Alright, we've hit on all of the major problems of the world, as far as I can tell. Occasional posts will still appear here regarding them, but today, I start a new series: An Ideal Society. It's time to stop talking about why our current situation is bad and start talking about what a good situation -- independent of whether a preceding bad one ever existed -- would look like, hypothetically. Over the months, I've hinted at some of the ideas that I'll be posting in this series, but I think that it's about time that I lay them out more explicitly.
Let's get started with the following two premises:
1. Our entire infrastructure is out of whack.
2. This is caused by bad values.
We waste things. A lot. The environmentalist movement seems to be aware of this, but in their quest to find a bad guy to blame, they've neglected the vast majority of the waste that humans produce in this society; perhaps one of their biggest blunders has been their blatant disregard for how we manage oil. Sure, there's lots of talk -- some of it legitimate -- about alternative energy, but what never gets discussed is that we could have continued to use oil for far longer than we will if we'd only structured society itself in a more rational, efficient way.
Let's pretend that society as we know it doesn't exist. If humans were to be dropped onto the Earth today, with big brains, language, and a need to understand whether the universe has any redeeming qualities whatsoever, how would their society (or societies) be structured in the ideal scenario?
For one, there'd be no suburbs. For two, there'd be no occupations.
Something that people generally don't seem to realize about jobs is that, in addition to being nauseatingly bureaucratic in nature, they're usually designed only to help someone else do his job; furthermore, for some reason, they don't really end.
Curious, isn't it? If jobs actually accomplished something, wouldn't they end at some point? If you need to paint your house, doesn't the need terminate once the house has been painted? You don't devise new ways to paint the house just to keep your family on the payroll, do you?
You might bring up more indefinite chores, like taking out the trash. To this, I say:
1. We already have the technology available to us to automate the majority of modern jobs. The only reason for why 90% of our jobs haven't been taken over by machines is that people need to make money in order to live. If we didn't need to make money, then machines would already be doing most of our menial chores.
2. Menial chores do not require that you hop into a car and drive for two hours to an entirely different building every day at a set time which cannot be violated. This is because menial chores are not enough work to constitute a true occupation, generally; they can be done by anyone whenever they're required to be done without forcing someone in particular to be "the guy" who does them at the same time every day. In short, while the chore of taking out the trash may be indefinite, my role as the person who handles the chore needn't be.
Number 2 takes us to the first assertion above: that the suburbs are a pathetic waste of resources.
Here's how our living spaces should be structured instead:
Housing units as large as one entire neighborhood -- or at least as large as some substantial portion of one, depending on architectural technicalities -- would exist all over the Earth. These units would look something like shopping malls in their openness, though they'd probably be much more aesthetically pleasing, given that no money means no capitalistic concerns over architectural parsimony. They would also contain individual quarters. There would be no leases, no deeds, and no mortgages, just as there are no leases, deeds, or mortgages for those who routinely and lawfully enter shopping malls all over the country every day today; if you wanted to take up residence within a housing unit, you'd simply walk inside at your leisure, just as you do today in parks, malls, libraries, and other public places where accommodations like benches and water fountains already exist.
For our ideal living quarters, though, the difference would be that, instead of mere water fountains and benches, you'd have access to cushioned resting areas, computers, pleasing scenery, and food kiosks. The analog to mall security in this scenario would be a centralized computer, complete with a camera system, alarm system, and connection to the main global network, where all information regarding individuals and material resources would be tracked (everyone would be monitored by a GPS in orbit around the planet). Of course, without money, there'd be no reason to hoard items and, more importantly, no reason to steal, so while the computer's sensors might get tripped from time to time, items leaving the premises wouldn't be one of the reasons for this.
Temporary residence would be encouraged, as exploration, innovation, and creativity would be valued in the place of self-indulgence, material excess, and expectation. The people within a particular housing unit's major lounge areas would likely be entirely different from one month to the next, with those bored of the area or finished with a particular project moving on to see the rest of the world, and newcomers (or past frequenters returning for one reason or another) constantly stopping by to relax and enjoy themselves.
Entertainment would vary, and would likely depend on the technology available per the time period. Modern examples might include fully immersive video games and other kinds of audio/visual simulations, Internet access from major kiosks for learning and interacting with content, mood lighting, and replicas of outdoor locations. Social activities would also be available, such as story-telling, game-playing (including physical games, though video games are already becoming increasingly physical), teaching, humor, etc.
Walls would, in many cases, be transparent; this would discourage privacy in public (i.e. the way that we treat places of work and cars today), promote open communication among everyone (e.g. if you're gay or really into Satanic heavy metal, you'd tell the middle aged woman sitting in the lounge area and never think anything of it), and increase the vitamin D intake for the population. The exception to the transparent walls rule would be private rooms, for the sake of allotting some amount of time for both personal contemplation and sleep.
Although such private areas would be available, when it would come to sleeping, they would be built to accommodate only one person, as group formation would be discouraged. Of course, it would be acceptable for a group of, say, four people, for example, to seek out a quiet room for planning an activity or working on a project, but each room would probably have one bed in order to both discourage the development of special needs (i.e. cutting down on pointless customization of infrastructure while in the process standardizing room sizes) and promote social transparency among the populace.
Rooms would be checked out by a user who would manually change the status of a door's computer from vacant to occupied, with additional settings including a "Please don't just barge in, but I'm open to talk if you need me" setting and a "Do not disturb" setting; the latter would call a computer-authenticated lock, and would also be monitored by the central computer in case the sensor ever remained flipped for substantially longer than is required by humans for sleep -- a sign of someone hiding something, in many cases.
