"In Defense of Childhood: Protecting Kids' Inner Wildness " by Chris Mercogliano, who spent thirty-five years teaching at the Albany Free School http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm
And there are many more I link to in the posts, but these are starting points.
It would take years to read through all the references I link to in the three posts (and it has.:-)
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with him, but for perspective, contrast with with Daniel Quinn, Ishmael, and "Beyond Civilization": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishmael_(novel)#New_Tribalist_Movement http://books.google.com/books?id=bHP9ztHuWmwC "With the publication of his trilogy of novels (Ishmael; The Story of B; My Ishmael), Quinn became something of a cult figure in visionary fiction. In those books, Quinn explored the self-sustaining nature of tribal societies and his belief that the current worldwide ecological and economic crises are due to the agriculture-based organization of civilized societies. He now turns his hand to nonfiction, with an appeal for universal renewal through a "New Tribal Revolution." Acknowledging that it would be impossible for most civilized humans to return to the hunting and gathering typical of tribes, Quinn argues that modern men and women need to invent a completely different mode of existence. To do this, they must question a basic assumption of all civilized societies: "Civilization must continue at any cost and must not be abandoned under any circumstances." Quinn, borrowing from Richard Dawkins, calls this assumption a "meme," the cultural equivalent of a gene. Quinn's main examples are peoples like the Maya and Anasazi, who returned to tribalism after unsuccessful attempts at other types of social organization, and the communal structure of traditional circuses. The author has a knack for stating the obvious with tremendous personal conviction. His articulation of a simpler way of life will appeal to those made frantic by globalization and all the forces conspiring to make people dance as fast as they can. (Oct.) "
On rethinking public funding: http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html "An outdated scarcity perspective in the non-profit community is still manifesting itself, however. There remains a continued emphasis on charitable projects which include plans for restricting access to the resulting publicly funded digital works now, in the hopes of creating revenue streams later. The funded organization usually proposes continuing to improve the work itself under its solitary control using money derived from selling licenses to the work. Contrast this with, for example, the post-scarcity development of the GNU/Linux operating system, made by thousands of volunteers contributing improvements to an initial base contributed by Linus Torvalds and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) GNU project.
The old scarcity criterion towards selecting what makes a viable project (based on a recurring royalty stream for static content) is completely at odds with the new post-scarcity model (based more on streams of attention, status, service, and customization). The new collaborative development process made possible by the internet (resulting in a work made by sharing licenses to copyrights made by a distributed network of authors funded indirectly by other means) is fundamentally different than the old process (resulting in a work made by centralized copyright ownership with a development process funded by selling licenses to the result)."
Some ramblings I don's see an obvious place to put; they are only tangential to your comment.:-)
See also my other comment in this thread with some related "hard" sci-fi ideas that seem "magical" just now: exploiting a bug in the VM simulating us, building natotech/biotech, and/or tapping zero point energy: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1733076&cid=33042664
Has anyone mentioned Edward Fredkin yet, by the way? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Fredkin "Fredkin's digital philosophy contains several fundamental ideas: Everything in physics and physical reality must have a digital informational representation. All changes in physical nature are consequences of digital informational processes. Nature is finite and digital. The traditional Judaeo-Christian concept of the soul has a counterpart in a static/dynamic soul defined in terms of digital philosophy."
And an article about Fredkin (taken from the book "Three Scientists and their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information" that the late Jim Beniger, a professor of mine, got me as a promo copy back in the 1980s, so thoughtful of him to suggest me for one, and it is a great book, and I especially liked the section on Fredkin):
"Did the Universe Just Happen?" http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/88apr/wright.htm "In addition to being a self-made millionaire, Fredkin is a self-made intellectual. Twenty years ago, at the age of thirty-four, without so much as a bachelor's degree to his name, he became a full professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Though hired to teach computer science, and then selected to guide MIT's now eminent computer-science laboratory through some of its formative years, he soon branched out into more-offbeat things. Perhaps the most idiosyncratic of the courses he has taught is one on "digital physics," in which he propounded the most idiosyncratic of his several idiosyncratic theories. This theory is the reason I've come to Fredkin's island. It is one of those things that a person has to be prepared for. The preparer has to say, "Now, this is going to sound pretty weird, and in a way it is, but in a way it's not as weird as it sounds, and you'll see this once you understand it, but that may take a while, so in the meantime don't prejudge it, and don't casually dismiss it." Ed Fredkin thinks that the universe is a computer. "
Sounds like quite a guy. It would be fun to chat with him someday. This was way before the Matrix. When the Matrix came out, I was like, that's the kind of idea I'd been thinking about for some time (inspired by several sources, including Fredkin) and it was nice to finally see it in the public consciousness in a big way.
