even a “neutral” college class (let’s say a standard algorithms & data structures CS class) is non-neutral relative to certain beliefs
Things that many people consider controversial: evolution, sex education, history. But even for mathematical lessons, you will often find a crackpot who considers given topic controversial. (-1)×(-1) = 1? 0.999… = 1?
some people object to the structure of universities and their classes to begin with
In general, unschooling.
In my opinion, the important functionality of schools is: (1) separating reliable sources of knowledge from bullshit, (2) designing a learning path from “I know nothing” to “I am an expert” where each step only requires the knowledge of previous steps, (3) classmates and teachers to discuss the topic with.
Without these things, learning is difficult. If an autodidact stumbles on some pseudoscience in library, even if they later figure out that it was bullshit, it is a huge waste of time. Picking up random books on a topic and finding out that I don’t understand the things they expect me to already know is disappointing. Finding people interested in the same topic can be difficult.
But everything else about education is incidental. No need to walk into the same building. No need to only have classmates of exactly the same age. The learning path doesn’t have to be linear, could be a directed oriented graph. Generally, no need to learn a specific topic at a specific age, although it makes sense to learn the topics that are prerequisites to a lot of knowledge as soon as possible. Grading is incidental; you need some feedback, but IMHO it would be better to split the knowledge into many small pieces, and grade each piece as “you get it” or “you don’t”.
...and the conclusion of my thesis is that a good educational system would focus on the essentials, and be liberal about everything else. However, there are people who object against the very things I consider essential. The educational system that would seem incredible free for me would still seem oppressive to them.
neutrality is a type of tactic for establishing cooperation between different entities.
That means you can have a system neutral towards selected entities (the ones you want in the coalition), but not others. For example, you can have religious tolerance towards an explicit list of churches.
This can lead to a meta-game where some members of the coalition try to kick out someone, because they are no longer necessary. And some members strategically keeping someone in, not necessarily because they love them, but because “if they are kicked out today, tomorrow it could be me; better avoid this slippery slope”.
Examples: Various cults in USA that are obviously destructive but enjoy a lot of legal protection. Leftists establishing an exception for “Nazis”, and then expanding the definition to make it apply to anyone they don’t like. Similarly, the right calling everything they don’t like “communism”. And everyone on internet calling everything “religion”.
“we will take no sides between these things; how they succeed or fail is up to you”
Or the opposite of that: “the world is biased against X, therefore we move towards true neutrality by supporting X”.
is it robust to being intentionally subverted?
So, situations like: the organization is nominally politically neutral, but the human at an important position has political preferences… so far it is normal and maybe unavoidable, but what if there are multiple humans like that, all having the same political preference. If they start acting in a biased way, is it possible for other members to point it out.. without getting accused in turn of “bringing politics” into the organization?
As soon as somebody asks “why is this the way things are?” unexamined normality vanishes.
They can easily create a subreddit r/anti-some-specific-way-things-are and now the opposition to the idea is forever a thing.
a way to reconstruct some of the best things about our “unexamined normality” and place them on a firmer foundation so they won’t disappear as soon as someone asks “why?”
Basically, we need a “FAQ for normality”. The old situation was that people who were interested in a topic knew why things are certain way, and others didn’t care. If you joined the group of people who are interested, sooner or later someone explained it to you in person.
But today, someone can make a popular YouTube video containing some false explanation, and overnight you have tons of people who are suddenly interested in the topic and believe a falsehood… and the people who know how things are just don’t have the capacity to explain that to someone who lacks the fundamentals, believes a lot of nonsense, has strong opinions, and is typically very hostile to someone trying to correct them. So they just give up. But now we have the falsehood established as an “alternative truth”, and the old process of teaching the newcomers no longer works.
The solution for “I don’t have a capacity to communicate to so many ignorant and often hostile people” is to make an article or a YouTube video with an explanation, and just keep posting the link. Some people will pay attention, some people won’t, but it no longer takes a lot of your time, and it protects you from the emotional impact.
There are things for which we don’t have a good article to link, or the article is not known to many. We could fix that. In theory, school was supposed to be this kind of FAQ, but that doesn’t work in a dynamic society where new things happen after you are out of school.
a lot of it is literally decided by software affordances. what the app lets you do is what there is.
