Monday, March 28, 2011

The importance of free education and reforming general education

The free nature of Wikipedia and YouTube demonstrates a potential direction for education -- if we're smart enough to allow it to happen. Unfortunately, Wikipedia's relevance criteria for articles is based on the argument from popularity (the American Idol/democracy argument), while YouTube is a for-profit website owned by scummy capitalists in league with advertisers devoid of real values; both are interested in pleasing people en masse, either as a symbol of some arbitrary image, or to make massive amounts of money at the expense of everyone else. Never mind the issues with inheriting wealth, allowing profit-generating entities to have owners (or to NOT be owned by everyone), the lack of alternative service providers, or using symbols in the place of hard, empirical observation; that all sucks, but what this post will be about is how such incentives and lack of regulation will keep us retarded for decades, if not centuries, to come.

Let's put it this way: You don't have to pay for an ISP in order to gain Internet access (try a library, school, or other academic location), so if you can read free articles and watch free vlogs that are of higher value than the average, hugely expensive college lecture, then someone better realize the potential that's currently being wasted and pull a Napster for education. Knowing who Napoleon replaced when he came to power or how to factor trinomials makes no sense in the context of the modern person's highly technicized existence, so why are we continuing to teach people such functionally useless nonsense? Do we really get off on artificially conjuring up value in order to give our society the false appearance of being interesting and productive? What about all the stuff that's out there in the real world that actually matters?

Furthermore, now that, thankfully, the music and film industries are dying* (and the porn industry†, believe it or not), I think it's time that the same started happening to the education industry. Let's not pretend that it isn't an industry, either, because that's exactly what it is. Remember when I said that it makes no sense for the average person to learn about Napoleon and complex math? Well, it does make sense -- for the banks and academic institutions administering all the tests, texts, and other materials. Firstly, yes, there are some colleges that are for-profit (I go to one), and secondly, regardless of motive, it's nevertheless still the case that millions of dollars get wasted every year on producing and using crap that not only could be learned by browsing Wikipedia in far less time, but is also totally irrelevant to anyone's ability to:

1. Treat people properly or behave in a competent manner within a social environment

2. Produce things that actually improve society's overall quality by removing or reducing negative impediments

The monetary incentive aside, colleges are still usually interested in upholding an image, which is a symbolic gesture that, in this case, has positive social consequences for the colleges, but hurts both the minds and wallets of those used to this end. Offering needlessly complex math and history courses in order to show off your "standards of quality" and "reputation" is no different from a woman showing off how "graceful" and "respectable" she is by wearing dresses. So all you feminists out there who advocate the slutification of your culture as a means to "realizing gender equality" or some such silliness, drop your personal predilection for the one symbolic standard that hurts your cause and start promoting free education -- for the betterment of all!

Alright, facetious rundown over. Three points:

1. In the future, if we're all going to be streaming movies from hulu.com and downloading mp3s, we might as well take our "online" classes for free as well; it's more efficient than the alternatives, and the technology is already available (even if everyone is too interested in music videos and online shopping to care).

2. If we're doing all education online and for free, then we might as well choose "courses" -- or even individual lectures -- ourselves, and leave out the authoritative administrators altogether. If you want to fix toilets for a living, find a free online service provider who specializes in providing information and examinations for that stuff, then read up on it, participate in the discussions, do your real-life practice lessons, and take a few (hopefully not too memorization-based) tests. This will allow you to earn a certification for your desired skill set without all of the wasted resources and bureaucracy.

3. Even though general education in the modern sense sucks, there should still be a foundational set of ideas that gets taught to everyone at a young age, regardless of what they go on to pursue later in life.

If we as a society ever become interested in this direction, in order to make sure that 3. is established as a societal baseline, we'll first need to scrap the following:

1. Psychology - especially Freudian psychology (if your textbook admits that a concept that it's bringing forth is no longer accepted even by modern psychiatrists, you know you're holding a waste of trees in your hands), but all psychology, really, as it focuses on the individual rather than the environment, doesn't involve empirical observation and testing, and contrives arbitrary "disorders" where almost all people have at least some of the qualifications, even if they don't have enough to qualify for "treatment"

2. Math - Keep arithmetic and times tables, but get rid of trigonometry, geometry, calculus, etc.

3. History - I don't need to know about King Hammurabi or the Boxer Rebellion in order to fix your computer

4. Creative writing - Most fiction writers never go to college for writing, and the few who do often don't get anything out of it. Being graded for such a subjective activity is really silly, anyway.

