Alfie Kohn
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alfiekohn.bsky.social
Alfie Kohn
@alfiekohn.bsky.social
3K followers 21 following 1.5K posts
author and lecturer on topics in #education, #parenting, and human #behavior....
(Personal messages more likely to be read if left on http://alfiekohn.org)
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alfiekohn.bsky.social
Completely predictable, but still stunning: A key organizing principle of these people - to the point of animating lunatic conspiracy theories - has been their passionate devotion to rooting out pedophiles. Wait, hold on - the leader of our authoritarian cult is deeply involved? Never mind, then...
Wired headline: "All MAGA Wanted Was the Epstein Files. Now They're Ignoring Them"
November 14, 2025 at 5:40 PM
alfiekohn.bsky.social
Short excerpts from an Atlantic article subtitled "The False Promise of AI Companionship": www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...
Friction is inevitable in human relationships. It can be uncomfortable, even maddening. Yet friction can be meaningful—as a check on selfish behavior or inflated self-regard; as a spur to look more closely at other people; as a way to better understand the foibles and fears we all share. Neither Ani nor any other chatbot will ever tell you it’s bored or glance at its phone while you're talking or tell you to stop being so stupid and self-righteous. They will never ask you to pet-sit or help them move, or demand anything at all from you. They provide some facsimile of companionship while allowing users to avoid uncomfortable interactions or reciprocity. “In the extreme, it can become this hall of mirrors where your worldview is never challenged,” Vasan said. And so, although chatbots may be built on the familiar architecture of engagement, they enable something new: They allow you to talk forever to no one other than yourself. “Every time theres been a new technology, it’s rewired socialization, especially for kids,” Vasan told me. “TV made kids passive spectators. Social media turned things into this 24/7 performance review.” In that respect, generative Al is following a familiar pattern. But the more time children spend with chatbots, the fewer opportunities they'll have to develop alongside other people—and, as opposed to all the digital distractions that have existed for decades, they may be fooled by the technology into thinking that they are, in fact, having a social experience.
November 14, 2025 at 1:05 PM
alfiekohn.bsky.social
Just sit with this one for a few minutes
"I have met some very bad people, none as bad as Trump," Epstein wrote in 2007 to former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers. "Not one decent cell in his body."
November 13, 2025 at 12:13 PM
alfiekohn.bsky.social
In case you needed another reason not to: www.pcmag.com/news/ask-cha...
[PCMag headline] Asking ChatGPT About Affairs or Abortion? Be Careful, Marketers Are Peeking at Your Prompts Browser extensions are potentially funneling your most personal queries to a company selling market insights about chatbot activity.
November 12, 2025 at 3:08 PM
alfiekohn.bsky.social
What's striking isn't the growing number of studies finding negative effects from using AI - in this case, to have it summarize research for you (vs. searching individual sources yourself) - but the kneejerk tendency of those reporting them to ask how best to use AI (vs. whether we need it at all).
Last spring, Shiri Melumad, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, gave a group of 250 people a simple writing assignment: Share advice with a friend on how to lead a healthier lifestyle. To come up with tips, some were allowed to use a traditional Google search, while others could rely only on summaries of information generated automatically with Google’s artificial intelligence. The people using A.I-generated summaries wrote advice that was generic, obvious and largely unhelpful — eat healthy foods, stay hydrated and get lots of sleep! The people who found information with a traditional Google web search shared more nuanced advice about focusing on the various pillars of wellness, including physical, mental and emotional health. The tech industry tells us that chatbots and new A. search tools will supercharge the way we learn and thrive, and that anyone who ignores the technology risks being left behind. But Dr. Melumad’s experiment, like other academic studies published so far on A.Ls effects on the brain, found that people who rely heavily on chatbots and A.I search tools for tasks like writing essays and research are generally performing worse than people who don’t use them.
