Time to piss some more people off...
Short-Term
1. Shorten the work day to four hours.
2. Provide a public alternative to social media websites.
3. Legally abolish the practice of inheriting fortunes.
4. Shut down all credit card companies and imprison their stockholders.
5. Nationalize all corporations.
6. Legally abolish planned obsolescence.
7. Increase the number of teachers per classroom and decrease the number of students.
8. Eliminate the boss/partiality dichotomy in parenting and promote real friendship, trust, and honesty between parents and children.
9. Criminalize alcohol consumption and possession.
10. Abolish the death penalty.
11. Legalize assisted suicide.
12. Criminalize the production of meat.
13. Promote automation in the industrial and service sectors of the economy.
14. Criminalize all forms of gun possession.
15. Criminalize pregnancy.
16. Teach how to think in the classroom before presenting any individual item as a fact; discourage memorization and tradition.
17. Eliminate all legal age requirements for everything and encourage individual demonstrations of skill and responsibility.
18. Encourage corporate collusion using an "open source" method.
19. Encourage the free downloading of any kind of media.
20. Shut down frivolous businesses (jewelry chains, professional sports franchises, record companies) until we can confirm both that no businesses can utilize child labor for acquiring their raw materials and that there are no longer major threats to sentience warranting immediate attention and resources.
21. Legally abolish the lottery.
22. Criminalize all forms of gambling.
23. Reform public broadcasting in all realms of media such that there is greater public awareness of its presence; make critical thinking entertaining in an effort to gradually phase out the currently prevailing forms of entertainment in media.
24. Scorn those who promote indefinite growth -- whether of population, economic output, or irrelevant information about our personal lives.
Long-Term
1. Make everyone on Earth a member of the government.
2. Allow ideas to rule our lives, regardless of who their originators are.
3. Do away with Daylight Saving Time and time zones.
4. Eliminate all languages except one.
5. Institute peer review by unaffiliated parties in all empirical matters.
6. Replace corporate advertisements with individual advertisements of new ideas and innovations.
7. Abolish the monetary system and all methods of trading and bartering; eliminate private property and the general conception of ownership of anything, whether intellectual property, ideas, or material goods.
8. Eliminate the concepts of the school day and free time in favor of an augmented concept of nurture; allow only certified, temporary personnel within youth centers to raise children -- never their genetic parents; eliminate the distinction between life lessons and academic lessons in favor of a unified model for raising children under a singular mode with uniform methods.
9. Eliminate the dichotomy of socializing and the news media in favor of fully transparent, technologically facilitated communication.
10. Design architecture to accommodate moods in innovative ways; stray from modern, square-shaped designs wherever possible.
11. Engineer a highway system for goods and raw materials such that said materials arrive at a given location on demand at the press of a button, thus encouraging individual creativity as a replacement for corporate appropriation.
12. Penalize extended privacy.
13. Eliminate all forms of extrinsic motivation.
14. Instead of retroactively treating symptoms of problems one-on-one indefinitely, address each emergent problem at its source.
15. Painlessly terminate as many consenting conscious agents as possible while enrolling the rest into full-time simulations of reality aimed at reducing as much suffering as possible.
16. De-emphasize individuality and personal identity; make all efforts to improve Earth about moments, experiences, and sensations rather than persons, rights, etc.
17. Remove the presence of finite resources from society altogether; promote cyclic alternatives.
Showing posts with label meta-cognition. Show all posts
Showing posts with label meta-cognition. Show all posts
Saturday, September 29, 2012
Saturday, October 29, 2011
An emergent approach trumps a traditional approach
When discussing ideas, we should use an emergent, systematic approach. This means that, as ideas emerge, we should tackle them case-by-case by addressing any apparent flaws in them, and then contrast those flaws -- or lack thereof -- with the flaws inherent in the alternatives available at that moment, per our existing knowledge base. This will allow us to determine the ideas' relative attractiveness, which is subject to change as new data -- and new alternatives -- emerge.
Further, our approach should be negative; we should arrive at logical vantage points by attacking all vantage points and subsequently determining which is least wrong. If you can manage to state all that is illogical, then what's left doesn't necessarily have to even be explicitly spoken of.
The alternative to this approach is tradition, which means deciding whether something makes sense based on one's own personal experiences and consumption of cultural values and customs. This latter approach promotes attachment and mental hoarding.
An example of the traditional approach would be someone making the claim that 2+2=5, and another person countering this claim by stating that our mathematicians have learned over the years that 2+2=4. This is a faulty way of addressing the new claim.
The emergent alternative would be to examine the claim that 2+2=5 prior to consulting past knowledge, then checking to see if there are any updates to past knowledge that contradict either the new claim, the old one, or both.
Further, our approach should be negative; we should arrive at logical vantage points by attacking all vantage points and subsequently determining which is least wrong. If you can manage to state all that is illogical, then what's left doesn't necessarily have to even be explicitly spoken of.
The alternative to this approach is tradition, which means deciding whether something makes sense based on one's own personal experiences and consumption of cultural values and customs. This latter approach promotes attachment and mental hoarding.
An example of the traditional approach would be someone making the claim that 2+2=5, and another person countering this claim by stating that our mathematicians have learned over the years that 2+2=4. This is a faulty way of addressing the new claim.