Guess it would be good to cross-link this comment thread somehow to the recent slashdot article on computer game designers burning out from overwork (and I think lack of vitamin D and lack of healthy whole foods). http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1731650&cid=33026262
So, were the "planet builders" of "digital physical universes" burned out from overwork and ill from an unhealthy lifestyle. Is that where the "bugs" came from? Or just the general philosophical problems we wrestle with from a poorly though trough plot line?;-) Or, is it all just sublime and wonderful beyond our knowing?
"You jest..." Well, not exactly. I don't know what to believe for sure. That is just one of the obvious possibilities at this state of our understanding of information processing. It may be true, or it may not. Enumerating it as a possibility at least is a bit of an antidote to fundamentalism of other kinds. I think you may be right on the bugs though.:-)
I've thought about writing a sci-fi novel based around three interacting groups (taking off on Arthur C. Clark's ideas of any advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic): * Those who have expanded human consciousness in a transhumanist technical nanotech/biotech direction and can do magical-looking things like with nanotech (like when nanites rebuilt the Red Dwarf). * Those who have found this debugger link or just a bug and can affect reality in magical seeming ways (so, like Harry Potter or Earthsea, where words an incantations and symbolic movements and symbolic devices like wands are combined to create patterns that invoke complex programs written in arcane symbols, such as from "lumos" causing light to all sorts of complex spells invoked in complex ways -- maybe with a high degree of secrecy involved in who makes these things and who is told about them). * Those who have just expanded humanity in a brute-force sort of way throughout the solar system and beyond through self-replicating space habitats duplicating themselves from sunlight and asteroidal ore, and maybe also have recently learned to tap zero-point energy and so create energy and matter in empty space (so, they can duplicate things out of thin vacuum as it were). I have no idea where that would go. But those are the major sorts of "magic" things I can imagine in our future, and all are hard-sci-fi "plausible". Would the mystery of consciousness be an underlying theme?
In keeping with the theme of this article of interacting "alien" civilizations in space, maybe it could be humans plus two other "alien" races from other stars that meet, each with a different technological approach as above, and they try to understand each others tech? On the other hand, it's likely that humans will radiate into multiple species if we expand, so the "aliens" may just be some form of us, in terms of, say, a cyborged person-whale hybrid that travels through space, or human mental patterns copied into robots (and then changed further in there?), and biotech variations, and Amish-like "pure strain humans" (a term used in the Gamma World role playing game of the 1980s which had a diversification of human forms). So, there could be three very different species of humans to go along with those three technological approaches.
Maybe ZeroExistenZ's other comment on Terry Pratchett has gotten me to think again on this. But I don't have the story-telling skill or attention to humanistic detail of someone like the late James P. Hogan. I just finished rereading his "Star Child" to my kid as a way to honor all the great stories he had written, and how they effected my own life in a positive way. His "Entoverse" has aspects of what you suggest -- computational processes in a big computer start moving out into the real world through what one might think of as a sort of "bug" in the computer system.
Your point on bugs etc. raises another issue. At what point is something running on a virtual machine really just a contained item? If it can do things that affect the outside world, then patterns in it can migrate outwards into an enclosing virtual machine (or "real" machine). So, sims evolved in a VM could be copied into robot bodies (or even biological bodies) in the outer enclosing world. Or those in an economic simulation used to decide policy in the outer world could choose to act differently to effect the economics of the outer world (or the morality or whatever is being learned through simulation).
I can wonder what the ethics might be in relation to simulating worlds? I think about that even now, in playing computer games with "sprites". We don't really know what c
In the recently late:-( James P. Hogan's writings, there is a scene at the end of one of his Giants novels where an archeologist finds a (legitimate) advanced watch-like piece of technology in an archeological dig and throws it away, assuming it is a joke by someone on his staff.:-)
Anyway, it's interesting how humor and creativity are often intertwined, with humor often related to breaking out of our current mental sets.
