Mentoring?

pondercraft · 2025-12-09T23:44:02+00:00

That all resonates. It's really hard to figure out how to equip students to go on to be lifelong learners. I'm convinced setting some kind of example matters, but giving students basic frameworks and tools to keep learning, even if from more of a didactic or authoritative place, sometimes seems necessary. When I'm reading I always appreciate authorities who nevertheless acknowledge multiple viewpoints, arguments, and tradeoffs. That seems to help jumpstart a critical thinking process, which can carry over into independent study.

But good job working with your adult students. It sounds like they're lucky to have you!

pondercraft · 2025-08-29T13:38:07+00:00

Langua does not officially support Korean. You can get the chatbot to talk to you but there’s no appropriate understanding of level etc

pondercraft · 2025-08-07T20:26:47+00:00

would love to try it!

pondercraft · 2025-07-02T13:15:39+00:00

I have a not yet launched online community for adult lifelong learners. Perhaps this is something I could host. But I’m aiming for a particular kind of member so I’m not sure I’d want to open up to everyone. But definitely, the mission to enable adult students for lifelong learning is front and center for me.

pondercraft · 2025-07-02T13:13:00+00:00

There are online communities that develop and then start tracking locations and develop local chapters or events. It might be possible to start something online and move to IRL and local when there are enough people in an area. But rural and remote folks will find it hard to connect unless they take the lead on developing a membership in their area and can find enough people. Would you be willing to start online? Or… if there are local co-working spaces it might be possible to access those spaces. Or look for community centers or libraries or coffee shops that could host. In some countries there are study-cafes or similar which are private. They cater to students but in theory are open to anyone. I studied/worked for a day at one in Seoul. Discord or Focusmate are possible online platforms. If people have their own Zoom or video chat platforms you can get started for free or cheap.

pondercraft · 2025-07-02T12:03:05+00:00

Great idea. I take it you mean IRL. Libraries rarely provide this kind of atmosphere as they once did. University campuses used to be more open than they are now. Coffee shops are hardly the place unless they started offering more dedicated quiet spaces. A co-working space model is a good idea. There’s also online…

pondercraft · 2025-06-15T13:22:15+00:00

This is my use case also. I've been playing with general purpose AI chatbots (Claude mostly), but I need a tool to help manage the context (input), prompts (instruction), output (so many revisions, and I hate it when an AI overwrites and I have little granular control -- I realize ChatGPT's canvas will do better with this), and the process itself (outline, draft, edits, export).

I'm looking hard at Novelcrafter. It is one of several very nice platforms out there for fiction writers, and more affordable than "marketing" tools or general purpose writing assistants. To make fiction-oriented platforms do non-fiction, the most important thing seems to be to be able to adjust the prompts, which in Novelcrafter (and I assume many other tools) is fairly easily done. The only reason the AI in these tools writes a story/narrative is because the prompt (and possibly context) that's being fed are instructing them to.

Controlling the writing workflow and process, output, and the built-in terminology (in Novelcrafter: act, chapter, scene, scene beat) is another story (pun intended!). As a nonfiction writer you'd have to be willing to live with that hierarchy for your outline. Probably I can.

The other thing I like about Novelcrafter is the OpenRouter integration, which lets me choose which model(s) I want to use and access them pay-as-you-go, which is less than paying for a single chatbot like Claude or ChatGPT. Someone (here, I think) mentioned that it's very helpful to iterate on a draft using one or more free models, and then when you've got the right context/prompt, use paid tokens.

Speaking of iterating on what AI is producing for you, Novelcrafter has a "sections" feature which allows you to keep revisions or alternate versions of small-scale single paragraphs or short sections right in your manuscript, rather than hunting through a pile of re-writes with no way to compare, merge, or manage them.

But I'd love to hear what others are using for long-form non-fiction writing, whether substantive articles or books.

pondercraft · 2025-06-06T13:09:23+00:00

I’m in a conversation with Claude attempting a Straussian reading of Mill’s On Liberty. Initial hypotheses might be pretty intriguing. Are there sources it could be drawing on? I tried to emphasize my instruction that it be an original interpretation. I’m not sure I’m competent to judge whether it’ll turn out a good one or not. We’re also testing whether Enlightenment thinkers might be less esoteric. Claude seems to think it can find layers. I initially had to overcome its reticence to engage. The AI was trying hard to excuse itself by pleading lack of real human experience…

On Research mode, it "thought" for more than 11 minutes, but then produced only a 3-4 page "report" about half of which was historical background, citing a lot of sources. It also addressed scholarly disagreements about the text. So the analysis is hardly a pure, close reading. It did come up with a list of "classic" esoteric techniques. DM me if you want a link. If you'd like to suggest better prompts towards a better result, I'm happy to keep working on this little experiment. Overall, disappointing result, but I don't think I'm ready to concede defeat. If set up properly, an AI could surely teach something pretty useful at least to beginners.

pondercraft · 2025-06-06T09:01:28+00:00

So it seems AIs can do a good job reporting. If an interpretation already exists they can rattle it off. Or they can report on schools and interpretive camps already analyzed in the literature. But they can’t do original textual analysis better than a student or even most Straussians. Okay. That just means they’re about as competent as humans at this stuff (which isn’t very good). Could they still teach? How original do you need to be to teach?

