I think it might be about specialized knowledge, because I see indexing and cross linking things as it’s own kind of specialized knowledge. It seems like all of your examples are focused on creating bigger denser networks of cross domain indexing. I think that is great, and I love trying to do it myself! It’s highly useful. But is it possible to be useful without it? I can hypothesize that a few people on a team with that skill could make other people that don’t have that skill useful...
For example, maybe my co-worker might not understand what Brewster’s angle actually means, but if I can rely on them to do the calculations correctly than I can use them to get more work done than I could do alone (hypothetically). If situations like that exist, or are common, then it is actually ok that most students (and employees) are not that interested in actually understanding what the symbolic manipulation they are doing means.
But there are two potential flaws. (1) We are creating more and more capable artificial general intelligence, and doing so may make the people who didn’t understand what they were doing deeply enough no longer useful. This is bad under the current prevailing social systems. (2) It might not be the case that schools are actually teaching students anything that is actually useful if the students do not understand it deeply with cross indexing.
(1) is a more general problem… and honestly I’m more worried about misaligned ASI then economic impact, but it is still a pretty important concern.
(2) Is definitely true in some regards. It seems like education does function as a shit test to sort people into social strata, but insofar as it is actually teaching skills that get used, it may be better if emphasis was shifted away from “practice applying specialized skill” and towards “learn dense indexes connecting specialized skills to their applications”, trusting that people can look up and reference the specialized skill if they need to apply it, but are much more likely to benefit from knowing which skills exist and where they are useful than to have a bunch of skills that they will forget because they don’t understand how those skills connected back to anything real at all.
But I must confess I think (2) is happening somewhat implicitly through the way different communities of different specialized knowledge produce specialists that connect into cross domain teams. I think it would benefit from being made more explicit, but that is probably the sort of thing that sociologists and business management students learn about… I would like to learn more about sociology.
I think it might be about specialized knowledge, because I see indexing and cross linking things as it’s own kind of specialized knowledge. It seems like all of your examples are focused on creating bigger denser networks of cross domain indexing. I think that is great, and I love trying to do it myself! It’s highly useful. But is it possible to be useful without it? I can hypothesize that a few people on a team with that skill could make other people that don’t have that skill useful...
For example, maybe my co-worker might not understand what Brewster’s angle actually means, but if I can rely on them to do the calculations correctly than I can use them to get more work done than I could do alone (hypothetically). If situations like that exist, or are common, then it is actually ok that most students (and employees) are not that interested in actually understanding what the symbolic manipulation they are doing means.
But there are two potential flaws. (1) We are creating more and more capable artificial general intelligence, and doing so may make the people who didn’t understand what they were doing deeply enough no longer useful. This is bad under the current prevailing social systems. (2) It might not be the case that schools are actually teaching students anything that is actually useful if the students do not understand it deeply with cross indexing.
(1) is a more general problem… and honestly I’m more worried about misaligned ASI then economic impact, but it is still a pretty important concern.
(2) Is definitely true in some regards. It seems like education does function as a shit test to sort people into social strata, but insofar as it is actually teaching skills that get used, it may be better if emphasis was shifted away from “practice applying specialized skill” and towards “learn dense indexes connecting specialized skills to their applications”, trusting that people can look up and reference the specialized skill if they need to apply it, but are much more likely to benefit from knowing which skills exist and where they are useful than to have a bunch of skills that they will forget because they don’t understand how those skills connected back to anything real at all.
But I must confess I think (2) is happening somewhat implicitly through the way different communities of different specialized knowledge produce specialists that connect into cross domain teams. I think it would benefit from being made more explicit, but that is probably the sort of thing that sociologists and business management students learn about… I would like to learn more about sociology.