The emergent alternative would be to examine the claim that 2+2=5 prior to consulting past knowledge, then checking to see if there are any updates to past knowledge that contradict either the new claim, the old one, or both.
Sunday, August 14, 2011
The next phase: Meta-conversations
Attracting people based on any particular present position is myopic. In retrospect, it may have been better for this blog to have stuck with detailing how to formulate ideals and make decisions than to have mentioned or endorsed any specific ideals or decisions. In the future, I would like to hold discussions regarding process management, premise formation, qualitative analysis, and logic; in short, I would rather discuss how to come to conclusions than give any of my readers any specific conclusions to revolve around and rally behind.
It may be the case that my conclusions -- tentative though they may indefinitely be -- are sound, but I am more interested in how a reader might have come to the same conclusions as myself than in the mere similarity of our positions. If, for example, your antinatalism leads you to choose vegetarianism, that does not entail that all vegetarians are antinatalists, or that congregating with vegetarians without any quality control is a sensible practice.
Note that I say all of the above not because I am interested in censorship or stifling important discussions, but rather, because there should be an order to this process, with specific ideals coming into play much later on after everyone has established that they utilize similar mental algorithms for processing information.
As a final thought on antinatalism, I will say the following (note the lack of generalizations below, as I am myself an antinatalist):
1. Many antinatalists are concerned solely with refraining from reproducing, and have either weak or nonexistent socio-political philosophies; in other words, they are often far wiser than most when it comes to being proactive (in at least the fundamental sense), but could use some improvement when it comes to being retroactive.
2. Many antinatalists view the world from an anthropocentric standpoint, meaning that they are solely concerned with the end of human reproduction. They may understand that animal suffering is bad, but they very often have no ambition to do anything about it beyond becoming vegetarian.
3. Many antinatalists view "the" problem as life itself (or, in more sensible cases, sentient life). The more accurate position to take, from my perspective, is that of "the" problem being a lack of intelligent management and regulation of the universe's energy processes -- or the mere existence of energy and work in the first place.
Furthermore, if sentience were distributed in discrete executable files to volunteering computers, such computers could call sentient processes for any given duration and turn them off on demand. In this scenario, a computer without any capacity to feel pain or pleasure could make calculations on a level of sophistication comparable to that of a human, and would only call conscious, sentient experience to the fore -- or "wake up," if you will -- when it felt like it would be fun or educational to do so; this would solve the problem of deprivation.
Of course, if such experiences, through repeated observation and testing, were demonstrated to be too risk-laden, then they would be phased out -- though, again, any conscious experience would be undertaken voluntarily, without impinging on any other conscious experiences or requiring anything other than self-contained information.
In summation:
Symptoms: Sentience; deprivation/desire/discomfort
Causes: Lack of intelligence; presence of existence
We either become gods and attain absolute, one-hundred-percent certainty that our ending the universe means that it's all over forever, or we volunteer to learn and explore, given that we cannot undo our births and that some of us suffer when contemplating death. Preventing future births, while a good thing, is no more credible as a rallying point than any other philosophical position, be it the unlikely existence of a deity or something as crass as rights-based activism. The discussion of how to properly use your brain is the only true rallying point -- for now.
It may be the case that my conclusions -- tentative though they may indefinitely be -- are sound, but I am more interested in how a reader might have come to the same conclusions as myself than in the mere similarity of our positions. If, for example, your antinatalism leads you to choose vegetarianism, that does not entail that all vegetarians are antinatalists, or that congregating with vegetarians without any quality control is a sensible practice.
Note that I say all of the above not because I am interested in censorship or stifling important discussions, but rather, because there should be an order to this process, with specific ideals coming into play much later on after everyone has established that they utilize similar mental algorithms for processing information.
As a final thought on antinatalism, I will say the following (note the lack of generalizations below, as I am myself an antinatalist):
1. Many antinatalists are concerned solely with refraining from reproducing, and have either weak or nonexistent socio-political philosophies; in other words, they are often far wiser than most when it comes to being proactive (in at least the fundamental sense), but could use some improvement when it comes to being retroactive.
2. Many antinatalists view the world from an anthropocentric standpoint, meaning that they are solely concerned with the end of human reproduction. They may understand that animal suffering is bad, but they very often have no ambition to do anything about it beyond becoming vegetarian.
3. Many antinatalists view "the" problem as life itself (or, in more sensible cases, sentient life). The more accurate position to take, from my perspective, is that of "the" problem being a lack of intelligent management and regulation of the universe's energy processes -- or the mere existence of energy and work in the first place.
Furthermore, if sentience were distributed in discrete executable files to volunteering computers, such computers could call sentient processes for any given duration and turn them off on demand. In this scenario, a computer without any capacity to feel pain or pleasure could make calculations on a level of sophistication comparable to that of a human, and would only call conscious, sentient experience to the fore -- or "wake up," if you will -- when it felt like it would be fun or educational to do so; this would solve the problem of deprivation.
Of course, if such experiences, through repeated observation and testing, were demonstrated to be too risk-laden, then they would be phased out -- though, again, any conscious experience would be undertaken voluntarily, without impinging on any other conscious experiences or requiring anything other than self-contained information.
