"The Houthis didn't shoot them down! They just fell off when we took dangerous emergency maneuvers to avoid Houthi rockets! We're not owned!"
CarlMarks
I recommend doing the opposite. Read good texts and widely so that you can recognize the flaws in others' rationales and school them when they try to pretend thst the Lexicon of one capitalist weirdo is somehow respectable. Some of this is philosophy but I would say that history and media criticism are even more important. Many arguments about "human nature" or how things should be vs. how they are are clouded by false histories and being unable to recognize manipulative thought processes.
Reading, say, Mein Kampf to learn about "the enemy" is of little value. "The enemy" didn't become who they are because Hitler wrote a convincing book and you won't argue them out of a position because you call them out when they quote it incorrectly or something. To understand Nazis you have to place them in their historical and political context. Who funded them? What was their class composition? Who opposed them and how? What were they a reaction to? And in modern times, who do they now appeal to? Are the mainstream cultural elements that overlap witg Naziism? Not just Trumpers, but mainstream liberals and "apoliticals"?
I would recommend starting with authors like David Graeber, Michael Parenti, Mike Davis, Michael Zinn, or Malcolm Harris for easier political-historical reads. To dive deeper you can read the texts they reference. And FAIR.org and the Citations Needes podcast for media criticism.
He can have some positive influences while still being the same thing I described. For example, Bernie focusing on vulgar class analysis and making socialism a more acceptable word (despite bastardizing it) were both useful things and yet Bernie is a pro-genocide chauvinist that sheepdogs for Dems. If Hasan's pattern holds, his takes on China will be, "China somewhat bad but USA worse and targeting it with nonsense" while trying to humanize actual Chinese people. His pattern is based on a vaguely left-liberal-with-socialist-language anti-racist internationalism of having empathy for people that the imperialist state seeks consent to do violence to. It's a good and useful thing to have voices opposed to that. But under his pattern, what will be the call to action, implicit or explicit? It will be to try to "push left" some Democrat imperialists and keep the focus on dead end electoral reformism. The only positive outlet for that is the same as for Bernie: disillusionment that we can build on for recruiting.
It is possible that he might give up on the electoralist angle eventually, which would also be useful if his audience is large. But I don't see that as his current trajectory.
Hasan is a slightly-left-of-AOC streamer doing the "we can push them left" thing, where the "them" is imperialist social democrats/left liberals. The place at which his followers arrive is, "I will only reluctantly vote for Kamala Harris" and, "I wish I could vote for AOC 2028". He occasionally arrives aa socialist positions and language like a toddler finding a new toy. He learns the toy, plays with it for a while, talks about it on stream, and then discards it. He wants to be on the edge of mainstream. Can't let the toy get in the way of that.
This is only good and useful in the same fashion that Bernie could be thought of as useful: some will be inspired by the toy, the appeal of possibility and pointing to (mostly) correct culprits of oppression, and then their disappointment at nothing changing may help radicalize. But many, probably the vast majority, will be led back to the Democratic party and liberalism, as Hasan neither offers them an onramp himself nor points anyone to next steps. He just returns to stream about electoral politics, Trump, the next elections, etc. And his audience follows him there.
Hasan should be considered situationally useful. We should be there to pick up the disaffected, as he is not pointing them to us. And doing it through our organizations. If we are not, then he is not part of any pipeline to developing more socialists, but just creating more Bernie-adjascent electoralists that sit at home and will be susceptible to most propaganda.
Email is inherently insecure and should be treated as such regarding corporate-government surveillance. This goes double for any company hosting an inbox. At minimum you need to control your own inbox, but of course that just means you're as vulnerable as the outbox of who sends you emails and the inbox of those you send emails to. Using gmail is just making it extremely easy for a spying-friendly group to see all your info, but degoogling isn't enough to have decent infosec.
I think the baseline default was around 20% before, which makes 30% still an increase.
Probably very few because most companies still source inputs from China so they either need to start pricing in higher input costs or decrease production while they hold off on orders hoping the tariffs are rolled back. Since this impacts basically everything, the inflation will hurt demand, so companies raising prices will also have difficulty selling, and not just because their own product's price went up.
This is basically a stagflation self-own.
