TRUTH IS NOT A TEAM SPORT.

Radiologist Scott Atlas suggests the future of higher education might not be so bright, in part because "consensus" and "collegiality" have crowded out scholarly inquiry.

Why, at this moment in history, is it particularly important to consider how America’s institutions—here, colleges and universities—should be reformed, or whether they can even be reformed?

After all, for decades we have been aware that our institutions were failing: editorialized, dishonest journalism; wasteful, corrupt government; and colleges and universities increasingly abandoning their essential purpose of fostering the free exchange of ideas and critical thinking in favor of agenda-driven social advocacy, particularly advocacy unbalanced toward the left.

It's not that nobody noticed.

CODIFY THE LIABILITY, CONSERVE THE TRANSACTION COSTS.

Sometimes I'll speak in riddles, and with all the algorithms combing through Cold Spring Shops these days, maybe now is a good time to serve an oldie up.  Twenty years ago, frustrated by Student Affairs types continually putting more special education responsibilities on faculty, I proposed to codify the liability the common schools were saddling higher education with.

Perhaps the most salutary reform the public universities could obtain would be to announce something like "Effective 15 April 2007, admission to Enormous State University (flagship, land-grant, compass-direction alike) is contingent on passing the mathematics and writing placement tests. Enormous will no longer offer no-credit remedial mathematics, writing, and speaking courses for high school graduates who have not really received a high school education. Furthermore, Enormous State's Office of Institutional Research will report placement test passage rates by school district." My sometimes sparring partner at Anonymous Community would no doubt be a bit unhappy to receive additional remedial students at the same time that his state is griping about having to pay for the same courses twice. Fine. As part of the reform, bill the school districts for those remedial courses and reimburse the community colleges. Principals now have a choice: offer token academic courses and suffer a budget cut, or spend money to improve their academic content.

Impractical?  Perhaps.  Get pushback?  I did.  "That changes may appear 'pretty screwy' is not necessarily reason to stop thinking along those lines, particularly when the status quo is not working."

I'M THE BOSS. YOU'RE THE KID.

The critical studies types are notorious for using wordnoise to turn a phenomenon of long standing into a thought crime.  Simply take a commonplace situation and tack a "-normativity" on the end and just like that you've pronounced anathema on it.  A few weeks ago it was "autonormativity," which is only slightly more ludicrous than the long-standing "heteronormativity."

If that doesn't work, there's always tacking an "-ism" or a "-phobia" on it.  This week's example is "adultism."

Unattributed bit of investigative journalism retrieved from Joanne Jacobs.

ABOUT TIME, TOO.

Joanne Jacobs offers a plea from California's (checks notes) college professors.  "Don't make us reteach middle-school math, say STEM profs at 'test-free' UC."

Apparently the college boards, let alone mathematics placement tests, were exclusionary, or something.

Dropping standardized test scores for admissions was supposed to expand equity, writes Gabrielle Temaat on College Fix. The University of California system stopped requiring standardized test scores for admission in 2020, and many other universities did the same.

However, highly selective universities such as Yale, Brown, Dartmouth and Penn have reinstated the SAT requirement, "after studies found standardized test scores to be the best predictor of students’ future academic performance." Princeton will reinstate the requirement starting with the 2027–28 admissions cycle, she writes.

That might help with faculty morale, although the government schools are perpetuating a different sort of fraud on the admissions offices.  “A lot of students have taken precalculus or calculus in high school, and they've basically been lied to by their school systems. They don't actually know these subjects at all."  That could be from that open letter signed by multiple California system professors calling attention to the Distressed Material matriculating despite not being able to do middle school arithmetic, or perhaps from an internal Berkeley report noting the same things.

California might not yet be where Wisconsin is, with legislation requiring the state's universities to identify the sources of Distressed Material.  First you have to recognize you have a problem, then you have to work the problem.  Thus far, nobody has implemented the next step, which is to send the school districts that didn't do it right the first time the bill for staffing those remedial, er, developmental, classes.