On: http://amultiverse.com/2010/07/26/infinite-pest/ Could be.:-) Of course, how many levels of simulation go above them?:-) Who are their implementers? And the implementers of their implementers? Etc. An infinite chain? And then what levels in other directions make that chain possible? And those other dimensions work? How infinite could all that be? And is their any commonality, like Consciousness?
When I was a psychology undergrad around 1984, I read a (recent?) paper my advisor (George Miller) had laying around about levels of mind simulation, but I can't remember the author (Roger Shepard, Philip Johnson-Laird, Geoffrey Hinton, maybe a philosopher?). I looked through references in my own senior thesis just now, but nothing jumped out about that, and looking up those three authors doesn't lead me easily to such a paper. I'd like to read that paper again. The basic idea was that there could be levels of mental machinery that each supported the next level somehow. It was applied to intelligence (AI-ish?), but it might have been the first place I saw such an idea of multiple levels of intelligence myself, sort of as nested virtual machines. I'm thinking it must have been from a philosopher.
On whether the simulation argument is like creationism, well, science can't really prove or disprove stuff about what caused first causes or by definition access any context outside a virtual server and firewall (if such exist), since science requires experiment, prediction, repeatability, accessibility, and so on. Access to those mysteries outside a simulated sandbox we might live in would probably be precluded by a well-written virtual machine (unless we found the debugging hooks?:-) Although who knows at what point someone might network our server to others?:-) Maybe when we "discover" other civilizations around other stars?:-) We also have to accept that everything like the fossil record could be faked (or at least just evolved once and then put in place billions of times from backup copies, same as you or I might provision a billion Virtual Servers in a cloud all from a standard GNU/Linux distribution configured once). And I say that as someone who was in a PhD program in Ecology and Evolution for a time.:-) Although with that said, about accepting the possibility of a God who is into fakery, it doesn't get us very far to pretend evolution does not happen given we can see it happening every year with various diseases evolving, so it's not really that useful a mental construct to think that a God exists who is intentionally misleading (or cruel) in that way (whether it is true or not). Evolution is a really useful idea in science and design and prediction, so it makes sense to work from that basis, given all the evidence (although there remain the mysteries of consciousness itself, identity, and a host of other related issues). Besides, with lots of CPU, it might just be easier to grow everything from scratch (a big bang?) each time anyway, maybe just altering seeds or constants a little here and there, sort of like booting up a GNU/Linux box; so on a practical basis, evolution might be a reality in each simulation essentially from a big bang.
We do something like that with growing plants from a seed in our PlantStudio software -- each time you grow it, we regrow it from scratch using a seed number for the random number generator that translates into a specific branching pattern for the plant that goes repeatedly with that random number seed and other parameters you have chosen. http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/
One alternative to thinking we are living in a "simulation" is a "many worlds" quantum viewpoint, but maybe they are essentially the same in implications anyway?:-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation
The recently late:-( James P. Hogan wrote about these kinds of ideas -- both life in a simulation (in Entoverse), and many worlds interpretations in his other works (Star Child, Paths to Otherwhere, etc.). http://www.jamesphogan.com/ I hope his spirit (if such exists) is onto better things (if they exist, either in otherwheres, other virtual machines, or other planes of reality, or something beyond our imagining).
That's a rather materialistic view on "the good life".What happened to the value of singing, dancing, telling stories, eating food you enjoyed, having free time, not having someone bossing you around, time for communion with nature and the infinite, doing comprehensible work you enjoyed doing at your own pace, having time to raise children, and so on? The Sahlins article shows how most hunter/gatherers most of the time had no want for food. Would you trade, say, having time for singing and dancing and friendships for some hot water? You can always put hot rocks in a basket of water if you want hot water. And while you don't have hot water on tap, you also don't have property taxes to pay or dioxin in the food supply to digest.
Also, you've overgeneralized the point. There is a big difference between saying there were a lot of good things about a period in human history and saying *everything* about that period was wonderful or that we should just abandon other aspects of our current lives that we enjoy. But clearly, these game developers are not enjoying their lives. So, something is wrong. Looking to the past helps give us some perspective on that.
