Jeff Greene

Are You ‘Agentic’ Enough for the AI Era? Silicon Valley built AI coding agents that can handle most of the grunt work. Now, the most valuable skill in tech is deciding what they should do.

Want to be irreplaceable? Know how to self-regulate, cultivate intellectual virtues, and think critically.

“You have to be very open-minded, curious, and willing to try whatever the newest thing is. The value of that sort of person is going up exponentially...”

Um...wow? Like, wow wow?

A few weeks ago you’ve heard about nmax as the insurance policy for sample size planning on @quantitude.bsky.social

Today we’re excited to launch the nmax Shiny app. Sample size planning with nmax can now be done in just a few button clicks!

🚀 yifeng-quant.shinyapps.io/nmax/

The moment many of us in #edresearch have been waiting for...

Reimagining the Institute of Education Sciences has been released.

ies.ed.gov/ies/2026/02/...

This post is getting a fair amount of attention (relative to my typical posts), so just to be clear: the quote above is from the linked article authored by @biblioracle.bsky.social. All kudos go to him.

Hear hear.

Buzzy UCSD Math Readiness Report Failed to Mention Calculator Ban Instead, the authors pinned the change on COVID-19 and an increase in low-income student enrollments. It’s unclear whether they knew about the calculator policy change.

Yet another reason why I prefer slow news analysis by experts to the "quick take" nature of (some) news reporting on social media. Is there a math issue, regardless of the change mentioned in this article? Perhaps. But I'd prefer to wait for experts with access to the data to do a thorough analysis.

🔥"Those who believe school can be reinvented seem to have a very limited understanding of school and even less consideration of students. Inevitably, they view learning as a problem of content delivery, failing to understand that learning is a social process, happening among and inside of people."

Sadly yes. The whole “Substack induced market panic” back and forth is a great example of this. People need to calm down and let experts do some actual analysis.

Totally agree on regulation. In the US, Congress should be voting on consensus guidelines. And it would be easier to achieve consensus if social media companies allowed careful review of data. Re: bans - they are a blunt and non-consensus instrument. And sadly the only one discussed at the moment.

“Congress needs to intervene, and quickly. “If Congress had legislated guidelines on autonomous weapons and surveillance, Anthropic would likely be far more comfortable selling its systems to the military,” he writes, “and the DPA threat would have never arisen.””

Anthropic Education Report: The AI Fluency Index Anthropic's AI Fluency Index measures 11 observable behaviors across thousands of Claude.ai conversations to understand how people develop AI collaboration skills.

What I like about the AI Fluency Index is the emphasis on (1) prompting the #GenAI to be more critical from the outset, (2) iterating to refine outputs, & (3) encouraging questioning of outputs. But why not build in a "Fluency Mode" where these things are default (1) or prompted by the system (2-3)?

Block shares soar as much as 24% as company slashes workforce by nearly half Block said Thursday it's laying off more than 4,000 employees, or about half of its head count.

I don’t know enough about business or coding to predict whether this will end well for Block or not. But I am tracking AI-explained job cuts, and I’m seeing many, followed by initial jumps in stock prices. This is evidence supporting the AI-big-disruption prediction. Hm.

...I understand people who feel the need to make the best decision they can with the evidence they have.

I'm an evidence guy, so I do think we should continue to support using that in policy-making. In this case, there's lots of evidence pointing in either direction, and the companies haven't released the data needed for more definitive answers. So...

Social media bans for teens lack evidence - Nature Health Online harms are an urgent societal challenge, but governments should prepare teenagers to responsibly use digital technology.

I appreciate the argument for more/better evidence here, but I think the tides have shifted and social media bans for teens are coming for many countries (I'm less sure about the US). That said, I agree students also need education on how to use technology safely, effectively, and autonomously.

Self-report knowledge of and self-concept for self-regulated learning differentiated adolescents into three groups that did differ in average GPA. Self-reports are fine as long as they are interpreted as respondents' knowledge or perception, rather than behavior. #PsychSciSky #AcademicSky #EduSky

Epistemic Vigilance Humans massively depend on communication with others, but this leaves them open to the risk of being accidentally or intentionally misinformed. To ensure that, despite this risk, communication remain...