November 10, 2025 at 8:52 PM
alfiekohn.bsky.social
When ideological purity and loyalty to the regime displace experience, expertise, and all other considerations: Exhibits A and B
Interviews with 25 people, including current and former Kennedy Center executives, board members, longtime employees, recent hires, industry leaders and Trump administration officials, revealed a Washington institution in crisis. Audiences are staying away. Internal sales figures obtained by The New York Times showed ticket sales down by about 50 percent from the same period last year during one typical week in October. Dozens of employees, many with decades of experience, have been fired or quit. Outsiders with few obvious qualifications aside from party loyalty were handed top jobs. The center's head of human resources estimated that staffing was down 30 percent from before Mr. Trump took over. Others call that a conservative estimate. SFDB @sfdb.bsky.social: The DeSantis administration has turned New College into the least efficient school in the state's university system. “The operating funds per student at New College is $83,207 — four times the university system average.” Batting "woke waste" is not cheap. [Sarasota Herald Tribune headline] New College of Florida shows soaring expenses as state targets 'woke waste’ A report by Florida DOGE found that New College is the most financially inefficient school in the university system.
November 10, 2025 at 1:18 PM
alfiekohn.bsky.social
Much has been said about Musk's appalling social media posts. Joyce Carol Oates takes a moment to notice what he *doesn't* post.
November 9, 2025 at 3:09 PM
alfiekohn.bsky.social
P.S. Say, what ended up happening to Ceaușescu, the corrupt, narcissistic Romanian dictator? Oh, that's right. He was eventually arrested, tried, and executed.
Posting a photo of Ceausescuo's bathroom for no apparent reason [which is ornate, with marble and gold to rival Trump's more recent monument to bad taste and self-indulgence]
November 8, 2025 at 7:01 PM
alfiekohn.bsky.social
WashPost headline: "In MAGA stronghold, fury over SNAP but little blame for Trump in shutdown"
November 7, 2025 at 3:57 PM
alfiekohn.bsky.social
Short answer: Lord, let's hope not!

Long answer: This is the kind of framing that capitulates to Big Tech (rather than exercising our critical faculties to ask whether we should be buying what they're selling) and that I challenged in this essay (is.gd/acOSmQ) & this podcast episode (is.gd/LOxdlR).
Education Week headline: "AI Is Picking Up Speed. Are Schools Keeping Pace?"
November 7, 2025 at 3:02 PM
alfiekohn.bsky.social
Close your eyes and imagine a leftist's heavy-handed caricature of American capitalism.

Now open your eyes.
47 Million People Face Food Insecurity Musk Wins $1 Trillion Payday Tesla shareholders approved a plan to grant Elon Musk shares worth nearly $1 trillion if he meets ambitious goals.
November 6, 2025 at 10:38 PM
alfiekohn.bsky.social
NYT headline: "Be Prepared Before Seeking A.I. Medical Advice" - which has been edited to add "...to Not Seek A.I. Medical Advice"
November 4, 2025 at 8:51 PM
alfiekohn.bsky.social
This imagined defense by Cheney ("What I Got Right About the Iraq War") from The Onion in 2023 ought to run as a sidebar to every obit that's published this week: is.gd/mzdB9j
It's easy for armchair critics to condemn the Iraq War. But you have to remember what things were like back in 2003. People actually trusted the government and had faith in the idea of America, Trust and faith aren't very sturdy things to build a perpetual war machine on, and they don’t make alot of money, either. The Iraq War eroded faith in the government and drove more Americans into suspicion and hatred, just as we hoped it would. Combine that with rising inequality and the American cult of the individual, and you have a perfect recipe for ensuring that most Americans are too disillusioned to mount collective resistance to any governmental transgressions. That's what I always hoped the Iraq War might accomplish, and man, it fels good to be right.
November 4, 2025 at 12:34 PM
alfiekohn.bsky.social
This imagined defense by Cheney ("What I Got Right About the Iraq War") from The Onion in 2023 ought to run as a sidebar to every obit that's published this week: is.gd/mzdB9j
November 4, 2025 at 12:31 PM
alfiekohn.bsky.social
Murdoch stands for only the highest-quality journalism
NY Post headline: "Nearly a million New Yorkers ready to flee NYC if Mamdani becomes mayor - possibly igniting largest exododus [sic] in history: poll"
November 3, 2025 at 4:33 PM
alfiekohn.bsky.social
We can rest easier knowing that the quality of the Washington Post's investigative journalism is equal to the challenges we're facing these days.
