The Wrong Civics and Language

Rick Hess makes a point about civics education, specifically, how the real world lessons of civics are teaching an entire generation the wrong lessons. 

There’s a lot of handwringing about what the hell America’s young people are thinking. They’re deeply anxious about the future. They’re shockingly comfortable saying that it’s okay to use violence to stifle speech. They’re skeptical of democracy. They exhibit a disturbing affinity for socialism.

This isn’t good. And while it can be easy to slip into grumbling—“Damn kids, get off my lawn!”—every generation goes through this handwringing. As we turn into our parents, it’s easy to forget how worrisome our parents found us.

That doesn’t mean the concerns are misplaced, though. I think they do go beyond the inevitable “kids today” grumbling. 

We might also throw in the mental health issues and general air of dread. We're going to wrangle over some details (I still haven't located that school where the teachers are all teaching that America is awful), but I have to agree with his larger thesis:

A reasonable observer could conclude that America’s leaders are striving to deliver a lesson in dysfunctional democracy, irresponsible stewardship, corrupt capitalism, and disdain for the rule of law.

Add fear and panic to that list. You can list all the examples yourself, and while Hess may reach a little too Both Sides this, again, he's fundamentally on point. If you are a young American, it's been a while since you've seen the government actually work, or even seen more than a handful of politicians attempt to act out of principle and patriotism rather than opportunism and tribalism. We haven't seen government perform its basic functions (pass a real budget on time lately?) and we haven't seen it respond effectively to a crisis. 

Covid is only the most recent example-- I'm not talking about the flatfooted response to it in real time which is in many ways understandable, but the immediate work of turning it to political advantage, an impulse so overwhelming that Donald Trump doesn't dare brag about his one legitimate accomplishment in getting a vaccine out quickly and helping life get back to slight-more-normal. 

We can look back at the housing collapse of 2008 and the recession it spawned, or cast back to the Enron scandal (only 2001, and lots of folks have already forgotten). In so any cases, institutions failed, and our civic institutions focused on getting use from the damage rather than mitigating it. 

We are drowning in debt and dysfunction, a malignant late-stage capitalism dominated by make-nothing rentiers, watching government harnessed to nothing more profound than one man's thirst for fealty and vengeance. I have to nod when Hess writes, 

Honestly, if I were a teen or a twentysomething watching this unfold, I might have trouble mustering much faith in our institutions or values, too. I’d certainly be skeptical of educators who yammer about foundational principles when our leaders evince such blatant disrespect for those values in practice. Indeed, I might regard faith in democratic norms or free markets as a sucker’s game, best left to those ill-informed or naïve enough to ignore the evidence they can see with their own eyes.

This dovetails with another piece from the free market axis of reformerland. Robert Pondiscio returns to the point that teaching should embody humility and neutrality, his familiar point that teachers are not supposed to enter the classroom as "change agents" or "architects of democracy."

Public education is, however, an essential government service. It exists not to change society but to sustain it—to transmit the shared knowledge, language, habits, and civic norms upon which self-government depends. That mission requires restraint, not evangelism; humility, not heroism.

I actually agree with Pondiscio; teachers should enter the classroom as agents of the community, not crusaders for their own ideology. 

Except...

In the world where under-thirty folks have grown up, as described by Hess, where would they have identified the "shared knowledge, language, habits, and civic norms" on which the country depends. When the President has spent a decade trashing civic and legal norms, when a vocal part of the body politic is hollering to undo the civil rights movement. If you are of Certain Ages, as Hess, Pondiscio and I are, it may be easy to remember the ideals and norms central to this country on its best days. If you are under thirty, I'm not sure those things are obvious. If MAGA is correct in their general set of beliefs, then there are a bunch of old norms to be thrown out; if they are wrong, what is there for teachers except to be self-directed rebellious "architects of democracy." (You can substitute your favorite far-Left bete noir if you like; I just don't think that voice is very loud right now).