A COUNTEREXAMPLE CAN BE A DISPROOF.

Detroit News film critic Adam Graham pans Pressure.

When Dwight D. Eisenhower allegedly told John F. Kennedy that the reason the Allies won WWII was because "we had better meteorologists than the Germans," it's possible that Ike was cracking a joke.

But the dead serious "Pressure" takes this assertion as gospel, and crafts a stiff drama around the weather on D-Day, and the brave men — or the brave man, in this case — who predicted it.

It's the kind of premise you'd expect to see on "SNL": In a world so overindexed on WWII movies, one man attempts to craft an Oscar-worthy biopic of the war's true unsung hero — the weatherman.

But "Pressure" isn't joking, at least on purpose, and director Anthony Maras does a good job of almost making viewers forget how ridiculous "Pressure's" premise is.

"This is a true story," reads the card at the introduction of the film, letting viewers know they're in for a Serious History Lesson.

It is very much not a true story, as anyone who knows why this monument is at Slapton Sands can tell you.

A Bohemian corporal noted upon being advised of Kriegsmarine torpedo boats shooting up a landing exercise there noted that there was a beach near Quineville with similar sands.  The houses of Slapton are closer to the Channel today.

Third Coast Review's Steve Prokopy is fine with a few liberties being taken with history in service of a good story.

I’ve said it before, but I’ll repeat myself until I pass out if I have to: docudramas are not documentaries; they don’t show us exactly what happened because they are trying to tell the best cinematic version of a true story. Admittedly, I’d prefer they don’t outright lie to the audience (I’m looking at you, Bohemian Rhapsody), but if something needs to be altered slightly or characters need to be combined for efficiency’s sake, I’m fine with that. Pressure is director and TV veteran Anthony Maras’ second feature (after Hotel Mumbai, also based on horrific true events), and I have no real issues with its account of the 72 hours leading up to the D-Day invasion of Normandy in June 1944, the largest and most dangerous seaborne invasion in history that effectively decided the fate of World War II.

Mr Graham disagrees, if not as dramatically as the protagonists attempting to make sense of the incoming soundings. "In a larger movie about D-Day, there's a great two-scene performance to be made about the weather guy who got it right when no one else did. Anything more is overcast, er, overkill."

THE TIME FOR HECTORING IS PAST.

Red State's Brad Slager is on to the con.  "Hint: anytime a Democrat wants a 'conversation,' they intend to deliver a lecture, and you need to zip up your donut vacuum and listen."  Well, yes, and it's grown tiresome.

That's where Our President having none of the usual drive-by narrative is so refreshing.

"If I was a king would I be talking to you."  Classic.

GREYLOCK NEXT TO TUMBLE.

As I wrap up the week's posting, ESPN note that of the over twenty-six million men's tournament brackets submitted in their challenge, some 3,714 entries are still in contention.  In Thursday's games, a lot of chalk had to be erased with six lower seeds winning, and the "upsets" continue today.

That title?  In the depths of the Depression, the Boston and Maine Railroad offered a contest in which lineside school children could name locomotives, including the 3700 series of medium-heavy Pacifics, and the judges selected Greylock for 3714.  One of those steamers is still in preservation, fittingly 3713, named Constitution.  Whether she will ever steam again remains to be seen.

So what's the over-under on all the brackets broken by the end of today's games?  Note: less-than-perfect brackets are still in contention for identifying the eventual champion.

POKEMON EVOLVE.

The anime enthusiasts, on the other hand, maybe not so much.  That insight came to Holly Math Nerd when she went to "the queerest place in Vermont" because the library was closed on Sundays, and left her hearing aids in.

I haven’t written much about the aesthetics — the visual and narrative world that forms the wallpaper of online queer identity, and that was covering every surface of this café.

