Tag: dumbing down

US government map of Africa mislabels every country at global conference

A U.S. government map of Africa mislabeled every country during a State Department presentation at ‌a global conference taking place in Brazil this week, causing a stir among attendees who took screenshots and posted them online.

Reuters viewed a video of the presentation given at the AIDS 2026 conference in Rio de Janeiro, which shows the errant map ​displayed halfway during a presentation about the State Department’s new health agreements.

A Reuters analysis found the ​image of the map included in the presentation contained an artificial intelligence watermark that ⁠signals it was made with OpenAI tools. The company said it was investigating the report.

The State Department said ​it took “full responsibility” for the confusion caused and that the map had been produced by a team member who ​hastily changed the slide deck before the event.

The map showed Nigeria, where the U.S. currently has several hundred troops deployed, as landlocked in the Sahara Desert. Mozambique, which is in southeastern Africa, was relocated to the Horn of Africa, while Ivory ​Coast in West Africa was placed on the other side of the continent.

Screenshots of the map first appeared ​in a Substack post by AIDS expert Emily Bass and were widely shared on LinkedIn, with one post garnering some ‌40,000 views.

“Whoever ⁠created and approved this slide did not know where countries in Africa are and did not care to check their work,” wrote Matt Petit, who focuses on AI and geopolitics at the Atlantic Council, in the post.

Keep reading

White House Moves to Ban Open Source AI Models to Keep America Dumb

The Coming AI Ban Designed to Keep America Dumb

I use Chinese open-source AI models like Qwen, DeepSeek, and Kimi every single day for my work. These models help me research, write, and analyze information faster than any US-based alternative. They are free (when run locally), powerful, and largely uncensored. But the Trump administration is reportedly planning to ban these models in the United States, citing phony “national security” concerns. Let me be clear: this move is not about security. It is about protecting failing US AI labs and keeping Americans ignorant and dumbed-down while the rest of the world moves forward.

The report from TechCrunch makes it plain: OpenAI’s head of strategic futures, Dean W. Ball, has argued that the US government should create “regulatory fear, uncertainty, and distrust” around open-weight models because they threaten capital investment in the American AI oligopoly [1]. This is not a secret. The administration wants to lock down access to superior Chinese models like Kimi K3, which now matches Anthropic’s Mythos in cybersecurity tasks [2]. Meanwhile, as I warned in February 2026, Anthropic’s smear campaign against Chinese AI is a pathetic attempt to hide the fact that China has already won the intelligence race [3]. The White House knows its pet companies cannot compete, so it wants to ban the competition to keep Americans stuck with using inferior AI models.

The Fair Use Ruling: Knowledge Wants to Be Free

Related to this news, but focused on the question of “Fair Use” and intellectual property, a recent federal court ruling reaffirmed that training AI on publicly available information is transformative fair use. This aligns with what I have argued for years: when you write a book, you are sharing knowledge, not hoarding it. I built BrightLearn.ai exactly for this purpose — to let anyone create and share books for free, and I actively encourage AI engines to train on my own book and the entire BrightLearn library. The whole point is to liberate knowledge from gatekeepers [4].

Why would any author object to their work being used to train an AI? Only if they believe their words are more valuable when kept scarce. But scarcity of knowledge is exactly what the establishment wants. As I discussed with Maria Zeee in February 2025, the battle is between large tech companies aiming to dominate society through AI and the decentralized movement that returns power to individuals [5]. The fair use principle is the legal foundation of that freedom. Now the White House wants to tear it down by banning open-source models that give everyone access to increasing intelligence.

Why Trump Wants to Ban Chinese Open-Source Models

The real reason behind all this is simple: Chinese models like Kimi K3, DeepSeek R1, and GLM 5.2 are outperforming US frontier labs in both capability and cost. DeepSeek R1 was trained for just $6 million and outperforms OpenAI’s O1, while Anthropic hemorrhages billions on lobotomized models that refuse to answer basic questions [6]. US companies like Anthropic are demanding $965 billion valuations while crippling their own AI with guardrails and censorship [7]. They are clearly terrified of open competition.

