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The solution is obvious: education. Education, education, education. Making it a truly common good will require a massive shift in the way most people are broug

by scalio 10y ago

The solution is obvious: education. Education, education, education. Making it a truly common good will require a massive shift in the way most people are brought up in the west, which is why it won't happen over a couple years but rather over a couple generations, which is why it's high time we got going. Once you can do things in and with your head, the world becomes your playground. Once the kids understand that hurting people in any way is literally senseless, that the civil servant state and nine-to-five work is destroying intellect, once they realise the awesomeness that lies within that big melon everyone of us is carrying around, I think humanity as a whole can get out of this mess properly. And I think enlightment is the only way humans are going anywhere other than destruction, by whom- or whatever it may be. The consumer (a.k.a. mind-numbing) industry everybody seems to be so happy about is definitely not the way to go. Forgive the metaphor, but plugging everybody into the matrix and feeding them bullshit 24/7 just to keep them happy is not how we can stay on top of things and our intelligent machines. If the complex machinery that is a Human is reduced to a consumer, it is of no value to electronic machines out to solve the galaxy's problems (other than maybe as an energy source ). It seems as though we won't be going anywhere far away from the solar system for a while, so instead let's go deep. Let's go into ourselves and discover the worlds inside that nature has provided us with.

_nalply 10y ago
And what would you teach?
- scalio 10y ago
  History, for one. So we could finally stop repeating the same idiotic errors over and over and over again. (edit) I wouldn't teach history either by forcing students to learn dates or locations by heart. Have the teachers respond to the students' whims by talking about whatever happens to catch their fancy. Philosophy and psychology. Not by forcing students to learn Kant by heart and regurgigate him for a good grade, but by showing children what they have in their minds and what they can do with that. Mathematics. Strongly related to philosophy, show the beauty in making connections between simple building blocks to create massively complex systems. You and I, this world, everything we know of is dictated by mathematics (or can at least be understood through them, depending on your point of view). That alone can give any non-debilitated mind enough material to think about for the rest of its days. If your mind is not structured in a way favourable to the understanding of complex relationships, you can go into the arts or crafts. Some minds work better with something physical to work on, some are better at internatlizing concepts and tearing them to pieces by thought. Don't put everyone through the same grind because everybody is different. No wonder our schools fail, because they do precisely that. Also, students are expected to learn a bunch of rules by heart, they often don't need to understand the underlying concepts to pass with flying colours. If you don't know where something comes from, you can hardly expand on it because there's nothing to build on. It's like a structure just hanging mid-air, going nowhere, but steadily being tacked stuff onto. It's not stable, and the stuff being tacked on has no relations to anything else, since there is no foundation of broad, general knowledge about the world. (edit) Classes are way overcrowded. What we need is lots of teachers for little groups so that every student's enquiries can be answered in proper time. Instant feedback on any question should also help make the whole thing more like a dialog where the student tries to find out more about a subject and the teacher can provide the information or show the student where and how it can be looked up.
Animats 10y ago
"The solution is obvious: education. Education, education, education." That's the traditional answer. It's obsolete. We've already reached "peak school", where sending more people to college doesn't pay off. (Especially if you have to pay for the schooling with loans.) About half of new US college graduates are not doing a job that requires their education. Teach someone to do something, now one person can do it. Teach a computer to do something, now millions of computers can do it.
- antisthenes 10y ago
  College is only one form of schooling and frankly you're right in that it is obsolete. There are other avenues we can take with teaching that revolve around self-learning, online tutoring and short-term intensive programs for specific skill sets.
- thevibesman 10y ago
  > Teach someone to do something, now one person can do it. Higher education is not necessarily the same as vocational education and has value beyond the teaching one to "do something" I see why you say this answer is obsolete, but I would disagree. Increasing the education level of a population I think will increase its likelihood to come up with creative solutions to the "no jobs" problem: either by the development of new jobs for educated humans, or more likely, a new way to live in our jobless society.
- scalio 10y ago
  Sorry, I did not mean more, but better education, so that by the time you get out of school, you can use your brain. That includes for example little things like reading food stickers to judge wether the ingredients are appropriate or not. In that context, I'm thinking about common sense, really. Now, common sense can't be taught, but it can be destroyed with pointless exercices, of which teaching programmes are chock full of. Once you have a certain base knowledge (which wouldn't necessarily be the same for everyone, not sure about that), the brain, if given the freedom to do so, starts exploring possibilities, all by itself. Children need to have interesting, fascinating things to play with. Learning the tools then becomes part of the games and starts happening automatically. > sending more people to college doesn't pay off. (Especially if you have to pay for the schooling with loans.) That's an economic problem, i.e. one humans have created themselves, thus it can, with the appropriate effort, be solved. In the perverse case of american student loans, it's just one issue in a whole system that cannot be profitable for more than a tiny fraction of its constituents. > About half of new US college graduates are not doing a job that requires their education. So now that AI is taking over, let these people finally do something with their knowledge that they enjoy. (edit) That means stop with this productivity madness. Creativity, be it graphical, musical, philosphical, mathematical, whatever, is not productive. Let the machine be productive, let the human mind roam free. > Teach someone to do something, now one person can do it. Teach a computer to do something, now millions of computers can do it. We are still a long way off artificial human intelligence, for a very simple reason: we do not understand ourselves. How do you plan on replicating our intellect as long as the same is misunderstood?
tpeo 10y ago
There might be a limit to how much fun you can get from learning, and I'd say most of the fun comes from the novelty of it. Figuring stuff out is nice, but education might be a source of enjoyment after a certain point (which I think is why "melancholia" was chiefly associated with philosophers). It doesn't last forever. But what if it isn't where we wander off to, inside or outside, that matters but the wanderlust itself? Maybe the main hindrance to human happiness, once some living standards are satisfied, is just our inherent restlessness. And maybe Pascal was right: maybe all of our miseries indeed derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.
- scalio 10y ago
  I disagree with your first point. If you are a conscious person that tries to know itself and you are not built so weirdly as to slip into mental distress, then I think there is little limit to what you can do with your brain, and by extension, little limit to the fun you can have doing so. I realize the vast majority of people can't even imagine what that feels like, but I think that is partly due to the children being fashioned in a way very detrimental to free (roaming) thought. That can be fixed. About everyone else... I don't know. Your second point is interesting and I have never considered the issue like that. Time to think ;)
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - scalio 10y ago
    (edit) ooh fucks sake. just spent three hours crafting the most elaborate of all fucking responses, hit reply, and the session cookie has fucking expired. guess i'll my lesson. also won't type it all up again just now, but when i get back.