In summation:
Symptoms: Sentience; deprivation/desire/discomfort
Causes: Lack of intelligence; presence of existence
We either become gods and attain absolute, one-hundred-percent certainty that our ending the universe means that it's all over forever, or we volunteer to learn and explore, given that we cannot undo our births and that some of us suffer when contemplating death. Preventing future births, while a good thing, is no more credible as a rallying point than any other philosophical position, be it the unlikely existence of a deity or something as crass as rights-based activism. The discussion of how to properly use your brain is the only true rallying point -- for now.
Sunday, July 31, 2011
No leadership does not equal no regulation
Some axioms:
1. There exist transmittable information patterns which guide the course of other information patterns in the universe. The former patterns are best understood when condensed into discrete concepts, or "ideas."
2. There exist facilitators, senders, recipients, and processors of the aforementioned information patterns. These could be loosely defined as information agents, and are currently most apparent in the form of human beings.
3. Information agents should agree upon a foundational set of information patterns as "ideals." Furthermore, this set should serve as the broadest base for work. For example, "Suffering is unwanted among sentient beings" is a maxim that should probably aid in the foundation of this base.
4. Ideals, while serving as the base of society over both self-satisfaction and ruling groups, should be questioned in order to promote consistency and uniformity among information agents. This axiom is the -- or one of the -- meta-ideals.
5. In theory, a meta-ideal could be questioned by a meta-ideal another layer back in the chain, but as this process has the potential to carry on ad infinitum and has no apparent point of logical termination, it is best, for practical reasons, to avoid it and instead opt to carry out the above in a manner which encourages positive demonstrable results.
On a related note, the IEEE standards are great examples of how information can be centrally standardized without the interference of any particular group of people. No one "rules" the IEEE or keeps "the people" who use its standards "out of power," yet networking technologies seem to get on just fine; likewise, Microsoft, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, etc. do not "enforce" IEEE standards or promise punishment for breaking with them.
Of course, the difference between a truly open system promoting the establishment of standards and the IEEE is that the latter exists within a capitalist paradigm, and is therefore channeled through corporate activities. Imagine if, instead of computing organizations, standards similar to those endorsed by the IEEE existed for nation-states, and that those states, binded by the standards, no longer had a reason to exist.
1. There exist transmittable information patterns which guide the course of other information patterns in the universe. The former patterns are best understood when condensed into discrete concepts, or "ideas."
2. There exist facilitators, senders, recipients, and processors of the aforementioned information patterns. These could be loosely defined as information agents, and are currently most apparent in the form of human beings.
3. Information agents should agree upon a foundational set of information patterns as "ideals." Furthermore, this set should serve as the broadest base for work. For example, "Suffering is unwanted among sentient beings" is a maxim that should probably aid in the foundation of this base.
4. Ideals, while serving as the base of society over both self-satisfaction and ruling groups, should be questioned in order to promote consistency and uniformity among information agents. This axiom is the -- or one of the -- meta-ideals.
5. In theory, a meta-ideal could be questioned by a meta-ideal another layer back in the chain, but as this process has the potential to carry on ad infinitum and has no apparent point of logical termination, it is best, for practical reasons, to avoid it and instead opt to carry out the above in a manner which encourages positive demonstrable results.
On a related note, the IEEE standards are great examples of how information can be centrally standardized without the interference of any particular group of people. No one "rules" the IEEE or keeps "the people" who use its standards "out of power," yet networking technologies seem to get on just fine; likewise, Microsoft, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, etc. do not "enforce" IEEE standards or promise punishment for breaking with them.
Of course, the difference between a truly open system promoting the establishment of standards and the IEEE is that the latter exists within a capitalist paradigm, and is therefore channeled through corporate activities. Imagine if, instead of computing organizations, standards similar to those endorsed by the IEEE existed for nation-states, and that those states, binded by the standards, no longer had a reason to exist.
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.
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.
Friday, January 28, 2011
Going beyond technical solutions -- into the territory of meta-cognition and abstraction
I'd like to address a commonly held misconception regarding the functioning of human societies -- specifically pertaining to the nature of social conflict. It seems that organizations such as the Venus Project and the Zeitgeist Movement subscribe to the notion that conflict is the result of material scarcity. This concerns me, as I see some potential in the general direction proposed by those organizations -- and am, as always, interested in the revaluation of our society and culture -- but see no merit in passively espousing the "scarcity" point of view.
The problem with this proposed line of thinking is that it brazenly ignores the intensity and fervor with which the average person defends his preconceptions -- about life, politics, economics, religion, practical matters, art. Even in a society free from social stratification, material inequities, barter, ownership, etc., there would still be a need for stringent monitoring of thought systems, for having open access to material resources would in no way mitigate the stresses of philosophical division. For example, sure, there would be less incentive to steal in a society where no one could profit from reselling a stolen item, or where no one would cache items in order to conceal them from neighbors, but would this so-called technical solution have any impact whatsoever on whether someone thought that the purpose of life is to reproduce and have fun? I think not.
Hunter-gatherer societies were almost universally egalitarian, and rarely generated murder or went to war with one another, but they were also notoriously superstitious in constitution. Technical solutions should be greatly favored over the band-aids and services which are in current practice, but they're only part of the solution as long as minds are involved.
