Insights, updates, and stories about our work and the impact of AI for social good.
Can You Handle the Truth?
In the final act of A Few Good Men, Colonel Jessep stops shouting about honor and starts shouting about reality: “You can’t handle the truth!” In the modern C-suite, the problem isn’t usually that…
Read →An introduction to Irreducibly Human: What AI Can and Can't Do
Irreducibly Human: https://www.irreducibly.xyz/The panic arrived in the wrong order.When ChatGPT went public in November 2022, schools declared a crisis. Students were cheating. Essays were being…
Read →Who builds the causal model of a system controls the decisions the system supports. The standard workflow gives that power to the wrong people.
Every causal model of an organization is also a political document. It decides which variables appear in the decision analysis, which interventions are worth simulating, which levers are visible to…
Read →Algorithms to Live By and the Intelligence No Proof Can Provide
There is a moment in the summer of 1997 when Mars Pathfinder, having traveled 309 million miles at 16,000 miles per hour to become the first rover to navigate another planet’s surface, simply stops…
Read →Finding the connections humans may miss, and charting the path forward as you take it
The traditional research reports you’ve relied on for decades are essentially history books.When you buy a report from a legacy firm, you aren’t buying a look at the present. You’re buying a polished…
Read →Jay McTighe & Harvey F. Silver (2020) | ASCD
PART 1: SECTION-BY-SECTION LOGICAL MAPPINGPREFACE & INTRODUCTION: The Case for Meaning-MakingCore Claim: Current schooling over-emphasizes knowledge transmission; what students actually need is…
Read →The Anatomy of a Descriptive Analytics Failure
Note: This Chapter, images and video were created by little tools that I wrote to generate a textbook chapter and little video from lecture notes.FOR DETAILS ON LIVING MODELS: Hypothetical AILiving…
Read →Causal Intelligence for the Decisions That Actually Matter
The Living Models framework didn’t start as a book proposal or a research agenda. It started with an email.Someone reached out with a concrete problem: how do you build intelligence that actually…
Read →Building the Machine That Interviews the Expert
Part Three of the Living Model SeriesPart One: The Causal Brain: Living Models and the End of Backward-Looking AnalyticsThe interview begins before the first question is asked.By the time a strategy…
Read →Two decades of Knowledge Engineering research keep arriving at the same answer — and it has nothing to do with algorithms.
This is the second piece in the Living Model series. The first established why causal AI matters for organizational decision-making. This one examines the structural barrier that keeps it confined to…
Read →hypothetical.ai explores the creation of realistic real-time hypothetical scenarios
There is a particular kind of organizational suffering that does not announce itself as suffering. It looks like a Monday morning meeting. Someone opens a dashboard. The numbers from last quarter are…
Read →Knowing Enough to Distrust the Machine
There is a specific kind of student I have watched for ten years. They are fast. They retrieve facts with confidence. They format their work correctly. They produce, on demand, the answers that the…
Read →Why the feeling of understanding is the most seductive obstacle in learning — and what cognitive science says to do instead.
The nod is a lie. Not anyone’s fault — not the student’s, not the teacher’s. It’s built into the same cognitive architecture that makes us efficient thinkers and unreliable narrators of our own…
Read →Why Most Corporate Training Is Designed to Protect the Organization, Not Develop the Employee
There’s a question worth sitting with before any discussion of learning metrics: Who is this training actually for?Not who it claims to be for. Not who it should be for. Who it is actually,…
Read →The sad case of Scooter the Tutor
There is a category of failure that educational technology almost never discusses. Not the system that crashes on launch day, or produces no measurable effect, or gets abandoned quietly when the…
Read →Goodell, Kolodner, et al. (2023) | Routledge
PART 1: SECTION-BY-SECTION LOGICAL MAPPINGINTRODUCTION: What Is Learning Engineering?Core Claim: Learning engineering is a distinct professional practice—not merely instructional design under a new…
Read →Development in the Age of Abundance
There is a moment, familiar to anyone who has sat through a mandatory corporate training module, when the screen goes dark between slides and the progress bar at the bottom reads 47% complete. You…
Read →Aravind Balaji at Northeastern
There is a sentence buried on page 2 of Aravind Balaji’s first research publication that stops you cold. After proposing a quantum-enhanced architecture for graph neural networks—a system that could,…
Read →Humans + AI + Music — tools, artists, and research for the people the industry was never built for.
Complete Project Overview — Humans + AI + MusicFounded: November 2024 Location: United States Contact: bear@bearbrown.co Website: musinique.com YouTube: @Musinique — 54,691 subscribers · 6.1M views ·…
Read →Why the Room Matters More Than the Curriculum
Consider what a mathematics classroom actually is. Not what the curriculum says it should be, not what the teacher intends it to be—but what it is, as experienced by a thirteen-year-old who already…
Read →When automation eliminates the apprenticeship before the apprentice arrives, we must ask who education is actually preparing people for.