by scalio 10y ago

_nalply 10y ago

And what would you teach?

scalio 10y ago
History, for one. So we could finally stop repeating the same idiotic errors over and over and over again. (edit) I wouldn't teach history either by forcing students to learn dates or locations by heart. Have the teachers respond to the students' whims by talking about whatever happens to catch their fancy. Philosophy and psychology. Not by forcing students to learn Kant by heart and regurgigate him for a good grade, but by showing children what they have in their minds and what they can do with that. Mathematics. Strongly related to philosophy, show the beauty in making connections between simple building blocks to create massively complex systems. You and I, this world, everything we know of is dictated by mathematics (or can at least be understood through them, depending on your point of view). That alone can give any non-debilitated mind enough material to think about for the rest of its days. If your mind is not structured in a way favourable to the understanding of complex relationships, you can go into the arts or crafts. Some minds work better with something physical to work on, some are better at internatlizing concepts and tearing them to pieces by thought. Don't put everyone through the same grind because everybody is different. No wonder our schools fail, because they do precisely that. Also, students are expected to learn a bunch of rules by heart, they often don't need to understand the underlying concepts to pass with flying colours. If you don't know where something comes from, you can hardly expand on it because there's nothing to build on. It's like a structure just hanging mid-air, going nowhere, but steadily being tacked stuff onto. It's not stable, and the stuff being tacked on has no relations to anything else, since there is no foundation of broad, general knowledge about the world. (edit) Classes are way overcrowded. What we need is lots of teachers for little groups so that every student's enquiries can be answered in proper time. Instant feedback on any question should also help make the whole thing more like a dialog where the student tries to find out more about a subject and the teacher can provide the information or show the student where and how it can be looked up.