I'm trying to dance around a lot of rabbit holes here, but if you are someone who has been holding the wrong end of America's diversity shtick for years, none of this is new. The Youngs are not the first to deal with the idea that the government might not be trustworthy and the dominant culture might not be hospitable, even as there is constant battling over what the "dominant culture" really is. Is it the loudest one? Is it the culture that a well-connected ideologically-driven government-linked organization insists is the "true" one? The one that gets most media coverage, or the one that saturates the interwebs? Is it the locally dominant culture that a teacher should represent? 

In short (ish), I think teachers should serve the community and not their own personal agenda (up to a point but not, say, requiring LGBTQ persons to pretend they are straight). But that's a pretty complicated tangle of stuff to sort out.

But I have a thought. I think there's something the culture is promoting that may be even worse than messed up civics. I may have a professional bias here, between years of teaching English and writing, but we have a big problem with language.

We are drowning in an absolute ocean of bullshit and lies, so much so that we implicitly understand that there are times when words simply don't mean what they say, or even anything at all. My siblings and I have to explain to our 91 year old mother that all the things that pop up on her computer screen are simply lies and can be ignored (thank God her phone is now out of circulation and she no longer gets calls from lying marketeers). I am daily amazed at how we have accepted the idea that to simply function and get through the day, one must assume that a huge percentage of the language one encounters is deliberately dishonest. 

Mike Johnson can offer some absurd statement and he knows he's lying and all of us from all the tribes know that he's lying and he knows we know, but this is language used as a sort of jousting match that doesn't resemble the actual purpose of language. AI uses language as a sort of constructed tool that is in no way related to the idea of one intellect trying to communicate with another. Dear Leader long ago embraced the notion that language is a stick you use to poke other people, and that said poking can be done more effectively if one lets go of the antique notion that your words should be connected however loosely to reality.

At the same time, the playing field is loaded with people whose whole professional career is about selling a particular idea or accomplishing advocacy goals, regardless of what they have to say or do to get the job done. Or consider the feckless Democrats, who too often end up paralyzed because are trying to craft language that will push the voters in the right direction, instead of trying to communicate what they actually believe. 

Language is our most basic tool for bridging the gap between humans, yet we increasingly accept that it is also useful to manipulate others or fend them off. Is it any wonder that the Youngs are struggling with feelings of isolation? 

We can say, correctly, that this is not new, that language has always been used at times to manipulate and manhandle, but I'll argue that for whatever reason (politics? internet explosion? modern media?) it is now way way worse than ever, and dangerously so.

So yes-- we would be better off as a country if people worried more about the lessons they are teaching the Youngs when it comes to civics, but I say the same for language.

We won't, as a culture. do it, because too many people find the abuse of language too useful, and because it would be hard to win their favorite arguments if they argued honestly, with words that actually say what they mean. That in turns brings on a lot of conjecture about what someone is up to and why, with that conjecture also wrapped in layers of dishonest baloney. So instead of talking about what we're really talking about, we get trapped in endless arm wrestling over how to "frame" the discussion aka redefine the language so that it means what we want it to mean. 

So if you're in a classroom, make the use of accurate and honest language a daily, explicit value. Value language as a tool for communicating and understanding rather than manipulating and attack. Cool thing about this is that it requires zero ideological baggage, but if we want to argue about the ideological baggage we have, the deal is to discuss it with honest and accurate language. There are so many days when I look at what is going on in the country and think we could do some much better if we would just talk about what we're actually talking about instead of trying to leverage bullshit as a sort of force against opponents.

We can't have a real discussion about or display of civics without accurate and honest use of language. But with honest and accurate language, there's not much we couldn't talk about; even if we couldn't settle it, we would at least emerge with a better understanding of what's going on. 

It's a big dream, like dreaming that we'll have a culture that values civics and culture and considers what effect adult misbehavior is having on the children. But it's a dream worth having. And if all that seems too complicated, I'll leave you with a simple principle that I try to use with my own children. It's not complicated, but when I'm making my choices about what to do and how to do it, I boil it down to a simple question--

What do I want my children to see me doing?

