article on LinkedIn by Ken Shelton. He looked at two articles:

“On one side:
AI as productivity infrastructure.
On the other:
AI as compliance enforcement.

But in both cases, the conversation centers on efficiency and policing, not on whether learning itself has been redesigned for an AI-rich world. Using historical context, one could reasonably make similar arguments around the implementation of technology as well. If students are learning to “sound human” to avoid detection…If institutions are investing in increasingly sophisticated surveillance tools…If teachers are primarily using AI to move faster within the same structures…Then we have to ask, as I have shared in previous posts:

Are we adapting learning?
Or are we simply optimizing and defending legacy systems?”

I found his article more interesting than the two he shared. I especially loved his final paragraph:

“The risk isn’t just that AI is moving too fast. The risk is that our response remains reactive, oscillating between efficiency and enforcement, without addressing purpose, power, and pedagogy. Therefore, the real inflection point isn’t technological, it’s analytical and philosophical.”

My thoughts: In education, go ahead and use AI to make teaching and lessons better, use it to help students learn, and also help them understand how to use AI to enrich their learning. But don’t use it to make learning easier. Real learning has a charge to it, it needs to come with some challenge, and hardship. If the learning experience is too easy, it won’t be remembered. If there isn’t enough challenge, if the answers are provided rather than constructed, the learning will soon be forgotten. Remove being stuck, struggling, and failure, and you’ve removed the greatest part of a learning experience.

So educators need to do two things: First, they need to use AI to make what they are doing even better. And secondly, they need to shift the learning experience to one where they no longer need to worry about policing and compliance. For example: The work isn’t finished with an essay, but with students defending their points in the essay against other students with slightly different points or different perspectives. The students who wrote the essay with AI and didn’t fully comprehend the topic can’t argue their perspective as well as the ones who were willing to do the work… and if they did use AI and can then argue the points better than their peers, that only proves that they understand how to use AI as a learning tool and not a tool to do the work for them. Because the real risk of AI in education is that the AI is doing the work, the struggle, and the learning for the student.

The problem we face is how learning can be circumvented by AI. And so the challenge for educators is to make it more challenging to use AI inappropriately, and to use AI to aid in making learning experiences more challenging. This is not an easy task, but it’s one we need to figure out and do well if we want our students to be learners who will have significance in a world where AI is all around us.

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Update: Just found this LinkedIn post by William (Bill) Ferriter, and it has two awesome images to fit with the above.

Update 2: I forgot about this post: Thinking Requires Effort

“Reducing busywork, and maximizing the problem-solving time, in a community of learners who find benefit from working together, is what schools should be in service of.“

Oblivious to what’s coming

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If you talk to people about LLM’s like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Claude, you’ll still hear things like, ‘They hallucinate and will make up fake research’, and something I heard recently, ‘they actually make work harder because workers need to spend more time editing and cleaning up what they produce’. What people who say this don’t realize is that this is pre-January 2026, and we are now fully into February 2026. Yes, things are moving that fast! And furthermore, what most people, including me, have not been paying attention to is that when we use the free version of these tools, we are essentially months and months behind what the latest models can do.

Matt Shumer’s ‘Something Big Is Happening‘, was written just 4 days ago and has already been seen by millions of people. Yes, it’s a bit of a long read, but it is also a ‘must read’. Here is an excerpt:

“Dario Amodei, who is probably the most safety-focused CEO in the AI industry, has publicly predicted that AI will eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years. And many people in the industry think he’s being conservative. Given what the latest models can do, the capability for massive disruption could be here by the end of this year. It’ll take some time to ripple through the economy, but the underlying ability is arriving now.

This is different from every previous wave of automation, and I need you to understand why. AI isn’t replacing one specific skill. It’s a general substitute for cognitive work. It gets better at everything simultaneously. When factories automated, a displaced worker could retrain as an office worker. When the internet disrupted retail, workers moved into logistics or services. But AI doesn’t leave a convenient gap to move into. Whatever you retrain for, it’s improving at that too.”

I recently shared my thoughts on the upcoming ‘Fiscal year end squeeze‘, where I said, “Corporations care about pleasing shareholders and maintaining stock value over caring for the people who work for them. This is the ugly side of capitalism. Eliminate thousands of salaries and suddenly the balance sheet proves to be more profitable. Never mind that these are people’s careers and livelihood that are being cut short. And never mind about loyalty to the company.” What I’m realizing now, after reading Matt’s article, is that the situation is far worse than I thought, because AI is coming after not just these jobs, but almost every other jobs these newly unemployed people will be looking for.

If I was out of a job right now, what I’d be doing is paying the monthly fees for the 2-3 best AI models out there and learning how to power use them. I wouldn’t be looking for a job, I’d be trying to find a niche where I could work for myself, or maybe become a contractor doing things for people who don’t realize that AI is good enough to get the work done faster than they can do it. Because the reality is that the vast majority of people in the world are oblivious to just how fast this disruption is coming, and unlike other disruptions in the past this one is going to happen everywhere and all at once. Most people can’t fathom how disruptive this will be, and even as I share this as a warning… I’m not sure I fully grasp the full impact either.