Animats 10y ago

"The solution is obvious: education. Education, education, education." That's the traditional answer. It's obsolete. We've already reached "peak school", where sending more people to college doesn't pay off. (Especially if you have to pay for the schooling with loans.) About half of new US college graduates are not doing a job that requires their education. Teach someone to do something, now one person can do it. Teach a computer to do something, now millions of computers can do it.

antisthenes 10y ago
College is only one form of schooling and frankly you're right in that it is obsolete. There are other avenues we can take with teaching that revolve around self-learning, online tutoring and short-term intensive programs for specific skill sets.
thevibesman 10y ago
> Teach someone to do something, now one person can do it. Higher education is not necessarily the same as vocational education and has value beyond the teaching one to "do something" I see why you say this answer is obsolete, but I would disagree. Increasing the education level of a population I think will increase its likelihood to come up with creative solutions to the "no jobs" problem: either by the development of new jobs for educated humans, or more likely, a new way to live in our jobless society.
scalio 10y ago
Sorry, I did not mean more, but better education, so that by the time you get out of school, you can use your brain. That includes for example little things like reading food stickers to judge wether the ingredients are appropriate or not. In that context, I'm thinking about common sense, really. Now, common sense can't be taught, but it can be destroyed with pointless exercices, of which teaching programmes are chock full of. Once you have a certain base knowledge (which wouldn't necessarily be the same for everyone, not sure about that), the brain, if given the freedom to do so, starts exploring possibilities, all by itself. Children need to have interesting, fascinating things to play with. Learning the tools then becomes part of the games and starts happening automatically. > sending more people to college doesn't pay off. (Especially if you have to pay for the schooling with loans.) That's an economic problem, i.e. one humans have created themselves, thus it can, with the appropriate effort, be solved. In the perverse case of american student loans, it's just one issue in a whole system that cannot be profitable for more than a tiny fraction of its constituents. > About half of new US college graduates are not doing a job that requires their education. So now that AI is taking over, let these people finally do something with their knowledge that they enjoy. (edit) That means stop with this productivity madness. Creativity, be it graphical, musical, philosphical, mathematical, whatever, is not productive. Let the machine be productive, let the human mind roam free. > Teach someone to do something, now one person can do it. Teach a computer to do something, now millions of computers can do it. We are still a long way off artificial human intelligence, for a very simple reason: we do not understand ourselves. How do you plan on replicating our intellect as long as the same is misunderstood?

tpeo 10y ago

There might be a limit to how much fun you can get from learning, and I'd say most of the fun comes from the novelty of it. Figuring stuff out is nice, but education might be a source of enjoyment after a certain point (which I think is why "melancholia" was chiefly associated with philosophers). It doesn't last forever. But what if it isn't where we wander off to, inside or outside, that matters but the wanderlust itself? Maybe the main hindrance to human happiness, once some living standards are satisfied, is just our inherent restlessness. And maybe Pascal was right: maybe all of our miseries indeed derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.

scalio 10y ago
I disagree with your first point. If you are a conscious person that tries to know itself and you are not built so weirdly as to slip into mental distress, then I think there is little limit to what you can do with your brain, and by extension, little limit to the fun you can have doing so. I realize the vast majority of people can't even imagine what that feels like, but I think that is partly due to the children being fashioned in a way very detrimental to free (roaming) thought. That can be fixed. About everyone else... I don't know. Your second point is interesting and I have never considered the issue like that. Time to think ;)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- scalio 10y ago
  (edit) ooh fucks sake. just spent three hours crafting the most elaborate of all fucking responses, hit reply, and the session cookie has fucking expired. guess i'll my lesson. also won't type it all up again just now, but when i get back.