Yeah, I often feel that having some kind of functionality would improve things, but the functionality is simply not there.
To some degree this is caused by companies having a monopoly on the ecosystem they create. For example, if I need some functionality for e-mail, I can make an open-source e-mail client that has it. (I think historically spam filters started like this.) If I need some functionality for Facebook… there is nothing I can do about it, other than leave Facebook but there is a problem with coordinating that.
Sometimes this is on purpose. Facebook doesn’t want me to be able to block the ads and spam, because they profit from it.
but having a substantive framework at all clearly isn’t incompatible with thinking independently, recognizing that people are flawed, or being open to changing your mind.
Yeah, if we share a platform, we may start examining some of its assumptions, and maybe at some moment we will collectively update. But if everyone assumes something else, it’s the Eternal September of civilization.
If we can’t agree on what is addition, we can never proceed to discuss multiplication. And we will never build math.
I think the right boundary to draw is around “power users”—people who participate in that network heavily rather than occasionally.
Sometimes this is reflected by the medium. For example, many people post comments on blogs, but only a small part of them writes blogs. By writing a blog you join the “power users”, and the beauty of it is that it is free for everyone and yet most people keep themselves out voluntarily.
(A problem coming soon: many fake “power users” powered by LLMs.)
I have many values differences with, say, the author of the Epic of Gilgamesh, but I still want to read it.
There is a difference between reading for curiosity and reading to get reliable information. I may be curious about e.g. Aristotle’s opinion on atoms, but I am not going to use it to study chemistry.
In some way, I treat some people’s opinions as information about the world, and other people’s opinions as information about them. Both are interesting, but in a different way. It is interesting to know my neighbor’s opinion on astrology, but I am not using this information to update on astrology; I only use it to update on my neighbor.
So I guess I have two different lines: whether I care about someone as a person, and whether I trust someone as a source of knowledge. I listen to both, but I process the information differently.
this points towards protocols.
Thinking about the user experience, I think it would be best if the protocol already came with three default implementations: as a website, as a desktop application, and as a smartphone app.
A website doesn’t require me to install anything; I just create an account and start using it. The downside is that the website has an owner, who can kick me out of the website. Also, I cannot verify the code. A malicious owner could probably take my password (unless we figure out some way to avoid this, that won’t be too inconvenient). Multiple websites talking to each other in a way that is as transparent for the user as possible.
A smartphone app, because that’s what most people use most of the day, especially when they are outside.
A desktop app, because that provides most options for the (technical) power user. For example, it would be nice to keep an offline archive of everything I want, delete anything I no longer want, export and import data.
Things that many people consider controversial: evolution, sex education, history. But even for mathematical lessons, you will often find a crackpot who considers given topic controversial. (-1)×(-1) = 1? 0.999… = 1?
In general, unschooling.
In my opinion, the important functionality of schools is: (1) separating reliable sources of knowledge from bullshit, (2) designing a learning path from “I know nothing” to “I am an expert” where each step only requires the knowledge of previous steps, (3) classmates and teachers to discuss the topic with.
Without these things, learning is difficult. If an autodidact stumbles on some pseudoscience in library, even if they later figure out that it was bullshit, it is a huge waste of time. Picking up random books on a topic and finding out that I don’t understand the things they expect me to already know is disappointing. Finding people interested in the same topic can be difficult.
But everything else about education is incidental. No need to walk into the same building. No need to only have classmates of exactly the same age. The learning path doesn’t have to be linear, could be a directed oriented graph. Generally, no need to learn a specific topic at a specific age, although it makes sense to learn the topics that are prerequisites to a lot of knowledge as soon as possible. Grading is incidental; you need some feedback, but IMHO it would be better to split the knowledge into many small pieces, and grade each piece as “you get it” or “you don’t”.
...and the conclusion of my thesis is that a good educational system would focus on the essentials, and be liberal about everything else. However, there are people who object against the very things I consider essential. The educational system that would seem incredible free for me would still seem oppressive to them.
That means you can have a system neutral towards selected entities (the ones you want in the coalition), but not others. For example, you can have religious tolerance towards an explicit list of churches.
