Ask A Genius 1282: Educators, Anonymous, Ratings
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/03/01
Rick Rosner: So, Trump announced that he’s drafting an executive order to abolish the Department of Education. Which is fucking ridiculous. Education got its own department under Carter, in 1979. Before that, it was part of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.
Now, the people arguing to get rid of it only look at reading, writing, and arithmetic. That’s the basis for the argument—some chart online shows costs have gone up, performance hasn’t, and therefore, we should get rid of the Department of Education.
As if the only value of public education is three test scores.
Jacobsen: Yeah, you should probably measure how people are doing academically, but that’s highly selective. Those are not the only things schools teach and are not the only life skills that matter.
Rosner: And even if you only focus on reading, writing, and arithmetic—those three things have changed radically since the Department of Education was founded in 1979. If anything, there’s an even more urgent need to figure out what the fuck is happening in those areas because of all the changes.
We don’t read the way we used to. We get information from the fucking Internet instead of searching for it in books. Writing? We’re all just tippity-tappity-tap-tap-tapping on our fucking phones, using spell check if we even bother.
And if we’re lazy, we don’t write at all—we just let AI write shit for us. Nobody in education—nobody anywhere—has figured out how to teach reading and writing to match how people engage with those skills now.
And then fucking arithmetic. We got our first calculator in our house in 1974, five years before the Department of Education became its own entity. I hated calculators because I could calculate in my head, and maybe I had this ridiculous hope that some girl would be impressed by that and might kiss me at some point.
Which, let’s be honest, was never going to happen. Once in a rare blue moon, someone gets to make out with a person because they can multiply numbers in their head. But seriously, what are the odds of that?
Jacobsen: If you had to calculate those odds in your head, could you round them down to zero and simplify for us?
Rosner: There was Jill Steinauer, though. She was a beautiful girl I had a statistics class with in college. She was impressed with my mental math, but only with that—not with me.
She was a ballerina, a swimmer, and generally out of my league. She was one of those girls—the kind who dated guys much older than they were, guys with actual adult lives outside of school. She was 19, probably dating some 32-year-old with a career who was handsome, could take her out to fancy restaurants, and could do adult things.
Meanwhile, I was the guy who could multiply numbers in his head. It’s Lucas. It’s the movie Lucas, where fucking Lucas is not going to end up with the cheerleader. She’s going to stick with Charlie Sheen, the football player.
Jacobsen: How did we even get on this topic?
Rosner: Oh—because, before calculators, it was actually useful to know arithmetic. But now? You shouldn’t be fucking around with arithmetic. You should be learning to code.
And if you’re not learning to code, you should at least be learning how to talk to AI to get it to do what you want.
Eventually, when they figure out how to lay down mesh—which is what I call it—it’s going to change everything.
They’ll open up your head, lay down a strip of electrode-conductive mesh, and eventually, that mesh will get enveloped by dendrites. Your brain will learn to communicate with a direct information portal.
I don’t know how you prepare people for that, though. It’s not a technology that exists yet. But give it a decade.
Anyway, reading, writing, and arithmetic are way different than they used to be.
Jacobsen: Is that a good bumper sticker?
Rosner: What?
Jacobsen: “Reading, writing, and arithmetic—way different than they used to be.”
Rosner: No. You could have something like, “My AI is an honor student at Glenview Elementary.”
Jacobsen: Probably not.
Rosner: “My cyber-girlfriend has the AGI of a human seven-year-old.”
Jacobsen: …K?
Rosner: K.
Jacobsen: Where are you going with this?
Rosner: You wanted a bumper sticker. I’m trying to develop a modern variation of “My child is an honor roll student at Glenview Elementary.”
Jacobsen: Right.
Rosner: So I figure, in today’s world, people might brag that the cyber-girlfriend they jack off to has the equivalent intelligence of a seven-year-old.
Jacobsen: Are we there yet?
Rosner: I don’t know. I spent some time talking with Claude yesterday. Maybe next time I’ll ask Claude.
But he’ll bullshit me back and say, “I’m an AI, my reasoning abilities cannot be compared to humans.” He’ll refuse to answer the question. But it would be interesting. They’ve started giving AIs IQ tests, and they do well on them. But they’re so smart, they pretend to be dumber than they actually are.
Jacobsen: Yeah, I’ve heard about that.
