Cynicism is the New Reality, Education edition

 I recently found myself in the position of defending standardized tests. Well, once I take a step into that slide to the depths, I might as well start exploring. I have been thinking about education and the educational process so allow me to think out loud. If you don't allow me, I will type more quietly.

a few underlying questions -- 

why is college important

why is any formal education important or useful

how do we measure intelligence or success

I started with the issue of the random college's needing to compare students from 2 disparate locales and high schools and contended that only through their taking the same exam can they be stacked against each other. However, I realize that we are moving into a post-mandatory-standardized test era. More and more schools are making standardized tests either optional or useless (test optional vs. test free admissions) which means that the one tool through which a school can "objectively" judge and compare students is being done away with. Then I heard about this story. NOTE -- I am not linking to or invoking that story to comment on the question of quotas or affirmative action. I'm simply pointing out that high grades and standardized test scores are becoming less of a factor in college admissions. I don't know anything else about the student (recommendations, extra or co-currics, essay or whatever) just that, clearly the testing and formal education part of the record is not necessarily persuasive. [See here for a question and some stats about being rejected even with perfect scores]

Let's go back to the ending -- what do we think the role of college is. What do students ever need to learn? The three general categories are

1. skills

2. facts

3. methods

Pre-professional tracks should be hallmarked (which is now a word) by number 1 mostly and number 2 secondly. I find too many programs that are heavy on 2 and less so on 1 but I'm beyond complaining about that. Liberal arts programs are all about 3 ("critical thinking" seems to fall in that category -- the content is secondary but the approach is valued). This is not to say that critical thinking (that is, a process of questioning to develop ideas instead of memorizing ideas) is absent from other programs, but the practice of questioning is less vital in those disciplines. 

Now we have a bunch of topics to address. First, what are the skills that we want students to have when they get into the workforce, and how can we best prepare them for that. If we think that comfort relying on technology, or a sense of collaboration is important then we should train them for that and assess their competence in that area. If we think that they need to know how to compute the area of a prism, then, heck, let's teach and test that.

For the most part, workers today need the skills of a very limited set of disciplines and the only reasons we have a broad high school curriculum is either because we figure that students don't know what they want yet so they need a foundation in a variety of areas, or because the act of learning and thinking is independently important and exportable to any field. Otherwise, why did I have to take chemistry? I knew from a young age that, come hell or high water, I wasn't going into any field that required the sciences. But I had to go through 3 years of science classes in high school. And I did poorly. My college admissions chances were tainted by the lower GPA impacted by poor science skills but none of that had any effect on my success or lack thereof after college. I didn't learn any thinking skills in history class either, so even though I learned facts and names and dates, unless the need is for me to dredge up a memory of a piece of history, my time was wasted once I got into the workforce.

Am I advocating dismantling the established curriculum? Well, once we come to terms with what students need the curriculum for, we can determine whether our current approach is relevant. With the advent of various technologies, it seems less useful to force students to read books or write most anything. Does anyone discuss Pride and Prejudice on the daily? Are we jamming poetry down their throats because we want a culturally literate population or isn't that just self-fulfilling as we are requiring that they know things because other people know those things even if the things have no inherent value! I mean, what's the point of so much of what we teach if not to require that students grapple with the unfamiliar and prepare for tests and learn to communicate what they understand clearly? If it is just to be useful workers, then let's just teach skills. If it is to be thinkers, then let's value learning as a process and assess whether students can think and produce ideas. Yes, this requires memorization and immersion and a rigor which goes beyond "doing" but if that's what matters, then great.

But what do colleges want? With the elimination of mandatory standardized tests, and the knowledge that local school curricula and grading policies make comparing number grades perfectly useless, how can a college know if an applicant has whatever the "it" is that that college is looking for? Unless the college creates a local assessment, checking whether a high school student can succeed in a very particular way, what does the school use? Does playing an instrument, learning a sport, or participating in some other club really give insight into a student's ability to succeed in any school or later in life, at a job? I think not. Plenty of students pretend to be in the Finance Club or to have glamorous summer jobs to make themselves attractive but few, if any of these claims are tested by schools or the 4 years at college. The application essay is, as often as not, written by committee and the recommendations make each student out to be Gandhi, Einstein, Michael Jordan and Shakespeare. Every kid is perfect, angelic and brilliant and if the teacher can't say that, ask a different teacher or tweak the recommendation to make it so.

So let's recap. Most curricular classes in high school (and, honestly, college) are useless in that they don't generally prepare one for the real world situations that will be encountered. (the guild/internship system is more effective) The criteria by which students gain entrance to "elite" colleges are useless -- they don't really tell anyone anything about the student and are often dishonest, not comparable between applicants and not relevant. Sure, there will be a need in the future for a few highly specialized and skilled people but that cream can rise to the top in any setting. If we want students to follow their passions, and we want them to gain what they will need in the real world then we either have to take the rough and tumble approach and say that they need to learn to persevere, struggle and vanquish, so having them face rigorous classes with the specter of failure is important, or we think that they will spend their lives aided by technology, reliant on their support network and an internet of friends (look -- a new collective noun!) then we need to teach them how to succeed at that and we shouldn't hold them accountable to the base skills of foundational thinking and facts acquisition.