There would be no need to "check out" a room the way that you do at a hotel, as the computer would handle everything by automatically updating the database to reflect room status changes. Check-out times would also be nonexistent, as the number of rooms per living area would always exceed the average population traffic size; where the main computer for a given population center detected that the average number of tracked people within the defined boundaries of the center was encroaching on an arbitrary maximum, an alert would be generated for someone to initiate a new building project for a separate housing unit.
So what about going places? The above description might be fine for a place to live, but what about the exploration that would allegedly be promoted by this model? Isn't what I've just written about the same as what we have today, only larger in scope and more socially open?
Well, no, it isn't. Remember that point two was that there'd be no occupations. Let's run through an example.
I, along with five people whom I've never met before, am a de facto overseer of a research project aimed at developing a way to clone organs. For convenience purposes, our research team has unanimously consented, without intervention from a third party or "leader," to meet at a specific population center designated on our communications devices' maps by an ID number (everyone would have a handheld computer that would provide him or her with names, IDs, and contact information for everyone else).
Perhaps we've chosen the population center based on the recreational activities available there. In any case, we convene at one of its living areas with tentative dates for when we'll be finished our research; there are no deadlines. To get to the population center, we take the public transportation system -- a series of interconnected, centrally managed, and automated vehicles tracked by the GPS. Once we arrive, we live there for about three months, often checking out local places of entertainment or enjoying time at the beach, but never really needing to go anywhere substantially far away. Remember: Every time that anyone in the society needs to commute to a new place of work, he changes where he "lives" to match.
My associates and I become close friends over the three months that we work together, sending our progress to the central computer for anyone in the entire society to read and add onto at any time. Once we've determined that we've made a substantial amount of progress and have heard back from a few interested individuals who want to pick up where we left off (without needing to preserve some profit-generating model, we'd have no reason to shun those interested in temporarily taking the reins), we part ways to relax or work on another, unrelated project elsewhere on the planet -- even if the latter project has nothing to do with medical science.
Contractors, freelance artists, and Wikipedia editors already do this; with the right amount of granular control, central management, and redundancy, real work can get done much faster in this model than it can in our current society -- especially given that there are no CEOs to demand that we manufacture the right amount of basketballs by a certain date or show up at exactly 9 AM every morning to begin scanning papers that are perfectly readable in their non-digital forms. The bottom line: Most "work" today is unnecessarily pushed into arbitrary time slots with pointless deadlines, all because the impetus is personal enrichment and not the betterment of society.
Alternatively, perhaps most or all of the research that I just outlined is done remotely, meaning that my imaginary team and I merely communicate via email and video chat, and are free to move around the world as we please. Maintenance and technical jobs might require physical meetings and close proximity to something in case it breaks, but again, as soon as someone else came in to take my place, I'd simply leave to do something else at another location on the planet.
So, there you have it. No ridiculous commutes, no traffic jams, no preposterous amounts of gas wasted every day. If you want to commute to a place and do work there, you go once, live down the street, and leave when your project has been completed. Even if the project takes years to complete -- an unlikely scenario in a sane, granular society with a socialistic bent -- there would never be a physical place of work without some living space within proximity, available to anyone free of charge. Really, if we can do it for libraries, we can do it for our homes.
Want to save gas? Don't do less; change the locations of your activities.
Showing posts with label open systems. Show all posts
Showing posts with label open systems. Show all posts
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
The Buddha's teachings are garbage
Notice how I didn't title this "Buddhism is garbage"; while stupid, Buddhism and its various sects often have nothing to do with what the Buddha actually taught, making them far less attractive as targets for critique. For example, the following were not part of the original teachings of the Buddha, yet are often essential to modern Buddhist practice:
1. Monastic hierarchy
2. Arbitrary rituals and customs (e.g. shaving one's head, wearing a robe, reciting formalized chants)
3. Forbidding sex (obviously in direct opposition to the Buddha's conception of the Middle Path)
4. Reincarnation; "seeing" past lives; dualism
5. Compassion for non-sentient life (e.g. trees and possibly insects)
...and, most importantly:
6. "Isms," or treating ideas as groups to be generalized, "converted" to, etc.
So, fine, the Buddha was right not to incorporate any of these things into his teachings. That's great, but he was nevertheless about as far from being scientifically minded as one can get. Don't believe me? Think the Buddha was some atheist way ahead of his time, or on par with Einstein? Have a look at the following flaws in his modus operandi:
1. The numbered lists: Everything that the Buddha taught seemed to break down into definite lists which more or less could not be challenged by his disciples. Perhaps you think this point ironic, since I'm putting it on a list of my own, but the difference is that I will neither title nor close off this list in an attempt to formalize it or make it dogma; in fact, it's very likely that I'll add onto it in the minutes and hours following my publishing this post.
Given the nature of data and the very states of impermanence and not-self that the Buddha was so fond of demonstrating, he should have more carefully considered that his lists would need updating and refinement as he encountered more worldly problems. Likewise, he should have considered listening to others, and consequently spent equal amounts of time both teaching and learning. Titling your list "The Noble Eightfold Path" or "The Four Noble Truths" is setting you up for adulation and blind acceptance on the part of your "followers." Wouldn't it have been better for the Buddha to have simply said, "I've found four things about reality that are worth teaching, but I, in being imperfect, am both student and teacher, just as you are. If you happen to find a fifth noble truth, by all means, let me know about it"? Certainly, the Noble Eightfold Path is very far from a complete list of methods for avoiding suffering; it doesn't even account for what currently appears to be the primary cause: unregulated emergent process.
2. The neglect of non-human causes of suffering: The Noble Eightfold Path basically asserts that we can end all suffering by changing our thoughts and actions. This is patently false; anyone who has ever passed a kidney stone, been shot in the stomach, or endured cancer can tell you that intense pain, no matter how good you are at managing it, is a by-product of material interactions which cannot be stopped unless their causal processes are. In other words, while I may be able to deal with suffering better upon taking up the Noble Eightfold Path, this in no way demonstrates that my newfound ability to cope with suffering also leads to the cessation of said suffering. It doesn't matter how great you are at meditation, mindfulness, or detachment from desire; if you're being beaten with a baseball bat or ripped apart by an alligator, your psychological sophistication is not going to prevent -- or even mitigate -- your suffering. Incidentally, how meditation could ever help starving baby birds is beyond me.