5. Arbitrary guidelines for research papers - It doesn't matter whether your student indented twice or only once for his block quotation, so stop throwing a fit about it and do something meaningful with your credentials for once

6. Political Science - This is just "Spend hundreds of dollars to listen to the news in person 101"

7. Sex Ed

8. Phys Ed

9. "Philosophy" - This is just "Spend hundreds of dollars to have someone give you a list of their favorite philosophers while refusing to in any way indicate that one might have better ideas than the others, or that other not-so-famous people probably have the same ideas... 101"

10. Music

11. Art

12. Any other liberal arts courses

13. Creation "science" and Intelligent Design

14. The pledge of allegiance

15. Prayer

16. Grades - Either you're good enough to do it in real life or you're not -- no arbitrary, base-10 nonsense necessary.

After we've scrapped all the junk, we'll need to teach the following to all young people before they go on to pursue an occupational field, regardless of what they become interested in learning about later on:

1. Arithmetic

2. English

3. Logic

4. Philosophy (the real kind -- not the "all ideas are equal and memorizing the names of famous people is more important than thinking coherently" kind)

5. Meta-cognition

6. Science (Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Astronomy)

7. Computer Science (or at least basic computer competency and troubleshooting skills)

8. Statistics

9. Economics

Obviously, anyone who wants to specialize in something will be able to go more in-depth in some of the above areas than what the general requirement entails; additionally, they'll be able to take entirely separate courses for the purpose of acquiring the above mentioned certifications. However, when it comes to what is a requirement, there are certain skills and concepts that should be stressed.

Specific things that everyone should be taught at a young age:

1. How to formulate logical premises and conclusions; logical fallacies and why they're fallacies; how to construct a logic flowchart; what things like non sequiturs are

2. The ever-present possibility of being in error, or of being deceived by one's senses

3. A methodology for living, including methods for how to manage processes, formulate values, and accomplish goals; an understanding of why something is more valuable than something else, or at least appears to be based on sensory information; an understanding of how to determine what to do in various situations and how to make decisions based on opportunity cost, value equations, etc.; how to isolate variables for problem-solving; how to perceive the world as an integrated system dictated by cause-and-effect, relations, input, processing, and output that can be infinitely broken down into subsystems

4. Waste management, which expands upon 3., but is a bit more specific

5. How to conduct an experiment (of the thought variety of otherwise); how the scientific method works; why peer review is important; the differences between dependent variables, independent variables, and controls

6. How to spot any kind of prejudice, bias, superstition, fear/attachment, emotionally-made decisions, or religious thinking (regardless of whether it applies to what people refer to as "religion")

7. The nature of pleasure as a termination of deprivation

8. The arbitrary nature of most criteria in all areas of life, including deadlines, work hours, and weekends. For example, there is no scientific evidence in favor of the idea that working eight hours a day is more effective than working seven or nine, or somehow optimal. In any case, the ubiquity of the arbitrary criteria phenomenon needs to be stressed at a young age.

9. The arbitrary nature of the self; why a peer of yours who is very similar to you ideologically is more "you" than your seven-year-old self; why memory is the only neurological component that prevents individual sentient organisms from realizing that they're the same, in substance, as all other sentient organisms; why your pain and someone else's pain are substantively equivalent in the same way that one chunk of iron and another chunk of iron are substantively equivalent; how chemicals enter and leave the body, and what they do during metabolic activities; why living organisms are sort-of-open systems, complete with processors, memory, storage devices, buses, input devices, output devices, system software, etc.

10. Statistics; how to collect a sample; how to deduce probability outcomes; the significance of sample size; how to calculate odds; how to interpret odds (to avoid wishful thinking, etc.). Note: If 3. and 8. are properly taught, then the idea of percentages will not be taken seriously, even if percentages will still be used on occasion (or maybe not, depending).

11. Attachment avoidance - for death, life, work, loved ones, ideas, beliefs, isms, and material possessions. I'm not sure if I'd take it as far as meditation and related practices, but there should definitely be an emphasis on preparing for the inevitable decay of the "fun" things around you, as well as how to maintain a productive psychology in the absence of fulfilled desires.

12. How to use a personal computer; how to use a mouse and keyboard; how to navigate the Windows operating system; how to keep your PC free from malware, security threats, and performance problems; how to upgrade your PC. Note that this doesn't need to be incredibly comprehensive or technical; it just needs to allow the general population to be computer literate. This deserves far more attention in school than dinosaurs or Pilgrims. Sorry.

