Chrisman
@chrisman
Cofounder/ceo @synthesischool, maker of superhuman AI math tutor, spinout of the SpaceX lab school. God, family, America.
Synthesis Tutor is off to the races. We are on pace for well over $10M revenue in 2025. Subscribed students up 4.5x year over year. Families clearly want a trustworthy AI tutor.
The simple solution is proctored standardized tests. Abolish grades, which are bullshit anyway. The only thing that matters is if you can pass the test.
This is the central problem with higher education in the age of AI. We can't require students to do take-home writing assignments (e.g. term papers) any more, because most will cheat and have ChatGPT or Claude or Grok do the writing. But we can't teach critical thinking,…
"What about reading comprehension?" If you can turn words on a page into words in your head, reading comprehension is the same as speech comprehension. In either case, you need a) enough background knowledge in the subject, and b) to care enough to try to comprehend.
PSA: phonics (learning the sounds letters make) is the best way to learn to read. There are 180 phonics rules in English, but kids only need to memorize ~35 of them, plus ~50 common words (e.g. "the") to read real books. The gate to literacy is memorizing 85 things.
PSA: phonics (learning the sounds letters make) is the best way to learn to read. There are 180 phonics rules in English, but kids only need to memorize ~35 of them, plus ~50 common words (e.g. "the") to read real books. The gate to literacy is memorizing 85 things.
Here's how government schools teach kids to pretend how to read: 1. Memorize familiar books. 2. Memorize massive sight-word walls. 3. Teach "reading strategies" like these when they reach unfamiliar words. 4. Massive grade and standardized test inflation. = an illiterate USA
Education (as distinct from narrow job training) should be the act of acquiring the most fundamental explanations. What do we mean by “fundamental” ? @DavidDeutschOxf has a great definition in recent interview with @naval.
11yo, apropos nothing, just declared “Bible time” and gathered everyone in the living room for a reading and discussion. This makes me happy.
Will believe this when I read the first good sentence composed by AI.
Elon Musk: It's going to be wild. “I would expect the first really good AI video game to be next year and probably the first half hour of watchable TV this year and probably the first watchable AI movie next year. Things are really moving at an incredible pace.” xAI Grok 4…
If you can vibe code it, you’re too late.
Conjecture: Anything AI can code is not valuable because the fact AI can code it means something similar has been done enough times to train the AI how to do it and therefore it is commodified. Same is true for AI writing.
Conjecture: Anything AI can code is not valuable because the fact AI can code it means something similar has been done enough times to train the AI how to do it and therefore it is commodified. Same is true for AI writing.
His reaction was also remarkable. Never in a million years would I imagine someone in his situation simply flattening himself on the ground.
this story is absolutely unremarkable except in how it managed to combine almost everything it's socially acceptable to hate brilliantly: HR, Coldplay, Cheaters, CEOs, millionaires.
I worry this could lead to an unhealthy level of ideological conformity in our elite college students. Imagine how bad that would be.
Spoken like someone who never got their four year old fingers slammed in one of these sliding doors.
Automatic doors on vans are just stupid mechanisms waiting to be broken and then not work (open or shut). Bring us back.
A large number of my secular friends send their kids to Christian summer camps and schools. Interesting, that.
It is an odd but beautiful aspect of our world that the best way to increase shareholder value in the long run is to ignore shareholder value and just build something great.
i am so tired of everything being owned by private equity losers who need to squeeze out every penny we're so deep into enshittification of every aspect of our lives we need more founders
This is crazy because schools have kids over 12,600 hours K-12 and literacy is the PRIMARY academic goal.
I’ve been an English professor at UNC for the past twenty-two years and I can assure you that what Athenian Stranger is saying here is absolutely true. Student literacy has gotten especially bad over the past five years.
It's sad. You can't even take your 6yo to the library anymore. Every book is about why it's great to be non-binary.
For more than 2,000 years children have loved Aesop’s Fables. Most of us grew up on these stories. We remember how The Tortoise and the Hare taught us the danger of arrogance and the reward of being steadfast. These stories shaped our hearts and formed our moral imagination. It…
Old men are almost always wrong when they advise young men on what field to go into.
Burgum: "AI will take jobs away, like software development, because AI can write code. But AI can't wire a building, do plumbing. Kids go into the trades today -- they're all gonna be making $150,000."
We are in a transitional period. Everyone thinks the future of education is the same as the past — except that students will get help from AI tutors. What will actually happen is AI tutors will completely take care of education for us.
No one smart goes “tech free” for their kids. That would be like going “book free” because most books are bad. Silly.
Tech free private schools and abstaining from tech will be a new class signifier like eating healthy and being in shape