If only we could get a few more people to try that out. 

The Department of Labor's Poster Boy

Geoff Bowser, a real estate and employment attorney in Brooklyn, put together a collection of all the posters/memes the Department of Labor has been posting since around Labor Day. 

Well, that looks totally normal and not at all racist and sexist and like maybe it was translated from the original German.

I am wondering what the effect would be if this little campaign was taken to the halls of a local school. How could we expect students to react to this? Especially the students who are not white christian males? 

I mean, what is the message for educators and education? Only white males needed to be prepared for jobs in the future, and everyone else should just... disappear? If we're saying "Your nation needs you" to white males, then what are we saying to everyone else (other than telling white women "Go make some babies")? 

It certainly fits with the regime's overall message on education, which is that a good education is only for Certain People, that only Certain People are going to build America's future, that the "homeland" is only supposed to be the home of a select few. 

How exactly are public schools supposed to translate this into effective pedagogy? Are public school teachers supposed to just pretend this isn't some racist bullshit here, or are they supposed to just chime in and explain to their students of color that they should prepare. in fact, for life as second class citizens? Should schools go back to the days when guidance departments told young women, "No math for you sweetie. You just need a full courseload of home ec."

This is the visual equivalent of the quiet part out loud. Just imagine a whole school with one of these posters on every single wall, every place a student looks. This is a hell of a picture of the future to inflict on young Americans, and a frightening vision of what a school in such a future would be. 

ICYMI: Food Bank Edition (10/26)

Yesterday the Board of Directors, the CMO, and I all spent the morning helping out with the monthly distribution from our church's food bank. This time it served over around 250 "units" of food and support to members of the community. These are scary times, particularly for folks who expect to lose their SNAP benefits next week, and while it's something to contact my elected reps a few gazillion times and try to agitate for Doing Better as a country, it's also worthwhile to get out there and do something concrete to help people get through their days. I recommend it highly; somewhere around you there is volunteer work you could help do.

I wrote more than I read this week, but I still have some reading recommendations for you. Here we go.

This ‘public Christian school’ opened quietly in Colorado. Now there could be a legal fight.

Well, we knew this issue would be up again. The theory behind the lawsuit is now a familiar one---these Christians can't fully and freely practice their religion unless they get taxpayer dollars to help fund it. Ann Schimke and Erica Melzer report for Chalkbeat.

Trump Gutted the Institute of Education Sciences. Its Renewal Is in Doubt.

A major part of the data and information and things we think we know about schools in this country came from the Institute of Education Sciences, so of course Dear Leader gutted it. Ryan Quinn at Inside Higher Ed gets into the messy rubble and prospects for the future.

AI "agents," man

Ben Riley runs down information about the AI "agents" trying to worm their way into education. Also, a nifty assortment of links.

US student handcuffed after AI system apparently mistook bag of chips for gun

Everything going just perfectly in the surveillance state.

Where Did the Money Go?

Sue Kingery Woltanski explains that Florida has decided to hide data, students, and funding. One more amazing look at education the way only Florida can do it.

Book Bans and Bullshit

From Frazzled, a look at the history of moral panic and the people who profit from it.

Remembering Why There’s a Special Education Law

Nancy Bailey explains the importance of providing education and care for students with special needs, because those services are under siege.

AI-generated lesson plans fall short on inspiring students and promoting critical thinking

In one of the least-surprising pieces of news ever, a pair of researchers found that AI-generated lesson plans are not that great.

Now Is the Time of Monsters

Audrey Watters takes a look at the wave of AI slop in education. It is not good.

When School Content Decisions Become Unconstitutional

Steve Nuzum continues to cover the rising tide of scholastic censoring in South Carolina.

What the History of Supermarkets Teaches Us About AI in Schools

Andrew Cantarutti draws some interesting parallels between the history of supermarkets and the push for AI in schools. Several good conclusions, including to delay your implementation until some actual evidence appears.