Manga and anime (both types of art used in comics) occupy a particular corner of internet culture that overlaps, to a degree that is not coincidental, with both the trans community and the autistic community. (Props to everyone who just heard Josh Slocum say “Ke-meen-itee!!”)

The aesthetic is distinctive: large eyes, androgynous figures, characters whose gender presentation is fluid or ambiguous by design. The storytelling frequently centers outcasts, people with hidden powers or secret identities, people who are not what they appear to be on the outside.

For a lonely, neurodivergent teenager who has not yet learned how to fit the body or the social role they were handed, this is not just entertainment — it is a mirror that flatters.

She offers an hypothesis that might provoke proper research, that is, if anybody is doing proper research any more.

The porn subset of manga, called hentai, includes entire genres organized around gender transformation and body-swapping fantasies. None of this is cause and effect by itself. But when you put a socially isolated autistic kid, a special interest in a medium saturated with gender-fluid imagery and transformation fantasy, a Discord server full of people who have found their tribe inside that aesthetic, and an ideology that promises a complete reboot of the self — you have assembled something that functions less like a subculture and more like a pipeline.

The detransitioners have been saying this for years. Most of them weren't diagnosed autistic until after they detransitioned, at which point the pattern became legible: the gender identity had been the special interest. The transition had been autistic perseveration made flesh.

The essay, which after that passage pivots to some people-watching that might be interesting in its own right, provokes yet more calls for research, perhaps multiple inquiries into the nature and causes of autism spectrum, a phrase likely thrown around carelessly.  Let us motivate that research with a passage in Sarah Anderson's "The War on Excellence Has Reached Our Classrooms."

I hated school as a child. First, it was boring. My mom had already taught me to read when I entered kindergarten, and I soon found that I already knew most everything else they were teaching us in those first few years. Second, I was lazy. But I had no motivation not to be because I was bored to tears. I wanted to be at home reading, playing, pretending, hanging out with my family, exploring outside, and creating. The only time school work ever interested me was when it was creative, and, let's face it, most of it wasn't.

Third, I was socially awkward. I've always been shy and introverted. Starting my school years as the "smart kid" didn't help me make friends. After a while, it led to bullying that forced me to shrink. I stopped speaking up in class. I learned that I couldn't trust my peers, which diminished my social skills even further. I tried to dumb myself down.

I can't help but wonder how many precocious kids have been put on Ritalin for "attention deficit disorder" or put on the spectrum as "neurodivergent," whatever that means, and, in recent years, how large a subset of those kids subjected to a transition because that was The Thing to Do.

OUR PATHETIC GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS.

Last week, we called attention to the very different ways the establishment press covered the professional protest communities unleashing their high school auxiliaries and Turning Point U.S.A. working with school districts that might have been willing to entertain the idea that in a quarter millennium maybe we got a few things right.

The fun continued into the weekend.  "Auburn High School students protest."

A large group of students was seen just before 3 p.m. Friday, lined up along Auburn Street with some standing on the medians in the middle of the street.

At 3:14 p.m., it is reported that police were telling students to leave.

Just a few minutes later, police squad vehicles were seen blocking a portion of Auburn Street.

According to a Rockford Public Schools spokesperson, “The students did not inform Auburn administrators that they would be leaving class to protest outside.”

Very anodyne reporting, no news of counterprotesters to interview, which is no surprise as Normals have jobs.  Moreover, Rockford's "institute day" (students excused from class for teachers to go to meetings ostensibly for faculty development) was today, a Monday, and, unsurprisingly, there was no news of any protesting students assembling to call attention to immigration enforcement or Nancy Guthrie or anything else.

SENDING IN THE VARSITY.

Yesterday's compare-and-contrast post featuring protest culture in the government schools of northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin noted an after-school event at Genoa-Kingston High School organized by the school's chapter of Turning Point U.S.A. that was a voluntary event too far for the professional protesters.  As we published yesterday, we did not know who the outside speakers were.  Later last night, the fourth estate saw fit to let us know.  "Erika Kirk, Linda McMahon speak at Genoa-Kingston High School ‘History Rocks!’ event."  That's right, the current chief executive officer of Turning Point and the Secretary of Education whose mission is to roll back that department.