The problem with this proposed line of thinking is that it brazenly ignores the intensity and fervor with which the average person defends his preconceptions -- about life, politics, economics, religion, practical matters, art. Even in a society free from social stratification, material inequities, barter, ownership, etc., there would still be a need for stringent monitoring of thought systems, for having open access to material resources would in no way mitigate the stresses of philosophical division. For example, sure, there would be less incentive to steal in a society where no one could profit from reselling a stolen item, or where no one would cache items in order to conceal them from neighbors, but would this so-called technical solution have any impact whatsoever on whether someone thought that the purpose of life is to reproduce and have fun? I think not.
Hunter-gatherer societies were almost universally egalitarian, and rarely generated murder or went to war with one another, but they were also notoriously superstitious in constitution. Technical solutions should be greatly favored over the band-aids and services which are in current practice, but they're only part of the solution as long as minds are involved.
Sunday, January 2, 2011
Explicitly defining value equations
There has been some chatter in a comments section of one of my posts lately, so I figured I'd make an official follow-up post outlining what I use to make decisions in life. This way, I'll avoid annoying people with double and triple commenting. Here you go:
As far as values are concerned,
Object A + Valued Quality X = Object B + Valued Quality X
and
Object A + Valued Quality X ≠ Object B + Valued (or not valued) Quality Y
and
Object A + Valued Quality X ≠ Object B - Valued Quality X
Choosing between two foods which your taste buds perceive in ways that are virtually indistinguishable to you, the macro-scale observer, does not require a practical decision-making process, because both foods share the quality of "delicious" in almost equal amounts and configurations. However, there had to have been a preceding decision -- the decision to eat something delicious, which was made practically based on qualitative analysis of the quality of "delicious" and its competitors. Once you've chosen to eat something delicious -- instead of to eat something disgusting, for example -- so long as what you're being presented with possesses this quality, your decision-making job is done.
Forget about physical objects; they're just convenience abstractions, mental projections of the external world. What really matters are the qualities that these abstractions harbor -- and in what amounts and configurations they exist.
As far as values are concerned,
Object A + Valued Quality X = Object B + Valued Quality X
and
Object A + Valued Quality X ≠ Object B + Valued (or not valued) Quality Y
and
Object A + Valued Quality X ≠ Object B - Valued Quality X
Choosing between two foods which your taste buds perceive in ways that are virtually indistinguishable to you, the macro-scale observer, does not require a practical decision-making process, because both foods share the quality of "delicious" in almost equal amounts and configurations. However, there had to have been a preceding decision -- the decision to eat something delicious, which was made practically based on qualitative analysis of the quality of "delicious" and its competitors. Once you've chosen to eat something delicious -- instead of to eat something disgusting, for example -- so long as what you're being presented with possesses this quality, your decision-making job is done.
Forget about physical objects; they're just convenience abstractions, mental projections of the external world. What really matters are the qualities that these abstractions harbor -- and in what amounts and configurations they exist.
Sunday, December 12, 2010
A proposition
The following already exist in our society:
- Abstraction techniques
- Meta-analysis (especially in the field of psychology)
- Peer review
- The scientific method
- Process management
- Systems analysis and development
- Meta-cognition
- Qualitative analysis
- Risk analysis
- Cost-benefit analysis; theories of opportunity cost
- Lists of logical pitfalls and fallacies to avoid during debates
- Set theory
- Information theory/systems theory
- Relational/regression analysis
- Iterative, cyclical, incremental, agile methods for improving systems
- Information transparency
The problem is that they do not exist concomitantly, and so are incoherent within the mess that is our bureaucratic, emotionally-driven society. The integration of these systems components, if you will, into a cohesive whole will be necessary for alleviating and terminating the negative consequences of sentient existence -- so let's get started! If you regularly perform any of the above processes or utilize any of the above tools and methods in a specific, concentrated area of your life, please start utilizing them in ALL areas, regardless of how contra it may be to your worldview and justifications for existing.
- Abstraction techniques
- Meta-analysis (especially in the field of psychology)
- Peer review
- The scientific method
- Process management
- Systems analysis and development
- Meta-cognition
- Qualitative analysis
- Risk analysis
- Cost-benefit analysis; theories of opportunity cost
- Lists of logical pitfalls and fallacies to avoid during debates
- Set theory
- Information theory/systems theory
- Relational/regression analysis
- Iterative, cyclical, incremental, agile methods for improving systems
- Information transparency
The problem is that they do not exist concomitantly, and so are incoherent within the mess that is our bureaucratic, emotionally-driven society. The integration of these systems components, if you will, into a cohesive whole will be necessary for alleviating and terminating the negative consequences of sentient existence -- so let's get started! If you regularly perform any of the above processes or utilize any of the above tools and methods in a specific, concentrated area of your life, please start utilizing them in ALL areas, regardless of how contra it may be to your worldview and justifications for existing.
Is it communism?
Preface: I am NOT a "member" of either the Venus Project or the Zeitgeist Movement. The below is an attempt to address accusations made by dissenters of those projects that they are inherently communist -- but with, perhaps, my own take on what a future society should look like. For the most part, this "rebuttal" does ally itself with the Zeitgeist Movement and the Venus Project, but 4. and 5. in particular may differ slightly from those organizations' propositions, and I make no attempts to hide this fact.