The solution really is far simpler than a contrived set of mental practices requiring extensive training: Just don't have kids.
3. The ambiguity: The Buddha often spoke in parables and metaphors -- which, in the general sense, may occasionally edify a person seeking to understand an elusive concept not easily grasped using more literal means -- but the Buddha is almost never direct with his followers in the Pali Canon. The lack of clarity of wording has had such dramatic consequences, in fact, that today, there are entire "Buddhist" sects which teach literal reincarnation where the Buddha only ever spoke of a metaphorical "rebirth" of one's moral energy, or kamma. Worse still, the concept of rebirth isn't even all that accurate: One transfers one's ideas, notions, and physical actions through the world both while alive and after death, so it's a continuous process, and not something that occurs exclusively after the body ceases to function. Counter by claiming that, in accordance with the flux of material reality, the Buddha was referring to the continuous generation of new "selves" who have causal influence on their environments and you'll further illustrate my point that the wording of the Buddhist texts is so ambiguous that we can't even agree on what it's referencing.
This problem could have been easily solved by the Buddha's referring to the phenomenon in question as simple transmigration of data and information -- both physical and conceptual -- rather than as a "rebirth."
4. The gods: Contrary to popular belief, the early Buddhist texts are filled with nonsense about gods of all sorts. Dimensions, planes, and immaterial consciousnesses are often spoken about as things which the Buddha confronts during intense meditation sessions. Essentially, they're all leftovers from the obviously whacky Hinduism, but the Buddha took what were integral facets of a supreme godhead and turned them into imperfect, desirous beings capable of suffering just like anyone else. The claim that a conscious, sentient being is necessarily imperfect, in part because of its desires and impetuses, is accurate; the claim that any such beings exist beyond the Earth, or in other realms of existence, has no basis in empirical observation whatsoever.
It's like saying that, even though it's quite obvious that man contrived Santa Claus, there could be a guy who rides a sleigh driven by flying reindeer somewhere in another dimension -- except that the Buddha apparently took the unfounded presumptions of his backward Indian culture quite seriously, to the point where he actively believed that gods and ethereal realms were real in the most literal sense imaginable.
5. No suicide or antinatalism: If ending suffering is the most important activity of life, then why didn't the Buddha advocate suicide or the cessation of human reproduction? You can counter by claiming that spreading the word on how to obtain enlightenment is a far better use of one's time than suicide, given that it will help end not just your own suffering but the suffering of others, but what if you're suffering so horribly that meditation does nothing to ease your mind? Is it okay to kill yourself? Furthermore, even if there were a valid reason within the Buddhist paradigm to forbid suicide, what does that have to do with merely refraining from having children? Sure, modern monks don't reproduce, but that has more to do with the false notion that the Buddha advocated abstinence than with any desire to end life as we know it -- and, assuredly, monks do not attempt to stop laymen from reproducing.
It seems rather obvious to me that the Buddha was entirely invested in the agenda of life: He saw that part of it was bad, but instead of trying to fix it proactively, he advocated messy self-help steps for those unfortunate enough to have had to endure the onset. If he'd truly been interested in eliminating all negative sensation, he'd have said more on how to cleanly terminate one's own life -- or at least strongly emphasized the importance of abstaining from sexual reproduction (regardless of social status).
And above all else, no matter what the Buddha actually said, the fact that some 350 million people continue to not only venerate but outright deify him goes to show what a mess we're in. If I, a random, anonymous person on the Internet can so effectively dissolve the original words of the Buddha with a few paragraphs, then why is he being treated with such reverence? Why is he being singled out above billions upon billions of people? If I can put a dent in his ideas, and there are seven billion people on Earth, how many others do you think can do the same?
Is it possible that the entire "path" advocated by the Buddha is -- like just about everything else that justifies enslavement to non-rational cognitive faculties -- a sham? Here's a final word of advice: No matter how much you agree with a person or set of ideas, if the method used to arrive at those ideas is flawed, or if the ideas share space with really stupid ones, you're better off not trying to gain social status through associating with their "isms." Always discuss ideas one at a time.
1. Monastic hierarchy
2. Arbitrary rituals and customs (e.g. shaving one's head, wearing a robe, reciting formalized chants)
3. Forbidding sex (obviously in direct opposition to the Buddha's conception of the Middle Path)
4. Reincarnation; "seeing" past lives; dualism
5. Compassion for non-sentient life (e.g. trees and possibly insects)
...and, most importantly:
6. "Isms," or treating ideas as groups to be generalized, "converted" to, etc.
So, fine, the Buddha was right not to incorporate any of these things into his teachings. That's great, but he was nevertheless about as far from being scientifically minded as one can get. Don't believe me? Think the Buddha was some atheist way ahead of his time, or on par with Einstein? Have a look at the following flaws in his modus operandi:
1. The numbered lists: Everything that the Buddha taught seemed to break down into definite lists which more or less could not be challenged by his disciples. Perhaps you think this point ironic, since I'm putting it on a list of my own, but the difference is that I will neither title nor close off this list in an attempt to formalize it or make it dogma; in fact, it's very likely that I'll add onto it in the minutes and hours following my publishing this post.