This can lead to a meta-game where some members of the coalition try to kick out someone, because they are no longer necessary. And some members strategically keeping someone in, not necessarily because they love them, but because “if they are kicked out today, tomorrow it could be me; better avoid this slippery slope”.
Examples: Various cults in USA that are obviously destructive but enjoy a lot of legal protection. Leftists establishing an exception for “Nazis”, and then expanding the definition to make it apply to anyone they don’t like. Similarly, the right calling everything they don’t like “communism”. And everyone on internet calling everything “religion”.
Or the opposite of that: “the world is biased against X, therefore we move towards true neutrality by supporting X”.
So, situations like: the organization is nominally politically neutral, but the human at an important position has political preferences… so far it is normal and maybe unavoidable, but what if there are multiple humans like that, all having the same political preference. If they start acting in a biased way, is it possible for other members to point it out.. without getting accused in turn of “bringing politics” into the organization?
They can easily create a subreddit r/anti-some-specific-way-things-are and now the opposition to the idea is forever a thing.
Basically, we need a “FAQ for normality”. The old situation was that people who were interested in a topic knew why things are certain way, and others didn’t care. If you joined the group of people who are interested, sooner or later someone explained it to you in person.
But today, someone can make a popular YouTube video containing some false explanation, and overnight you have tons of people who are suddenly interested in the topic and believe a falsehood… and the people who know how things are just don’t have the capacity to explain that to someone who lacks the fundamentals, believes a lot of nonsense, has strong opinions, and is typically very hostile to someone trying to correct them. So they just give up. But now we have the falsehood established as an “alternative truth”, and the old process of teaching the newcomers no longer works.
The solution for “I don’t have a capacity to communicate to so many ignorant and often hostile people” is to make an article or a YouTube video with an explanation, and just keep posting the link. Some people will pay attention, some people won’t, but it no longer takes a lot of your time, and it protects you from the emotional impact.
There are things for which we don’t have a good article to link, or the article is not known to many. We could fix that. In theory, school was supposed to be this kind of FAQ, but that doesn’t work in a dynamic society where new things happen after you are out of school.
Yeah, I often feel that having some kind of functionality would improve things, but the functionality is simply not there.
To some degree this is caused by companies having a monopoly on the ecosystem they create. For example, if I need some functionality for e-mail, I can make an open-source e-mail client that has it. (I think historically spam filters started like this.) If I need some functionality for Facebook… there is nothing I can do about it, other than leave Facebook but there is a problem with coordinating that.
Sometimes this is on purpose. Facebook doesn’t want me to be able to block the ads and spam, because they profit from it.
Yeah, if we share a platform, we may start examining some of its assumptions, and maybe at some moment we will collectively update. But if everyone assumes something else, it’s the Eternal September of civilization.
If we can’t agree on what is addition, we can never proceed to discuss multiplication. And we will never build math.
Sometimes this is reflected by the medium. For example, many people post comments on blogs, but only a small part of them writes blogs. By writing a blog you join the “power users”, and the beauty of it is that it is free for everyone and yet most people keep themselves out voluntarily.
(A problem coming soon: many fake “power users” powered by LLMs.)
There is a difference between reading for curiosity and reading to get reliable information. I may be curious about e.g. Aristotle’s opinion on atoms, but I am not going to use it to study chemistry.
In some way, I treat some people’s opinions as information about the world, and other people’s opinions as information about them. Both are interesting, but in a different way. It is interesting to know my neighbor’s opinion on astrology, but I am not using this information to update on astrology; I only use it to update on my neighbor.
So I guess I have two different lines: whether I care about someone as a person, and whether I trust someone as a source of knowledge. I listen to both, but I process the information differently.
Thinking about the user experience, I think it would be best if the protocol already came with three default implementations: as a website, as a desktop application, and as a smartphone app.
A website doesn’t require me to install anything; I just create an account and start using it. The downside is that the website has an owner, who can kick me out of the website. Also, I cannot verify the code. A malicious owner could probably take my password (unless we figure out some way to avoid this, that won’t be too inconvenient). Multiple websites talking to each other in a way that is as transparent for the user as possible.
A smartphone app, because that’s what most people use most of the day, especially when they are outside.
A desktop app, because that provides most options for the (technical) power user. For example, it would be nice to keep an offline archive of everything I want, delete anything I no longer want, export and import data.