If I wait for this to be perfect, I will never post it. Please forgive the (hopefully temporarily) unorganized nature of my writing and thinking. I hope to put on this page some ideas that can link together in interesting ways, and I will continue to add ideas and organize my thoughts as the semester goes along. Please feel free to add ideas or perspectives that you also find helpful, useful, or funny. Pretty pictures and good music will also be appreciated.

Inequality

When someone made the point last week that inequality is part of the way things have always been, I think he was alluding to what is commonly called The Matthew Effect.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect

To take a random example, when you’re searching for a job the more opportunities you’ve had, the more opportunities you’re given, even though you usually learn most of what you need to know on the job anyway…

But the point is that if you have demonstrated your usefulness in some way, society will give you things that make it easier to increase your usefulness…...why should anyone invest resources in things that haven't been shown to work?

(Some might argue that people are like seeds, and they have enormous potential that we're basically wasting by having winners and losers in society...)

Rich people have the luxury of making decisions that will benefit them in the long run, whereas poor people often have to sacrifice the long run just to survive in the present…

So, whereas the rich are engaged in “generative spirals” (in the sense that their wellbeing continually improves), the poor are often trapped in “degenerative spirals” and poverty traps.

Obviously, IQ is largely determined by wealth…what have we been selecting for in the "ownership class", exactly?

http://www.newser.com/story/79783/iq-tests-for-4-year-olds-reveal-nothing-but-wealth.html

http://nymag.com/news/features/63427/

Poor kids' brains are like those of stroke victims:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081203092429.htm

Laissez-faire systems allow/perpetuate this sort of inequality…

But just because this seems to be the way things are, doesn’t necessarily mean inequality is inevitable and the situation hopeless…

You could make an analogous argument to the one Jeffrey Sachs makes in the End of Poverty: There is some threshold level of wellbeing at which people can be in generative rather than degenerative spirals. If rich people can aggressively create conditions such that that level of wellbeing is met for poorer people, then those people might be able to lift themselves out of poverty...

We have failed, as a society, to increase the level of wellbeing of those at the bottom, thus creating a death spiral of anger and poverty that threatens to consume our “representative democracy”…Save us, Oh Bama! (I don’t mean that in an entirely sarcastic way, I love this man)

http://www.hulu.com/watch/125320/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-q-and-o#s-p2-sr-i1

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090915174455.htm

Pragmatism, Functionalism, Legal Realism

Inequality is particularly interesting in light of our discussions of pragmatism, functionalism, and legal realism. By pragmatism I simply mean that ideas are tools…just like hammers, say, or sickles.

Zero Marginal Cost

This is itself interesting when you consider Eben’s statement that he lives in a world of zero-marginal cost, where money has been replaced with information flows…that could mean a lot of things, but that’s one possible thing.

Synthesis: Ideas can be thought of as tools, capital, and power. We can combine and and rearrange ideas/tools to build other, better tools. The relationships between ideas make them that much more powerful…

(I think) what Eben is trying to do is to get us to collaboratively synthesize ideas...if we start the process now, then maybe at some point we would have enough ideas that we wouldn’t have to play the game “the establishment” incentivizes us to play…

Ideas can be copied and synthesized cheaply…free hammers for everyone! I can give you my ideas for cheap, which creates positive sum gains...

We’re essentially living in abundance, with free money everywhere, but there’s too much information and too many ideas…the average person is drowning in unorganized data, but “data is dirt and knowledge is gold”…too much of the information available doesn’t improve anything, so it’s useless…

But of all the possible ideas, most of them are stupid...ergo Occam's Razor. So it makes more sense to listen to the ideas of the guy with the PhD? than the homeless guy on the street...you have to play the game in order to be taken seriously, because success (consequences?) is the final arbiter of truth.

Non-zero marginal cost

There are scarcities that matter greatly, and which create zero sum games…

Ownership class…do they also own the ideas? I would love to hear Eben talk about intellectual property...

