http://www.deseretnews.com/article/705298649/Universities-will-be-irrelevant.html

Also, if you’re interested, you can take a look at the progress of the article since I started it. It’s history can be found at GitHub, and I plan to continue to version control blog drafts there in the future.

• The blogosphere has just as distorted an incentive structure as the Times news office. What does it mean to anticipate its weaknesses and failures? What does the media landscape look like when there are many incentive structures? How do we nurture that pluralism?

• What ingredients make deep understanding more than an underdog? How can we create a market for deep understanding? Does that involve finding sweet spots of broad appeal and the potential for depth, set to a score of emotional leverage and social currency (as in “The Great Pool of Money”)?

• Is every citizen a journalist? Or is journalism a meeting place where every citizen expects to be, once in a while? Does the idea of journalism fade into the background–will one day, calling yourself a “citizen journalist” make as much sense as identifying as an “Internet user?” Or will journalism be set aside as part of our identity, as we do with being a voter or churchgoer?

These questions aren’t new. (Which doesn’t mean you shouldn’t jump in with questions or suggested directions of investigation in the comments. I’m particularly looking for the language other people have used to think about this, so that I can find what others have said.) But they point toward rediscovering journalism’s potential as an educational organ of society. The value we place on freedom of speech and press point to how deeply education is a civic function: so much so that it could be said to be incidental to the exercise of freedom. That is, the point may not be the learning, but the active, civic life.

What does a vision like that mean for educators and journalists and all the other professions that comprise a healthy, civic landscape? We can’t afford to continue to tolerate and extend the specialization of our civic functions, leaving citizens out of the loop.

Another thing that comes to mind is that Eric Rosenbaum is now working on systems for reflecting or metacognition to help people think about their process. This topic is probably a superset of helping people avoid pitfalls, but still a near neighbor.

Clearly, this becomes a much less significant distinction when the goal is the skill.

You’re trying to link convergent problem-solving design to the lack of good, tinkerable kits, right? And the way you do this is by saying that since education is currently putting its efforts into convergent problem solving — scenarios that have a defined question and answer — we simply haven’t taken the time to create the kind of kits that would support free-form exploration in domains that could use it.

Is that it??

That said, we’re still a ways off from this technology working well, and there isn’t enough meta information attached to content or individuals yet for it to work on a grand scale. But this seems to be the direction we are moving in.

To answer your question, in the context of education and in terms of your project (starting your own university) I think it would be a really interesting study in the learning process if you could build a semantic layer into your technology, so that each individual student receives the information that is most relevant and useful to them.

How do our personal interests in hands-on, stimulating education meet with the hacker / DIY culture?

I think it’s something we’ve been circling around for a while. This is what I driving a little bit talking to Brady Forrest yesterday — is there a conference or meetup for people who create tools like Scratch, think in similar “get kids deigning/making and the concepts will come” lines, or have cool science/engineering apparati that they would love to make kid accessuble? He didn’t know of one, but it would be cool to somehow focus on creating a culture of educators with this DIY you-can-learn-or-do-anything spirit, rather than the traditional you-can-prepare-to-do-anything-educational mindset.

What would some first steps in that direction be?

1.) I think that to actually understand science, philosophically speaking, is extremely difficult. To get your head around what it means to “do science” rather than just affecting science is way harder than getting your head around what it means to “do music” (though there’s still a difference between “doing music” and “affecting music”). I think it’s kind of dangerous (culturally) for people to just start doing science on their own.

2.) Practically, I can’t imagine what your layman could even accomplish. Maybe (probably) this is my own naivety/ignorance coming out, but what could your lay electrical engineer do in a week that Alex3, for instance, could not do with a flick of the wrist?

Are you thinking something more along the lines of long-term development of scientific talent/understanding?

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I guess both of the above questions (the former being the “ideal” and the latter being the “pragmatic”) really have the question “What is science?” at their base. What is science?

I’m not entirely sure how to approach your comment. I would like to clarify my points, because I’m sure that I was unclear in some places, but I don’t really see how your response even relates to my comment.

You seem to be objecting to political discussion in general. For example, if I said that I wanted the Democrats to gain power, since the Republican Party has an essentially Fascist conception of executive power, would you tell me that abstractions like “fascism” versus “democracy” are less important than necessities?