“I was able to lead a portion of the presentation and introduce Mrs. Erika Kirk onto the stage,” said Oliver Piotrowski, Genoa-Kingston High School Club America Chapter President. “The overall vibe was very patriotic. People were cheering. People were very happy to be there. They were happy to have the opportunity to see Erika Kirk and Secretary McMahon.”

Around 2 p.m. Thursday, a group of protesters gathered near the high school. Some demonstrators held signs protesting against Trump administration policies, while others showed up to voice their opinion over the decision to hold the event at the school.

That's right, one paragraph describing what happened at the event, and the balance of that story devoted to the same protest-centric coverage we noted yesterday.  The print coverage in DeKalb's Daily Chronicle also mostly rehashed the protesters' positions.  "Turning Point USA, history event draws protests in Genoa."  There was reporting from inside the event, students posting their videos on social media.  And people wonder why Washington's Post downsized itself and the other traditional newspapers are as if skin suits.  Outside the event, the cold civil war continued.

Numerous cars passing by on Route 72 honked in apparent approval of the protesters.

The driver of a car with two American flags flying in the back and “Trump” written on a side window passed by the protesters multiple times while revving the engine.

The education secretary came to Genoa from another school event, at Chicago's Hope Academy, which Chicago's Tribune describes as a "private Christian school."  That event was also part of the "History Rocks!" tour, which is your tax dollars at work with a little help from non-governmental organizations of a traditional patriotic persuasion.

IS THE CHILDREN LEARING?

Instead of Senior Skip-Out day, high schoolers of all grade levels organize, with the concurrence of their teachers, protests against immigration enforcement.

The protests began before the first protester had a fatal encounter with law enforcement in Minneapolis.

Protests against the Trump Administration's immigration enforcement tactics were held across the country [January 20] — with dozens of those protests happening in Southeastern Wisconsin.

The demonstrations were organized by The Women's March in what they called the "Free America Walkout," encouraging the public to walk out of school or work in protest of ICE.

In Milwaukee, hundreds of Rufus King High School students walked out of class [January 20] morning and could be seen walking through the Rufus King neighborhood.

"It's really important for all these students to be out here because ICE's policies are not only affecting politics, they're students like us, students around the nation, and it's causing a lot of fear, which becomes an issue in our communities because everybody deserves to be safe and feel safe in their own communities." Kali Maafree, a Rufus King student, said.

Rufus King is notionally a magnet school, although its academic performance is on a par with many urban schools.  There might be forces at work other than active immigration patrols making people feel less than safe in their own communities.  "That's not an urban design problem, that's what happens when you celebrate transgressivity and call bad behavior authenticity.  The same community members who would like to stop the bad driving are also now at work to reduce the gang gunplay.  There is still hope for a hurting world."  You only have to walk two blocks south or three blocks west of the King campus to find the bad driving.

EDUCATION SO INCLUSIVE NOBODY LEARNS ANYTHING.

I'm reusing an old post title and revisiting an old argument.  "I encourage readers to focus on two words: fifth grade. Perhaps, in suggesting that the state universities send the high schools a bill for each credit hour of remedial arithmetic and writing their students racked up, I was not being bold enough."

Conditions have not gotten any better in sixteen years.  Recently, collegians having trouble with 7+2 = x+6, which can be posed as a first grade arithmetic problem by replacing "solve for x" with "fill in the box" came to our attention.  Dear reader, even the house organ for business as usual in higher education was troubled.  "A ‘Steep Decline’ in Students’ Academic Preparation at UC-San Diego Struck a Nerve."

GOOD HELP, HARD TO FIND?

Little Caesars opens first self-service restaurant in Rockford.  There's a video clip at the link.  "Restaurant" appears to be a misnomer, as there are no tables to eat in.  A Horn and Hardart has more charm.