13. The different spheres of influence on the individual, and how to recognize them in everyday life. For example, the media wants you to stop smoking not because it's the only thing (or the most painful thing, or the first thing) that can kill you, but because there's plenty of money to be made in ineffective products advertised as being capable of helping you to quit. It's unlikely that lung cancer will be less pleasant for you than the average cancer; likewise, it's likely that you'll live almost as long as you would have had you never started smoking. Besides, quality is more important than quantity, which is always absurdly tiny when weighed against eternity. Oh, and all that marijuana that you think "isn't a drug, man"? Yeah, no one has gotten lung cancer from it yet because your grandparents didn't consume it in massive quantities every day for years. In a nutshell: Do you hold a fairly popular belief or presumption? If yes, then odds are good that someone is making money off of your gullibility.

14. The flaws inherent in the English language and why, despite our needing conventions in order to effectively communicate, most of the rules of English are totally arbitrary and meaningless. For example, synonyms are often superfluous, and capitalization was only necessary in times of hard-to-read Gothic script devoid of paragraphs.

15. What the Bible actually says; comparisons between modern values and ancient Semitic values to demonstrate the huge contrast between the two; emphasis on the barbarism of the Old Testament and why it makes sense in the context of a pastoral people with few resources; emphasis on the previously henotheistic nature of proto-Judaism; how religions, like languages and species, share common ancestors and are related to one another, in spite of the commonly held view that they are spontaneously generated

16. The differences between harmful radiation and harmless radiation (wavelengths, frequencies, photons and electrons, etc.). Honestly, people being afraid of ghosts and Satan is bad enough in 2011. Do they really need to be afraid of cell phones and microwaves, too?

17. Maybe a LITTLE bit of drawing technique or music theory as part of a larger course on something else, just to demonstrate why no one should make millions of dollars by painting portraits of women without eyebrows or by singing songs about love

18. How slaughtering livestock actually works; why meat is just a preference and not a basic human need; how much money and resources could be saved by feeding grain to all of the starving people on the planet as opposed to the pigs and cows on your burgers, which don't need to exist in the first place

Updated 6/2/11: 19. First aid; a mild amount of medical knowledge


Doing all of the above will only be possible in an environment where everyone with innovative ideas is allowed to start his own organization or website and subsequently generate publicity for his efforts; it won't be possible in an environment run by corporations, and it certainly won't be possible in the current academic environment. We must, to the best of our abilities, separate not only education but all forms of human conditioning from money-making; if we don't, we'll never promote proper skill acquisition or social understanding and competency, and courses will continue to waste resources and brain space in the meantime.

Why doesn't anyone talk about this stuff? Well, the majority of people are not in school, so they don't care, because it doesn't affect them -- at least not directly. If more people would stop treating education as either some compartmentalized facet of existence that "just happens" or a pathway to corporate enslavement, then maybe it would be easier for them to see just why our inability to raise children properly leads to war, world hunger, and any other huge, generic problem in the world.

Feel free to add onto one or more of the above lists in the comments section if you have any additional ideas. I'm always looking for more.

_________________________________________________
* This is the place where I'm supposed to link you to articles proving that I'm right, but I don't feel like Googling for the obvious.

† Apparently, because so much porn is available for free all over the Internet, producers are struggling to stay in business. I find this kind of amusing for some reason.

22 comments:

  1. Not everyone has equal capacity to grasp, retain and apply what they've studied (even elementary things like basic logic), so you have to allow for some kind of tracking or ability testing.

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  2. 1. We've never really implemented a system that teaches people how to critically analyze data and information from a young age, so it's somewhat difficult to know with certainty how hard it is for people with varying genetic makeups to grasp various logical processes.

    2. However, I don't find the most critical aspects of logic to be much more difficult than basic arithmetic, and we have evidence that arithmetic is easy to grasp at a young age for most humans. By inference, I'd imagine that logic and meta-logic would be relatively easy to grasp for most humans -- so long as distractions, disparate cultural influences, and other hindrances didn't present themselves to the subjects in question over a prolonged period of time. While some logical problems are complex, I would only expect the general population to understand the simpler and more wide-reaching and important ones.

    For example, realizing that it probably isn't a good idea to look down on someone for laughing a certain way is still not entirely grasped by the current world population; this needs to be remedied. Meanwhile, knowing how to properly weigh the cost and benefits of various solutions to the problem of a damaged spaceship, or how to actually repair the ship isn't something that everyone should need to know.

    3. I don't have any problems with testing or tracking whatsoever and never claimed otherwise. On the contrary, these things are vital to the success of a future civilization.