The reason that I talk about abstractions is because a higher-level understanding of a problem is necessary to bring about any change. Everyone is interested in solving problems like famine, ecological destruction, violence, poverty, political oppression, etc., but they are not at all being solved. Evidently, they don’t know how to solve these problems. I am trying to talk about possible strategies that could be adopted to solve some of these problems.

Eating is a priority of humans. Preservation of the “rich relationship between humankind and its food” could only be a priority of someone with the time/resources/education to cast “liking to eat good food with other people” in such terms.

Profit in any business is a means of abstracting value, buying even those who do not profit in cash the luxury of focusing energy in a direction other than sustaining life. Agribusiness supplies what people will eat- sometimes at an awful cost in collateral damage to the environment, but cheaply, and despite the fussing of intellectuals, it supplies what people prefer. “Food culture” does not exist for most people. It’s an arid and vacuous term to anyone who has to figure out how to afford to eat.

Culture’s pre-occupation with symbolic reasoning
Which you demonstrate by reifying ‘culture’. People reason. They reason with concepts, symbolically. This is a property, not a symptom.

Someone who is dirt poor knows well what progress is, even if others have forgotten. ‘Is-ought’ comes after the basics are provided. Then one has the luxury.

So to long for days when everyone toils for her own bread is crazy. If it is just the option you want, you have it. DIY. Just don’t prescribe it for everyone.

Eating is a priority of humans. Preservation of the “rich relationship between humankind and its food” could only be a priority of someone with the time/resources/education to cast “liking to eat good food with other people” in such terms.

Profit in any business is a means of abstracting value, buying even those who do not profit in cash the luxury of focusing energy in a direction other than sustaining life. Agribusiness supplies what people will eat- sometimes at an awful cost in collateral damage to the environment, but cheaply, and despite the fussing of intellectuals, it supplies what people prefer. “Food culture” does not exist for most people. It’s an arid and vacuous term to anyone who has to figure out how to afford to eat.

Culture’s pre-occupation with symbolic reasoning
Which you demonstrate by reifying ‘culture’. People reason. They reason with concepts, symbolically. This is a property, not a symptom.

Someone who is dirt poor knows well what progress is, even if others have forgotten. ‘Is-ought’ comes after the basics are provided. Then one has the luxury.

So to long for days when everyone toils for her own bread is crazy. If it is just the option you want, you have it. DIY. Just don’t prescribe it for everyone.

Eating is a priority of humans. Preservation of the “rich relationship between humankind and its food” could only be a priority of someone with the time/resources/education to cast “liking to eat good food with other people” in such terms.

Profit in any business is a means of abstracting value, buying even those who do not profit in cash the luxury of focusing energy in a direction other than sustaining life. Agribusiness supplies what people will eat- sometimes at an awful cost in collateral damage to the environment, but cheaply, and despite the fussing of intellectuals, it supplies what people prefer. “Food culture” does not exist for most people. It’s an arid and vacuous term to anyone who has to figure out how to afford to eat.

Culture’s pre-occupation with symbolic reasoning
Which you demonstrate by reifying ‘culture’. People reason. They reason with concepts, symbolically. This is a property, not a symptom.

Someone who is dirt poor knows well what progress is, even if others have forgotten. ‘Is-ought’ comes after the basics are provided. Then one has the luxury.

So to long for days when everyone toils for her own bread is crazy. If it is just the option you want, you have it. DIY. Just don’t prescribe it for everyone.

It’s also an area of inquiry where there’s a lot of complete nonsense getting in the way of a reasonable theory. The two dominant ideas are both ridiculous, in completely different directions. Namely, there is the “abstract rational agent” who *merely uses* information, and is not affected by it; and then there is the “abstract educational subject,” the “blank slate,” who is *merely affected* by information (“indoctrination”).

The techniques (technologies, types of labor, use of land) which agribusiness uses are more productive than the techniques which can realistically be used by a small-scale “DIY” farmer. The problem of course is that the priorities of agribusiness (profit) conflict with the priorities of humans (care for the health of the land, biosphere, and the human population; preservation of the rich relationship between humankind and its food).