1. Anarcho-communism and perfect communism are nothing like Stalinism, or any other implementation of state communism. The early Communist parties were afraid of revolt, so they adopted authoritarian practices. If our economic models are similar to perfect communism, that does not entail all of the negative consequences of what was essentially state socialism. Most of Europe is already socialist today, but no one has a knee-jerk reaction to its healthcare policies, for example, because those policies were implemented in a way that was completely dissimilar to that of the policies of the original Communist parties. In any case, while associating true communism with Marxist-Leninism or any other variant of state communism is itself erroneous, more importantly, each of the tried economic plans is contingent on the existence of scarcity, ownership, private property, etc. -- and, therefore, state mandates, hierarchy, top-down approaches, and lowest-common-denominator distribution of resources.
If the criticism is not that communism = state communism, then it is often that communism as an ideology has existed for over a hundred years and has never been effectively put into practice. This is basically a concession that it is a "good idea" (our economic models are not communist, though they are very similar), but that no one will listen. If this is the case, then the person making the assertion needs to stop attempting to convince those attempting to convince the world that it's not going to work, and start attempting to convince the world! Wouldn't that be so much more meaningful a use of his time?
Attempting to convince me to stop convincing others is not going to work itself, so you're being doubly inefficient by trying, and hypocritical to boot.
2. We have no interest in empowering the proletariat. In the future, humans will not just freely work alongside one another at will; they will also delegate monotonous tasks to machines. Marx had good ideas, but they were limited to his particular time period, and were thus naive and myopic -- in essence, resultant from the conditions and variables of the current system, and not from anything outside of it.
3. The economic system is just one of several internetworked systems which play a key role in the functioning of society as a super-system. Two "communists" may agree about the problems of means of production, private property, and social hierarchy, but that does not mean that both understand the various technical and social issues which currently plague our societies. Saying that our goals are "communism" is akin to saying that a computer system is an instant messaging application running on the system software.
So we and "communists" both enjoy using that same application; what does the application say about our respective practical solutions to foundational problems, or our goals and values? Further, what does it say about the entire, emergent system which we are developing? Reducing or relegating any set of ideas to a predefined category is an error of categorization borne from faulty qualitative analysis; an idea possessing a quality found in another idea that is part of a particular category does not mean that the former idea is also part of the category, and to think otherwise leads not only to errors in cognition, but to social enmity and conflict as well. Additionally, even where an idea is a member of a particular category, we cannot use non-defining qualities shared by members of that category to make assumptions about the idea.
4. We need a justification for human life before beginning work on the design of a new system. Communism does not provide this, because it is merely a vague economic model; it says nothing about scarcity, technology, infrastructure, the meaning of the universe, epistemology, meta-cognition, methodologies, process management, the scientific method, the nature of value, eliminating social biases, etc.
5. Communism is flat-out wrong in assuming that we can be "free" to access resources as they are made available, regardless of who we are. Rehabilitation, confinement, and conditioning centers will all be necessary in the future -- though, as abundance increases, and all fundamental human drives and desires come to be properly satiated with minimal time spent feeling deprived, there will eventually no longer be an impetus for most traditional, obvious forms of human conflict. After this, we would simply need to monitor conditioning centers carefully so as to allow memes and concepts to run properly and efficiently on their host minds, while controlling environmental stimuli to the greatest extent possible. This process will become easier as the human mind is augmented via nanotechnology and other cognitive enhancements.
Marx's communism was missing a necessary element that was not entirely developed in his time: the scientific method and its corresponding methodologies and principles. Rule by an ungoverned majority who simply wish to oppress dissenters in the name of their precious "free access to resources" or "control over the means of production" is NOT something that happens to peer reviewed communities in any form. So, yes, checks and balances will exist, as they do in democracy, but they will have some rational basis, and they will not come in the form of any one particular person or group of persons -- they will be contrary ideas. In other words, in our model, if a "senator" makes a decision that defies the views of someone who has written a letter to him -- and it is concluded that his decision is best, based on a number of variables and calculations performed by several parties -- that does not guarantee that the person who'd written the letter will not be "senator" for a day when his or her next idea is more agreeable and logical. Context will be stressed, and no one will have an absolute, indefinite role to play.
This may all sound like we're setting ourselves up for oppression, but do scientists "oppress" one another by prohibiting the publishing of poorly conducted studies, or by invalidating published ones with new or current research? Do architects "oppress" their peers by determining that they do not understand how to build bridges? Does Wikipedia "oppress" its users by disallowing the publishing of irrelevant or frivolous articles (well, they may be too lax)? Meta-analysis already exists in psychological circles, so why don't we implement it on a more fundamental level? True oppression only occurs in the face of scarcity; everything else is simply a matter of listening to the ideas that exist. What reason would anyone have to develop a bias, then consequently ignore new information, in a society like that proposed? How would he or she benefit from boosted social status and ego in a world without social hierarchy?
1. Anarcho-communism and perfect communism are nothing like Stalinism, or any other implementation of state communism. The early Communist parties were afraid of revolt, so they adopted authoritarian practices. If our economic models are similar to perfect communism, that does not entail all of the negative consequences of what was essentially state socialism. Most of Europe is already socialist today, but no one has a knee-jerk reaction to its healthcare policies, for example, because those policies were implemented in a way that was completely dissimilar to that of the policies of the original Communist parties. In any case, while associating true communism with Marxist-Leninism or any other variant of state communism is itself erroneous, more importantly, each of the tried economic plans is contingent on the existence of scarcity, ownership, private property, etc. -- and, therefore, state mandates, hierarchy, top-down approaches, and lowest-common-denominator distribution of resources.
