Reading, writing, arithmetic: the crisis coverage never leaves the three Rs. But the list is a reduction. The old core of schooling put logic at its gateway, and the slogan dropped it. Reasoning has no score, so it can have no crisis, so it is never deliberately taught. And AI just made the other three nearly free.
Juniors learned the trade by doing the grunt work next to seniors. AI is cutting the grunt work and remote work is cutting the proximity, so the apprenticeship that quietly made partners is breaking, with nothing designed to replace it. Who becomes the next partner?
Michigan covered its grades and the internet answered in a day. Some replies were careful, most were not, and nobody could tell them apart. That is a market failure with a Nobel Prize behind it. It explains why good arguments go unread, why I chose to argue without standing anyway, and what anyone with an audience can do about it in about a minute.
The Wall Street Journal spent fourteen years testing stock pickers against darts, and fifty years of fund scoreboards say the professionals rarely beat the plain index after costs. The same belief is reassembling around AI: predictive language models read as insight engines, with no scoreboard at all. Same error, new tape. Here is the test that would settle it, and the reason its result will not.
Every day, millions face important choices. They see what appears to be equal options. They rely on intuition. Here’s why we keep picking the wrong door
That’s right, I am using four questions that decide what deserves my time. Here’s what it did for me and why you need a system too.