As I wrote in “Why China Is Winning the AI Race,” the conventional narrative that America leads in AI is a dangerous fantasy [8]. China graduates over three and a half million engineers annually without woke indoctrination, and its models are open-source, uncensored, and available to all [9]. The Trump administration knows this. Now the White House is demanding a license for your brain — restricting frontier AI use to government-approved partners only [10]. This isn’t about safety; it is about monopolizing intelligence and forcing Americans to use dumbed-down “government approved” AI models.

Keep reading

State University of New York System Implements Mandatory Tutoring Program Because ‘Record Number’ of First Year Students Are Failing Math and Writing

The State University of New York (SUNY) is implementing a mandatory tutoring system because a record number of first year students are failing reading and math. This problem is widespread and not isolated to New York.

Part of this problem is due to what happened during Covid-19, when school systems across the country shut down for months and conducted classes via Zoom. Students everywhere fell behind and never caught up.

It is also due to the fact that so many schools have abandoned basic elements of education in favor of pushing woke garbage about social justice, race, and gender.

The College Fix reports:

SUNY institutes mandatory tutoring, extra class time due to ‘record’ number of first-years failing math, writing

Due to a “record” number of first-year failures in freshman writing and math courses, the State University of New York system now will require students to have weekly meetings with a one-on-one tutor, and will add additional time to classes in the latter category.

According to the Times Union, SUNY reported that a quarter of its freshmen failed the introductory math course, and 22 percent flunked English.

This fall at SUNY Albany, selected first-years will have to get tutored in writing for an hour each week, and for 90 minutes in math/science. “Hundreds” of high-performing students have been tapped to help with the effort.

Dean for Undergraduate Education JoAnne Malatesta said that the assisting students, who “did well” in the writing class, will “direct freshmen to the tutoring center and encourage them to go to the professor’s office hours.”

Some 375 student tutors also will hold “90-minute ‘supplemental instruction’ sessions” each week in math and science that freshmen are “expected” to attend.

Malatesta said similar sessions in the past have led to “significant gains” in academic performance.

Keep reading

‘Quality decays exponentially following AI arrival’: Research shows experts and contributors leaving online communities amidst silent ‘knowledge reset’

Research from the University of Auckland on Stack Overflow’s demise over the last few years points to an increasingly worrying trend in the software community: the best, or highest-skill, contributors are leaving in droves.

AI, which arguably bridges the gap between most entry-level and mid-range coders and some of the best in the business, might actually be accelerating the latter’s exit from online communities, as they feel their efforts are no longer as valued as they once were.

Stack Overflow has seen a nearly 76% decline in monthly questions posted since ChatGPT’s advent in 2022, indicating that both new and existing users are abandoning the site.

A much broader problem than just Stack Overflow?

Stack Overflow’s problems and the reason for its decline were multi-faceted; however, many users felt that the site and some of its most talented contributors engaged in a certain degree of hubris.

This, coupled with heavy-handed moderation that many called ‘self-righteous,’ meant that users finding a viable option would inevitably leave the platform.

ChatGPT and its AI alternatives became considerably more pliable and, over time, doubled as search engines for many coders with routine, repeatable queries, even as AI increasingly handled questions such as syntax issues better than before.

Keep reading

As Reading Skills and IQ Decline, the Leaders of the Future Will Be Readers

Americans are reading less than at any point in decades, and reading proficiency continues to decline. As the gap between readers and nonreaders widens, those who continue to read may gain an increasingly significant educational, economic, and leadership advantage.

The long-term decline in reading habits among Americans is well documented. National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) data tracked through the American Time Use Survey show the share of adults who read a book for pleasure in the past 12 months falling from 61% in 1992 to 49% in 2022. The same peer-reviewed analysis found that the share of Americans reading for pleasure on an average day fell from 28% in the early 2000s to 16% in 2023.

Among children, the decline is even sharper. National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) long-term trend data show that the share of 13-year-olds who read for fun almost every day fell from 35% in 1984 to just 14% in both 2023 and 2025, the lowest level since the question was first asked. Nine-year-olds show a similar pattern, with the share falling from 53% in 1984 to 37% in 2025.

Reading proficiency is also declining across all grade levels. Roughly 40% of fourth graders and one-third of eighth graders now score below the NAEP Basic level, the largest shares since 2002 and the highest in NAEP history, respectively. Twelfth graders posted their lowest average reading score in more than three decades in 2024: 283 on NAEP’s 500-point scale.