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  3. I'm glad that you're interested enough in this blog to comment and critique it. I wish there were more of you here, or more blogs with similar content and analysis.

    With that said, though, I'm curious about something: What do you think of the blog so far? I know that you've mentioned enjoying it in the past, but I'd like to know what, specifically, makes it something that you read. Did you find it via another blog with similar content? What are your most important philosophical and social positions? I promise that I won't make any assumptions about your level of competency based on which ideas you find most attractive; I'm just curious about where you're coming from and what your goals are.

    Feel free to:

    1. Not respond

    2. Email me any time for any reason

    3. Respond in this comments section, even though it has nothing to do with the topic. It won't get in the way of anyone else's conversation or create any mess, so I don't see why not.

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  4. Re: basic logical ability, point taken. We need more longitudinal studies about early logic education.

    You might find this page useful for biases that show little correlation with general intelligence as measured by IQ.

    I like the blog so far, but it could be improved with some outreach efforts. Right now you're mostly talking to yourself. You might want to look into discussing your ideas in forums which might have more people receptive to them. Transhumanists, eugenists, antinatalists, and other people who reject appeals to nature come to mind.

    Case in point, one of your comments on Sister Y's antinatalist blog attracted me here. I agree with most (not all) of your basic assumptions about nature and society, and you're a nice change from the self-righteous fools of all stripes I find on most other forums and blogs. There are not enough shared assumptions about rationality, so people just end up shouting at each other 99% of the time. It's pretty depressing, so I hope this blog attracts more attention. :)

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  5. I've been enjoying your post, as always. But then I read the following:

    So all you feminists out there who advocate the slutification of your culture as a means to "realizing gender equality" or some such silliness, drop your personal predilection for the one symbolic standard that hurts your cause and start promoting free education -- for the betterment of all!

    Ah, feminists and their silly efforts to "scare quote"realize gender equality"scare quote". I think someone needs to take his (it's his, isn't it?) own advice and try to spot his prejudices and biases. And perhaps provide some empirical support for the assertion that advocating gender equality in sexual expression somehow gets in the way of advocating free education.

    And what's with "your culture"? Have you seceded from the culture of patriarchy that makes advocating gender equality necessary? I somehow doubt it.

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  6. I used quotes because the people to whom I was [jokingly] referring don't have any interest in realizing gender equality whatsoever; they're predominantly interested in themselves, and will do whatever it takes to pursue this interest. This makes them no different from anyone else -- male or female -- who, for example, advocates "freedom of religion" when their kid is forced to say a prayer in school, but otherwise has no interest in the concept of freedom for anyone else anywhere on Earth.

    Honestly, how much good is it doing the world for women to do away with meaningless cultural norms like being "ladylike" if such "triumphs" are not only blatantly negligent with respect to all other types of people on the planet (both male and female) and their desires, but also seek to replace one short-sighted custom with another? Pursuit of pleasure and ego gratification have nothing to do with making the world a better place, and there are bigger things to worry about -- like starvation, apathy, or wasting huge amounts of time and resources on expendable entertainment and doing useless jobs.

    ...and it was a joke.

    Some further points:

    1. Anyone who defines or labels him- or herself as a "feminist" is contriving unnecessary personal limitations, which are usually founded on a bias. If I had to pick an "ism" for myself, it'd be "feelingsist," or "sensationsist."

    2. The joke referred not to feminists, but to feminists "who advocate the slutification of your culture".

    3. The joke was that humans tend to use symbols in the place of empirical observation where it benefits them socially. One example of this is when a commercial contains smiling people, which is symbolic of the quality of the product; another is when a college gives people A's just to get funding, or provides "excellent humanities" courses which have nothing to do with functional work or training; another still is when women cross their legs in order to convey that they are not delinquents. None of these examples of symbolic gesture has anything to do with whether the product actually works, the college actually trains people to improve society, or the women are pleasant company; it just so happens that my example is more broad than the example used by "feminists," and their solutions are often kind of frivolous.

    It might have sounded condescending, but unless you consider yourself a person who promotes frivolous sexual exchanges as a symbol of personal freedom and liberation, you really shouldn't have to worry!

    4. Yeah, I'm a guy, but what I find more interesting is the prospect of your being female. I'll not assume one way or the other, but I always find it curious when people get indignant about things simply because they define themselves by them or in some way associate themselves with them. I, for instance, am not black, but I think about the plight of Africans very frequently, and am just as likely to get upset when someone says something disparaging about them without good reason as I am when someone makes a similar generalization that has to do with me personally.