The rate at which scientific information is being generated is astounding…and if information entails adaptation, then things should be changing pretty quickly…

The problem is that much of this information is too disorganized to be useful...

Just because rationalizations within the law gives a false sense of certainty (when what you really have is coherence... “analytic truths” are themselves just tools), that doesn't mean rationalizing/theorizing can't serve a useful function...

Capitalism

FA Hayek: Communism with a central planner fails because the planner can't adapt quickly enough to new information, whereas in capitalist economies, the information aggregation in the form of prices allow (in theory) allow markets to adapt more quickly to new information...&#8230

I’d like to make an analogy between Hayek’s argument against centrally planned economies, and the current educational system. Maybe the educational system is failing for some of the same reasons central planning fails: a “central planner” can’t adapt quickly enough to new information, so it is terrible at correcting inequality/inefficiency, and it it cuts off a lot of people’s potential… in the process...

Pain also creates needs...

If your needs aren't being fulfilled (or even recognized), that creates inefficiencies. You might try to replace sleep with food, for example...that's not good for anyone...

Don’t pawn your license

Reasons to play the game

(1) For many people success is the final arbiter of truth, so it makes sense to pursue traditional power, even if you want to change the game: no one cares about your ideas if you’re a nobody. For example, if Eben was a homeless person we passed by on the way to class instead of a law professor, we would be less inclined to take his ideas seriously, no matter how good they were.

(2) Assuming that we’re too stupid to change the game (perhaps because we've been crippled by the educational system), playing the game is probably our best option

(3) Going along with institutional forces guiding our decisions is like floating with the stream and not against it, stupidly. We have our own problems to deal with…

(4) Even if we end up going into meaningless jobs instead of changing the world…hey, lots of people don’t change the world and yet can still be very happy...and they find meaning in spending time with family and friends and whatnot...

(5) The current system may not be perfect, but if everyone just does what they're supposed to do, then everything should be okay...if everyone refused to play the game, the system would collapse and poor people would suffer the most, like they always do...and there's no guarantee that getting rid of the old system would ensure that a better system would take its place.

Reasons not to play the game

(1) Immoral to clean up the vomit of capitalism

(2) Potentially unsatisfying

(3) Eben’s career could offer more variety, whereas most careers require specialization for the sake of “efficiency”…our brains are highly adaptive generalists

(4) In terms of resourcefulness, it's possible that we can be happy with what we've been given...maybe "enough" is "enough"

Collaboration/Associational thinking

Associational thinking... On the one hand, the wiki format is supposed to be inherently associational/collaborative...

And if the outcome is built into the process, then I suppose that's a good thing...

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/boroditsky09/boroditsky09_index.html

Education

If we’re trying to reduce inequality, we can’t not talk about education.

This is a good candidate for one of those areas where the adults simply have no idea of what’s going on. The hand that rocks the cradle is brain-dead.

There are many organizations dedicated to bettering education: The Gates foundation. Geoffrey Canada, TFA, a whole bunch of other organizations…

Our brains and bodies are far too complex to be “educated” through “brute force” or coercion…

Eben mentions John Dewey and growth... learning through doing: how often do kids in school get a chance to think creatively in a way that actually matters?

What are some of important things that we don’t teach/give kids in public school? Where do we expect kids to learn these things if we don't teach it in public school? http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=mixed-impressions

If one of the points of education is to keep people from having to reinvent the wheel, then isn’t leaving all of those important things to “freedom”/ the private sector incredibly inefficient? (I'm interested in people's conceptions of "freedom")

What is the relationship between the separation of church and state and what we can and can’t teach in schools?

If we have kids sit down for 7 hours a day, should we be surprised when we end up with a sedentary society?

If you think of religion as a "way of life" instead of a “belief system” (although William James would say that a belief is just a habit of action) is there really a separation of church and state? Or is that simply another legal fiction that keeps the peace, but is false in practice?

Grades and organic growth...we need to "evaluate" kids, right? So how do we get kids to stop comparing themselves to others...