Little Caesars photograph retrieved from WIFR.

What have I been telling you for over twenty years, dear reader, about the "slovenly, poorly trained people" who might not get the order right, who have no clue how to handle change, who can't manage a "we are sorry and hope to do better next time?"  Is it any accident that the first of these outlets is in Rockford?  "Perhaps the mayor would like to have more Rockfordians equipped to finish college, that is, to not be among the inefficiently many people in institutions pretending to offer higher education. That, however, is a call for stronger common schools, or perhaps stronger commitment to the Habits of Effective People among Rockfordians."  Rockford's schools, and its television stations, emphasize high school sports to the exclusion of almost everything else, including the etiolation, etiolation of pizza, pizza.

The restaurant at 3134 11th Street removes the traditional walk-up counter. Customers can place an order on the Little Caesars app or website, go to the restaurant and grab their items from the mobile order pickup zone.

Another option for customers is the new Hot-N-Ready self-service station inside the restaurant. Guests can select and scan items, then pay for their order without going through a cashier.

“It’s really intuitive, and the self-checkout is very similar to what you might see in a convenience store or at the airport. So, it makes it very easy, and who doesn’t want a hot fresh pizza really quickly,” said Trish Heusel, Vice President of Innovation at Little Caesars.

Hot, fresh, and to order suggests there might be someone, or has the kitchen side been automated as well?  I wonder, this being on Rockford's South Eleventh Street, how much security is on duty.  And people buying from this automat don't have to pay the incompetence tax.

Managers say the new design keeps today’s customers in mind, with an experience focused on speed and convenience.

“You can get in and out of the store in less than 20 seconds,” said Heusel.

Little Caesars got its start in Detroit.  I wonder if the innovation will be available south of Eight Mile.

NO KREMLIN PARADE FOR YOU.

It's 108 years since Great October Socialist Revolution.  I don't know whether there's inchoate socialist revolution in United States electoral politics, tavarish.  I submit, though, that Babylon Bee have proper perspective on current socialist mania.

Enjoy, and don't forget to thank Student Affairs for providing education!  Do svidanya.

CHICKIFICATION MIGHT BE TOO FRIVOLOUS A DESCRIPTION.

For years, the late Rush Limbaugh called attention to the "chickification" of American culture, not in a good way.

In a truly pathetic news story, this is deeply troubling. We have been talking recently on this program about the chickification of American culture, the feminization of American universities, the chickification of the news business. From the Associated Press, this a story by Melissa Dutton, and this is about man showers. Brian, you went to one of these just last week, a man shower.

In that excerpt, from 2008, he alluded to a more destructive phenomenon then presenting in the knowledge and information industries. The "man shower" was somebody's idea about how to make the concept of a bridal shower more inclusive.

HONESTY IS THE BEST POLICY.

Oklahoma girls’ basketball team returns championship after realizing they lost.  Like so many sports stories, it begins with "after review."

The story stems from the Oklahoma Secondary School Activities Association, where a crucial scoreboard error early in the game gave the girls basketball team at Academy of Classical Christian Studies the edge over its Apache high school counterpart, as CBS News recently reported.

Academy coach Brendan King told the network: “As soon as I walked out of the locker room, my stomach kind of turned into knots. And I said: ‘I’m going to need to know if we really won this game or not.’”

King went home that night and watched a recording of the game. He meticulously watched each play and recounted every basket – eventually discovering his team had actually lost.

The game ended with Academy, of Oklahoma City, winning 44-43 on a last-second shot. But King discovered the score was actually 43-42, with the opposing team from Apache High having actually outscored his team – and Academy being erroneously given more points than they had actually earned amid confusion about the scoreboard at one juncture of the game.

Strictly speaking, once the final horn sounds, the result is official.  Sometimes, though, how you play the game does matter more than the result.