If the criticism is not that communism = state communism, then it is often that communism as an ideology has existed for over a hundred years and has never been effectively put into practice. This is basically a concession that it is a "good idea" (our economic models are not communist, though they are very similar), but that no one will listen. If this is the case, then the person making the assertion needs to stop attempting to convince those attempting to convince the world that it's not going to work, and start attempting to convince the world! Wouldn't that be so much more meaningful a use of his time?
Attempting to convince me to stop convincing others is not going to work itself, so you're being doubly inefficient by trying, and hypocritical to boot.
2. We have no interest in empowering the proletariat. In the future, humans will not just freely work alongside one another at will; they will also delegate monotonous tasks to machines. Marx had good ideas, but they were limited to his particular time period, and were thus naive and myopic -- in essence, resultant from the conditions and variables of the current system, and not from anything outside of it.
3. The economic system is just one of several internetworked systems which play a key role in the functioning of society as a super-system. Two "communists" may agree about the problems of means of production, private property, and social hierarchy, but that does not mean that both understand the various technical and social issues which currently plague our societies. Saying that our goals are "communism" is akin to saying that a computer system is an instant messaging application running on the system software.
So we and "communists" both enjoy using that same application; what does the application say about our respective practical solutions to foundational problems, or our goals and values? Further, what does it say about the entire, emergent system which we are developing? Reducing or relegating any set of ideas to a predefined category is an error of categorization borne from faulty qualitative analysis; an idea possessing a quality found in another idea that is part of a particular category does not mean that the former idea is also part of the category, and to think otherwise leads not only to errors in cognition, but to social enmity and conflict as well. Additionally, even where an idea is a member of a particular category, we cannot use non-defining qualities shared by members of that category to make assumptions about the idea.
4. We need a justification for human life before beginning work on the design of a new system. Communism does not provide this, because it is merely a vague economic model; it says nothing about scarcity, technology, infrastructure, the meaning of the universe, epistemology, meta-cognition, methodologies, process management, the scientific method, the nature of value, eliminating social biases, etc.
5. Communism is flat-out wrong in assuming that we can be "free" to access resources as they are made available, regardless of who we are. Rehabilitation, confinement, and conditioning centers will all be necessary in the future -- though, as abundance increases, and all fundamental human drives and desires come to be properly satiated with minimal time spent feeling deprived, there will eventually no longer be an impetus for most traditional, obvious forms of human conflict. After this, we would simply need to monitor conditioning centers carefully so as to allow memes and concepts to run properly and efficiently on their host minds, while controlling environmental stimuli to the greatest extent possible. This process will become easier as the human mind is augmented via nanotechnology and other cognitive enhancements.
Marx's communism was missing a necessary element that was not entirely developed in his time: the scientific method and its corresponding methodologies and principles. Rule by an ungoverned majority who simply wish to oppress dissenters in the name of their precious "free access to resources" or "control over the means of production" is NOT something that happens to peer reviewed communities in any form. So, yes, checks and balances will exist, as they do in democracy, but they will have some rational basis, and they will not come in the form of any one particular person or group of persons -- they will be contrary ideas. In other words, in our model, if a "senator" makes a decision that defies the views of someone who has written a letter to him -- and it is concluded that his decision is best, based on a number of variables and calculations performed by several parties -- that does not guarantee that the person who'd written the letter will not be "senator" for a day when his or her next idea is more agreeable and logical. Context will be stressed, and no one will have an absolute, indefinite role to play.
This may all sound like we're setting ourselves up for oppression, but do scientists "oppress" one another by prohibiting the publishing of poorly conducted studies, or by invalidating published ones with new or current research? Do architects "oppress" their peers by determining that they do not understand how to build bridges? Does Wikipedia "oppress" its users by disallowing the publishing of irrelevant or frivolous articles (well, they may be too lax)? Meta-analysis already exists in psychological circles, so why don't we implement it on a more fundamental level? True oppression only occurs in the face of scarcity; everything else is simply a matter of listening to the ideas that exist. What reason would anyone have to develop a bias, then consequently ignore new information, in a society like that proposed? How would he or she benefit from boosted social status and ego in a world without social hierarchy?
Saturday, December 11, 2010
Defining people
A human being, in the abstract, can be defined as a biochemical process -- and its corresponding systems, input, and output -- genetically distinct from, and incapable of genetic recombination with, processes and systems which meet the morphological and genetic criteria for "non-human." Technically, all physical objects to which symbols or concepts refer are interrelated, making their separation and definition arbitrary, but the concepts which are constructed from those objects can be given definite shape for the purposes of analysis and ideation. Words and concepts, therefore, can be given absolute definitions, because they are artificial in construction, while physical objects and other referents cannot undergo such objective abstraction (they are still necessarily abstracted by our sense organs, and we have no way of knowing what the true source of the abstractions is, however). Because of this, out of pure, practical necessity, we must give shape and constitution to any arbitrary set of objects or abstractions with which we interact, and human beings are no exception.
However, there are two erroneous ways to define a human:
1. Reducing him or her to one or several particular qualities or sets of qualities. Examples: Defining someone as "smart," "athletic," "fat," "black," "quiet," "artsy," "an atheist," "a liberal," etc. Obviously, this is problematic, because humans are complex organisms, and to reduce them to arbitrary facets of their so-called personalities is to gloss over essential nuance.