Epistemic vigilance is a concept developed by Sperber et al. describing how we guard against the possibility that other people might misinform us.

Two key points in this literature:
1. We need to scrutinize the content of messages
2. We need to scrutinize the source of messages

2/

Self-report knowledge of and self-concept for self-regulated learning differentiated adolescents into three groups that did differ in average GPA. Self-reports are fine as long as they are interpreted as respondents' knowledge or perception, rather than behavior. #PsychSciSky #AcademicSky #EduSky

Belonging: a review of conceptual issues, an integrative framework, and directions for future research Objective: A sense of belonging – the subjective feeling of deep connection with social groups, physical places, and individual and collective experiences – is a fundamental human need that predict...

For sure. Very relevant. There's been good work on belongingness since then, building on their work. For example: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Interesting, thanks! My sense is that SDT tries to create environments where people feel autonomy, but I'm not sure how much work has been done to see if one person's perception affects another person's perception. Feels like we are moving into the socially shared regulation of learning lit! :)

Self-Determination Theory in Work Organizations: The State of a Science Self-determination theory (SDT) is a macro theory of human motivation that evolved from research on intrinsic and extrinsic motivations and expanded to include research on work organizations and other...

Thanks for the good thoughts! I wonder if expanding the focus on self-efficacy to all three basic needs in self-determination theory might help to create environments where teams have autonomous motivation to improve? Perhaps you've already thought of this. :)

How Teens Use and View AI Just over half of U.S. teens say they've used chatbots for help with schoolwork, and 12% say they’ve gotten emotional support from these tools. Teens tend to view AI's future impact on their lives…

A majority of teens AND PARENTS think it is okay for students to use #GenAI for homework/learning. Companies must design GenAI to help people actually learn, rather than offload learning. And we must educate people about when it is and is not a good idea to use GenAI for learning. #EduSky

New Paper: Towards a science of AI agent reliability Quantifying the capability-reliability gap

I really like how these authors conceptualized & tested #GenAI reliability. It's not where it needs to be for mission-critical work, particularly for work where the AI has to be autonomous or near-autonomous. So far, GenAI seems best positioned as augmenting what humans do, not replacing human work.

Most Conservative Students Don’t Feel Persecuted on Campus A new survey of college students contradicts Republican rhetoric that campus culture is hostile to right-wing views.

"93 percent of students said they’re confident they’re learning the skills they need to get the type of job they want, and 88 percent expressed confidence that their degree or credential will help them get a job after graduation. The majority (75 percent) also believe college is worth the cost..."

The political effects of X’s feed algorithm - Nature Among users initially on a chronological feed, 7 weeks of exposure to X’s algorithmic feed in 2023 shifted political attitudes and account-following behaviour in a more conservative direction…

Findings like these make me wonder whether Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934 should apply to algorithms. These algorithms seem to boost reach of particular content (not just on X but any site using an algorithm) with effects on thinking (unsurprising). #PsychSciSky #AcademicSky #EduSky

...a "review" with the veneer of insight, which is quickly pierced upon a careful read. AI has its place and is getting better. But I remain extremely doubtful that current AI models, following current growth paths, will ever produce the kinds of insight needed for a good "lit review." (2/2)

I've paid for upgraded models. I've used careful prompts to ask for "deep research" on areas of literature. And AI, as of yet, does not do lit reviews better. (I'd never use it for peer review.) It lacks access to important lit. And when I've asked it to review my own material, it produces...(1/2)

FAQs: Checking in on the Department of Education | Brookings A year into the second Trump administration, Brown Center scholars offer a check-in on the Department of Education—what has happened and what might lie ahead.

Checking in on the Department of Education - a year(ish) into the second Trump administration and ahead of SOTU tomorrow, we looked back at what has happened to ED and what you might expect in the year ahead

www.brookings.edu/articles/faq...

Screenshot of title page of a preprint article titled: "Thinking—Fast, Slow, and Artificial: How AI is Reshaping Human Reasoning and the Rise of Cognitive Surrender."

Typically I don't post about preprints, but this one is hot right now. In short, I'm not convinced #GenAI is so different than other tools that we need to invent a whole new system of thinking for it. People offload and defer to other people and tools all the time. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....