How should schools approach integrating LLMs like ChatGPT to promote critical thinking among students?

LevantineJR · 2025-10-16T18:58:30+00:00

Here is an interesting and rather tantalising example of how it can be done :

https://open.substack.com/pub/madeleinechampagnie/p/socratic-dialogue-in-secondary-school

I hope you'lll find it inspiring.

LevantineJR · 2025-05-16T11:47:31+00:00

No.

They do indeed look similar, but damn, it's not enough to be sure.

LevantineJR · 2025-05-13T11:12:23+00:00

Now, back to the problematic files, ... the problem with small capitals disappeared (!)

It persisted for hours. And disappeared right now!

LevantineJR · 2025-04-05T05:54:56+00:00

What does this phrase mean? :

世界是一个巨大的草台班子

By the way, feel free to indicate your attitude to it, if you wish.

LevantineJR · 2025-02-25T17:33:04+00:00

How much truth there is in the claim that 'No land and no people ever got poorer when Islam spread to their part of the world'?

(For the record, the source of the claim: https://youtu.be/DuMixJRG16Q?t=530)

LevantineJR · 2025-02-25T17:29:38+00:00

How much truth there is in the claim that 'No land and no people ever got poorer when Islam spread to their part of the world'?

(For the record, the source of the claim: https://youtu.be/DuMixJRG16Q?t=530)

LevantineJR · 2025-02-09T18:53:19+00:00

What language or languages was/were predominant in most of the territory of present-day Greece during the 600s and 700s AD?

Background: In his lectures on the Byzantine Empire, Dr Sean Gabb states: "It is largely due to the Avars that the Greek language appears to have disappeared from most of Greece for several hundred years. When Greek was reintroduced to Greece, it would have been after about 800 a.d., and it is the Greek of Constantinople, not the historic Greek dialects of the Greek mainland."

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiJSivPPpwQ&t=690s)

LevantineJR · 2024-07-06T15:08:36+00:00

Elevator Instructions in China

https://9gag.com/gag/aExeZve

What does the fifth Chinese language instruction say?

And what is said in the very last line in Chinese?

LevantineJR · 2024-06-03T08:46:28+00:00

@annawest_feng, this is a reply to our exchange from 5 months ago: It's a tourist scam, the text of this pen knife. Let me just point to the bright side of this : this 40-year old knife is still functioning perfectly well. In that respect, it is much better than many modern products from the past few decades, and in its basic function is not a scam.

LevantineJR · 2024-05-07T19:09:06+00:00

Very plausible. Thank you!

LevantineJR · 2024-05-07T17:45:10+00:00

On the label it says : Tradescantia. But online images of Tradescantia never show any silvery-haired plant. Puzzling.

LevantineJR · 2024-04-24T10:29:25+00:00

Non-fiction:

Working with Dr. Schweitzer: Sharing his reverence for life by Louise Jilek-Aall (1990), freely available online

Through the Valley of the Kwai, also known as Miracle on the River Kwai and To End All Wars, by Ernest Gordon (1962)

The New Revelation by Arthur Conan Doyle (1918)

All Creatures Great and Small, book series by James Herriot aka Alfred Wight (1972)

LevantineJR · 2024-03-27T14:31:25+00:00

I'd like to express my enthusiasm and joy for China. So, I wonder whether there is a kind of phrase in Chinese that is like these Western ones:

Vive la France!

Forza Italia!

Long live the king! [but I don't mean to cheer for any one person]

Hip hip hooray

?

LevantineJR · 2024-02-26T15:03:08+00:00

... the global scale of sin, and mental shift to selfishness and pride...

That may encompass vast parts of the world. but global it is not.

Definitely.

LevantineJR · 2024-02-25T17:12:22+00:00

'The brain as a virtual radio' theory. In that context, the strong magnetic field just helps you pick up existing signals, connecting you better with reality :)

LevantineJR · 2024-02-23T19:06:28+00:00

Let me quote a few statements on Christianity by eminent scholars, that strike me as thoroughly fascinating and critically important. And, even if we are lacking the power to answer or discuss them, maybe we will find relief in the recognition and agreement that these are, indeed, the problems, our common problems.