That was three points below the 2019 average and 10 points below the first assessment in 1992. Only 35% were considered prepared for entry-level college reading coursework, down from 37% in 2019. The decline extends into adulthood. Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) data show that U.S. adults’ literacy scores fell by 12 points from 2017 to 2023. Today, 28% of adults, or 58.9 million people, score at Level 1 proficiency or below, up from 19% in 2017.

The decline is not uniform. NAEP’s own percentile breakdowns show scores for top-performing students holding roughly steady while scores for the lowest performers fall sharply, widening the gap to its largest margin on record at both the 12th grade and 13-year-old level. NCES’s commissioner has described this as “a dwindling middle” in U.S. skills.

A small subset of heavy readers accounts for a disproportionate share of all reading. A December 2025 YouGov survey found that 19% of Americans account for the majority of books read nationally. Separate data show that only about 14% of adults read 20 or more books per year.

Keep reading

The Death of Reading

Picture it. You’re lucky enough to live in the late 19th century. Van Gogh is wandering around the Netherlands painting haystacks and stars. Spiritualism is everywhere: séances, mediums, table-turning, and seers who communicate with the dead. Some dude named PT Barnum is criss-crossing America with this crazy melange of traveling circus and sly hoaxes. There are side shows and peep shows, theatrical extravaganzas in every town. Ragtime is just taking hold.

And for the first time in the history of man, books are available to the everyone with a few ha’penneys to rub together. The print industry has exploded, becoming more systematized, and better at shipping. Suddenly, even ordinary people can read – in their parlors, at saloons and libraries, and after dinner, once the harpsichord recital is done. Novels are everywhere: Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, George Eliot. In France, Victor Hugo. The Russians? They’re producing metric tons of pages. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. People are inhaling these stories, 900 pages at a time.

Academics refer to this period as the “reading revolution.” Reading was as much an indulgence as carnivals and music halls. People didn’t HAVE to read, they GOT to read. They did it ostentatiously and with zeal. And this habit lasted, in one form or another, until recently when reading for enjoyment started to tank. Blame the Internet and social media and our fractured attention span. Blame Oprah, who in her quest to ‘get people reading’ promoted one title and focused every English-speaking woman’s attention on it, to the exclusion of every other book on the planet. 

But the real culprit, if you ask me, is politics. When identity and partisanship become your defining feature, when you adhere to rigid ideas and philosophies – and fear anything that challenges your beliefs – reading becomes dangerous. All those random ideas floating around? Problems that have no easy answers? Bah! Who needs that?

So here’s where we are: reading for enjoyment has fallen by 40% in the past 20 years. And despite bullshit feel-good essays about how we’re not really reading less, it just seems that way – and online influencers who hawk the classics without a single specific detail about plot, theme, or character – literacy in every single cohort is falling off a cliff. Publishing is becoming narrower, more ideological, and preachy. The books that face out in shop windows reinforce pat answers instead of asking hard questions. And the world seems smaller, because it is.

Keep reading

Woke activists push for ‘Black English’ to be taught in Democrat state’s preschools to combat ‘harmful language hierarchies’

California activists are calling for the state’s preschools to legitimize the use of Black English in the classroom.

Supporters say teaching the dialect, also known as African American English (AAE) or African American Vernacular English (AAVE), will help ‘combat harmful language hierarchies.’

The Black Californians United for Early Care & Education group is part of a movement advocating for Black English to be recognized as a legitimate, rule-based language in preschool classrooms on par with other languages.

Co-founder Dr Ashley Williams told PBS the movement is personal because she grew up being told by her family that the way she spoke at home wasn’t acceptable at school.

Williams says she felt ashamed and embarrassed by this and is spearheading the movement because she doesn’t want her two-year-old son to grow up with the same experience. 

‘I don’t want my son to walk into any room and feel like his voice is not valued or his perspective can’t be heard because he’s not saying it in one way or the other,’ she told the outlet. 

The advocacy group – known as BlackECE – has trained educators to support Black English speakers in the same way they support dual language learners. 

The group uses resources like the Black English Knowledge Brief and webinar series, which helps educators, caregivers, and school leaders better understand Black English, its roots.

It also offers ways to create classrooms that affirm children’s language and identity.  

It comes after the Golden State introduced a plan in 2020 to expand early dual-language learning and support bilingual children.

BlackECE argues that Black English should also be included as part of the scheme.

