Maybe this is because individual level appeals rely on models that are relatively trusted within the behavioral sciences (e.g. RL) where the concern is with individual behavior.

And regarding the taboo of teleology, I do think plenty such appeals to evolution are still made at the individual level, especially w.r.t. exploration. Within behavioral sciences, it seems almost as if it's more okay to make such arguments about individual survival than it is about societal.

Therefore, understanding these decisions is the closest approximation to understanding free will.

Additionally, there is evidence that belief in free will affects behavior. These effects may be adaptive not only at the individual level but in a net diversification of knowledge in societies.

Sure! It was more a wild and speculative digression, though.

From the perspective that all decisions are mechanistic, specific exploratory choices often are those that are hardest to explain because the full history is unknowable and the choice has never previously been made.

Aesthetics seems more willing to entertain this type of argument, or at least to take it into consideration.

I do also wonder how the drive for knowledge is related to experiential "free will" where it is among the forms of behavior that most obviously exhibit hysteresis.

Explanations of knowledge seeking I have seen seem always to invoke some teleological argument, often incidentally, and only ever at the individual level. You bring into consideration individualism as fulfilling a computational role at the level of civilization, heterogenizing distributed knowledge.

I cannot imagine this having gone any more to the contrary of the characterization by the Speaker of the House.

Replace "hate", "mob", and "ideology" with 'love', 'festival', and 'democracy'.

On the equity section, in addition to bias: it's been said before that varied levels of quality in AI education and varied pressures on students may worsen existing inequities in educational outcomes. It's roulette on which children learn to use the risky calculators healthily; the wheel is unfair.

My opinion, having been of that generation (not necessarily well founded), is that these fads were largely marketing schemes, that gains in computing literacy could have been found by more effective and direct means, and that the net effect was to reduce students attention in the classroom.