Thanks Chris & Paul. A couple comments on your education theme:
- Re education, I taught for 30 years in a little weekend test prep and enrichment school with virtually no administration and absolutely no silly paperwork. Our job was to get the kids to master useful skills and that was it. If the kids learned, the kids were happy and the parents were happy. No job protection, no bennies, no pension, nothing like that. If you taught well, you were back next week; if you were no good, you were booted out by lunchtime and it was see ya wouldn’t want to be ya. There was a simple purity to the job that I appreciated and of course it was highly unusual, almost 19th century in its stark precariousness, but it was a better teaching and learning experience than many other places out there. Too many schools have become little other than wildly expensive daycare and indoctrination centers that do more harm than good.
- If vigilant parents can homeschool with like-minded families, that’s almost always a much cleaner and more vigorous choice. Homeschool, church, master/apprentice; play, sports, exploration, fluency with physical tools and instruments; libraries, online lectures, working the soil – these would likely yield more than a dozen conventional schools without the neuroses and addictions.
- In recent years, the most sane and good-humored people I meet are tradesmen working their own business out of vans; the most out of touch and unhappy are lost in the Neverland of abstraction chomping on one blue pill after another.
- Re AI, there may be a legitimate place for it as a tool, but we know that people will take shortcuts whenever possible, and it’s simple to predict that students (and adults) who already can’t write (or think) very well will have even less skill if they don’t have to labor through essays or graphs or presentations themselves. By writing we learn to think. Routinely take the AI shortcut and we will have generations coming up who won’t be able to think at all. These will rely on AI for everything, similar to how the calculator eroded everyday math skills and GPS has made people increasingly clueless about the layouts of even their own home towns.
- Re AI’s erosion of critical thinking, we’re already seeing how the Censorship Industrial Complex shuts down “misinformation” and “conspiracy theories” identified by “authorities” and “trusted sources” – and though PP and other places are dedicated to decoding and mocking the official BS, the day will soon come when most people will have insufficient skills to even see they are being duped and no ability to challenge and defrock the Wizard of Oz. That’s when things can tilt Full Orwell Forever – or just until entropy and energy failure save us by starving the grid and servers. But such a society, having fallen from the 12th or 24th rung, will still be in mighty big trouble.