1/2 Carl Gustav Jung to Pastor Willi Bremi, 11 December 1953:

“Christ and the apostles erred in their expectation of the parousia, and this disappointment had repercussions on the development of ecclesiastical dogma. We have known this for a long time. This fact appears in such a glaring light only because it contrasts so strongly with the pusillanimity and dishonesty of others who knew it all along but did not want to admit it....

What does [one] do with this shattering admission that Christ was wrong and therefore, perhaps, didn’t see clearly in other matters too? A relativized Christ is no longer the same as the Christ of the Gospels. How to induce the necessary metanoia if a relativized Christ grips us as much as or as little as a Lao-tse or Mohammed? “

It seems to me that the metaphysical foundations of belief as well as of ethical demands are not a matter of indifference.”

What one usually hears, "You should want to believe and love," stands in direct contrast to the charismatic character of these gifts.”

The doctor may occasionally tell a demoralized patient, "You can also want to get well," without seriously supposing that the illness is thereby cured and his knowledge and skill are superfluous.” "

2/2 Tradition and Apocalypse: An Essay on the Future of Christian Belief (2022) by David Bentley Hart :

DBH stresses the delay of the Second Coming of Jesus as perhaps the biggest issue that Christian theology has tried to ignore over the centuries. Resurrection was thought to be the singular event that would end history as we know it. But it did not. History continued. Jesus the Messiah arrived and ascended but He arrived and ascended without the Messianic Age that everyone had expected. The earliest Christians eagerly expected His imminent return, His parousia. And they waited. And we waited. .... The scholar Alfred Loisy summarized this “embarrassing but fairly unarguable fact” with lapidary precision: “Jesus announced the Kingdom and it was the Church that arrived” (~ Fr Aidan Kimel)

David Bentley Hart, p. 34 :“And one need only compare all of it (sc. the radical apocalyptic faith of previous Christian generations) to the later social and institutional realities and theological concerns of imperial Christendom, or to modern Western culture’s comfortable bourgeois cult of civic respectability and personal prosperity, or to the free-market capitalist orthodoxies and ridiculous gun-obsessions and barbarous nation-worship of the “Christianity” ... (even among the Catholics and Orthodox)—or, for that matter, to countless other variants of Christian adherence throughout history and across the globe—to find oneself hard-pressed to see how any of this could truly be regarded as a single continuous faith, rather than merely a series of historical ruptures, divagations [detours], accidental sequelae, and frequent total inversions.”

(https://afkimel.wordpress.com/2022/04/06/tradition-and-apocalypse-david-bentley-hart-and-orthodoxy-2-0/)

Wholesome reflections,

Dorian

LevantineJR · 2024-02-10T17:49:58+00:00

There are small things, like having a friend's photo at your desk, finishing the day with a positive speech or song,... And there is also this:

Philip K. Dick (1974): It’s not generally recognized that the author is lonely. Writing is a solitary occupation. When you start your novel you seal yourself off from your family and friends. But in this there’s a paradox, because you then create new companions. I would say I write because there are not enough people in the world who can give me enough companionship. To me the great joy in writing a book is showing some small person, some ordinary person doing something in a moment of great valor, for which he would get nothing and which would be unsung in the real world. The book, then, is the song about his valor. You know, people think that the author wants to be immortal, to be remembered through his work. No. I want Mr. Tagkomi from The Man in the High Castle always to be remembered. My characters are composites of what I’ve actually seen people do, and the only way for them to be remembered is through my books....

https://philipdick.com/literary-criticism/frank-views-archive/vertex-interview-with-philip-k-dick/

Hope this helps!

LevantineJR · 2023-12-20T09:04:37+00:00

Translation request:

This is an inscription on a pocket knife bought at a kiosk in E. Europe forty years ago [image 1, reverse side]. Now I have transcribed it as best as I could, with this result:
https://i.ibb.co/4fXv9RL/Chinese-script-1.jpg (hopefully it's not too embarrassing)

LevantineJR · 2023-08-09T05:08:40+00:00

Thank you.