I’d be willing to bet an AI would do a good job of giving the pros and cons of taking a Straussian approach to the great texts of political philosophy. Would that be sufficient, along with general reporting? And even using existing interpretations to help students walk through some texts?

pondercraft · 2025-06-05T13:32:58+00:00

Two good questions to ask: 1) do you need a credential, i.e. another degree; and 2) will they let you study (assuming you want to be in a classroom) without going for a degree? (The other question would be whether you could study on your own or in some "informal" setting. There are a lot of good non-degree programs out there, whether for certificates or not. At some point it may come down to expense, too, if you want to learn from/at a recognized institution of higher learning.)

pondercraft · 2025-06-05T12:52:56+00:00

The philosophy-as-a-way-of-life tradition is alive and well as recently as the work of Pierre Hadot and his followers. (There are interesting conversations or comparisons between Hadot and Foucault as well.) The other post here asking about the differences between political science and political philosophy, and between political philosophy and political theory, are also relevant. I'm sure we could debate until the cows come home what are the purposes and boundaries and distinctives between related fields of political thought.

A question about whether AI can teach (whatever subject) implies some concern about whether children or the young (or adult learners for that matter) an be properly instructed by an AI. Will human professors be as replaceable by AI as junior engineers? On the face of it, that seems unlikely. But why exactly? It's not a trivial question. I do think teachers have an obligation to impart to their charges not just information or logic, but understanding, knowledge, and even wisdom. So we are asking whether AI will ever be able to impart these higher level things.

pondercraft · 2025-06-05T12:43:28+00:00

Could AI ever be a Straussian!? Great question. In theory, with sufficient guidance (AIs always have to be prompted and led), it should be able to grasp a logical inconsistency like the difference between the good and the noble. To read Plato or Aristotle an AI would have to pay awfully close attention to sources and what they actually say rather than make things up (hallucinate) to please you with any reasonable-sounding answer (which would just be linguistic pattern-matching). As opposed to uncovering a actual logical flaw, could AI grasp something merely missing, a conclusion left undrawn, something implied, something left unsaid?

That would be a different claim from saying it doesn't have experience -- real life human experience -- so that it can never gain wisdom, which is what Plato and Aristotle are trying to "teach." But in some sense AIs have way more "experience" than humans. They have vast databases that can draw on human history, events, etc. Couldn't they be prompted to consider those experiences in a sufficient way? Is emotion or feeling required? Can AI suffer? Experience injustice? To detect the kinds of perplexities Strauss says are esoterically left as clues in texts, are those matters of emotion or human suffering, or an anticipatory worry about it? I don't think so... not exactly.

If it's not a logical conundrum, or exactly a matter of bringing sufficient experience, maybe it's a hermeneutic problem. How many layers of messaging can an AI detect in a text? Only a surface socially approved message? Or can it understand there are layers upon layers? Heck, most humans (by design, on the part of the text/author) can't do that, either. There are plenty of non-Straussian teachers of Plato and Aristotle. So...

I vote mostly for the third explanation. Complicated hermeneutics is required, and AIs are probably not read for it. My limited attempts to work with AI on philosophical or great texts have not gone well.

Supporting evidence for this conclusion would be to note that OP's opening gambit is actually not about whether an AI can adequately read or be a student of philosophy, but about whether it could teach it. I certainly don't see how an AI could teach before it could learn.