Given the nature of data and the very states of impermanence and not-self that the Buddha was so fond of demonstrating, he should have more carefully considered that his lists would need updating and refinement as he encountered more worldly problems. Likewise, he should have considered listening to others, and consequently spent equal amounts of time both teaching and learning. Titling your list "The Noble Eightfold Path" or "The Four Noble Truths" is setting you up for adulation and blind acceptance on the part of your "followers." Wouldn't it have been better for the Buddha to have simply said, "I've found four things about reality that are worth teaching, but I, in being imperfect, am both student and teacher, just as you are. If you happen to find a fifth noble truth, by all means, let me know about it"? Certainly, the Noble Eightfold Path is very far from a complete list of methods for avoiding suffering; it doesn't even account for what currently appears to be the primary cause: unregulated emergent process.
2. The neglect of non-human causes of suffering: The Noble Eightfold Path basically asserts that we can end all suffering by changing our thoughts and actions. This is patently false; anyone who has ever passed a kidney stone, been shot in the stomach, or endured cancer can tell you that intense pain, no matter how good you are at managing it, is a by-product of material interactions which cannot be stopped unless their causal processes are. In other words, while I may be able to deal with suffering better upon taking up the Noble Eightfold Path, this in no way demonstrates that my newfound ability to cope with suffering also leads to the cessation of said suffering. It doesn't matter how great you are at meditation, mindfulness, or detachment from desire; if you're being beaten with a baseball bat or ripped apart by an alligator, your psychological sophistication is not going to prevent -- or even mitigate -- your suffering. Incidentally, how meditation could ever help starving baby birds is beyond me.
The solution really is far simpler than a contrived set of mental practices requiring extensive training: Just don't have kids.
3. The ambiguity: The Buddha often spoke in parables and metaphors -- which, in the general sense, may occasionally edify a person seeking to understand an elusive concept not easily grasped using more literal means -- but the Buddha is almost never direct with his followers in the Pali Canon. The lack of clarity of wording has had such dramatic consequences, in fact, that today, there are entire "Buddhist" sects which teach literal reincarnation where the Buddha only ever spoke of a metaphorical "rebirth" of one's moral energy, or kamma. Worse still, the concept of rebirth isn't even all that accurate: One transfers one's ideas, notions, and physical actions through the world both while alive and after death, so it's a continuous process, and not something that occurs exclusively after the body ceases to function. Counter by claiming that, in accordance with the flux of material reality, the Buddha was referring to the continuous generation of new "selves" who have causal influence on their environments and you'll further illustrate my point that the wording of the Buddhist texts is so ambiguous that we can't even agree on what it's referencing.
This problem could have been easily solved by the Buddha's referring to the phenomenon in question as simple transmigration of data and information -- both physical and conceptual -- rather than as a "rebirth."
4. The gods: Contrary to popular belief, the early Buddhist texts are filled with nonsense about gods of all sorts. Dimensions, planes, and immaterial consciousnesses are often spoken about as things which the Buddha confronts during intense meditation sessions. Essentially, they're all leftovers from the obviously whacky Hinduism, but the Buddha took what were integral facets of a supreme godhead and turned them into imperfect, desirous beings capable of suffering just like anyone else. The claim that a conscious, sentient being is necessarily imperfect, in part because of its desires and impetuses, is accurate; the claim that any such beings exist beyond the Earth, or in other realms of existence, has no basis in empirical observation whatsoever.
It's like saying that, even though it's quite obvious that man contrived Santa Claus, there could be a guy who rides a sleigh driven by flying reindeer somewhere in another dimension -- except that the Buddha apparently took the unfounded presumptions of his backward Indian culture quite seriously, to the point where he actively believed that gods and ethereal realms were real in the most literal sense imaginable.
5. No suicide or antinatalism: If ending suffering is the most important activity of life, then why didn't the Buddha advocate suicide or the cessation of human reproduction? You can counter by claiming that spreading the word on how to obtain enlightenment is a far better use of one's time than suicide, given that it will help end not just your own suffering but the suffering of others, but what if you're suffering so horribly that meditation does nothing to ease your mind? Is it okay to kill yourself? Furthermore, even if there were a valid reason within the Buddhist paradigm to forbid suicide, what does that have to do with merely refraining from having children? Sure, modern monks don't reproduce, but that has more to do with the false notion that the Buddha advocated abstinence than with any desire to end life as we know it -- and, assuredly, monks do not attempt to stop laymen from reproducing.
It seems rather obvious to me that the Buddha was entirely invested in the agenda of life: He saw that part of it was bad, but instead of trying to fix it proactively, he advocated messy self-help steps for those unfortunate enough to have had to endure the onset. If he'd truly been interested in eliminating all negative sensation, he'd have said more on how to cleanly terminate one's own life -- or at least strongly emphasized the importance of abstaining from sexual reproduction (regardless of social status).
And above all else, no matter what the Buddha actually said, the fact that some 350 million people continue to not only venerate but outright deify him goes to show what a mess we're in. If I, a random, anonymous person on the Internet can so effectively dissolve the original words of the Buddha with a few paragraphs, then why is he being treated with such reverence? Why is he being singled out above billions upon billions of people? If I can put a dent in his ideas, and there are seven billion people on Earth, how many others do you think can do the same?
Is it possible that the entire "path" advocated by the Buddha is -- like just about everything else that justifies enslavement to non-rational cognitive faculties -- a sham? Here's a final word of advice: No matter how much you agree with a person or set of ideas, if the method used to arrive at those ideas is flawed, or if the ideas share space with really stupid ones, you're better off not trying to gain social status through associating with their "isms." Always discuss ideas one at a time.
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.
Monday, March 21, 2011
Individualism and the absence of goal-setting on the Internet
Let's get one thing straight: The Internet is dominated by a handful of corporate* websites that are for-profit. Government websites and personal hosting space are almost nonexistent; can you name a site that you regularly frequent that isn't corporate-run? When was the last time that one of your friends decided to invest in a few servers and implement something like IIS or FTP for hosting sites or files? Was it practical? Did it prove useful?