So either we need to double down on tradition and demand excellence in all areas, or we need to reinvent the entire educational system into either a highly focused set of courses which include real-world practice and an ignoring of anything not geared to ultimate real-world professional success or a system of courses leveraging all technology to the hilt, abandoning classical disciplinary (foundational) content and based on collaboration and general market skills that rely on the outsourcing of anything not deemed advanced enough to be worth the human's time.

And what will this do to the established system of higher education? Right now, firms and institutions hire students from Harvard not because Harvard has the best education which best prepares the students, but because Harvard started by admitting the best students in the first place. If Harvard has no way of judging the "best" anymore, then there is no reason to strive to get our children into it or other similarly selective schools, or even value a college education/degree. 

In the meanwhile, we are perpetuating a series of lies. We start children at a young age learning stuff that ultimately they won't need, so that they can get into schools that will get them into the next set of schools by teaching things they don't need and assigning high enough numbers to ensure that their reputation for warehousing excellence remains unmatched. Then the students get into and through the right colleges and into the firms that will give them the most money even if the students are not necessarily the best at what they do -- they just work at the right place and haven't gotten fired yet.

Just some songs

 I need to keep this list somewhere so I'm posting it here. You can listen to these songs if you want but you don't have to. This is for me, mostly. There is something about the mix, production, instrumentation, tone (emotion) or something else about these songs that puts them into a group.

Sole Survivor -- Asia

Turn up the Radio -- Autograph

Turn Me Loose -- Loverboy

On the Loose -- Saga

Fight the Good Fight -- Triumph

Magic Power -- Triumph

Tell Me What You Want -- Zebra

I sense that there should be a song by Survivor on here but I can't think of a fitting one.

Also, Styx could have either Fooling Yourself (Angry Young Man) or Best of Times on this list. I'm not sure.

Updates as I think of them

Vayishlach, take 1

 I need to write a dvar torah for Vayishlach and this was the first try. I don't like it so I'm just putting it here.

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As we wander through the world, we aren’t generally aware of all the impact we make on those around us for good and for bad. We serve as role models whether we want to or not, so it is important that what we impress on others is always the most positive message, and we have to be aware about how our actions can be taken and used as precedents even for the wrong things.

Ya’akov Avinu’s life is marked by deception, or at least, the use of hidden methods. He secures the birthright by impersonating his brother and he increases his flock by using a trick to impact the genetics of the sheep. Of course, this is because he is surrounded by others who also use underhanded means to get what they want. Lavan deceives him as to which daughter Ya’akov will marry first (and the two sisters conspire to keep this secret) and Rachel hides the teraphim that she took from Lavan. And yet, the meforshim work hard to recontextualize all of Ya’akov’s behaviors as defensible and hallmarks of his role as a paradigm of honesty! So he, surrounded by dishonesty and pursuing courses of honest which could be labeled as dishonest is assigned a position as the quintessence of uprightness. This makes sense as his role models (father and grandfather) each had to lie about their wives’ identities, and yet they are not accounted as liars.

This continues throughout Parshat Vayishlach. When pursued by Esav, Ya’akov presents a series of tributes but separates them to create the impression of a larger gift and appease Esav’s greed (כְּדֵי לְהַשְׂבִּיעַ עֵינָיו שֶׁל רָשָׁע according to Bereisheet Rabbah 76). He then presents children with their mothers in order to psychologically inspire the mothers (by invoking a strong maternal bond which would drive them to defend their own). At their parting, Ya’akov says he and his family are headed to Se’ir when that is not the case. What does such a constant practice of (apparent) dissembling and situational manipulation do to the children who grow up seeing it? Are they able to see the “good” in terms of motives or the underlying “honesty” which can only be discerned if one reads through the events with the lens of Ya’akov’s being an inherently truthful person?

At the time of the meeting with Esav, Re’uvein was a few days past his twelfth birthday according to the Ibn Ezra (he was born, according to the medrash Yalkut Shimoni 162, on the 14^th of Nisan 2195, with Shimon born a month and a half later, Levi 3 months after that and Yehudah, 2 months later). Six more children were born within the next 5 months so many were on the cusp of adulthood at that point, able to watch and learn from their world. But what is the next event to befall the family? The abduction of Dinah, which is resolved when Shimon and Levi take advantage of the incapacitated state of the Sh’chemite males and kill them. Even had there been no murder, the request that the males get circumcised was a trick to keep them from protecting Dinah so the other brothers could rescue her. When confronted with a challenge, the sons fall back on using deception (mirmah in 34:14), and Shimon and Levi capitalize even further on this situational manipulation and kill all the men but THIS upsets Ya’akov. There are many commentators who explain that their behavior was righteous under certain understandings but Ya’akov just sees that they took improper advantage through the deception. So while his actions need to be looked at in the most favorable light, he reacts to the killings in the most negative way, not giving his sons the benefit that is extended when understanding all of HIS actions!