There is a theory of learning so old it predates the university: you learn by doing, and the doing happens alongside someone who already knows. The medieval guild called it apprenticeship. The law…
Read →Think! Before It's Too Late
There’s a metaphor in Think! Before It’s Too Late that does more work than Edward de Bono probably intended. The rear left wheel of a motor car, he writes, can be absolutely perfect — flawlessly…
Read →John Dewey (1916) | Project Gutenberg
PART 1: SECTION-BY-SECTION LOGICAL MAPPINGCHAPTERS 1–4: Education as Life, Social Function, Direction, and GrowthCore Claim: Education is not preparation for life but a form of life itself. It is the…
Read →Why the tools for transformative learning already exist — and who's already using them
The Mathematics of ExclusionConsider what $17 buys. A high schooler whose father rebuilt his life after years of addiction sits down with a monthly subscription and produces a publishable analysis of…
Read →Learning by doing
What Seventeen Projects Reveal About How Change Actually Gets BuiltThere’s a number that keeps appearing in research on international students navigating the American job market. Not the one you’d…
Read →A Critical Practitioner’s Guide to Artificial Intelligence in Learning Environments
Preface: Writing in PublicThis book began as a Substack post.That fact matters more than it might seem. It means the argument you’re about to read has already been tested — not in the controlled…
Read →Between the laboratory and the classroom, someone has to go first.
The Problem With ProofThere is a particular kind of intellectual cowardice that disguises itself as rigor. It says: we cannot act until the studies are complete. It says: correlation is not…
Read →The machine watches you learn. You should watch it back.
You’re being watched.Not by your teacher. Not by your classmates. By the textbook itself.It tracks which sections you reread. Which questions you answer wrong. Which examples you skip. Then it…
Read →On Van Damme & Fadel's Technologies Smarter, Humans "Dumber"? (2026)
There is a king in Plato’s Phaedrus who refuses a gift. Theuth, the Egyptian god of invention, arrives bearing writing—the technology of memory, the externalization of thought—and presents it to King…
Read →Notes on Exploring the Assistance Dilemma in Experiments with Cognitive Tutors
The computer knows you’re stuck.You’ve been staring at the algebra problem for forty seconds. You made one attempt. It was wrong. The system logged your error, updated its probability estimate of…
Read →An Instructional Policy Suite for the Assistance Dilemma
The SOCRIT protocol makes a compelling case for Socratic prompting—withhold the answer, force the student to generate reasoning, escalate only when they’re genuinely stuck. But Socratic resistance is…
Read →A review of Is ChatGPT a Boon or a Bane for Learning? Experimental Evidence Across Task Formats and Chatbot Designs
NOTE THE ORIGINAL PAPER:Li, Andy Tao and Liu, De and Ye, Teng, Is ChatGPT a Boon or a Bane for Learning? Experimental Evidence Across Task Formats and Chatbot Designs (January 15, 2026). Available at…
Read →The machinery works fine — until it doesn't, and then you can see exactly what it was doing all along.
CHAPTER SUMMARIESPreface: The Musical SpeciesSacks opens with Arthur C. Clarke’s alien overlords, puzzled by humanity’s devotion to “meaningless tonal patterns.” The preface establishes music as…
Read →The Machine That Learned to Teach
LINK: https://rdcu.be/e4tifImagine you are failing a physics class.Not struggling. Failing. The professor’s voice is a metronome counting down to a grade that will matter for years. The textbook sits…
Read →How to Stop Writing Prompts That Answer Their Own Questions
SOCRIT is a structured protocol for diagnosing and transforming educational prompts that mistake answer-delivery for genuine inquiry. It works by running any submitted prompt through nine evaluation…
Read →A Short Introduction for Fellows
The Mycroft project represents an ambitious attempt to democratize institutional-grade financial intelligence through open-source AI systems. Across 33 distinct projects, the portfolio demonstrates a…
Read →A Short Introduction for Fellows
This textbook makes a claim most corporate finance books avoid: the tools you use to analyze capital structure, value acquisitions, forecast cash flows, and assess risk aren’t neutral containers for…
Read →Possible projects for Humanitarians AI Fellows
THIS ARTICLE IS FOR HUMANITARIANS AI VOLUNTEERS CONSIDERING LEARNING ENGINEERING RESEARCHYou’re reading a textbook evaluation that catalogs intelligent education systems. But embedded in each chapter…
Read →When Measuring Conformity to Wikipedia Becomes "Proficiency Assessment"
The number is stark: 0.80. That’s how closely BERT—a neural network trained on Wikipedia—agrees with human experts rating spoken English proficiency. Not “somewhat aligned.” Not “moderately…
Read →The Architecture of Adaptation: How “Teaching with AI” Builds a Framework for Educational SurvivalThe Opening MachineryThe book opens with Marie Curie’s call to understand rather than fear—a choice…
Read →Part 1: Chapter-by-Chapter Logical MappingIntroduction: What is Learning Engineering?Core Claim: Learning engineering is a distinct professional practice combining learning sciences, human-centered…
Read →The Economist Podcast, September 20, 2025
We Don't Need No (AI) Educationhttps://www-economist-com.ezproxy.neu.edu/podcasts/2025/09/20/we-dont-need-no-ai-education?utm_campaign=shared_articlePART 1: Section-by-Section Logical MappingSection…
Read →The Economist, December 4, 2025
PART 1At Home and at School, AI Is Transforming Childhood https://www-economist-com.ezproxy.neu.edu/briefing/2025/12/04/at-home-and-at-school-ai-is-transforming-childhoodSection 1: Introduction — The…
Read →How Cialdini's Six Principles of Persuasion Reveal the Architecture of Human Decision-Making and What That Means for Instructional Design
Chapter 1: Weapons of Influence — The Mother Turkey and the ShortcutCialdini opens not with theory but with a puzzle: why did turquoise jewelry sell better when its price was accidentally doubled?…
Read →When Neuroscience Meets Absolutism—Dissecting the Evidence Against Educational Technology and the Implementation Gap Its Author Won't Acknowledge
PART ONE: Chapter-by-Chapter Logical MappingPrologue: The Luddite WarningCore Claim: The Luddites weren’t technophobes but defenders of human practices threatened by industrial tools—a warning…
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