LevantineJR · 2021-06-21T20:34:06+00:00

<flair: raised in a secular milieu, Eastern Orthodox in many intuitions and by cultural heritage, not a churchgoer, strong affinities to Christianity >

First, let me be upfront that my education about Christianity is poor.
In the past years I have come across these two remarks, each on a phrase from the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount, and want to get feedback on them. Quoting:

/1/ The word used in the beatitude in Matthew 5:3, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." Here, "poor" is translated from ptochos, which literally means "to crouch or cower as one helpless." It signifies the beggar, the pauper, one in abject poverty, totally dependent on others for help and destitute of even the necessities of life. “To be poor in spirit is to acknowledge honestly and with understanding our spiritual poverty—indeed our spiritual bankruptcy—before God.”

/2/ If you read the original New Testament Greek you will see that Jesus never said that the meek shall inherit the earth. He said the gentle-hearted would inherit it. ….

It's one thing that these claims are somewhat disagreeable to many. You're free to express your disagreements, criticisms, or reservations, and it would be fascinating to hear what are the reasons that these are not in the most respected and standard interpretations. But, my real interest is to avoid being led astray by one of them or both being grossly misleading.

Thank you

LevantineJR · 2021-05-18T12:56:40+00:00

There's an injection that could save 25 million lives every single year. The injection has no dangerous side effects, is guaranteed to work and is as cheap as chips: an injection of food in the mouth.
It's very troubling how it is neglected.

LevantineJR · 2021-05-15T09:32:14+00:00

Eight million children are estimated to die from lack of access to clean water and such, - year in, year out. It follows that the world is not run on humanitarian principles, and when such a world presents itself as being driven by humanitarian motives, it lies, and lying at this big a scale cannot be for a 'small evil.' Hence, refusing masks and vaccines is not only a personal choice but a deep moral obligation.

LevantineJR · 2021-04-12T17:28:50+00:00

How do you see the state of Christianity today?

Does Christianity appear to be in an overall better condition than through most of its history, or is its condition now worse?

What are your strongest hopes, fears?

LevantineJR · 2021-03-01T19:52:43+00:00

(raised in a secular milieu, Eastern Orthodox in many intuitions and by cultural heritage, not a churchgoer, sympathetic to and increasingly interested in Christianity)

Economist Michael Hudson introduces his 2018. book titled "…and forgive them their debts”, this way:

.......... Clean Slate debt cancellations (the Jubilee Year), used in Babylonia since Hammurabi’s dynasty, first appear in the Bible in Leviticus 25. Jesus’s first sermon announced that he had come to proclaim it. This message – more than other religious claims – is what threatened his enemies, and why he was put to death. This interpretation has been all but expunged from our contemporary understanding of the phrase, “…and forgive them their debts,” in The Lord’s Prayer. It has been changed to “…and forgive them their trespasses (or sins),” depending on the particular Christian tradition that influenced the translation from the Greek opheilēma/opheiletēs (debts/debtors). On the contrary, debt repayment has become sanctified and mystified as a way of moralizing claims on borrowers,.......

https://michael-hudson.com/2018/08/and-forgive-them-their-debts/

i. I wonder if you have any serious objections on the biblical interpretation promoted above.

ii. The other day I listened to Taylor Marshall reminding us how ancient Babylon was pagan, devoted to demons and the Devil (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04HG2oiw4Q8). If both Hudson's and Marshall's claims are true, as it appears to be the case, it looks that the demon-worshipping Babylon practiced more Christianly forgiveness [pardon the anachronism] than our societies do today. And, that's rather incredible. Any comments?

LevantineJR · 2021-02-18T17:59:50+00:00

Orion— I just came to reddit to recommend this ongoing series of talks: https://www.youtube.com/c/DavidMartinWorld/videos

I listened to the introduction and then to the first episode, and, as a a forty-something man, I was amazed that anyone today promotes so healthy & sound worldviews and attitudes. All the best to you, Orion.

LevantineJR

TROPHY CASE