King’s team would have legally retained its championship had it stood pat on the result. The Oklahoma Secondary School Activities Association rules say that once a game is finished, the score becomes permanent, and there is no way to change the outcome of a completed game.

But King approached his team to tell the players of his video review’s findings. And the players all unanimously decided to appeal their own victory with the association, asking for the other team to be recognized for their rightful win – and for them to be assigned a defeat in the game.

The appeal – described by CBS as having no precedent – succeeded. And King hand-delivered the championship plaque to Apache.

Apache’s head coach said she was glad to have won the title. But the coach, Amy Merriweather, also said Academy’s act of honesty and integrity meant more than the actual victory.

“It showed us, you know, there are still good people in this world,” Merriweather said. “It’s something we’ll always remember.”

Students from Academy also spoke with CBS. One student told the outlet that “it would have felt wrong, I think, to have taken the trophy, regardless”.

Another student from Academy said it was a “really good teaching moment” to establish that winning “is not the whole point”.

That was the Academy of Classical Christian Studies, and, truly, truly I say unto you, those players will have parables of their own to refer to as they mature and age.

BACK TO SCHOOL.

Yes, there are lots of Eventful Things going on.  Those can wait for next month.  We'll close out August, and the summer season, with the University of Wisconsin Marching Band playing their way off a heritage trolley.

Enjoy the long weekend.  Find yourself a preservation railway and ride it.

IN SIGHT IT MUST BE RIGHT.

It took Canadian Pacific nearly twenty years to scrap their motion mark and restore the beaver to their herald.  Cracker Barrel thought better of their meaningless mod, and the current herald shall remain.  Was it "customer backlash?"  "Conservative backlash?"  "Right-wing backlash?"  Or none of the above?  "When people get tired of things being broken, they seek to restore a state of good repair."

Perhaps, as Pajamas Media's Matt Margolis argues, it was much ado about very little.

To me, this looks more like a fairly common branding move than culture warfare—though plenty of people are eager to frame it that way.

The logo change comes as part of bigger shifts inside Cracker Barrel. Over the past year, dozens of locations have been remodeled with a brighter, more modern interior design aimed at drawing younger diners. To longtime customers, that feels like betrayal; to the boardroom, it looks like survival.

Rebrands always carry risk. Some companies pull off modern updates, others flop—but in an age of sleek, minimalist branding built for smartphones and social media, Cracker Barrel is hardly the first to try.

The problem is that chasing trends often means alienating the very customers who made you successful. That’s exactly what happened here. It happens.

For me, though, this isn’t a hill conservatives need to die on. Sure, Cracker Barrel has pandered to the left before, and the new logo is unimpressive. But does it really change your life? There are real battles in the culture war worth fighting—a restaurant chain’s sloppy logo refresh isn’t one of them.

Perhaps so, although in a world of consumers weary of service degradation being spun as an "improved experience" or something similar, that it was Cracker Barrel's remaining diners pushing back might be part of a general trend of the Normals saying Enough to Their Progressive Betters.

SOME STRAIGHT TALK ABOUT ECONOMIC GROWTH.

DeKalb's public schools are back in session as of today, 13 August.  It's all too much for the editorial board at Chicago's Tribune.  "Back to school? Summer shouldn’t be over this early."  Something about balancing the semesters such that the fall semester wraps up before Christmas.  And the obligatory nod to "the very real learning loss that takes place when kids press pause on their studies for months on end."  I don't recall any such fretting in the Leave It to Beaver era, and I've undoubtedly triggered somebody by pointing that out.  Too bad.  If they're serious about balancing the semesters, why did DeKalb bring all the kiddos in this morning only to dismiss at 11 am?

Students will soon be returning to Northern Illinois University as well.  It might be that students come to university equipped with conventional wisdom that is wrong, or they might be exposed to faculty lounge commonplaces that are misleading.  Dominic Pino contemplates the ways.