On the Internet these days, ads and unskippable commercials abound; incentive and encouragement are given to those who help the corporations in question make money -- so long as such people aren't associated with ideas antithetical to the corporations' pursuits, that is. If you don't give a particular site a bad image or speak out against it, you're acceptable; if you have an interest in genuine goals and completion of finite, quantifiable tasks, however, you're in trouble.
This problem is compounded by the fact that, not only is the Internet run by corporations, it's more or less run by a number of them no larger than the amount of fingers on your two hands. So long as the incentive for providing a web service is profit, no resultant product site is going to be geared toward encouraging people to better themselves, or work. Work, in this society, is not something that consumers do; it's something that producers do, and while most people take on both roles at various points in their lives, they almost never take them on simultaneously.
People aren't interested in making society better unless the betterment of society is incidentally profitable on a personal level, so if they're not getting paid -- especially if they're expecting to be provided a service for purposes other than "work" by someone who is getting paid -- they're not going to be interested in doing anything that isn't for themselves. And, as the saying goes, the customer is always right.
Or is he?
When you really think about it, it does seem as though the primary cause of the monopolization of the Internet is the apathy and selfishness of the average e-consumer. "Here's a new technology that allows you to make videos of yourself and broadcast them to thousands of people; do whatever you want with it except take your clothes off or badmouth us. Oh, and since you can do whatever you want with this functionality, there's no need to go to any other sites with similar functionality ever, ever again!"
This line of thinking keeps the website's superficial, outward integrity in tact while simultaneously enabling the customer to fulfill his every most base desire, regardless of how much of a waste of time the desire is when put into the context of a finite existence continuously guided by decision variables affecting all of sentient life. In other words, the owners of the website get richer by encouraging its users to use the service for pretty much any reason they want, which usually turns out to be one that doesn't involve helping someone else; in simplest terms, the website has no goals.
Sure, there is a distinction to be made between continuous goals and finite goals, and profit is a continuous goal, but what about the latter type? To me, a goal in the truest sense of the word is any completable construct representing the need for an object that can be quantified. For example, "make money," as previously noted, isn't really a goal per se, but "make X amount of money" is, as it contains a quantity variable, and, once the quantity is obtained, the goal ceases to exist.
The problem with our current framework for the Internet is that, not only does it disregard attainable goals, it actively seeks to prevent them from emerging, as it treats the Internet as an end in itself (for the consumer) or a means to the end of profit (for the producer) -- rather than as a means to any other imaginable end, including real, quantitative goals.
Without intervention from an external body -- whether a government or something similarly authoritative -- the Internet, like much of our economic system, will continue to foster goalless profit-seeking, which, while superficially beneficial to the consumer for mere minutes at a time, is ultimately only materially beneficial to a fraction of the human population smaller than the population of the average city. Perhaps someone unaffiliated with a particular website has brilliant ideas, or is working on a project that would be of interest to you, but because the project isn't in the best interest of the two or three major websites capable of hosting it, you never learn that it exists. What a travesty this is if true.
Imagine a world where websites actually promote goal creation and completion. By this, I don't mean vapid social networking "gaming dynamics" (i.e. allowing users to set commenting goals, story writing goals, etc.), which only encourage further self-absorption in the same manner that the video games after which they're modeled do; I mean things like providing propositions for a community, convincing others that your ideas are reasonable, and finding new avenues for promotion and discussion.
A real-world example might be something like a YouTube, Blogger, or even Wikipedia specifically geared toward philosophy, science, and social welfare vlogs/blogs/articles as opposed to just about any non-"offensive" videos or articles that one could imagine. A mission statement or declaration of methodology and goals would be evident everywhere on the site, and all users would be subject to bans based not on how their content affected others emotionally, but on whether the content was logical and conducive to the goals proposed by the site. There would be no owners, and everyone would have access to all editable components and modules.
In this scenario, suddenly, the aforementioned sites are no longer doing everything [legal] that they can in order to get ahead of everyone else; instead, they're working toward seeing demonstrable, practical results of proposed solutions to the world's problems. Users are encouraged not to simply behave themselves, but to actually do work. The dichotomy of user and designer has collapsed; everyone fulfills both roles simultaneously, creating a positive feedback loop of suggestion input and implementation. Everyone involved consumes resources or uses services in order to make other resources and services better, with the latter resources and services doing the same, etc., all to the end of improving society.
So long as problems exist, it should be every major organizational entity's goal to solve them. This goal can be broken into a plethora of sub-goals, of course, but it should nevertheless lie at the foundation of every organization's agenda, no matter the circumstance. Until we stop treating everyone as a source of our own personal satisfaction, though, this will not happen.
So just imagine it for a second. Imagine being able to edit someone else's blog, because you've both agreed beforehand on the direction and goals of the blog. Imagine participating on (and owning) a YouTube channel owned by fifty other people, each capable of uploading and favoriting videos. Imagine being able to, as something like a site moderator or administrator, suggest whether someone should be removed from the group or have their videos deleted, but not being able to actually do those things on your own without the input of the entire group. Imagine being able to alert everyone involved to potential areas of expansion. Imagine a website that exists not to provide people a service, but to get something done. People "get things done" and set goals all the time in their own personal lives, so why shouldn't a website advertise itself for this same purpose? A simple "Calling all interested parties: We need someone to start writing material on X subject. So and so is already working on Y subject, but if you think you have a better way, let so and so know" would suffice.
It would certainly beat what we currently have.
The interesting thing is that most of the above is possible right now on a small scale, but the services provided by the sites that can be used in this manner don't exactly help in any significant way. While it's certainly possible for you to write a blog or book on a topic that is actually important, without promotion from a major organization tailored specifically toward promoting and regulating content like yours, it probably isn't going to matter much.