By the way, life expectancy after age five in hunter/gatherers may have been comparable to today. It is only in the last 100 years that human skeletons are now as tall as they were 10,000 years in the past (because agriculture was a big step backward nutritionally and culturally): http://press.princeton.edu/titles/6812.html
Some things like sewage treatment are only needed because of high population densities today.
Many people don't have access to medical care, and even when they do, the for-profit medical system harms them compared to simpler approaches (whole foods diet, fasting, sunlight, meditation, good sleep, etc.). Many chronic disease today are caused by eating poorly or not getting enough sunlight (cancer, diabetes, heart disease, mental illness, depression, influenza, autism, etc.) http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml http://www.alternativeratreatments.com/eat-to-live.html so it is not completely clear how much happier most people are now compared to people 10,000 years ago.
Also people back then did not know what was possible, so someone from now sent back to those times might feel different than people did who grew up then.
So, sure, there are some good things about today (the internet overall seems to be a wonderful thing). But there is plenty of bad too, so the equation of how different times stack up is not so simple.
A little bit on what America was like before Columbus (describing Haiti): http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncol1.html """ "They... brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells. They willingly traded everything they owned... . They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features.... They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane... . They would make fine servants.... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want."... The Indians, Columbus reported, "are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who
Vitamin D deficiency can lead to depression and mental illness (as well as all sorts of other medical issues including joint pain), and I would expect most game developers working such long hours indoors are suffering from it. Here is how to get treatment for pennies a day using supplements: http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
As far as population density, you are right that it can be an issue, but that is what space habitats and ocean habitats are for.:-)
"Growing a Space Habatit with a Lichen Composite" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4XFqyKx4BM
"1st Seastead Design Contest overall winner by András Gyrfi from Hungary" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCCStJ8a7pg
If we have the technological capacity to change the planet's atmosphere as a geologic force, surely we have the capability to create a few self-replicating space habitats and seasteads?
Anyway, this is not to disagree with your larger points about bad aspects of many hunter/gatherer societies in the past (infant mortality, disease, even wars). Ideally we want the best of both cultures -- an end to "work" and a return to "joy" and "community", along with an end to needless suffering that advanced technology can help prevent as well as a chance at transcendence to whatever the better aspects of technology can, in theory, provide.
And something I organized on why work as we know it is going away (according to Marshall Brain and many others, given that the same technology that makes fancy computer games with fancy game AIs possible is also reducing the value of most human labor relative to automation and better design): "Beyond a Jobless Recovery: A heterodox perspective on 21st century economics" http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
Ultimately, there will be no greener pastures to leave towards as robotics spreads; see for example Marshall Brain's "Manna": http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
See: http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm "Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times."
On how charitable givers should insist on a post-scarcity copyright and patent policy for the results of anything they fund in whole or in part (from a document I wrote): http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html "For example, where can one go to get a freely modifiable design including CAD files for even a simple health-related appliance like a wheelchair? Or worse, where is the community freely collaborating on improving wheel chair designs? Are a few dozen intentionally-vague patents on wheel chair design the best to be hoped for given the trillions of dollars of investments into public works, including vast amount of money spent on medical research?... This physical public works paradigm is unfortunately then applied to thinking about most digital public works, and there is a major flaw in the analogy. A bridge does not require much marketing....
Consider again the self-driving cars mentioned earlier which now cruise some streets in small numbers. The software "intelligence" doing the driving was primarily developed by public money given to universities, which generally own the copyrights and patents as the contractors. Obviously there are related scientific publications, but in practice these fail to do justice to the complexity of such systems. The truest physical representation of the knowledge learned by such work is the codebase plus email discussions of it (plus what developers carry in their heads).
We are about to see the emergence of companies licensing that publicly funded software and selling modified versions of such software as proprietary products. There will eventually be hundreds or thousands of paid automotive software engineers working on such software no matter how it is funded, because there will be great value in having such self-driving vehicles given the result of America's horrendous urban planning policies leaving the car as generally the most efficient means of transport in the suburb. The question is, will the results of the work be open for inspection and contribution by the public? Essentially, will those engineers and their employers be "owners" of the software, or will they instead be "stewards" of a larger free and open community development process?