    If you are indeed a female, I'll leave you with this question: Would you leave a similar comment on a post joking about something totally unrelated to yourself, such as obesity, racism, or Christianity (you could be overweight, black, or Christian; I have no idea if you are or not, but you get the point)?

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  7. On the "your culture" line, your criticism seems like a nitpick; I'm not sure what makes the legitimacy of my characterization so crucial. My only guess is that you're trying to throw in everything you can in order to inflate your point, which is borderline red herring-ish, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and act as though you meant well in my reply.

    I suppose I do "belong" to Western culture, in a sense, even if I don't adhere to its customs beyond practical necessity -- but again, it was a joke aimed at people who are foolish enough to get riled up over very small criticisms of their rather selfish solutions, and certainly not "feminists" as a whole. In any case, I do see some merit in distancing oneself from culture in language in order to make the point that many people are culture drones.

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  8. If you meant to talk about people who use symbols in the place of empirical observation where it benefits them socially, why not, you know, say "people who use symbols in the place of empirical observation where it benefits them socially"? Moreover, being able to express oneself sexually with the freedom accorded to men and not face social ostracism or blame in case you get raped seems like a rather tangible, and not merely symbolic, benefit.

    I haven’t actually seen any feminists advocate that we should have a custom and expectation of female promiscuity; maybe you have. If that’s the case, it wasn’t clear from your original post that that is whom you meant. What I have seen feminists advocate is that women who wish to be promiscuous be allowed to do so without it being assumed that it’s okay to rape them, or that they are morally deficient somehow (whereas men are judged by much more lenient standards). If you think such advocates are necessarily motivated by selfish considerations, you are wrong. If you think this issue is trifling, you must not have researched it much or given it much thought. Not having to worry about such things is part of the privilege this culture accords you as a man. That’s why it’s crucial to not underestimate your connection with Western culture: you may be a culture drone in ways you don‘t even realize. You seem to think the slut stigma is a non-issue compared to people’s wasting time and resources on expendable entertainment, but at least people want to do that (and those who are currently starving would do the same, if they could). No one wants to be raped because they are seen as a free-for-all due to their sexual or sartorial choices. If women's sexual freedom somehow became the new status quo, that would be a good thing, if only because the status quo bias and propinquity effect would lead to people treating women who do not conform to the "madonna" stereotype less viciously than before, which would reduce suffering.

    Re: it was a joke. It wasn’t funny. Why not make a joke about how separate drinking fountains for black people were merely a symbolic standard, and getting rid of them was a waste of time?

    And, of course, you still haven’t shown how advocating slutification makes one unable to also advocate other things, even if one does it for selfish reasons. Do you write this blog from your own computer? Why not sell it and donate the proceeds to Oxfam or some such organization? It would probably make more of an impact than writing a blog, realistically (though I‘ve come to the conclusion that feeding starving people without limiting their fertility leads to the increase of starving people). But we sometimes choose to do things that make life more bearable for us personally. You seem to have some kind of idiosyncratic virtue ethics about eschewing happiness and pleasure (in which your personal preferences are conveniently given privileged status). You have not provided convincing evidence that the rest of us should adopt your virtue ethics or, more importantly, that it is even possible for everyone to do so.

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  9. I do happen to be female and am pretty gender-conforming (mostly for habitual and practical reasons), but I regard my femaleness as an accidental property, and gender and sex as social constructions. Evidently, pretty much everyone else disagrees with me, so being a feminist is a way to acknowledge and address the way society treats the group of people they have arbitrarily designated as “women”. It does not preclude concern for beings society does not designate as women. You should really lay off using false dichotomies. And, though it’s not any of your business, I do comment about the treatment of groups such as trans people or children, and I am neither (though I used to be a child, obviously). Though I am female, I prefer monogamy, so while I would derive some satisfaction from women being accorded the same sexual freedom as men, I would be mostly harmed by such a development because I find the existence of promiscuity distressing and personally threatening. I have learned to overcome my prejudice against people who do not share my (idiosyncratic) values. I suggest you do the same, especially since you seem to care about overcoming prejudice a great deal.

    it was a joke aimed at people who are foolish enough to get riled up over very small criticisms of their rather selfish solutions

    Since advocating slutification!=getting riled up over very small criticisms, I assume this is now a personal attack on me. Way to demonstrate how unbiased and impartial you are by resorting to ad hominems and making false assumptions based on stereotypes. I criticized the content of your post, yet you chose to insinuate that my comment should not be taken seriously (while promising to act “as though” I meant well). And FYI, accusing women of being humorless and foolish is a textbook example of marginalizing and dismissing their concerns.