Oh well. Until progress in this area is made, the alternative should be group YouTube channels, group blogs, wikis, etc.
____________________________________________________
* Wikipedia is an interesting exception. I'm in support of its method, but not its goals. Modern people tend to conflate method with goals quite often, which is unfortunate, because the technology is fantastic, in this case, and could be used in a more stringent and socially beneficial manner. Instead, Wikipedia contributors are content to delete articles for interesting ideas unfamiliar to the general public, for example, but if something which promotes horrible values is incredibly popular, it's "relevant" to humanity in some skewed way, and thus worthy of an article according to the site.
I'm not against providing or caching information on every conceivable topic, because free information, no matter how trivial, could prove useful to someone in the future. However, even if one concedes this, Wikipedia's only "goal" is to let people learn more about things they've already heard of. Popularity is only one form of relevance; relying on it to demonstrate the benefit of your website to society at large is, like democracy, a form of argumentum ad populum.
On the Internet these days, ads and unskippable commercials abound; incentive and encouragement are given to those who help the corporations in question make money -- so long as such people aren't associated with ideas antithetical to the corporations' pursuits, that is. If you don't give a particular site a bad image or speak out against it, you're acceptable; if you have an interest in genuine goals and completion of finite, quantifiable tasks, however, you're in trouble.
This problem is compounded by the fact that, not only is the Internet run by corporations, it's more or less run by a number of them no larger than the amount of fingers on your two hands. So long as the incentive for providing a web service is profit, no resultant product site is going to be geared toward encouraging people to better themselves, or work. Work, in this society, is not something that consumers do; it's something that producers do, and while most people take on both roles at various points in their lives, they almost never take them on simultaneously.
People aren't interested in making society better unless the betterment of society is incidentally profitable on a personal level, so if they're not getting paid -- especially if they're expecting to be provided a service for purposes other than "work" by someone who is getting paid -- they're not going to be interested in doing anything that isn't for themselves. And, as the saying goes, the customer is always right.
Or is he?
When you really think about it, it does seem as though the primary cause of the monopolization of the Internet is the apathy and selfishness of the average e-consumer. "Here's a new technology that allows you to make videos of yourself and broadcast them to thousands of people; do whatever you want with it except take your clothes off or badmouth us. Oh, and since you can do whatever you want with this functionality, there's no need to go to any other sites with similar functionality ever, ever again!"
This line of thinking keeps the website's superficial, outward integrity in tact while simultaneously enabling the customer to fulfill his every most base desire, regardless of how much of a waste of time the desire is when put into the context of a finite existence continuously guided by decision variables affecting all of sentient life. In other words, the owners of the website get richer by encouraging its users to use the service for pretty much any reason they want, which usually turns out to be one that doesn't involve helping someone else; in simplest terms, the website has no goals.
Sure, there is a distinction to be made between continuous goals and finite goals, and profit is a continuous goal, but what about the latter type? To me, a goal in the truest sense of the word is any completable construct representing the need for an object that can be quantified. For example, "make money," as previously noted, isn't really a goal per se, but "make X amount of money" is, as it contains a quantity variable, and, once the quantity is obtained, the goal ceases to exist.
The problem with our current framework for the Internet is that, not only does it disregard attainable goals, it actively seeks to prevent them from emerging, as it treats the Internet as an end in itself (for the consumer) or a means to the end of profit (for the producer) -- rather than as a means to any other imaginable end, including real, quantitative goals.
Without intervention from an external body -- whether a government or something similarly authoritative -- the Internet, like much of our economic system, will continue to foster goalless profit-seeking, which, while superficially beneficial to the consumer for mere minutes at a time, is ultimately only materially beneficial to a fraction of the human population smaller than the population of the average city. Perhaps someone unaffiliated with a particular website has brilliant ideas, or is working on a project that would be of interest to you, but because the project isn't in the best interest of the two or three major websites capable of hosting it, you never learn that it exists. What a travesty this is if true.
Imagine a world where websites actually promote goal creation and completion. By this, I don't mean vapid social networking "gaming dynamics" (i.e. allowing users to set commenting goals, story writing goals, etc.), which only encourage further self-absorption in the same manner that the video games after which they're modeled do; I mean things like providing propositions for a community, convincing others that your ideas are reasonable, and finding new avenues for promotion and discussion.
A real-world example might be something like a YouTube, Blogger, or even Wikipedia specifically geared toward philosophy, science, and social welfare vlogs/blogs/articles as opposed to just about any non-"offensive" videos or articles that one could imagine. A mission statement or declaration of methodology and goals would be evident everywhere on the site, and all users would be subject to bans based not on how their content affected others emotionally, but on whether the content was logical and conducive to the goals proposed by the site. There would be no owners, and everyone would have access to all editable components and modules.
In this scenario, suddenly, the aforementioned sites are no longer doing everything [legal] that they can in order to get ahead of everyone else; instead, they're working toward seeing demonstrable, practical results of proposed solutions to the world's problems. Users are encouraged not to simply behave themselves, but to actually do work. The dichotomy of user and designer has collapsed; everyone fulfills both roles simultaneously, creating a positive feedback loop of suggestion input and implementation. Everyone involved consumes resources or uses services in order to make other resources and services better, with the latter resources and services doing the same, etc., all to the end of improving society.
So long as problems exist, it should be every major organizational entity's goal to solve them. This goal can be broken into a plethora of sub-goals, of course, but it should nevertheless lie at the foundation of every organization's agenda, no matter the circumstance. Until we stop treating everyone as a source of our own personal satisfaction, though, this will not happen.