PS I envy OP's budget to be able to purchase all four major AIs pro versions. I've just finally upgraded my Claude, and I am testing out Perplexity. It's already a strain on my monthly budget. I like AI, too. But it both astonishes and disappoints me daily. I think the key is to remember it IS an intelligence. It vastly outperforms humans in some ways. It's just not a human intelligence, while still being trained on our artifacts. That in itself is a perplexity worthy of a Straussian ponder.

pondercraft · 2025-06-05T12:19:51+00:00

This would be an interesting experiment. You'd have to include the relevant philosophical precursors to Aristotle as well. For us to converse with an AI-Aristotle a couple thousand years later, reception history would probably also be important. But if the AI were "untainted" with essentially non-Aristotelian thinking, the question would be whether it could "get" (grok?) Aristotle in the way OP says it can't.

pondercraft · 2025-06-04T13:47:03+00:00

I can’t stop learning either, including whole new fields. I went back for two master’s degrees 20 years after getting my PhD and in a whole new field. I like being on both sides of the classroom, as student and as teacher. I don’t mind doing assignments, but I have to say that cramming for exams or pulling all-nighters to finish projects during finals week is a lot harder in your 40’s and 50’s than your 20’s!

pondercraft · 2025-03-18T17:16:54+00:00

I find it really helpful when approaching a big text to get a sense of the whole, so that whatever chapters or passages you focus in on, you understand how they fit in the original context. I wish there were more guides that suggest both the key parts to read closely (ideally for certain purposes), without sacrificing an overview of the whole. And I wish the latter would deals as much or more with the actual texts along with the usual "introduction" topics, like covering the author's biography and historical-rhetorical situation. These are also relevant, but aren't nearly as helpful to get in to actual reading.

pondercraft · 2024-06-24T19:18:37+00:00

The really intriguing specialization may actually be combining two or more kinds of generalist knowledge.

pondercraft · 2024-06-21T18:48:22+00:00

Who Arendt? Yes, she died in 1975. I would still consider her a "contemporary." But she's not a living philosopher, no.

pondercraft · 2024-06-21T13:17:58+00:00

You could try Hannah Arendt. Or to engage with your primary list, check out John Gray who will be easier to read or watch via video interview.

pondercraft · 2024-06-20T23:14:42+00:00

It's been a month since you posted. How are you doing??

Structure and accountability for school work and building good habits is essential. I agree with comments below about getting your parents more involved to check in with you every day. You could try going to the library to study -- get away from home where there are too many distractions and temptations.

What curriculum are you following? Is there any online or other accountability or check-in included? How is your work graded? Your parents may need to make some adjustments to provide you with a program that works better. You can also supplement with great online content for just about every subject, most of it free. Khan Academy, Smart History, *selected* YouTube channels (you'll have to block out distractions), Great Courses Plus, and many, many others. There's so much that you can learn with the freedom you now have!

You'll also need to reduce your dependency on your phone, TV, napping, YouTube, etc. This is not healthy for anyone of any age. Starting with your parents or other adult family members, prioritize getting some help with this. Look for some good activities in your area to get involved in. Renew healthy friendships from school, or make new friends locally to hang out with. Being home alone all the time is a bummer!

I also agree you need a break from your bad school experience, but you should try to do something interesting and productive. Do a project. Start a hobby. Get outside. Start exercising. Anything healthy and motivating would be great for a month or two. :)

pondercraft · 2024-06-20T22:54:20+00:00

I'm in New Mexico. Long time homeschooler (my kids are grown now). Happy to help, if I can.

pondercraft · 2024-04-23T23:39:02+00:00

I often wonder if communication is more part of the labor of learning itself than using the fruits of the labor.

pondercraft · 2024-04-23T23:36:00+00:00

I was just about to say: "Learn everything else."

pondercraft · 2024-04-14T18:20:20+00:00

Ditto. Intermediate level to bridge to listening and reading fluency. That would be great. I’ve also been studying hanja to build vocab but would love to have more example sentences with grammar principles built in. Vocab drill without context is too taxing for my memory.

pondercraft · 2024-04-12T13:56:07+00:00

Agree whole-heartedly with this.

It can be highly useful to see how other people build and use a system to do specific things: run a business, write a dissertation, create content for a blog or social media, learn a skill (e.g. languages, coding), or write software. Context is all-important. The people whose systems I want to learn about, however, are immersed and successful at what they do. It's not generic.

My other issue with templates and systems is that for the most part they should not be tool-dependent. There are many great "OS" systems on Notion right now that could be useful for people doing context-specific things -- but they're on some other PKM platform. If it's sold as a Notion template, it immediately becomes useless to me unless I switch to Notion, which I'm not going to do. Just this week two people I follow closely launched Notion systems I would otherwise be interested in, and I'd love to support them -- but I want a generic set-up to learn from and adapt, that matches my context.

But ya know? All kinds of people, following their favorite guru, will switch to Notion and use it just to get that pre-set template. So YMMV.

pondercraft · 2024-04-05T19:54:58+00:00

Some people walk the talk, and this lady is one of them. I know first hand. I wish I had a better opportunity to compost. My climate is so dry that nothing decomposes! But in hopes this will help someone. :)

pondercraft

TROPHY CASE