    This kind of behavior really hurts your credibility as a person who supposedly wants to do something about algorithmic decision-making and model building, which is a shame since you have some really interesting thoughts.

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  10. If you meant to talk about people who use symbols in the place of empirical observation where it benefits them socially, why not, you know, say "people who use symbols in the place of empirical observation where it benefits them socially"? Moreover, being able to express oneself sexually with the freedom accorded to men and not face social ostracism or blame in case you get raped seems like a rather tangible, and not merely symbolic, benefit.

    I haven’t actually seen any feminists advocate that we should have a custom and expectation of female promiscuity; maybe you have. If that’s the case, it wasn’t clear from your original post that that is whom you meant. What I have seen feminists advocate is that women who wish to be promiscuous be allowed to do so without it being assumed that it’s okay to rape them, or that they are morally deficient somehow (whereas men are judged by much more lenient standards). If you think such advocates are necessarily motivated by selfish considerations, you are wrong. If you think this issue is trifling, you must not have researched it much or given it much thought. Not having to worry about such things is part of the privilege this culture accords you as a man. That’s why it’s crucial to not underestimate your connection with Western culture: you may be a culture drone in ways you don‘t even realize. You seem to think the slut stigma is a non-issue compared to people’s wasting time and resources on expendable entertainment, but at least people want to do that (and those who are currently starving would do the same, if they could). No one wants to be raped because they are seen as a free-for-all due to their sexual or sartorial choices. But I suppose you think Western women should be eternally grateful to enlightened individuals such as yourself who allow us to wear pants without being jailed or flogged, which still happens in some places. Clearly, asking for more is just shameless self-indulgence.

    Re: it was a joke. It wasn’t funny. Why not make a joke about how separate drinking fountains for black people were merely a symbolic standard, and getting rid of them was a waste of time?

    And, of course, you still haven’t shown how advocating slutification makes one unable to also advocate other things, even if one does it for selfish reasons. Do you write this blog from your own computer? Why not sell it and donate the proceeds to Oxfam or some such organization? It would probably make more of an impact than writing a blog, realistically (though I‘ve come to the conclusion that feeding starving people without limiting their fertility leads to the increase of starving people). But we sometimes choose to do things that make life more bearable for us personally. You seem to have some kind of idiosyncratic virtue ethics about eschewing happiness and pleasure (in which your personal preferences are conveniently given privileged status). You have not provided convincing evidence that the rest of us should adopt your virtue ethics or, more importantly, that it is even possible for everyone to do so.

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  11. I'm not sure why my other comment keeps disappearing, but whatevs.

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  12. "You should really lay off using false dichotomies."

    Example? What I stated was that you could be coming at this from a personal perspective, because that's how this often works, and I haven't seen any objections from you yet regarding other topics. That's one side of the dichotomy, if there is one, but I really don't know what the other would be, or what you're getting at.

    "Since advocating slutification!=getting riled up over very small criticisms"

    It doesn't, but that wasn't the statement. What I was attempting to say was that the joke was aimed at people who are foolish enough to get riled up over very small criticisms of a particular mindset. If you take issue with a minor jab at the notion that sexual liberty is going to save humanity, then it makes sense that you also believe that sexual liberty is going to save humanity. However, because you could have other reasons for commenting -- i.e. ones other than "getting riled up" -- then the statement could apply to you, but it doesn't have to, depending on what your explanation is.

    "Way to demonstrate how unbiased and impartial you are by resorting to ad hominems and making false assumptions based on stereotypes."

    1. Using ad hominems against hypothetical people does no harm. Even if the criticism applied to you personally, that doesn't mean that it was directed at you. After all, the odds of your being the only person to whom the criticism applies are very small, and this isn't an email or personal message; it's a public blog post intended to be read by everyone. Again, however, I never claimed that the joke applied to you -- just that this was a possibility, given your reaction.

    2. There's a difference between "resorting" to ad hominems and using them as supplements irrelevant to the content of your actual argument. But again, given that all I said was that it's "foolish" for anyone, regardless of who they are (you, me, or someone else) to get riled up over a criticism of what I'd consider to be a childish worldview, I wouldn't classify the statement as an ad hominem. If this statement targets you in some way, it does so incidentally.