So just imagine it for a second. Imagine being able to edit someone else's blog, because you've both agreed beforehand on the direction and goals of the blog. Imagine participating on (and owning) a YouTube channel owned by fifty other people, each capable of uploading and favoriting videos. Imagine being able to, as something like a site moderator or administrator, suggest whether someone should be removed from the group or have their videos deleted, but not being able to actually do those things on your own without the input of the entire group. Imagine being able to alert everyone involved to potential areas of expansion. Imagine a website that exists not to provide people a service, but to get something done. People "get things done" and set goals all the time in their own personal lives, so why shouldn't a website advertise itself for this same purpose? A simple "Calling all interested parties: We need someone to start writing material on X subject. So and so is already working on Y subject, but if you think you have a better way, let so and so know" would suffice.
It would certainly beat what we currently have.
The interesting thing is that most of the above is possible right now on a small scale, but the services provided by the sites that can be used in this manner don't exactly help in any significant way. While it's certainly possible for you to write a blog or book on a topic that is actually important, without promotion from a major organization tailored specifically toward promoting and regulating content like yours, it probably isn't going to matter much.
Oh well. Until progress in this area is made, the alternative should be group YouTube channels, group blogs, wikis, etc.
____________________________________________________
* Wikipedia is an interesting exception. I'm in support of its method, but not its goals. Modern people tend to conflate method with goals quite often, which is unfortunate, because the technology is fantastic, in this case, and could be used in a more stringent and socially beneficial manner. Instead, Wikipedia contributors are content to delete articles for interesting ideas unfamiliar to the general public, for example, but if something which promotes horrible values is incredibly popular, it's "relevant" to humanity in some skewed way, and thus worthy of an article according to the site.
I'm not against providing or caching information on every conceivable topic, because free information, no matter how trivial, could prove useful to someone in the future. However, even if one concedes this, Wikipedia's only "goal" is to let people learn more about things they've already heard of. Popularity is only one form of relevance; relying on it to demonstrate the benefit of your website to society at large is, like democracy, a form of argumentum ad populum.
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Brains are the source of suffering
If the universe were a closed system composed of nothing but temporally "closed" subsystems, then the eventual entropic decay of each "isolated" system -- and of the universe itself -- would be inevitable. However, for some currently unknown reason, at some point in the past, a process called life emerged on at least one planet in the universe, effectively breaking the previously prevailing chain of tendency toward system disorder. Once this event took place, it became possible for systems that were more or less closed in the traditionally understood, macroscopic sense to -- almost contradictorily -- remain open -- by seeking out energy actively rather than passively.
Of course, to prevent integration with competing systems and other environmental parameters, these new systems also had to remain partially closed -- at least in the sense of putting defense and regulatory mechanisms in place. This kept the systems well-defined, with physical barriers and spatial limitations, while still allowing them enough openness to acquire the energy necessary for their perpetuation.
So what did this opening of otherwise self-contained, self-regulating systems accomplish? For starters, it introduced homeostasis into the environment. This was initially a radical, if meaningless, departure from the way in which energy had been transferred from one location to another in the past. After the fact of life's emergence, though, it turned out that the "mostly closed" systems, or organisms, were nevertheless quite susceptible to the various forces of the universe, and thus, entropy. Mobility and a binary attraction-repulsion system enabled them to disperse energy in an entirely new way, but other physical agents were still quite persistent in their vying for physical space, and were occasionally successful at bringing about states of maximum disorder among some living organisms; this eventually culminated in what we call death.
The organic instructions to resist disorder were mutually persistent, however; as time went on, organisms managed to find, by happenstance, new ways to perpetuate themselves -- even with both living and non-living "space competitors" vying for the same resources. Finally, a few billion years into this routine, one motivation mechanism of incredible efficacy arose -- sentience.
But why does it matter? What was sentience effective at?
Well, as it would turn out, the goal of sentience was not to help organisms "enjoy" their processes; rather, it was to stop organisms from decaying, as it had been with all previous biological mechanisms.
In short, this meant that neural nets would go on to continually birth, over and over again in successive generations, increasingly complex incentives for organisms to avoid behaviors and parameters conducive to their own destruction. At some point during all of this, fully robust brains emerged, and with them, not the capacity to feel pain, but pain itself. To put it succinctly, brains did not attempt to manage pain to the benefit of organisms; they attempted to manage disorder to the benefit of nothing, using the pain that they created entirely on their own as a motivator. We sneeze a lot when sick not because viruses convert themselves into mucus as they multiply, but because, to prevent the body from being destroyed, the immune system must produce mucus. We experience pain not because external agents are inherently painful, but because brains are painful while attempting to prevent disorder.
If you're not following along, again, "disorder" in this context refers to that lack of physical work that causes closed systems to literally "freeze," having no more energy to convert from one state to another; everything has been evenly distributed, and each piece is incapable of transferring energy to any other, or has itself decayed.
Is there anything wrong with decay, though? When two weather patterns collide and eventually disperse their energy content, leaving no further work to be done, is this a bad result? Is it something to be avoided, or even stopped at all costs? It doesn't appear to be, based on anything that we've ever observed; furthermore, without any good reason to invest in the god hypothesis, the agenda of brains (and of central nervous sytems as wholes) must be questioned, for the alternative to the god hypothesis is that the universe -- and thus, all constituents, including central nervous systems and other organic systems -- emerged.
This, if true, essentially means that no intelligent or coherent reason for the existence of life was considered beforehand by a rational entity in some planning stage. In the absence of any good reason to take the notion of a planning stage seriously, or the notion of there being a valid goal in preventing the decay of material systems, we more or less have to conclude that the brain's ability to create sensations in reaction to stimuli is not only unintelligent, but downright nasty.