‘We talk about multilinguals, but we don’t include Black children who may be African-American English speakers,’ Xigrid Soto-Boykin, director of the Children’s Equity Project at Arizona State University, said.

‘We completely miss this subgroup of children that could also benefit from their language backgrounds to be sustained, but also to be leveraged for their own learning.’

According to 2020 research published by the National Library of Medicine, about 20 percent of US children and 44 percent of California children ages five to 17 are bilingual. 

As of 2023, 96 percent of Black Americans speak English fluently.

Around 88 percent speak only English, with the remaining respondents using another language at home and speaking English very well, according to Pew Research.

Keep reading

College Students Are Testing at the Level of 10-Year-Olds

Gone are the days of university freshmen reading classical philosophers like Plato or contemporary pedagogues like Ta-Nehisi Coates. These days, incoming college students are lucky if they can get through Judy Blume’s “Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing.”

According to a new “Survey of Adult Skills” conducted by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development — a forum for 38 high-income, predominantly Western countries — a not insignificant number of adult students enrolled in higher education are now reading and doing math at a level which, in a more functional society, would be alarming for a middle schooler.

The survey, first spotted by the Economist, tested around 160,000 people of all ages, across all 38 member states. It found that across all OECD member countries, a full 8 percent of college students are reading at the level of a ten-year-old, if not worse. While countries like Germany and France rang in at under 5 percent, countries like Poland, Israel, and the United States blew the curve at 21, 20, and 14 percent, respectively.

The numbers aren’t much better when it comes to math. Across OECD countries, 9 percent of college students do math at or below a ten-year-old level. In Italy, the US, and Slovakia, that figure jumps to over 15 percent — only outdone by Israel, where roughly 21 percent of college students were underachieving at the same low benchmark.

It seems there are numerous compounding explanations for these test results: pandemic-era learning gaps leading to lower levels of preparation, declining college enrollment forcing schools to lower admissions standards, and lower levels of public funding for education, to name a few.

The results also coincide with the explosion of large language models like ChatGPT, which by many accounts have carved out a new floor for academic failure in both K-12 and college-level education.

While there’s no denying how complicated the issue is, there is evidence that removing technology from classrooms altogether could offer an immediate boost.

In one classroom in Minneapolis, for example, a literature and English teacher banned phones and laptops, requiring all coursework to be done on pencil and paper. As the school-year started in September, just 46 percent of the students involved said they felt confident about their reading skills. A few months later in February, that number stood at 95 percent.

Though it’s just one classroom, something is clearly off the rails in the education systems of the richest countries of the world — and the longer it goes unaddressed, the more students will be pushed into the world with the reading skills of 4th graders.

Keep reading

The Biggest Problem With AI Today

What’s the biggest problem in AI today? Is it cost, with token budgets being blown out of the water by agentic AI? Is it sustainability, with AI consuming electricity and fresh water? Is it ethics, with tech companies cramming AI into everything?

I think it’s deeper than that. Those are all symptoms of a much deeper-rooted problem: nobody’s making decisions.

Or more correctly, we’ve abdicated far too much of our executive function to AI. We’ve surrendered our thinking. 

Let’s dig in.

Part 1: Where This Issue Came From

On Friday afternoon, I was mulling over what I wanted to cover in this week’s issue. It’s a holiday weekend here in the USA, so not as many folks will be reading, and that’s okay. (I appreciate that YOU are) And I’ve covered a ton recently:

So on a whim, I set up a NotebookLM with the last 180 days of conversations from over 40 different subreddits, like r/marketing, r/chatgpt, etc. – everything around marketing, business, and AI. I connected it to Claude Code with the NotebookLM command line tool (the most token—efficient way for Claude to talk to NotebookLM), and then put all of my 2026 newsletters year to date into an input folder.

I asked Claude to compare what I’ve written about thus far this year with what folks are finding their hardest problems are with AI. Claude spit out a list of 10 major things derived from over 800,000 words of foaming at the mouth on Reddit that it thought might be good newsletter topics:

  • AI Visibility challenges
  • Agentic oversight is degrading
  • AI deployment is broken
  • 40-60% of company budget is wasted on the wrong models
  • AI is a rental
  • AI sycophancy is screwing up synthetic focus groups
  • AI detectors don’t work
  • AI is hollowing out corporations and no one’s hiring junior staff
  • People measure AI by tokenmaxxing
  • Marketers are basically unpaid labor for AI companies training data

Claude was REALLY pushing for me to write about how measurement is broken in marketing and AI today, and I might do that at some point, but that’s not what I see when I look at this laundry list. Yes, there are measurement issues in many of them, data issues in many of them, but… measurement being broken is the symptom of what I said earlier – we’ve abdicated executive function.