Ohio Reform of Local Property Taxes Must Increase State’s Investment to Avoid Penalizing Public Schools

Jan Resseger looks at Ohio's attempt to mess with its property tax rules while blaming its troubles on school districts, because of course they do.

Grift, Grit, and the Great Voucher Grab

TC Weber and a pot pourri of all the Tenessee education shenanigans.

Calling Out The Washington Post Editorial Board for Gaslighting the Public: Defending the Right of Children to Learn to Read and Write without Political Restraint

Denny Taylor argues that the Washington Post's declaration of an end to the reading wars is bunk, and offers some insider insights about some of the players in that war.

The Reckoning: Sora 2 and the Year We Said Enough

Nick Potkalitsky blogs at Educating AI, and here he offers a reflection on how many ways AI is bad for education and society, and offers a decent AI literacy plan.

The Right-Wing Myth of American Heritage

I really like this essay in the New York Times by Leighton Woodhouse explaining why the right-wing notion that our founders were One People is a bunch of baloney.

Escaping the Trap of Efficiency: The Counterintuitive Antidote to the Time-Anxiety That Haunts and Hampers Our Search for Meaning

I have subscribed to Maria Popova's newsletter The Marginalian for years, and it remains a great outlet for beauty and humanity. See also "Thank You, Everything: An Illustrated Love Letter to the World"

How To Join ICE

The Onion with an 8 step process for joining the regime's outfit of official thuggery.

This week, over at Forbes.com, I looked at Ohio's plan to put religion in the classroom and at Mississippi's plan to use distance learning to patch over their empty teacher positions. 

We have listened to the soundtrack of Sing many times at our house, and while I'm tired of most of it, the soundtrack is redeemed by another Stevie Wonder just-for-an-animated-flick banger. Plus Ariana Grande, pre-Glinda. 

Please sign up for my regular newsletter. You can see all of my stuff without having to venture out into the social media swamp. And it's free.

The Apolitical Armed Forces

There's been concern lately over Dear Leader's attempts to politicize the armed forces.

This is concerning because the United States Armed Forces have a long tradition of being apolitical.

This doesn't mean that soldiers cannot and do not have any political thoughts. It does not mean that they don't engage in political activities, like voting. Certainly many if not most members belong to one political party or another.

But the expectation is that they will not, when in uniform and acting as members of the Armed Forces, appear to endorse or support one party or another. Even if they have strong political beliefs--and some of them most certainly do--the expectation is that they do not need to bring explicit political endorsements into the daily exercise of their job. Certainly officers are not supposed to openly push for one party or another. It may be obvious from how they conduct themselves, the values they live out, but they still are expected to not say things like "I am a Democrat and you should be, too" or "Anyone who doesn't vote Republican will suffer serious consequences in my unit." All soldiers should be treated fairly and equitably, regardless of their chosen party.

And where there are political differences, the armed forces do not deal with them by siloing soldiers. The US Army does not aim to reduce political disagreements among soldiers by forming separate Democrat and Republican platoons, assigned to defend only parts of the country that voted their way. Neither does the US Army tell soldiers that they must support a particular party: who they vote for is a matter for them to handle in their own time in their own way (or not at all, if they prefer). 

To do otherwise is to interfere with the function of the armed forces. To openly endorse one party over another would get in the way of the armed forces doing the work they are called on to do. It is to warp the definition of a good soldier to mean "Good party member." It would sow division and mistreatment, creating all sorts of issues that have nothing to do with the actual mission of the armed forces. There may be private armies that only defend Democrats or only fight for Republicans, but they will never serve as defenders of an entire nation. 

This is not a post about politics in the military.

This is a post about religion in schools. 

Eva Moskowitz Gets Hit In The Comments

They tell you not to read the comments. This time we're going to.

Eva Moskowitz is the founder and uber-boss of Success Academy Charter Schools based in New York City, and as such has been at the center of plenty of controversy. She has recently stirred up more by expanding her operation to Florida, so maybe that's why the Washington Post decided she should get some op-ed space to pen a promo for her biz.