So, to reiterate: Nothing capable of being received by a brain as sensory input is possessed of some innate unpleasantness; the brain, as part of the central nervous system, is chiefly interested in preventing the genotype, as an energy-dependent process, from decaying; to this end, the brain creates unpleasantness as a reaction to the "efforts" of external agents to bring about disorder in the system; however, there isn't any intelligent reason to believe that entropy is something to be stopped, making the brain's extremely painful efforts to stop it really unnecessary and unintelligent; additionally, every brain has failed or will probably fail in its efforts, and over 99% of them no longer exist.
Pain is bad, but is termination of life? If we were completely incapable of feeling anything, but, unlike bacteria, still possessed language, would we really mind dying? Are shark teeth bad because they can damage our organs, or because they hurt? Would you mind a lion ripping your guts out if it didn't hurt or cause intense fear, and if not, why is that a bad thing? If the AIDS virus were the only entity in the universe capable of replication, it would no longer be a terrible virus, for what do rocks care if they "get AIDS"? Brains create pain to preempt decay; get rid of all the brains and you could have a universe composed of nothing but AIDS -- with no problems whatsoever, anywhere.
The next time that you try to avoid a horribly painful situation, remember that it's not the world that you should be fearing -- it's your brain and its childish insistence on resisting entropy. Bullets, kidney stones, births, panic attacks? Bone cancer? They're okay in themselves. Really, the only thing that's actually capable of hurting you is that pink thing in your skull.
Of course, to prevent integration with competing systems and other environmental parameters, these new systems also had to remain partially closed -- at least in the sense of putting defense and regulatory mechanisms in place. This kept the systems well-defined, with physical barriers and spatial limitations, while still allowing them enough openness to acquire the energy necessary for their perpetuation.
So what did this opening of otherwise self-contained, self-regulating systems accomplish? For starters, it introduced homeostasis into the environment. This was initially a radical, if meaningless, departure from the way in which energy had been transferred from one location to another in the past. After the fact of life's emergence, though, it turned out that the "mostly closed" systems, or organisms, were nevertheless quite susceptible to the various forces of the universe, and thus, entropy. Mobility and a binary attraction-repulsion system enabled them to disperse energy in an entirely new way, but other physical agents were still quite persistent in their vying for physical space, and were occasionally successful at bringing about states of maximum disorder among some living organisms; this eventually culminated in what we call death.
The organic instructions to resist disorder were mutually persistent, however; as time went on, organisms managed to find, by happenstance, new ways to perpetuate themselves -- even with both living and non-living "space competitors" vying for the same resources. Finally, a few billion years into this routine, one motivation mechanism of incredible efficacy arose -- sentience.
But why does it matter? What was sentience effective at?
Well, as it would turn out, the goal of sentience was not to help organisms "enjoy" their processes; rather, it was to stop organisms from decaying, as it had been with all previous biological mechanisms.
In short, this meant that neural nets would go on to continually birth, over and over again in successive generations, increasingly complex incentives for organisms to avoid behaviors and parameters conducive to their own destruction. At some point during all of this, fully robust brains emerged, and with them, not the capacity to feel pain, but pain itself. To put it succinctly, brains did not attempt to manage pain to the benefit of organisms; they attempted to manage disorder to the benefit of nothing, using the pain that they created entirely on their own as a motivator. We sneeze a lot when sick not because viruses convert themselves into mucus as they multiply, but because, to prevent the body from being destroyed, the immune system must produce mucus. We experience pain not because external agents are inherently painful, but because brains are painful while attempting to prevent disorder.
If you're not following along, again, "disorder" in this context refers to that lack of physical work that causes closed systems to literally "freeze," having no more energy to convert from one state to another; everything has been evenly distributed, and each piece is incapable of transferring energy to any other, or has itself decayed.
Is there anything wrong with decay, though? When two weather patterns collide and eventually disperse their energy content, leaving no further work to be done, is this a bad result? Is it something to be avoided, or even stopped at all costs? It doesn't appear to be, based on anything that we've ever observed; furthermore, without any good reason to invest in the god hypothesis, the agenda of brains (and of central nervous sytems as wholes) must be questioned, for the alternative to the god hypothesis is that the universe -- and thus, all constituents, including central nervous systems and other organic systems -- emerged.
This, if true, essentially means that no intelligent or coherent reason for the existence of life was considered beforehand by a rational entity in some planning stage. In the absence of any good reason to take the notion of a planning stage seriously, or the notion of there being a valid goal in preventing the decay of material systems, we more or less have to conclude that the brain's ability to create sensations in reaction to stimuli is not only unintelligent, but downright nasty.
So, to reiterate: Nothing capable of being received by a brain as sensory input is possessed of some innate unpleasantness; the brain, as part of the central nervous system, is chiefly interested in preventing the genotype, as an energy-dependent process, from decaying; to this end, the brain creates unpleasantness as a reaction to the "efforts" of external agents to bring about disorder in the system; however, there isn't any intelligent reason to believe that entropy is something to be stopped, making the brain's extremely painful efforts to stop it really unnecessary and unintelligent; additionally, every brain has failed or will probably fail in its efforts, and over 99% of them no longer exist.
Pain is bad, but is termination of life? If we were completely incapable of feeling anything, but, unlike bacteria, still possessed language, would we really mind dying? Are shark teeth bad because they can damage our organs, or because they hurt? Would you mind a lion ripping your guts out if it didn't hurt or cause intense fear, and if not, why is that a bad thing? If the AIDS virus were the only entity in the universe capable of replication, it would no longer be a terrible virus, for what do rocks care if they "get AIDS"? Brains create pain to preempt decay; get rid of all the brains and you could have a universe composed of nothing but AIDS -- with no problems whatsoever, anywhere.
The next time that you try to avoid a horribly painful situation, remember that it's not the world that you should be fearing -- it's your brain and its childish insistence on resisting entropy. Bullets, kidney stones, births, panic attacks? Bone cancer? They're okay in themselves. Really, the only thing that's actually capable of hurting you is that pink thing in your skull.
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