The Curious Engineer

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Anecdotal Value

hollisrobbinsanecdotal.substack.com

Observations informed by having paid attention for a long time. Click to read Anecdotal Value, by Hollis Robbins, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.

Essays / personalSociety / politics / economyAI / ML

’24’25’26
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135 from 14 Jul 2024 to 22 Oct 2026
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2026 58

  1. What Is Teaching Without Knowledge?
  2. Colleges need to teach last-mile knowledge
  3. How I look at buildings, with aphantasia
  4. Darwin and AI
  5. Aristotle and AI
  6. “After the University” (Review)
  7. Just one more thing....
  8. Teaching the Ocean to Swim
  9. The Medium Eats the Message
  10. What a Time to Be an Agent!
  11. What if Wirecutter Rated Universities?
  12. DeepMind and The Visualizer's Fallacy
  13. Universities would prefer not to.
  14. The Zoë: Life Abundant Conference report
  15. The Miasma Theory of Education
  16. Look on my Outcomes, ye Mighty and despair
  17. Two new ways to see your university
  18. Stereotype Threat
  19. Why Can't a Model Be More Like a Man?
  20. Let Us Now Praise Famous Shape Rotators
  21. How to Listen to a Tarantino Movie
  22. Amor Fati Entropy
  23. AI and the DMZ
  24. For Whom the Bell Curves
  25. *The One and the Ninety-Nine* [review]
  26. From the Athens of Veracruz to ChatGPT
  27. Trad-husband jobs on Mars
  28. Discuss Among Yourselves
  29. How to make a mint off the coming higher ed contraction
  30. College credit for this?
  31. What does the "higher" in higher ed mean?
  32. How to limit unauthorized AI use in the classroom
  33. Red, White, and Psychedelic
  34. What AI changes about 'Viewpoint Diversity'
  35. Why sameness, not teaching, is the goal
  36. My AI thinks Civics is Black Studies
  37. The most dangerous student on campus
  38. Marginal Literary Revolution
  39. Automatic for the people
  40. Milgram's subjects were never aligned
  41. What should a university AI czar do?
  42. For the love of God, learn to paragraph
  43. Why did it take a NYTimes investigation?
  44. The AI campus gender wars ahead
  45. The Great Syllabus Stagnation
  46. Pittsburgh, Austin, the Cosmos, and the Local
  47. Your LLM needs a grandmother
  48. Metannoying
  49. Attention is All You Need to Bankrupt a University
  50. The Rumsfeld Matrix
  51. Why Film Professors Can't Fail Students Who Won't Watch Films
  52. What escapes containment is less valuable
  53. The First Rough Draft of History
  54. Civics Centers as Ivory Towers
  55. LLMs are lagging indicators
  56. Embrace your lack
  57. LLM poetry and the "greatness" question
  58. Out of Sight, Out of Mind

2025 51

  1. None of your beeswax!
  2. Cold Cases in the AI era
  3. Teaching Quality
  4. Form and State
  5. A We-free December
  6. “In sooth, I know not why I am so sad”
  7. Allowing Failure
  8. Last Mile Education
  9. Ethical Diversity
  10. Who is Ladling the Chum?
  11. Dan Wang's "Breakneck" (review)
  12. Token-Relief
  13. The Faculty are Riding Horses
  14. Decoding Without Pictures
  15. The Two-Minute Mile Problem
  16. Rawls & Rationality in the 1970s
  17. The Academy Now
  18. When I hear “viewpoint diversity,” I think Diogenes the Cynic
  19. The Canary in the Classroom
  20. Vision Without Seeing (Part II)
  21. How to Tell if Something is AI-Written
  22. The Claude Test
  23. Notes on Spite
  24. Culpability (Review)
  25. How to Deliver CSU's Gen Ed with AI
  26. Toward Science Fiction Education
  27. Remember Corporate Training Programs?
  28. The Shape of Things Unseen (Review)
  29. You say 'silo' as if it were a bad thing...
  30. Is embracing AI intellectual or anti-intellectual ?
  31. The Scandal of Outdated Science
  32. Strange Bedfellows
  33. Put Your Bodies Upon the Gears
  34. I Want a Squire
  35. Why I think the new Civics Centers will fail
  36. Seeing Like a State University
  37. The Technological Republic (Review)
  38. Tools and Trees
  39. Harvard Will Survive
  40. Western Civ on Mars
  41. "...as it turns out..."
  42. How I read poems, with aphantasia
  43. The God's eye view is death to poetry
  44. Aphantasia and "The Sixth Sense"
  45. An Extinction Event?
  46. The Emperor's New DOGE
  47. Sisyphus, Unbothered
  48. It's Later Than You Think
  49. Learning by Dismantling
  50. The New Canon Wars
  51. AI Aced Your State’s Gen Ed. Now What?

2024 26

  1. Last Mile Expertise
  2. Anecdotes on Character
  3. Anecdotal Value in the Age of AI
  4. Verbs Against the Machine
  5. Aphantasia and Mental Modeling
  6. The Higher Ed Battle Ahead
  7. AI and the Last Mile 2.
  8. AI and The Last Mile
  9. Higher Ed Musings 17.
  10. The English Major to Plumber Pipeline
  11. Secretary jobs in the age of AI
  12. Higher Ed Musings 15.
  13. Profits of Order
  14. Does it Matter if Columbus were Jewish
  15. Remembering and Reckoning
  16. Stanford on the Moon
  17. Higher Ed Musings 10.
  18. AI and the Blank Spaces
  19. Higher Ed Musings 8.
  20. Class Year Identity Politics
  21. What the Humanities Could Learn from Peter Thiel
  22. Higher Ed Musings 5. Brigade d’Academia
  23. Higher Ed Musings 4.
  24. Higher Ed Musings 3.
  25. Higher Ed Musings 2.
  26. Higher Ed Musings 1.