There is a narrative gap – Binyamin is born (and Rachel dies) 13 years later and nothing really “happens”, but the next textual ”story” highlights another seemingly improper behavior. After Rachel dies and Re’uvein moves his father’s bed from Bilhah’s tent to Leah’s. While the text uses strong language to describe the behavior, again the commentators find ways to explain his behavior as properly motivated.

It seems that Ya’akov impacted his children at a series of formative moments. They were influenced to see that the solution to a problem was to use underhanded means and cover themselves – they sell Yoseif and lie about it to their father! Could Ya’akov have anticipated that his example would be so comprehensively followed? Maybe the lesson here is that even when our motives are proper, others can see our actions as examples which might lead to less than honorable ends.

Cultural AIppropriation

  

In 1997, there was an outcry when ad people made an a commercial in which Fred Astaire danced with a vacuum. It seems that in the real life filming event he wasn’t actually dancing with a vacuum, but with a cane (!) so people didn’t like the idea that a computer system could fabricate images. Now, in the era of deep fakes and the like, the problem has, as you might expect, disappeared. Aging and de-aging actors so that they can play other stages of life, and using CGI to insert actors who died have become acceptable ways of generating relevant cultural content. I also keep seeing ads on my various feeds for a service that can create voice-over avatars, inventing the semblance of a pretty face who can lip-sync my words.

And then I saw this https://typecast.ai/learn/ai-voice-cloner/#:~:text=AI%20can%20clone%20and%20modify,custom%20voice%20perfect%20for%20projects.

This system can, apparently, take my voice, clone it and have it say things I never said. The ethical questions are staggering:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/lanceeliot/2022/07/02/ai-ethics-starkly-questioning-human-voice-cloning-such-as-those-of-your-deceased-relatives-intended-for-use-in-ai-autonomous-systems/?sh=4110e3ad4882

While I know that there is much to argue regarding the morality of manipulating people by impersonating their loved ones, but I am going to stick to an application of a recent issue – that of appropriation.

I am a fan of the Simpsons and I have been since before the first episode (I was a fan of Tracy Ullman). One character in the show is named Apu and he was voiced, for a long time, by Hank Azaria. In 2020, Mr. Azaria decided to stop voicing the character because his imitation of accent was considered offensive. For you Family Guy fans, feel free to retell this story just using Mike Henry’s voicing Cleveland Brown until he didn’t anymore. Now, on one hand, I can rail against this because actors’ impersonating characters from other places is pretty much standard. Heck, on the Simpsons, Bart’s voice is rendered by Nancy Cartwright and Erin Chase has voiced Charlie Brown (and Dan Castallaneta who voices Krusty is not Jewish). Watching the spate of British actors (Hugh Laurie, Benedict Cumberbatch and Tom Holland, I’m looking at you, mostly because you are all really good looking) play Americans or Jared Leto play an Israeli, Oscar Isaac don an imperfect English accent, Toby Jones pretend he is Swiss or Sacha Baron Cohen play most any role is part of the suspension of disbelief. But on the other hand, an outcry is an outcry, right?

Now, this isn’t really all that new. Remember that Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, 2 white men, played the voices of black characters Amos and Andy. But times are apparently different now, as they often are.

So, first, let’s consider where we draw lines. Blackface is out. Jewface is in. Womanface is in, but only sometimes. Appearances are still in flux. Authenticity (that is, the actor’s matching the character’s particular characteristic) is highly variable. A straight man playing a gay character and vice versa? I think that’s still acceptable but I could be wrong. A Hispanic actor playing a non-Hispanic historical personage is OK as long as the entire story is a treatise on race and ignores the actual reality behind the story. ScarJo cannot play a Japanese character as non-Japanese. Anne Boleyn was not black but casting Jodie Turner-Smith is ok. And at this point, I’m not sure if Nick Fury is black or white.

But be all that as it may, and it may, my question today is about the use of AI to play roles or present voices that are inauthentic for about a million reasons. Can a voice-cloning AI use a celebrity voice to play a role? What about an effected accent or a comedic take on a voice? Could a programmer use the past performances of Mr. Azaria to create a new performance of Apu for future episodes? Who would get the credit and who the blame?

If a computer cloned a pidgin or a dialect which is less than/different from the king or queen’s English, who would be committing the offense? The programmer? The person who spoke in the sample that the computer ate in preparation for spitting out new words with the old voice? Beyond the issue of intellectual property laws which would come into play if a company uses a voice without permission, creating the impression that a famous person endorses what he doesn’t (this has already happened with celebrity impersonators) or the voice of a dearly departed celeb (without permission of the estate) there are the questions of that confounded authenticity. The AI isn’t Jewish, Hispanic, Asian, Brooklyn-ish or whatever. Would an AI vocal performance employing the stereotypical affectations which make our pap culture palatable be criticized for relying on the same shorthand that our actors employ? Can computers be attacked for appropriating the culture of others, any others – because a computer has no native culture? What if the programmer is of that culture?

We need to hate someone and the AI isn’t a someone and this might prove a problem when we try to channel our righteous indignation.

 edit -- https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/06/let-the-beatles-be/ interesting comments on AI's taking over a voice