Neuroscience and computer science should also be taught in public schools… http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/usr/wing/www/ct-and-tc-long.pdf

It is a sad society in which philosophy is regarded as useless…the theory is that you can’t pass on “wisdom” because recognizing patterns in experience can’t come without experience…do things, but we can’t give people perspectives on living well…that would just cross some line...it's as though we're prohibited from giving kids the skills, habits, ideas, character to live well, in the long run…

Other people's internal states are too difficult to control externally: therefore we ignore internal states or use blunt instruments, like coercion: but what you think about and they way you think about them matter, greatly.

Nature is good for people's brains, art is good for people's brains, stimulation in the immediate environment is important...

If health is a necessary condition for learning, then “educating” kids before making them healthy is absurdly inefficient, and perhaps a little cruel...

Why don't we give kids access to more powerful ideas when they are younger and more plastic…otherwise, aren't we just wasting their time?

Your time is much more valuable when you're younger, because the habits and ideas you acquire now will benefit you for the rest of your life...sort of like compound interest over time...

The point is that kids' time is disgustingly valuable, their brains are incredibly plastic, and the fact that our educational system wastes so much of their time and potential is a travesty of epic proportions.

Brains are too complex to “educate” through force and coercion… Learning by doing is much more effective...we all know that taking lots of practice tests helps to consolidate and organize information in our heads...but teachers don't like to give practice tests or give much feedback...

Not to mention, the world is too complicated for us not to focus on helping kids develop the things that will be useful/beneficial in the future as opposed to the things that might be useful/beneficial.

Embodied cognition…

Pranav Mistry http://www.ted.com/talks/pranav_mistry_the_thrilling_potential_of_sixthsense_technology.html

If you’re aiming to lose weight, that’s stupid…it’s just one indicator of how healthy you/your lifestyle are.

The country is aiming for weight loss instead of health, worrying about the wrong things. Like worrying about grades instead of growth...confusing the signals for the value that's supposed to underlie those signals...aim to be healthy and your weight will take care of itself...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HX1qZ2WmjDE

Kids who exercise have higher IQ’s (not that we should care at all about IQ as a measure of "intelligence")

http://www.physorg.com/news178978326.html

Walking grows brains You mean increasing blood and oxygen flow to our brains can make us smarter?! Oxygen, which we can’t live without for more than a few minutes, is good for our brains? You mean that all but eliminating the basic form of transportation we’ve had for thousands of years could have a detrimental effect on a "representative democracy"?

The biological level and the political level: are kids smarter, happier, more self-aware at the end of every day? Or simply more “educated”?

Is the current educational system good only because it's better than watching TV all day? (Incidentally, what needs does TV fulfill? Why do sad people watch so much TV?)

"Signalling model" of education versus organic growth models...you can't rush organic growth...and the kind of growth that we want won't necessarily happen on the arbitrary schedules we create for it...and it's not as though we don't immediately forget large chunks of what we "learn" in terms of memorization anyway...the semester ends, but life goes on...

Fear, risk, uncertainty...body language, bodily intelligence, white matter, the present...ventromedial prefrontal cortex...what Eben means by courage...

How can we create conditions that allow kids to become emotionally healthy, content, caring, and "other-centered" adults (as opposed to unhappy, self-centered adults)

Some things are too important for the public realm to put its grubby hands upon?: the personal is too important for the public realm to handle…there is a certain element of privacy, a line that can’t be crossed…

But the point is that if you’re going to use 8 hours of someone’s time inefficiently every single day, it isn’t as though you aren’t encroaching on the private realm already…

We are taught in schools to ignore (1) the complexity of it all and (2) important features of human nature…...to ignore either is a bad habit

An unexamined life isn’t worth living, an unreflective educational system isn’t worth going through…

Of the infinite number of things you could be doing, thinking about what you could be doing is one of them…At least some of the time should be spent thinking about how to make whatever you’re doing, better.