Essays should be done in class if they are graded. Not to add a time crunch, but the opposite: at-home assignments leads to unrealistic and often classist expectations of homework time and parental/tutor support. Yes, spending time writing alone is valuable for learning. So is homework. Neither should be scored for a student's grade. At-home essays suffer from the same rampant cheating that homework does, which does a disservice to everyone involved in terms of learning. It's important to distinguish evaluations from the act of learning itself, the two are not synonymous: if students' essays are to be graded, they should be done under proctorship and with time and venue alotted for fairness, subject to special cases. Many standardized tests have essay portions and for all the problems with standardized testing, it is appropriate that they don't let test takers go home and mull over it for as long as their economic and support sotiation allows.
Writing essays in class runs into a time crunch in most primary and secondary schools because each class is alotted an arbitrary hourish window once per day. But there are schools that do 2+ hour sessions and have off days, making this practical. A student can write a rough draft one day, turn it in, get feedback, and then polish and turn it in for a grade. And universities can always dedicate appropriate amounts of class time, they just don't want to pay TAs for anything that can be turned into homework time. Too busy doing financialized real estate schemes instead.
Re: LLMs, they can produce essays yep. This is an indictment of a course that grades take-home essays. The course was already inappropriately constructed. The LLM didn't cause the problem here, it just exacerbated the existing problem that manifests as standard cheating (paying/bullying for essays), generally accepted soft cheating (parents write the essay), generally accepted classist legs up (parents help but don't write it/tutors do the same), and the inequalities in free time that impacts students heavily enough already.
but what if the synthesis itself was in the training data?
Then it has a good chance of regurgitating it. But this is very close to reusing test questions, which is already bad practice and leads to cheating. It's true that an LLM will solve a problem that none of the students have seen if the teacher's strategy of synthesis is to Google for examples, though. That pary is unfortunate but an assessment shouldn't be done in the context where someone can use an LLM anyways. Either way it's not synthesis.
In HS and undergrad level courses, how often are the topics at hand really novel enough to rely on that not being the case?
The topics aren't novel at all. But that doesn't really have anything to do with rote memorization regurgitation vs. synthesis. Synthesis questions are often new and different, even just changing the words used for a biological process for a question will strip memorization and force a focus on concepts. Add a follow up question to relate it to something else that was learned and you get synthesis. This is actually a very easy kind of test to write if you practice it.
Or how often is the syllabus really flexible enough to allow teachers to reframe all assessments into synthesis questions?
Assessments should be done in-person. In-person assessments can include simple recall questions. At-home work that is simple recall questions can already be solved by just Googling things. And you're describing a problem in course design. It's not individual teachers' faults that schooling is broken.
Re: the rest, you seem to think that I am picking on teachers. Not sure why.
Yes, of course
100%. By solved I really mean graded with a high score. Also, rampant cheating on homework is also basically the same as using an LLM. I have seen a very large number of college students share homrqork answers. But I don't think homework should be scored for a grade anyways. Homework should be for learning and for the teacher to know how well the class is going. If students understand this, that homework is a participation grade, and that the evaluations like tests are what determine grades, then cheating, LLMs, and getting parents' doing all the homework will be solely detrimental to grades, i.e. will no longer have any incentive. A win-win for pedagogy.
I think it's probably pretty bad at both of those things when it comes to what should actually be evaluated, which is students' understanding of concepts, not just recall. If you ask for the complexity of some algorithm, an LLM will try to find some pattern that matches the kinds of answers it has already seen before. It might get the answer right because it has digested 100 examples like it before and matched the input to it. But if you ask students to actually explain their reasoning and walk through it step by step, and throw in a modification to the algorithm that impacts the answer, the LLM is likely to fail in some way.
Though really, what should be graded is evaluations like tests. Homework should be for learning and practice, not a grade.
Bernie is basically textbook chauvinism. He explicitly cares more about people similar to himself than others, starting with nationality. His complaint of, say, "sending jobs overseas" is that it decreased moderately well-paying union jobs for (predominately white) US citizens. He doesn't care that the workers overseas are even more exploited. He only uses elements of their exploitation to villainize the countries those workers live in.
This is why global empathy and appreciation of proletarian struggle is so important. If a person walls themself off from this like Bernie, they end up becoming the oppressor.