2. Assuming that the qualities which are currently applicable to him or her will always be applicable, or are applicable regardless of context. Examples: Defining someone as a creationist and consequently ignoring his or her attempts to have a philosophical discussion under the pretense that his or her beliefs are unshakable; defining someone as quiet after having interacted with him or her in only one kind of environment.
By all means, indicate where an "ism" applies to a person in the sense that it is something with which they agree (only if they universally agree with it, though), but refrain from indicating that the person is an "ist," and from any of the above. Tangentially, when it comes to "isms," it is important that you do not espouse any yourself, as it is impractical to invest in a belief, or to believe in anything at all; making probability assessments, then subsequently taking practical action to test the utility or efficacy of an idea -- all while never assuming that what you are acting as though you believe to be true actually is -- is the only way to live -- for now.
Also, many "isms" are bound by entirely independent qualities, making them pointlessly arbitrary and impractical. For the most part, discuss ideas individually; do not coin words for sets of ideas unless it is practical to do so, and above all else, where a proposed quality is not inherent in the definition of a predefined category, refrain from placing an idea sharing the quality into the category (unless it meets the actual criteria, of course).
Example illustrating the different kinds of isms: "Atheism" is simply the absence of a belief in a god, while "liberalism" contains so many concepts in its definition that it would be incredibly impractical to ever associate it with how you view the world.
However, there are two erroneous ways to define a human:
1. Reducing him or her to one or several particular qualities or sets of qualities. Examples: Defining someone as "smart," "athletic," "fat," "black," "quiet," "artsy," "an atheist," "a liberal," etc. Obviously, this is problematic, because humans are complex organisms, and to reduce them to arbitrary facets of their so-called personalities is to gloss over essential nuance.
2. Assuming that the qualities which are currently applicable to him or her will always be applicable, or are applicable regardless of context. Examples: Defining someone as a creationist and consequently ignoring his or her attempts to have a philosophical discussion under the pretense that his or her beliefs are unshakable; defining someone as quiet after having interacted with him or her in only one kind of environment.
By all means, indicate where an "ism" applies to a person in the sense that it is something with which they agree (only if they universally agree with it, though), but refrain from indicating that the person is an "ist," and from any of the above. Tangentially, when it comes to "isms," it is important that you do not espouse any yourself, as it is impractical to invest in a belief, or to believe in anything at all; making probability assessments, then subsequently taking practical action to test the utility or efficacy of an idea -- all while never assuming that what you are acting as though you believe to be true actually is -- is the only way to live -- for now.
Also, many "isms" are bound by entirely independent qualities, making them pointlessly arbitrary and impractical. For the most part, discuss ideas individually; do not coin words for sets of ideas unless it is practical to do so, and above all else, where a proposed quality is not inherent in the definition of a predefined category, refrain from placing an idea sharing the quality into the category (unless it meets the actual criteria, of course).
Example illustrating the different kinds of isms: "Atheism" is simply the absence of a belief in a god, while "liberalism" contains so many concepts in its definition that it would be incredibly impractical to ever associate it with how you view the world.
Thursday, December 9, 2010
On categorization
Categorization and definition are essential aspects of human reason; they give practical shape and meaning to concepts, and are therefore unavoidable during the process of understanding. Although this is currently the case, we must also realize that all definitions and categories are ultimately arbitrary, as their referents are purely conceptual; meanwhile, physical referents found in the "real" world are in fact interconnected with their surroundings, and mutable.
Arbitrary categorization is often a major problem in our society resultant from poor understanding of the mechanisms of causality and relation, or the populace's inability to properly conduct qualitative analysis. However, it is important to abstract this problem into two major groups, given that categorization is occasionally a necessity of being human:
1. General categorization: Often problematic, but sometimes temporarily necessary for the purpose of discussion or deliberation. If I give a name to a set of concepts that I find worth implementing, that does not automatically imply that I will not consider casting off the name as soon as new data becomes available. However, any form of categorization becomes a problem as soon as I decide that, because each member of a category shares a given quality, they must necessarily share all qualities. For example, all apples grow on trees, but not all apples are red. Sadly, this principle of multiple qualities is often ignored when people conduct qualitative analysis.
2. Categorization of new ideas by predefined groups: More or less always problematic, as it attempts to force new concepts and memes to "be" older ones. This is usually done in order to gloss over the nuances of the new concepts, thus trivializing them and relegating them to the status of having already been tried and tested.
Note, also, that a set of concepts can exist within a category without any particular generalization being inferred from their interaction. For example, categorizing a person who participates in the welfare system as "poor" is not the same as stating that all poor people are uneducated drug addicts; the latter is poor induction at its worst, and quite pervasive in today's society.
Put succinctly, there are two distinct errors of categorization:
1. Inferring that qualities not inherent in the definition of a category apply to all members of the category. Example: Some obese people are lazy; therefore, all obese people are lazy.
2. Assuming that qualities shared between a category and an unassociated idea imply that the idea is actually a member of the category; assuming that any quality shared by members of a category is a defining quality of the category itself. Example: Existentialism rejects a personal god; therefore, existentialism is the exact same thing as nihilism.