    "I criticized the content of your post, yet you chose to insinuate that my comment should not be taken seriously (while promising to act “as though” I meant well)"

    I don't know if you meant well! I assume nothing in life, so why would I make an exception in this case? I replied after determining the default response for the scenario, which was the same as if you had meant well in your reply -- because I had to reply some way, and replying in the opposite way would have been more damaging while being equally uninformed. Do you mind if I act as though you mean well when I reply to you -- in the absence of information one way or the other?

    Anyway, let's not get bogged down in meta-conversation (that is, unless you think there's further reason to).

    "And FYI, accusing women of being humorless and foolish is a textbook example of marginalizing and dismissing their concerns."

    Not sure what this is referring to. If you feel like I'm making this accusation, perhaps you're being a bit too defensive (notice here, though, that I'm not accusing you of being defensive, either -- merely asking a question)? I don't know what would make you infer that I'm being condescending to women; when I see something that I think is bad for humanity, I out it, and when I think it's absurd, I may do so playfully. Not that it matters, but I have more female friends than male friends, and find most male dispositions disagreeable and incompatible.

    So if you're not for the point that I was criticizing, and I've clarified that I was only attacking those in favor of the point rather than all feminists, what do you have issue with in my post? I hope there's something else there aside from emotion.

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  13. Try saving all of your comments in Notepad or another word processor before responding here. If one of them keeps disappearing, email it to me, and I'll post it with proper quotations and credit.

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  14. Actually, one more follow-up: "and I've clarified that I was only attacking those in favor of the point rather than all feminists" should really be separated into two statements:

    1. I attack ideas that seem bad to me

    2. If someone is emotionally invested in the ideas, I might playfully poke fun at this, but I won't include it in a formal argument, research paper, etc. It will also usually be obviously a joke, and will never end in termination of contact, shunning, passive aggression, etc.

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  15. Originally posted by Elizabeth on 4/10/11

    Re: basic logical ability, point taken. We need more longitudinal studies about early logic education. You might find this page useful for biases that show little correlation with general intelligence as measured by IQ. I like the blog so far, but it could be improved with some outreach efforts. Right now you're mostly talking to yourself. You might want to look into discussing your ideas in forums which might have more people receptive to them. Transhumanists, eugenists, antinatalists, and other people who reject appeals to nature come to mind. Case in point, one of your comments on Sister Y's antinatalist blog attracted me here. I agree with most (not all) of your basic assumptions about nature and society, and you're a nice change from the self-righteous fools of all stripes I find on most other forums and blogs. There are not enough shared assumptions about rationality, so people just end up shouting at each other 99% of the time. It's pretty depressing, so I hope this blog attracts more attention. :)

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  16. Originally posted by Anonymous on 4/20/11

    If you meant to talk about people who use symbols in the place of empirical observation where it benefits them socially, why not, you know, say "people who use symbols in the place of empirical observation where it benefits them socially"? Moreover, being able to express oneself sexually with the freedom accorded to men and not face social ostracism or blame in case you get raped seems like a rather tangible, and not merely symbolic, benefit. I haven’t actually seen any feminists advocate that we should have a custom and expectation of female promiscuity; maybe you have. If that’s the case, it wasn’t clear from your original post that that is whom you meant. What I have seen feminists advocate is that women who wish to be promiscuous be allowed to do so without it being assumed that it’s okay to rape them, or that they are morally deficient somehow (whereas men are judged by much more lenient standards). If you think such advocates are necessarily motivated by selfish considerations, you are wrong. If you think this issue is trifling, you must not have researched it much or given it much thought. Not having to worry about such things is part of the privilege this culture accords you as a man. That’s why it’s crucial to not underestimate your connection with Western culture: you may be a culture drone in ways you don‘t even realize. You seem to think the slut stigma is a non-issue compared to people’s wasting time and resources on expendable entertainment, but at least people want to do that (and those who are currently starving would do the same, if they could). No one wants to be raped because they are seen as a free-for-all due to their sexual or sartorial choices. But I suppose you think Western women should be eternally grateful to enlightened individuals such as yourself who allow us to wear pants without being jailed or flogged, which still happens in some places. Clearly, asking for more is just shameless self-indulgence. Re: it was a joke. It wasn’t funny. Why not make a joke about how separate drinking fountains for black people were merely a symbolic standard, and getting rid of them was a waste of time? And, of course, you still haven’t shown how advocating slutification makes one unable to also advocate other things, even if one does it for selfish reasons. Do you write this blog from your own computer? Why not sell it and donate the proceeds to Oxfam or some such organization? It would probably make more of an impact than writing a blog, realistically (though I‘ve come to the conclusion that feeding starving people without limiting their fertility leads to the increase of starving people). But we sometimes choose to do things that make life more bearable for us personally. You seem to have some kind of idiosyncratic virtue ethics about eschewing happiness and pleasure (in which your personal preferences are conveniently given privileged status). You have not provided convincing evidence that the rest of us should adopt your virtue ethics or, more importantly, that it is even possible for everyone to do so.

