@Princeton alum. @USMC vet (0311/8154). Con law nerd. Writing specialist. Em dash fan—before Nov '22. Je pratique mon français tlj. Views my own. RT≠endorse.
Orange County, CA
Joined April 2021
- Tweets254
- Following947
- Followers62
- Likes779
Xander de los Reyes retweeted
This shouldn't be unexpected in a well-functioning world, but it seems noteworthy that not only were the mid-term elections held, but they were administered without major incident, and the lopsided results are apparently not being questioned by those on the losing side of it.
Xander de los Reyes retweeted
The First Monday of October—which is tomorrow—is a good time to remember the importance of state courts and state constitutions. For most Americans, state courts—not the Supreme Court of the United States (or other federal courts)—are where they will experience justice firsthand.
If you’re interested in learning more about state judicial systems, please follow the National Center for State Courts at @StateCourts.
Xander de los Reyes retweeted
This is actually really bad for the justice system
Lindsay Clancy holdout juror shares pictures of himself with newborn daughter - as his fundraiser tops $350,000 trib.al/7Qs2Ngh
Xander de los Reyes retweeted
A lot of despair in this good article. From many academic voices.
"I believe that students need to practice putting their thoughts in an essay—they need the friction and difficulty of putting words together and learning how to think." Right, "friction" is a good term here.
As more and more students begin using A.I. to complete assignments, professors across the country are changing their approach—and losing their hope. “My emotional response to all this is hard to describe, something between disgust and despair,” a history professor writes. “Was it always the case that half of our students would cheat if it were easy enough?” Jay Caspian Kang collects testimonials from 12 faculty members from across the country on how A.I. usage in the classroom has changed their work. Read them here: newyorkermag.visitlink.me/Pc…
Xander de los Reyes retweeted
If you know what you want to say but you "just can't express it," then you do not in fact know what you want to say. The knowing is the saying. This is the most basic lesson of good writing, and it is why the act is so alternately frustrating and rewarding.
Xander de los Reyes retweeted
Fn. 51 is horrifying, but IMO worse is the actual text of this paragraph. It's dangerously unprofessional judicial writing (see article linked below). "[A]ny boomer watching cable news knows…"—why should an article III judge ever signal out a sector of his fellow citizens as ignorant.
Xander de los Reyes retweeted
i'm sure the ability to fabricate convincing historical footage that eventually drifts across the internet, where it's picked up by people who present them as real, at a time when trust in educational and media institutions is already eroding, will prove to be a net positive
Xander de los Reyes retweeted
I think the fundamental disconnect here is that you wants politics to solve man's search for meaning and I want politics to deliver a prosperous, safe, free society in which everyone can go find meaning in something other than politics.
Xander de los Reyes retweeted
No conservative could possibly have come up with a self-parody of the left this good. College Democrats invite an openly socialist China simp as a speaker, and he shows up in a commie suit. Incredible.
Dressed like Mao and talking about how much he hates the majority of Democrats as an invited guest of @CollegeDems. Our party having a normal one.
Xander de los Reyes retweeted
“One, if by land, and two, if by sea.”
On this night 251 years ago, two men climbed Old North Church's steeple. They held high two lanterns as a signal from Paul Revere that the British were heading to Concord via the Charles River.
Their famous “one if by land, two if by sea” warning ignited the American Revolution.
ALT A photo of two lanterns shining from Old North Church's steeple in Boston.
Xander de los Reyes retweeted
Not sure how I missed this Trump insanity.
Xander de los Reyes retweeted
There's a toxic culture coming out of the AI industry that keeps trying to get us not to think.
The message is everywhere. Don’t read the code, just vibe-code. Don’t try to understand all the text, just let AI summarize it. Don’t bother educating yourself, it’s too late.
Don’t worry about the errors. Trust that everything will be fixed in the next version.
The theme is the same. Don’t think too hard. Just keep swallowing the slop.
Xander de los Reyes retweeted
A very good decision. Students do not abandon their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse gate.
Instead, disagreement is an opportunity for education, not a pretext for censorship -- even at a young age.
Xander de los Reyes retweeted
Teachers and parents: if you know anyone on a curriculum selection committee, please send them this tweet, ask them to choose book-and-paper oriented curricula.
Thank you @karenvaites
Paging educators 🚩🚩🚩
This is the second time in 2 weeks that @JonHaidt has called to get Ed Tech out of classrooms by September:
"I hope that many elementary schools will remove devices by Sept., or create an analog path for parents who want that. Let's see if kids do better with books and paper"
Haidt drove the cell phone ban legislation. What are the odds his words carry in a similar fashion?