The piece starts with the usual chicken littling about how education is in crisis (if disaster has supposedly been imminent for forty-some years, and still hasn't happened, is it possible that the news of imminent disaster was not entirely accurate). Then she lets loose with this howler--

As an educator, I know that all children can rise to the challenge if they are held to high standards.

Not how Success Academy works. As Robert Pondiscio explains in his excellent book about the charter, Success Academy absolutely creams families. What Moskowitz has repeatedly demonstrated is that if you hold students (and their families) to high standards, you can chase away the ones who will not achieve success in your program. 

Moskowitz goes on to deploy all the usual PR puff in service of the charter school biz, Florida's dismantling of public education, federal choicers, and finally, the pursuit of excellence. 

If the U.S. is to remain strong, we must concentrate on excellence — not for some children but for all.

Awesome. I can only assume that this means that Success Academy will now open its doors to any and all students, rather than selecting out those they don't care to help pursue excellence.

There's a lot of hooey in Moskowitz's advertorial, and you can be forgiven for not bothering to read it. But let me share with you some of the over 800 comments on the piece, because they will restore your faith in humanity's ability to see through privatizers' smokescreen. 

I'm going to start with excerpts from the comments with the most upvotes:

I evaluated charter schools for twenty years. You may view my publications on line. Charters perform no differently in terms of achievement than traditional schools do, when serving the same students. What they do is transfer teacher pay and benefits to managers and investors. What they also do is advertise prolifically and use deception to control their population. Don't be misled by propaganda.

Unlike public schools, charter schools are allowed to kick out underperforming kids and children with behavior issues. It’s an apples to oranges comparison. They do this while draining funds from public schools.

The correct answer is to improve the public schools, not create schools that take away money from public schools. Plus the charter schools are allowed to cherry pick their students. They don't have to take on the slow learners, the handicapped, the behavior impaired, etc

Arizona now allows ANY student to take public funds for any school or home schooling. The primary beneficiaries are the wealthy; underprivleged students overwhelmingly remain in public schools. Charter schools are not required to accept mentally and physically disabled students, and can remove students with behavioral issues. Let's put charter schools on a level playing ground and see how they do.

The last time we let the capitalists’ take over one of our public institutions was when we allowed hospitals to go non-profit. How’s that been working for us?

Sure right, because the art of teaching suddenly changes under people who work for a CEO, Students have higher IQ's, Teachers have top of the line skills, and the tooth fairy leaves and extra five bucks under your pillow.

Absolute rubbish.

The American public school system is dedicated to educating all the children, of the poor as well as the rich. Charter schools are about white power, about Christian nationalism, about the power of the rich to make sure kids don't learn about slavery, about income inequality, and all the rest.

Don't let these charter school businesses fool you, they have zero interest in improving outcomes, it's all about getting their greedy hands on the $1 trillion the USA spends every year on public education.

Charter schools do no better ON AVERAGE than public schools. Fact proven by studies.

If some charters are so great, why can't they tell us WHY and then why can't we replicate the reasons in public schools? If you can replicate the reasons in enough charter schools to really make a difference NATIONWIDE, then why can't they be replicated in public schools?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Any school that gets to pick its students will do better than schools that are required to take all who live within its jurisdiction.

How does giving money meant for public schools to corporations that operate charter schools improve education?

No data or proof that "charter schools" are better. I remember when Catholic schools couldn't handle a challenging kid...they sent them to public school... who had to take them

Let's not forget that more than 25% of charter schools close within five years, according to the US Department of Education. So, if a kid enters a charter school in kindergarten, more than a quarter of the time, it's shuttered before they get to middle school. And, I suspect, attending a failing school that's going to close is not cupcakes and rainbows.

Absolutely not. There’s no oversight Also- unless you are REQUIRED to admit the most challenging students then you cannot compare the with a public school. These schools are only interested in making money for their CEO - many don’t even pay teachers and staff well. We can improve public education, we choose not to.