Having said that the problem is the priorities of agribusiness, I now have to turn around and say that the *real* problem is the fact that the techniques of agribusiness are in some ways indissociable from the priorities of agribusiness. That is, certain social assumptions are built in to the techniques: use of mass-scale technologies implies that land, workers, and consumers are all interchangeable. This necessitates that everyone eat the same stuff, all land is capable of supporting the same crops, all workers do the same work. And of course
this is only possible given the (highly negative) systems of fertilization and pesticide use to homogenize land; work supervision and training to homogenize labor; consumerism to homogenize consumption.

“Assume DIY farming becomes mainstream. Even if DIY farming is empowering, market pressure will want to divide labor. And I don’t see how we can then avoid climbing back up the balkanization ladder – or even if there’s a reason to resist that ascent (other than avoiding our current situation).”

Market pressure is not an abstract force. The pressure to have cheaper tomatoes acts in concert with the pressure to eat bland, consumer-focused crap, and the pressure to give over land for industrial use. It is difficult and questionable to fight the pressure for cheaper tomatoes, but the other two tendencies can be fought on a social and political level, respectively.

The assumption that natural resources such as land, air, or petroleum should go to the highest bidder is certainly not a precondition for a system of free-market competition. And consumer culture is highly unhealthy – already there is a backlash. If these two tendencies were counteracted, then farming would change even under a free market system. It wouldn’t necessarily become entirely small-scale, but agribusiness as it exists today would certainly die. A DIY farmer probably is able to produce “a cheaper tomato,” given that the tomato farming respects a democratic system of collective land ownership, and integrates into a food culture which demands high-quality, healthy
produce.

How does this relate to the larger question of progress as such? I have questioned the definition of agricultural “productivity”; and I would similarly question any particular definition of “progress.” Progress is only well-defined in the context of a particular system of production; and systems of production always include certain assumptions about the role of the consumer, etc. To me, “progress” is almost a useless term. As you say, it is at the wrong level: we need
to be talking about how we are approaching food, how we are approaching science, how we are approaching medicine. Progress for the sake of progress is certain to be a waste, when the same energy could be expended towards a concrete goal in the realm of human needs.

In other words, why not to climb the Balkanization ladder has several concrete answers: consumerism is alienating, industrial work is alienation, fertilizer is environmentally harmful, etc. Similarly in an area such as medicine or law. Why *to* climb it, on the other hand, has only the most self-justifying sort of answer.

I hope these quickly written thoughts are helpful in your “weekly” essay on this subject. I’m looking forward to reading it.

Clearly people are born different from each other in lots of ways, but it can be limiting to measure people by their talent. Take piano virtuosos, say. Arguably, saying someone is a great pianist because of their “talent” may be partly true, but probably puts too little weight on the hard work they’ve done to take advantage of the talent. And if you think in terms of talent too much, you have too fixed a view of human abilities.

All that’s just to say I agree!

There’s this prof at stanford named Carol Dweck who writes about the importance of understanding this stuff, developmentally. Like, if you believe that some people are innately smart, and you’re not, it’s quite harmful. If instead you believe that smartness is more like a skill, you can learn stuff by working hard, etc, you do better overall.

That’s a bit of an equivocation, since practice is really the straightforward way to become skilled at something, but it is certainly true that different people have different “initial competencies” in a skill.

Does that make sense?

It’s hard to be “clear” in the sense that “anyone can understand what you’re saying” because sometimes what you’re saying can require powerful and uncommon concepts.

1.) Culture’s pre-occupation with symbolic reasoning (e.g. reasoning about “progress”) does not imply that its terms have (or can have) semantic content outside of the cultural sphere in which they are used. The meaning of “progress” is like the meaning of “god,” in my opinion – largely produced by complex social interactions.

The reason we can’t define “progress” so as to talk about it usefully in a philosophical setting is the is-ought problem.

2.) DIY is individualistic – cultural forms are lasting stable. Do you think that this causes problems? How can you have a culture of individuality? I think another culture would kick its ass. The borg always wins. Always.

It also brings to the fore that DIY versus big business is just a silly notion. Obvious everyone is not going to make all their own food, grow their own wheat, mill it, etc. There is a proper scale for all things. My main question would be, how does exchange occur in an intelligent way across many scales? Because I think it is the means of exchange that drives many market forces. For instance, it is easiest for me to shop at a supermarket because I know I can get everything I want. It is easiest for a supermarket to buy from large suppliers to ensure consistency. It is centralizing information by centralizing institutions.

This has been a long comment.