I remember quantum country from a couple of years ago and like most things online, I spent a bit of time on it, then it sat as an open tab for probably months b

I remember quantum country from a couple of years ago and like most things online, I spent a bit of time on it, then it sat as an open tab for probably months before I went through and purged it because it wasn't important enough to revisit. It was very compelling, except it wasn't a tool. There was a view of a controversy in what education was (I associate it with Cardinal Newman), where the question was whether it was more effective to inculcate and find more efficient ways to encode and transfer information into minds, or whether it was best to "draw out," capabilities in students. It was framed as drawing out vs. putting in. The idea of drawing out implies that there are more efficient ways to leverage innate human capabilities by providing students with tools to solve problems they already have. The complaint that "math isn't practical," is a failure of imagination on the part of teachers to present compelling problems, and teaching the abstractions without reasoning your way into them rewards only a very limited type of mind. "Math is social," is another one I hear a lot, which means you need to be engaged in an active conversation about it to do it, which is peculiar because I can hack my way through playing Bach and Chopin pieces on my own with just enough sight reading to get them under my fingers, and routinely memorize archaic and complex 1k+ word monologues for performance, but for some reason one still needs to be an initiate to do math because it's still modelled on the "putting in" mode of education. Spaced repetition is amazing and necessary, and memory work is a very old practice, but they're limited by the "putting in" ideas behind it. When I'm doing those other activities, there is an urgency and a reward in them, where we haven't quite articulated a path for drawing it out in other fields. I have a pet theory that the way to leverage peoples minds is to set the correct initial conditions that yield internal consistency from their iteration. Look at how encyclopedic people become when they believe in something. They have an explanation for everything that reinforces the initial idea, and some of it is actually not always terrible. Purely synthetic ideologies are just over a century old, but they are unreasonably effective as knowledge graphs. There is a formulaic recipe for ideologies I've been noodling, and maybe a good test run of it would be whether we could use it to create an Ancient Aliens tv show but for math, where we can travel around interviewing slightly bemused mathematicians about how really complex ideas are just homologies of a few elegant ones. I'm not saying it's category theory, but it's category theory. The memes write themselves.