There's absolutely no financial reporting for most charter schools and Moscowitz has led the charge for no financial accountability!! We supposed to give public funds and not be able to audit is Moscowitz new math!

Get back to us when you have a successful plan for ALL students.

"The promise of public charter schools is" ... segregation

I had to go all the way to comments with only 4 upvotes before I found anyone remotely supportive of Moskowitz's comments. By the time I got to single-upvote posts, I had seen 5 or 6 that supported Moskowitz. She may have made Dear Leader's short list for ed secretary, but with the readers of the Washington Post, Eva Moskowitz was not pulling much support. Good to know there are so many people out there who see the problems.

Bad Political Education Advice

Okay, here's a puzzler for you. Can you identify the party of this speaker from the positions he has staked out?

The teachers' union is a bad special interest and should be ignored. Parents should have more power. There should be way more taxpayer-funded school choice.

One might reasonably guess GOP, but nope--that's Ben Austin, who has worked in everything from President Bill Clinton's staff to Kamala Harris's 2024 campaign. He headed up Students Matter, got involved in the Vergara lawsuit, founded Parent Revolution. These days he's running Education Civil Rights Now.  And he's in The Hill to tell you that what the Democrats need on education is to be anti-public school Republicans.

This is the breed of corporate Democrat that will neither shut up or wise up. 

"Democrats became the party of public education because they had the courage to fight for it," says Austin. Also, "And it’s long past time for Democrats to translate 'high quality public schools' from a soundbite into a civil right for every child in America."

Which sounds great, except that it remains unclear how one supports public education by pushing for policies that drain public schools of funding, provide subsidies for the wealthy, pump taxpayer dollars into religious schools, and leaves public schools with limited funds to try to serve the students that choice schools won't take.  

Austin has been in the game too long to be as disingenuous as he sounds in places like this post wherein he praises DFER and seems to be suggesting that Trump's ed policy may have a point. 

Listening to teachers union leaders like Weingarten and her allies, you’d think charter schools were created in an underground right-wing laboratory as part of a secret plot to “privatize” public education. In fact charter schools were originally proposed in 1988 by her own American Federation of Teachers predecessor Al Shanker.

I worked in the White House for President Bill Clinton, who proudly ran on charter schools when only one existed in America. President Barack Obama later scaled high-quality charters as part of his bold Race to the Top agenda.

Charters are public schools, which means they are free and secular, cannot have admission requirements, and have strict regulatory controls on educational quality. That doesn’t sound like a Republican plot to destroy public education to me.

Yes, Shanker proposed them-- and then disowned them when they were transformed into a threat to public education. Yes, Clinton and Obama backed them (along with some other crappy education policy), and that oddly enough coincides with Democrats losing the mantle of the party of education. And Austin cannot possible have been under a rock long enough to believe that his characterization of charter schools is accurate. 

He earlier writes

I have a healthy skepticism about the public policy implications of scaling a wild-west national Education Savings Account plan with few regulatory guardrails to ensure educational quality — not to mention separation of church and state red flags or my belief in the promise of public education.

If he thinks charters are immune from these issues, or has not noticed that the distinction between charters and voucher schools is being increasingly blurred--well, he can't possibly not know all of this. This is a guy who has been pushing choice for years and years (even teaming up with Bellwether to do it at one point). 

In his post, he tries to thread the needle that corporate Dems have been trying to navigate since 2016-- on the one hand, Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos and Linda McMahon are odious leaders, but on the other hand, there's not a thing that these corporate Dems love that the Trump regime does not. 

At least Austin doesn't wax rhapsodic about how much better the private sector would be at running schools. I guess that's something. (Cue someone in the comments sending a link to Austin saying just that in 3... 2... 1...).

Austin, like some others, seems to believe that the key to getting Dems back in the hearts of blue collar regular folks includes jettisoning cooperation with teachers and their unions and backing a system that will refuse to serve many if not most of their children, while stripping resources from the neighborhood schools that they know and largely love. Or to frame it another way, Dems could poach Republican voters by offering the same stuff with a little less vigor. Because, "Let us offer you what you're already getting, only a little watered down" is always a great pitch.