If often becomes clear that there is no good reason for doing things a certain way other than that that is the way that they have been done…Granted, there are often good reasons to do things in some way that aren’t clear until you’ve done them yourself (Incidentally, many people have a habit of rejecting ideas that don't fit within the rationalizations they already have...they call this "critical thinking")...but nonetheless, much of what people do on a daily basis is remarkable for its absurdity. "foolish consistencies" etc.

It’s amazing to me that we presume to teach children…as though we ourselves know what’s going on…I’d argue that philosophy should be taught in public schools, so at least people would question what they know and what they think they know, etc.

The way we educate kids today is insane…INSANE… And it may always be insane, because there are always massive improvements that can be made...but in particular, today, it is a remarkably stupid system...although all the "free money" available is heartening...

There are massive inefficiencies in the way we pass on information…wisdom, supposedly can’t be passed on, because (I think) wisdom involves seeing patterns within experience, and kids don’t have much experience...so how can we impart "wisdom" without imparting our biases?

Complex, adaptive systems

The educational system has to be far more adaptive…Hochman said he went through the educational system and felt like he knew nothing…on the one hand, that’s excellent...given the insane complexity of it all, even the "smartest" people ever know almost nothing compared to what's out there...

With all our talk of formal systems, you can never design a perfect educational system...it would break down at some point. Which is why we shouldn’t be aiming for perfect but rather a system that improves consistently. The most beautiful and effective systems have some sort of adaptive/self-corrective mechanism/failsafe... scientific experiments (often, I know this is simplistic) have to be repeatable and peer reviewed…the change has to be built into the system, because once it is in place, it becomes institutionalized, rigid, and formal…but all formal systems fail, because they can’t capture all of the available information…If the system can’t adapt itself prospectively, the system will be forced to adapt/break down through “exogenous” circumstances…

(I think) Eben mentioned something to the effect that the problems of today/tomorrow require systems engineers…not legislators who prefer to work within the current system

There are simply too many ideas and too many improvements that can be made…the educational system itself should be better today than it was yesterday, and so forth…yet it will be largely the same tomorrow…

Yet, there's no reason for it not to be better tomorrow. If I was more cynical, I would wonder whether the current system serves more of a crippling function in order to maintain an orderly society in which people are dependent upon capitalism…

One possible solution would be to have kids do what we’re doing now. Maybe kids in schools should be synthesizing diverse bodies of knowledge to improve the system under which they’re operating, thereby not only teaching them to synthesize (and giving them ownership over their lives AND creating "capital" in the form of ideas) but also to actually improve the system under which they’re operating in the process...they would be playing positive sum games from a young age...We would have children being able to ask, freely, “what if?” One possible way of changing the game...

Miscellaneous

Politics shouldn’t be this fish oil/candy game…if something is difficult and it stays difficult, that probably means you’re doing it wrong.

I’m also interested in Eben’s dismissive attitude toward right wing populism…if class warfare is your game, then these people seem like natural allies… it’s one thing to be dismissive of right wing ideas, but the emotional injustices these people feel are real, and I know he knows that...but on an emotional level, you can't tell people that their ideas don't matter in a "democracy."

Religion

Values and social change…what function do values have?

As a practical matter, I assume pragmatism, liberalism, and “metaphysical” atheism…in a (supposedly) representative democracy, we must appeal to reasons other people can see...

But I think there are fundamental human needs that the system simply chooses not to recognize…religion isn’t going anywhere…it is a fact of existence in America…

And if you're talking about the history of radical social movements, how can you not talk about religion?

There are some moral ideas that are more easily expressed through a non-materialistic standpoint… from a materialist standpoint, why should I care about a person that is “functionally” useless?

If we suppose that religion fulfills some fundamental human needs, we could stop arguing either/or and start thinking “okay, but/and”

Ideas are simply tools: hammers are good for some things and not for others...mentalistic explanations of the universe are terrible at explaining/predicting things (relative to scientific/systematic explanations), but could be fantastic at fulfilling important mental/emotional needs everyone has...

-- AjKhandaker - 04 Feb 2010