We set out to find the real reason pickleball noise is so annoying The racket from some 70,000 pickleball courts across the United States has generated bitter fights. If we understand the sound, can we learn to ignore it?
November 2, 2025 at 1:00 PM
alfiekohn.bsky.social
That AI is likely a huge bubble in the making - and already rife with risks & harms - doesn't trouble the key players b/c the goal in our system isn't doing good or even doing well; it's winning.
Big Tech cos. pursue dangerous nonsense b/c what each most fears is losing market share to its rivals.
Big Tech's A.I Spending Is Accelerating (Again) Despite the risk of a bubble, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon plan to spend billions more on artificial intelligence than they already do.
November 2, 2025 at 12:27 PM
alfiekohn.bsky.social
Your reminder that technofascism, like MAGA in general, is powered by religion: www.theguardian.com/technology/2....
Religiosity like Gelsinger’s - a born-again Christian who has referred to Silicon Valley as his “mission field” - is shaping Silicon Valley's culture in its image. Where there was once purported atheism, there is now “a very loud, very visible, and very specifically Christian-inflected technological culture” in Silicon Valley, said Damien williams, a scholar at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte who studies how technologies are shaped by religious beliefs. It’s exemplified by figures like Peter ‘Thiel - who warns of the coming of the antichrist if humanity fails to work toward certain technological frameworks - and Andreessen Horowitz's Katherine Boyle, a close friend of JD Vance, the vice-president. Gelsinger has long been outspoken about his Christian values, helping found Transforming the Bay With Christ in 2013, an organization aiming to ignite a Christian spiritual movement in the region.
October 30, 2025 at 12:59 PM
alfiekohn.bsky.social
So the antithesis of Amazon et al. would be a company that rejected speculative AI in order to preserve jobs?
Wired headline: "Amazon Confirms 14,000 Corporate Layoffs So It Can Move Faster on AI"
October 30, 2025 at 11:38 AM
alfiekohn.bsky.social
The Projector-in-Chief has kindly offered a fresh example for my latest essay, "Seeing What Isn't Out There: A Meditation on Various Forms of Projection" (in which I also show how the phenomenon underlies the tendency to anthropomorphize).
Read it here: is.gd/O0HzoM
Trump social media post with this sentence circled: "Look what happened to our Country when a Crooked Moron became our 'President!'"
October 29, 2025 at 6:26 PM
alfiekohn.bsky.social
photo of a bubble
October 29, 2025 at 3:57 PM
alfiekohn.bsky.social
Useful chart listing the most invasive apps. Meta products are the worst offenders by far. Full story here: www.pcmag.com/explainers/t....

(Even worse: AI-powered browsers: www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...)
From PC Mag: The top 20 most invasive applications. (Full content available in the article linked to in the post.)
October 29, 2025 at 1:20 PM
alfiekohn.bsky.social
The NYT is just asking (skeptical) questions - about whether Mamdani will really be able to transform NYC in the face of opposition and skepticism of the kind we might find in, say, this very article.

(Also, will his efforts be judged against perfection or against his predecessors' track records?)
But as the stars of the liberal world reveled in the moment, they were contemplating what awaits after the Nov. 4 election, if they win, when Mr. Mamdani and his movement will face a far tougher challenge than even a long-shot campaign: running the largest city in America and proving to the political world that their agenda can be replicated across the country.
October 27, 2025 at 10:32 PM
alfiekohn.bsky.social
Interesting. It turns out that this crisis you humans are experiencing gets a little worse every time you consult me.
[WIRED headline] Google Earth Gets an AI Chatbot to Help Chart the Climate Crisis
October 23, 2025 at 4:31 PM
alfiekohn.bsky.social
See also: Betteridge's Law, examples of
WIRED headline: "Can AI Avoid the Enshittification Trap?"
October 21, 2025 at 3:19 PM