Update: Upon giving this further thought, I think that I've pinpointed a third error:
3. Inferring that, because a good or bad idea is a member of a given category by default, any associated idea, or the category itself, is absolutely good or bad. Example: Existentialists do not believe in god; therefore, existentialism is good. Antithetical example: Fascism is oppressive; therefore, the concept of impinging on so-called "freedoms" is bad.
Arbitrary categorization is often a major problem in our society resultant from poor understanding of the mechanisms of causality and relation, or the populace's inability to properly conduct qualitative analysis. However, it is important to abstract this problem into two major groups, given that categorization is occasionally a necessity of being human:
1. General categorization: Often problematic, but sometimes temporarily necessary for the purpose of discussion or deliberation. If I give a name to a set of concepts that I find worth implementing, that does not automatically imply that I will not consider casting off the name as soon as new data becomes available. However, any form of categorization becomes a problem as soon as I decide that, because each member of a category shares a given quality, they must necessarily share all qualities. For example, all apples grow on trees, but not all apples are red. Sadly, this principle of multiple qualities is often ignored when people conduct qualitative analysis.
2. Categorization of new ideas by predefined groups: More or less always problematic, as it attempts to force new concepts and memes to "be" older ones. This is usually done in order to gloss over the nuances of the new concepts, thus trivializing them and relegating them to the status of having already been tried and tested.
Note, also, that a set of concepts can exist within a category without any particular generalization being inferred from their interaction. For example, categorizing a person who participates in the welfare system as "poor" is not the same as stating that all poor people are uneducated drug addicts; the latter is poor induction at its worst, and quite pervasive in today's society.
Put succinctly, there are two distinct errors of categorization:
1. Inferring that qualities not inherent in the definition of a category apply to all members of the category. Example: Some obese people are lazy; therefore, all obese people are lazy.
2. Assuming that qualities shared between a category and an unassociated idea imply that the idea is actually a member of the category; assuming that any quality shared by members of a category is a defining quality of the category itself. Example: Existentialism rejects a personal god; therefore, existentialism is the exact same thing as nihilism.
Update: Upon giving this further thought, I think that I've pinpointed a third error:
3. Inferring that, because a good or bad idea is a member of a given category by default, any associated idea, or the category itself, is absolutely good or bad. Example: Existentialists do not believe in god; therefore, existentialism is good. Antithetical example: Fascism is oppressive; therefore, the concept of impinging on so-called "freedoms" is bad.
Saturday, December 4, 2010
A note on the future directive of this blog
In the future, I will be making fewer posts on specific, derivative problems, even if they are fairly fundamental, as in the cases of suffering, the agenda of life, the eternal struggle between logic and sensation, etc. As previously stated, solving problems requires that we first solve the problem of being bad at solving problems -- in a word, meta-cognition. Actively and pragmatically refine cognitive processes and hardware, and you'll become much better at decision-making and problem-solving. Better yet, do this in iterative increments involving lots of testing for errors, and you'll be more likely to maximize your productivity. In short, it's more important to teach people how to arrive at conclusions than that they should arrive at your conclusions (bonus points if you don't ever draw any conclusions at all, given the inability to confirm your senses' reliability without relying on your senses, and instead merely act as though you draw conclusions out of practical necessity).
Plus, there are so many descendant problems all around us that, unless we work alongside those who process data using the same algorithms and mechanisms that we do, it doesn't matter whom we choose to support; we'll never get anything done. You can agree with liberals that the war in Iraq was a dumb idea, but that doesn't make you a liberal. Most people get something right, so declaring yourself a something-ist every time that you encounter a good idea is going to be quite tedious and time-consuming!
If you agree with someone, but have different reasons from him or her for your tentative conclusions, then your agreement is ultimately trivial. It is of no practical value to share commonalities when it comes to what you think, so long as you do not share commonalities when it comes to how you think. You may agree now, but if your mode of thinking allows you to change your mind, or if the other person uses his mode of thinking to arrive at an erroneous conclusion in another realm, then you are effectively wasting time by associating or working with him -- that is, unless you can help him see his errors, or vice versa.
So, then, let's get down to business: Bad memes prevent progress, and faulty cognitive agents and mechanisms prevent good memes from doing their jobs. Until we clean ourselves up, it doesn't really matter who agrees with whom -- we're all part of the problem.
Plus, there are so many descendant problems all around us that, unless we work alongside those who process data using the same algorithms and mechanisms that we do, it doesn't matter whom we choose to support; we'll never get anything done. You can agree with liberals that the war in Iraq was a dumb idea, but that doesn't make you a liberal. Most people get something right, so declaring yourself a something-ist every time that you encounter a good idea is going to be quite tedious and time-consuming!
If you agree with someone, but have different reasons from him or her for your tentative conclusions, then your agreement is ultimately trivial. It is of no practical value to share commonalities when it comes to what you think, so long as you do not share commonalities when it comes to how you think. You may agree now, but if your mode of thinking allows you to change your mind, or if the other person uses his mode of thinking to arrive at an erroneous conclusion in another realm, then you are effectively wasting time by associating or working with him -- that is, unless you can help him see his errors, or vice versa.
So, then, let's get down to business: Bad memes prevent progress, and faulty cognitive agents and mechanisms prevent good memes from doing their jobs. Until we clean ourselves up, it doesn't really matter who agrees with whom -- we're all part of the problem.
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