The problem is that people believe that the New Deal ended the Great Depression, free markets caused the Great Recession, the Industrial Revolution led to increased poverty, and free trade hollowed out America. They really, sincerely, believe these things to be true. And that really does matter.

“Conventional wisdom firmly holds” that the myths in the book “constitute strong evidence for expanding government’s role,” Gramm and Boudreaux write. If you think a lot of that government expansion has been detrimental, as conservatives do, then that conventional wisdom is socially harmful.

It can be a bit uncomfortable sometimes for conservatives to say that people’s beliefs can be socially harmful, because too often the follow-up to that is some kind of imposition on people’s freedom. Climate activists, for example, have argued that dissent from their alarmist view of climate change should be criminally prosecuted.

The role of education, as ever, is to equip students with the ability to determine when a man is talking rot, and the intellectual chops to ask the right questions, rather than to go straight to questioning somebody's motives or accusing him of a thought crime.

PROGRAM, MORON.

One of the most liberating moments in college came in an introductory computer science class.

At one time, the term "moron" referred to an individual who could carry out tasks that were well-defined and sequenced. As my first computer science professor taught me, a computer could be thought of as an electric moron.

That liberated me, early on, from putting too much stock in so-called artificial intelligence.

An artificial intelligence algorithm, admittedly a very good algorithm, is the Moriarty manipulating social media and doing a number of other things, but you'll have to read the book to find out what those other things.  An artificial intelligence algorithm, though, is only as good as its programming, which is to say, it is still an elaborately scripted moron, and, let's say, in implementing its instructions according to the priorities assigned to it.

Moreover, dear reader, here is the good news.  Dan Brown can conceive of a malevolent algorithm.  The programmers, though, have had less luck.

In a recent pre-print paper, researchers from the University of Arizona summarize this existing work as "suggest[ing] that LLMs are not principled reasoners but rather sophisticated simulators of reasoning-like text." To pull on that thread, the researchers created a carefully controlled LLM environment in an attempt to measure just how well chain-of-thought reasoning works when presented with "out of domain" logical problems that don't match the specific logical patterns found in their training data.

The results suggest that the seemingly large performance leaps made by chain-of-thought models are "largely a brittle mirage" that "become[s] fragile and prone to failure even under moderate distribution shifts," the researchers write. "Rather than demonstrating a true understanding of text, CoT reasoning under task transformations appears to reflect a replication of patterns learned during training."

You can program a moron to recognize the dimensions of a box.  But thinking outside the box?  You might as well be saying "Upward, not Northward" in Flatland.

To test an LLM's generalized reasoning capability in an objective, measurable way, the researchers created a specially controlled LLM training environment called DataAlchemy. This setup creates small models trained on examples of two extremely simple text transformations—an ROT cypher and cyclical shifts—followed by additional training that demonstrates those two functions performed in various orders and combinations.

These simplified models were then tested using a variety of tasks, some of which precisely or closely matched the function patterns in the training data and others that required function compositions that were either partially or fully "out of domain" for the training data. For instance, a model trained on data showing two cyclical shifts might be asked to perform a novel transformation involving two ROT shifts (with basic training on what a single example of either shift looks like). The final answers and reasoning steps were compared to the desired answer using BLEU scores and Levenshtein Distance for an objective measure of their accuracy.

As the researchers hypothesized, these basic models started to fail catastrophically when asked to generalize novel sets of transformations that were not directly demonstrated in the training data. While the models would often try to generalize new logical rules based on similar patterns in the training data, this would quite often lead to the model laying out "correct reasoning paths, yet incorrect answer[s]." In other cases, the LLM would sometimes stumble onto correct answers paired with "unfaithful reasoning paths" that didn't follow logically.

"Rather than demonstrating a true understanding of text, CoT reasoning under task transformations appears to reflect a replication of patterns learned during training," the researchers write.

For the moment, it appears that a truly Heuristic Algorithmic computer does not exist, as even the Heuristics that these learning models are using are Algorithmic and can't recognize what's outside the box.