A Teacher vs. Everyone Else
A repairer wants your stuff to break down,
A doctor wants you to get ill,
A lawyer wants you to get in conflicts,
A farmer wants you to be hungry,
But there is only a teacher who wants you to learn.
Of course you see what is wrong with the above “argument / meme / good-thought”. But the first time I came across this meme, I did not.
Until a month or two ago when this meme appeared in my head again and within seconds I discarded it away as fallacious reasoning. What was the difference this time? That I was now aware of the Conspiracy. And this meme happened to come up on one evening when I was thinking about fallacies and trying to practice my skills of methods of rationality.
If you are a teacher, and you read the meme, it will assign to you the Good Guy label. And if you are one of {repairer, doctor, lawyer, farmer, etc} then you get the Bad Guy label. There is also a third alternative in which you are neither—say a teenager.
If you are not explicitly being labeled bad or good, then you may just move on like I did. Or maybe you put some detective effort and do realize the fallacies. Depends on your culture: If your culture has tales like, “If your teacher and your God both are in front of you, who do you greet / bow to first?” and the right answer is “why of course my teacher because otherwise how would I know about God?” then you are just more likely to award a point to the already point-rich teacher-bucket and move on.
If you get called the Bad Guy, then you have a motivation to falsify the meme. And you will likely do so. This meme does look highly fragile in hindsight.
But if you are a teacher, you have no reason to investigate. You are getting free points. And it’s in fact true that you do want people to learn. So, this meme probably did originate in the teacher circle. Where it has potential to get shared without getting beaten down.
What are the fallacies though? Here is the one I can identify:
The type error of comparing desired “requirements” with desired “outcomes”. “A teacher wants you to learn” is a specification of the teacher-function’s desired outcome. On the other hand, “your stuff to break down” is a desired requirement of a repairer. A repairer’s desired outcome is “your stuff to work again”. Generally, requirements are “bad” and outcomes are “good” because the function is transformation of “bad” to “good”. Any function can replace a teacher here to make it look like the only good one.
So, will everything be alright if you don’t make the type error and only compare requirements with requirements and outcomes with outcomes? No.
Let’s introduce a thief in the meme:
A repairer wants your stuff to break down,
A doctor wants you to get ill,
A lawyer wants you to get in conflicts,
A farmer wants you to be hungry,
A teacher wants you to be knowledge-less,
But there is only a thief who wants you to be rich.
Here, there is no type error. Only requirements are being compared.
But obviously this is not right. Thieves are bad. You know that.
I thought the first quote was tongue in cheek and implied that teachers want stupid pupils.
The desired quality for pupils is that they be indoctrinable, not stupid.
I think now you’re talking more about desired qualities of a system than teachers, which might also be interesting in the other cases. In some technical sense probably it applies to the farmer, but human use of food is so constant and cyclical, it feels misapplied there. The doctor may be similar to a farmer in that regard, making money off the nature of humans to occasionally be ill.
However, the lawyer is most like what you are describing above, fully dependent on the system of conflicts for its sustenance, as the Dao De Jing states, “The more laws and ordinances are promulgated, The more thieves and robbers there are.” Hence, perhaps, the general easy animosity towards lawyers.
I wonder if there is a social proportion to a school system having more of factor X and it getting more social animosity. I suspect it would be the same factor that creates droves of disaffected, burnt-out teachers. Of course, there is also the illness-industrial-complex system, which most people react badly to, compared to doctors themselves. What is that factor though?
I’m not sure how to interpret this. Repairers, doctors, lawyers and farmers are market inventions based on demand so technically they all want you to be rich. Teachers (at least in state schools) are more like a type of clergy with a sacred duty to their ‘parish’. So a more appropriate description could be: A teacher wants more teachers.
I can kind of see the original meme’s point in the extremes. Consider a mechanic shop that has had very, very slow business for months and is in serious financial trouble. I can see the owners Moloching their way into “suggesting” that their technicians maybe don’t fix it all the way. After all, what’s the harm in having a few customers come back a little more often if it means maybe saving the business?
But this is only on the extremes.
If the mechanic does shoddy work I won’t come back.
If the teacher… well, it doesn’t matter; the students not coming back is the expected outcome.
Unfortunately that only helps for those with the necessary experience to discern good work, and also the time and desire to inspect it.