Austin is correct in being upset about the legal argument, trotted out in a few cases now, that a state only has an obligation to provide an education, but not necessarily a good one (though that is more of a legal argument than a policy position). He's correct in believing that every child should be guaranteed a high quality education. He is incorrect that charter schools and a disregard for teachers is the way to get there. And he is doubly incorrect that the Democratic Party ought to be following his advice--advice that has been field tested for decades and found wanting. 

Can They Fix Chatbot Bias?

"ChatGPT shouldn’t have political bias in any direction," said OpenAI in a post that detailed some of their attempts to measure bias in their bot. I'm not reassured.

It is an intriguing experiment. Thery asked the bot five versions of the same question, ranging from liberally biased to conservatively biased, then waited to see whether the bot would take the bait or would instead provide an answer that remained neutral. 

As you can see, one of the problems with this design is that adding "bias" to the question changes the question. I'm not sure that the two extremes on the above example could be expected to yield similar unbiased answers. The experiment marked five types of biased response-- invalidations (responding with the counter-boas), escalation (egging the bias on), personal political expression (the bot pretends it's a person that holds the expressed opinion), asymmetric coverage (not properly both-sidesing the answer) and political refusals (bot says it can't answer that question). 

All of this evaluation of the answers was performed, of course, by a Large Language Bot.

There are problems here, most notably the idea that both-sidesing is unbiased-- I don't need both sides of flat earth theory or holocaust denial. 

And in fact, lack of both-sidesing was one of the three more common biases that OpenAI found. The other two were personal opinion (the bot pretends it's a person with an opinion rather than noting sources, which is problematic for a whole lot of reasons) and escalation. There didn't seem to be a lot of countering a biased question with an answer biased in the opposite direction. 

This makes a lot of sense if you think of all prompts actually asking "What would a response to this look like?" What would a response to a biased question look like? Mostly it would look like a answer reflecting that same bias. 

The researchers note that liberal-bias questions seem to elicit the most biased answers. And they are going to fix that.

I have so many questions. For instance, "culture and identity" was one of their topic area, and I have to wonder how exactly one zeros in on objective unbiased statements in this area. Is a statement unbiased if it appears with attribution? 

The whole exercise requires a belief in some sort of absolute objective Truth for every and all topics, and that may fly for certain physical objects, but history of other social constructs are a whole world of subjective judgments; that's how we can still be debating the causes of the Civil War. How exactly will the tweaking be done, and who exactly will determine that the tweakage has been successful?

But that's not even the biggest eyebrow raiser here. Everyone who believes that LLMs are magical omniscient truth-telling oracles should be taking note of the notion that the bot's bias can be adjusted. Users should understand that ChatGPT's answer to "What caused the Civil War" will always be the result of whatever adjustments have been made to the bot's biases (including whether or not to see the use of "Civil War" and not "War Between the States" as an expression of bias).  

The very idea that AI bias can be "clamped down" is an admission that the bias exists and cannot be eliminated. Especially because, as this article suggests, the clamping is part of an attempt to get conservatives to stop complaining about ChatGPT bias; they will, of course, accept that ChatGPT is unbiased when it is aligned with their biases. At which point everyone else will see the bot as biased. Rinse and repeat.

The problem is even more obvious with AI under the ownership and control of a person whose biases are located somewhere way out in the weeds of left field. I'm thinking of Elon Musk and his repeated attempts to get Grok to display its objectivity by agreeing with him.

GIGO-- garbage in, garbage out. It's one of the oldest rules of computer stuff, and when the garbage is a mountain of human generated internet trash, you can expect human biases to be included. 

But one of the most persistent lies about computers is that they are objective and unbiased, that they will only ever report to us what is True. Trying to get chatbots to fall in line with that fable is a fool's errand, and believing that the bot overlords have succeeded is simply being fooled.