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A discussion about how school is modeled seems on point for this site, but the author of this seems a bit... zany? "Before humanity is taken over by AI?"

wayoutthere 7y ago
Yeah, I get the sense that this guy attached himself to a topic in the early 80s and has been on a self-directed tangent ever since. He makes a lot of unfounded claims, peppering in just enough references to sound credible. I’m sure he believes everything he says wholeheartedly, but self-directed learning without guidance can lead you to pick up some weird ideas before having the context to understand why they’re “weird”. I don’t think he’s entirely off-base with his criticisms of the school system, but I also don’t think he presents any arguments that aren’t well-established already. The question of which sources to trust (and thus learn from) is the biggest reason not to go entirely self-directed with learning. One is equally likely to end up with a theological argument as a scientific one depending on which sources you were introduced to first.
- saalweachter 7y ago
  I feel fortunate in that most of the zany ideas I attached myself to in my late teens/early 20's were re: physics and mathematics. Because they could be pretty easily shown as nonsense with just a tiny bit more education and thought, like concretely, useless nonsense, for very straight forward easy to demonstrate reasons, I was able to later discard them without too much difficulty, and accept that I didn't actually have any Big Ideas about math and physics, ideas that were going to change the world. If my Big Ideas about how the world works had been about something more difficult to prove or disprove, like sociology or psychology, I kind of think I would still believe them, because it's one thing to elaborate your maths to a logical contradiction on a couple of sheets of paper, and another to run a well-controlled experiment with thousands of subjects.
guerrilla 7y ago
It sounds like it could be related to the LessWrong cult [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LessWrong#Roko's_basilisk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LessWrong#Roko's_basilisk

wayoutthere 7y ago

Yeah, I get the sense that this guy attached himself to a topic in the early 80s and has been on a self-directed tangent ever since. He makes a lot of unfounded claims, peppering in just enough references to sound credible. I’m sure he believes everything he says wholeheartedly, but self-directed learning without guidance can lead you to pick up some weird ideas before having the context to understand why they’re “weird”. I don’t think he’s entirely off-base with his criticisms of the school system, but I also don’t think he presents any arguments that aren’t well-established already. The question of which sources to trust (and thus learn from) is the biggest reason not to go entirely self-directed with learning. One is equally likely to end up with a theological argument as a scientific one depending on which sources you were introduced to first.

saalweachter 7y ago
I feel fortunate in that most of the zany ideas I attached myself to in my late teens/early 20's were re: physics and mathematics. Because they could be pretty easily shown as nonsense with just a tiny bit more education and thought, like concretely, useless nonsense, for very straight forward easy to demonstrate reasons, I was able to later discard them without too much difficulty, and accept that I didn't actually have any Big Ideas about math and physics, ideas that were going to change the world. If my Big Ideas about how the world works had been about something more difficult to prove or disprove, like sociology or psychology, I kind of think I would still believe them, because it's one thing to elaborate your maths to a logical contradiction on a couple of sheets of paper, and another to run a well-controlled experiment with thousands of subjects.

guerrilla 7y ago

It sounds like it could be related to the LessWrong cult [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LessWrong#Roko's_basilisk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LessWrong#Roko's_basilisk