Are we doing enough to signal this shift to districts?
1/2
Xander de los Reyes retweeted
I just gave a closed-book, pen-and-paper midterm exam in my 300-level course at UBC with 100 students. All exams were graded by an experienced graduate-level TA according to a rubric.
*** The average was 64/100.***
My class averages at UBC are usually 80-85.
Context:
• This was the first midterm, covering ONLY 4 weeks of material.
• Students had a list of possible questions in advance: no surprise questions.
• Questions included (a) 3 concept definitions, (b) 3 paragraph-long questions, and (c) a 1.5-page essay.
• I have taught this class multiple times. Nothing in my teaching style changed this semester.
• We read entire paragraphs of text in class, so students don't have to do something on their own that wasn't covered during the lecture.
• Students take a 10-question multiple-choice quiz at the end of every class (30% of the final grade).
• Attendance is 95-99% every class. Attention during lectures and participation in pair-work activities are very high → anticipating the end-of-class quiz.
*** But unfortunately, I suspect many students are not reading the material on the syllabus. They are asking LLMs to summarize it instead.***
After the midterm, students reported:
• They thought they knew concept definitions but couldn't produce them on paper.
• They thought they understood the arguments but struggled to connect them or identify points of agreement and disagreement.
My view:
It might be “cool” or “innovative” to teach students to summarize readings with ChatGPT or write essays with Claude. But we may be doing them a disservice: reducing their ability to retain material, think creatively, and reason from what they know. If you only read what AI has summarized for you, you don’t truly "know" the material.
Moving forward:
We have a second midterm coming up. I don't know how to convey to students that the best way to do better on the exam is to rely on and improve their own reading skills.
Ezra Klein: "Having AI summarize a book or paper for me is a disaster.
It has no idea what I really wanted to know and wouldn't have made the connections I would've made. I'm interested in the thing I will see that other people wouldn't have seen, and I think AI typically sees what everybody else would see.
I'm not saying that AI can't be useful, but I'm pretty against shortcuts.
And obviously, you have to limit the amount of work you're doing. You can't read literally everything. But in some ways, I think it's more dangerous to think you've read something that you haven't than to not read it at all.
I think the time you spend with things is pretty important."
@ezraklein
Xander de los Reyes retweeted
Education is habituation/formation; you can't offload it. No one thinks AI can lift weights for you. Similarly, it cannot develop a mind for you. Sadly, we have an education system that has forgotten this, that has made itself transactional, narrowly focused on credentials.
Ezra Klein: "Having AI summarize a book or paper for me is a disaster.
It has no idea what I really wanted to know and wouldn't have made the connections I would've made. I'm interested in the thing I will see that other people wouldn't have seen, and I think AI typically sees what everybody else would see.
I'm not saying that AI can't be useful, but I'm pretty against shortcuts.
And obviously, you have to limit the amount of work you're doing. You can't read literally everything. But in some ways, I think it's more dangerous to think you've read something that you haven't than to not read it at all.
I think the time you spend with things is pretty important."
@ezraklein
Xander de los Reyes retweeted
In my 3rd week at Princeton, I had a take-home, self-timed math quiz. I didn't finish & turned in a half-blank sheet, convinced that most others would cheat. When it was graded, the instructor apologized because almost nobody finished. That's when I knew I was at the right place!
My personal evidence is the following. In high school, I saw plenty of cheating, never reported it. (Generally, cheaters are dumber than non-cheaters -- otherwise they wouldn't need to cheat -- and so are very easy to catch.) I saw no cheating at Princeton myself. As weak a signal as that may be, it's not nothing...
Xander de los Reyes retweeted
I’m deeply uncomfortable with this.
War is noisy, chaotic, messy, bloody, smelly and terrifying - after the event for me, rather than at the time.
When you’ve had someone’s head splashed over you, smelled the stench of someone’s flesh burning, seen corpses ripped apart and scattered across the ground, a dead persons guts spilled across the road and covered with dirt and flies…then you may realise that it’s not like a computer game, Hollywood film, or about cheering on a football team.
War is on another level. At the effects end it is serious beyond the comprehension of those who’ve not experienced it intimately.
It scars you.
When it comes to it, someone has to stand between those who would do harm and those to whom they would do it. But things that glorify war or portray it as a sport or game, as this video does, concern me.