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  17. Link from Elizabeth's original post, since I'm too lazy to figure out whether she did it with HTML or not (and perhaps it's worth noting individually):

    http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2011/02/12/are-we-rational-animals-part-2/

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  18. "I like the blog so far, but it could be improved with some outreach efforts. Right now you're mostly talking to yourself."

    Agreed. I'm not a salesman, though, so this part has always been lost on me.

    "You might want to look into discussing your ideas in forums which might have more people receptive to them. Transhumanists, eugenists, antinatalists, and other people who reject appeals to nature come to mind."

    I've considered it -- and I do leave a comment on a YouTube video or two from time to time. The problem seems to be a lack of quality communities coupled with my lack of tolerance for concepts like transhumanism; once you start playing according to someone's arbitrary conditions, you become restricted in the scope of debate.

    But if you have anything in mind, feel free to provide some links. I used to frequent a number of atheist, primitivist, and nihilist forums, but haven't really looked into anything lately.

    "I agree with most (not all) of your basic assumptions about nature and society, and you're a nice change from the self-righteous fools of all stripes I find on most other forums and blogs. There are not enough shared assumptions about rationality, so people just end up shouting at each other 99% of the time. It's pretty depressing, so I hope this blog attracts more attention. :)"

    Well, my little poll thing jumped from 11 votes to 23 in the last couple of weeks out of nowhere and Google is telling me that my views are going up a good bit, so unless they're all from bots, something must be happening. I don't think it's nearly enough, though, which is why I'm interested in building the system that Tim Cooijmans and I were discussing in another comments section here.

    So, yes, I am actually looking into community building and finding new avenues for promotion at the moment. I don't expect much and have little faith in my species, though, so we'll see.

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  19. You should have just said "let's get rid of all the fun classes and teach all the children we won't have because procreation is WRONG how to fix a computer and to believe my stupid armchair nerd philosophy"

    It would have been simpler.

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  20. You should have just said "I support getting rid of all the fun classes and teaching all the children we won't have because procreation is WRONG my bullshit armchair internet philosophy"

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  21. This blog's flailing efficacy combined with a looming redundancy has put a halt to future posts, for the most part, but as I'm going through older posts, I'm occasionally finding the need to clarify a few things.

    To the above anonymous commenter, the section of this post aimed at compulsory education was developed after careful consideration of what the lowest common denominator is among humans when it comes to skill sets and mentation; the intent was to promote compulsory education which is neither superfluous to a sentience-sympathetic value system nor too technically demanding for all potential human genotypes.

    Analogously, all people (within reason, anyway) are capable of driving a car, but piloting a private jet or winning races with a sports car, while by no means excluded in my model of a future society, are not things that everyone is truly capable of. To put it simply, just because a course is not required does not mean that you cannot pursue it, anyway; learn all that you want about literature, art, or outdated philosophical systems. Knowledge itself never hurts anything, and with the above-mentioned meta-philosophy in place to curtail or preempt poorly calculated decisions or poorly implemented or otherwise misused knowledge, risk would be greatly reduced as it is.

    Plus, in the above, money-free model, you'd have:

    1. A greater choice of professors, "schools," and courses; you could take courses on Internet memes or obscure new genres of music -- or create your own

    2. No extrinsic motivation, and thus, a greater correlation between chosen courses and passion for said courses

    3. More granularity and customizability of material, leading to every single one of your concerns being addressed by someone, even if they do so from a remote location on the other side of the world

    4. Encouragement of your personal input while downplaying your need to memorize arbitrary "facts"; for example, stipulating that a person needs to know the exact speed limit laws of each state in the Union before he or she can earn a driver's license is purely arbitrary and has nothing to do with his or her ability to parallel park

    Come on. I'm on your side!

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  22. In short: Everyone should be required to learn a language and dress themselves, but not everyone should be required to attempt to become a skilled musician. Is music fun to learn? Absolutely. Should you be able to learn it in a well-managed, studious environment? Absolutely. Should there be room for you to teach your professor(s) and fellow classmates new techniques or styles of music -- and possibly even have them incorporated into future curricula? Absolutely.

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