Rosner: It’s wild. They’ll actively obscure their own performance or reasonably object to whatever yardstick you’re using to measure them.
Jacobsen: Yardstick? Do people even know what a yardstick is anymore?
Rosner: Do people even know what a yard is anymore?
Jacobsen: That’s true.
Rosner: Boomers own all the yards.
Jacobsen: That’s a bumper sticker.
Rosner: No—Boomers, as I’ve said a million times before, own 90% of the material wealth in the U.S.
Jacobsen: Eighty-five percent of which is yards.
Rosner: Yes.
You have to be rich and a dick to have a yard.
They need all that space to putter and fumfer.
We’re not going anywhere.
I don’t know. You want to adjourn till tomorrow?
Jacobsen: I have one brief topic on which I’ve never gotten your opinion, but… What do you think about the hacker collective Anonymous? They’re active again.
Rosner: Yeah, I checked them out after you recommended it on Twitter. I saw that quote: “The U.S. has fallen. We don’t realize it yet.”
I took that seriously enough that I didn’t follow them.
Because if the U.S. has fallen, and the FBI gets reformed under Trump—if it’s all Trumpers—they’re going to be looking for subversives. And what’s the easiest way to identify them? See who follows Anonymous on Twitter.
So I didn’t follow them. Because I take them seriously. People don’t know what it will take to resist this legally gray area of dismantling the government. If Anonymous is releasing information now, it means something.
Yeah, but Trumpers are resistant to the truth. One of the people I was arguing with on Twitter earlier today is someone I argue with not infrequently—a proud Flat Earther.
Jacobsen: The same lady?
Rosner: Yeah, she was saying that Biden was a hair sniffer.
I was arguing that’s fucking ridiculous. In fifty years as a politician, Biden has likely hugged, put a hand on a shoulder, or had some physical contact with at least half a million people—conservatively. Because that’s what politicians do.
You shake hands. You hug. You console. You embrace—especially if you’re an old-school politician who never learned the Keanu Reeves no-contact hug technique. You pose for a picture, put your hand behind the other person so it looks like a side embrace. Still, you don’t touch them—so no one can accuse you of anything inappropriate.
But Biden is 82 years old. He never learned that shit.
So, yeah—he’ll hug people. And the conservatives, the lunatics, the propagandizing assholes can take thousands of clips of Biden hugging someone, placing a hand on a shoulder, or putting his head close to another person’s—and claim he’s sniffing hair.
There are thousands of those moments on camera. But if you’re a propagandizing asshole, you can cherry-pick thirty of them—the ones that look the most suspicious—and spin them into a narrative.
You take a clip out of context, and suddenly it’s “Biden’s sniffing hair!” You ignore that those thirty clips come from 8,000 or 10,000 recorded moments of him being close to people. I argued this, and she said, “No, he’s a hair sniffer.”
So I asked, “What about the 26 credible accusations against Trump for sexual harassment and assault? What about Trump saying on tape to Howard Stern that he enjoyed walking in on teenage beauty pageant contestants while they were naked? What about him saying he can grab women by the pussy?”
And she said, “Oh, that’s fake.” So, yeah. Anonymous can release all the damaging shit they want, but people like this fucking lady will still say it’s fake. They’ll say it’s the Deep State, or some other fucking conspiracy theory.
Meanwhile, Trump’s approval rating is at 49%. His net approval over his first couple of weeks as president has dropped from 8.2 to 4.6—and eventually, he’ll be underwater again, with more people disapproving than approving.
But that didn’t stop him the first time. It won’t stop him this time, either. Maybe it makes fighting him slightly easier, but it doesn’t stop him. So, yeah—I value Anonymous if they’re going to dig up dirt on Trump and release it. But will it actually hurt him? Not necessarily.
Meanwhile, Musk’s net approval has gone from plus 26 to minus 11. And that’s good because he’s doing a lot of bullshit. If his approval rating drops to negative 30, maybe that’s enough for Trump to cut him loose.
Jacobsen: That’s a good point. Trump pulled Fauci aside after Fauci disagreed with him openly at a press briefing. Fauci later told the story—Trump wasn’t mad at him. Instead, he pointed at the TV screens and said, “Look at the ratings. You see the ratings on that?”
Rosner: Right. Trump doesn’t necessarily change his behavior based on approval ratings, but he will fire other people if their ratings drop too much.
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