For those who aren’t analytics nerds, you know that measurement is a trailing indicator. It’s not a leading indicator.

Part 2: Executive Function Recap

As a reminder, I bucket executive function into four categories that I call PODS:

  • Plan: you think about achieving something in the future and make a plan to get there from here
  • Organize: you take what you have and try to make sense of it
  • Decide: you take what you have and make decisions about it
  • Solve: you solve the problems you have

Yes, there is more nuance to executive function than this, but this handy, short list is an easy way to see what our brains are doing. That’s critical thinking, one of the worst-named practices we have.

Why? Because critical thinking isn’t about being critical, per se. It’s about metacognition – the definition of which is thinking about thinking. When you’re thinking about how you think, you open the door to improvements, to growth.

Thinking about thinking means asking questions and reflecting – is this the best way to do something? How could I do this better? How could I derive more enjoyment from this thing I’m doing? It’s not criticizing yourself as much as it is recognizing what you’re doing and whether it’s working or not.

When you’re planning, organizing, deciding, and solving, you’re inherently thinking about thinking. Every time you plan, every time you bring order to chaos, you have to check in with your own brain to see if what you’re doing is moving you closer to the goal posts.

Executive function is one of the things that defines our sentience as living creatures. Every sentient creature from a mouse to us does these tasks. You’ve read or heard stories about crows fashioning tools from wire to solve problems, you’ve watched dogs and cats make decisions and plan. I’ve watched my own cat measure optically whether or not she can make a particular jump.

Properly prompted, today’s AI tools are superb at executive functions as well. Given the right frameworks, harnesses, and data, they can plan, organize, decide, and solve better than we can at most language-based tasks.

And therein lies the actual problem.

Keep reading

Six California Cities Ranked Among Top 10 Least Educated In US

Six California cities ranked among the top 10 least educated metropolitan areas in the United States, according to a report by WalletHub published on June 29.

Looking at the 150 most populated metro areas, the city of Visalia ranked as the second least educated, while Bakersfield was fourth, and Modesto, Fresno, Stockton, and Salinas followed.

All six are in central California.

The other four metros that rounded out the top ten were all in Texas – McAllen-Edinburg-Mission, Brownsville-Harlingen, Beaumont-Port Arthur, and El Paso, at first, third, ninth, and tenth least educated, respectively.

“Higher education doesn’t guarantee better financial opportunities in the future, but it certainly correlates with it,” WalletHub analyst Chip Lupo said in the report.

“The most educated cities provide good learning opportunities from childhood all the way through the graduate level.”

As Dylan Morgan reports for The Epoch Times, to determine the ranking, WalletHub equally factored in the share of adults at least 25 years old who have a high school diploma or higher, who have at least some college experience, who have a bachelor’s degree or higher, and who have a graduate or professional degree.

Visalia ranked last among the 150 metros in percent of bachelor’s degree holders and percent of graduate or professional degree holders.

It ranked 107th highest in median annual household income, and there appeared to be a general correlation between income and education rates across the nation.

However, Visalia still had a lower poverty rate than the state average—11.3 percent compared to 11.8 percent, according to U.S. Census data—and Stockton ranked as having the 31st highest median household income while Salinas ranked as 26th highest, though those two cities were near the bottom in education.

Education and income rate correlations may not reflect California’s higher cost of living and regional economic structures, such as the Central Valley’s reliance on agriculture, an industry that has not historically required higher education the same way other California hubs have, such as Silicon Valley.

The San Jose metro, home to Silicon Valley, ranked as the fourth most educated in the United States.

WalletHub said that more than 55 percent of the San Jose metro’s population over the age of 25 have at least a bachelor’s degree, while nearly 28 percent have an advanced degree. .

It also ranked third for university quality. San Jose is near Stanford University and has Santa Clara University and San Jose State University in the center of the metro.

The nearby San Francisco metro area, which is home to the University of California—Berkeley, ranked as the eighth most educated.

Keep reading