Open source software is typically eventually of much higher quality http://www.fsf.org/software/reliability.html and reliability because more eyes look over the code for problems and more voices contribute to adding innovative solutions. About 35,000 Americans are killed every year in driving fatalities, and hundreds of thousands more are seriously injured. Should the software that keeps people safe on roads, and which has already been created primarily with public funds, not also be kept under continuous public scrutiny?..."
A shorter version of that: http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html "Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely
To support your point, maybe they would find these links on Rat Park experiment from the 1970s that shows how addictive behavior arises from distressing environments?
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park """ Rat Park was a study into drug addiction conducted in the late 1970s (and published in 1980), by Canadian psychologist Bruce K. Alexander and his colleagues at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada.
Alexander's hypothesis was that drugs do not cause addiction, and that the apparent addiction to opiate drugs commonly observed in laboratory rats exposed to it is attributable to their living conditions, and not to any addictive property of the drug itself.[1] He told the Canadian Senate in 2001 that prior experiments in which laboratory rats were kept isolated in cramped metal cages, tethered to a self-injection apparatus, show only that "severely distressed animals, like severely distressed people, will relieve their distress pharmacologically if they can."[2]
To test his hypothesis, Alexander built Rat Park, an 8.8 m2 (95 sq ft) housing colony, 200 times the square footage of a standard laboratory cage. There were 16-20 rats of both sexes in residence, an abundance of food, balls and wheels for play, and enough space for mating and raising litters.[3] The results of the experiment appeared to support his hypothesis. Rats who had been forced to consume morphine hydrochloride for 57 consecutive days were brought to Rat Park and given a choice between plain tap water and water laced with morphine. For the most part, they chose the plain water. "Nothing that we tried," Alexander wrote, "... produced anything that looked like addiction in rats that were housed in a reasonably normal environment."[1] Control groups of rats isolated in small cages consumed much more morphine in this and several subsequent experiments.
The two major science journals, Science and Nature, rejected Alexander, Coambs, and Hadaway's first paper, which appeared instead in Psychopharmacology, a respectable but much smaller journal in 1978. The paper's publication initially attracted no response.[4] Within a few years, Simon Fraser University withdrew Rat Park's funding. """
Im Soviet Russia there were guards at the borders to keep people from escaping. In the Capitalist USA, there are guards at the medicine cabinets to keep people from escaping. We need to fix the society and its underlying economics to meet the needs of the 21st century, as discussed in this knol I put up: "Beyond a Jobless Recovery: A heterodox perspective on 21st century economics" http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
I put together this Knol on the general issues you raise about the declining value of human labor: http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery/ "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
According to NYS Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto, almost all school teachers scar children in common ways: http://www.worldtrans.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt "Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class assignment, dulled responses, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are good training for permanent underclasses, people derived forever of finding the center of their own special genius."
See also: "State Controlled Consciousness" http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html "Schooling is a form of adoption. You give your kid up in his or her most plastic years to a group of strangers. You accept a promise, sometimes stated and more often implied that the state through its agents knows better how to raise your children and educate them than you, your neighbors, your grandparents, your local traditions do. And that your kid will be better off so adopted.
But by the time the child returns to the family, or has the option of doing that, very few want to. Their parents are some form of friendly stranger too and why not? In the key hours of growing up, strangers have reared the kid.
Now let's look at the strangers of which you (interviewer) was one and I was one. Regardless of our good feeling toward children. Regardless of our individual talents or intelligence, we have so little time each day with each of these kids, we can't possibly know enough vital information about that particular kid to tailor a set of exercises for that kid. Oh, you know, some of us will try more than others, but there simply isn't any time to do it to a significant degree...."
"She used to enjoy discussing literature, now she only reads what's safe. I've got a lot of un-teaching to do, as a result. Perhaps there's a valuable life lesson burried under the pile of lost assignments this teacher never graded,..."
That schools are unreformable? http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm """ I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises--no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system.
Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there. """
Sorry, you do not seem to know the first thing about homeschooling/unschooling based on any research or first hand experience. On what do you base such harsh opinions of two million or so homeschoolers in the USA? No doubt you could find some examples of what you say, same as I could find endless examples of school bullying (which is much more common), but are you suggesting the vast majority of homeschooled kids are suffering socialization problems? Are you suggesting that learning only to socialize with same age peers of roughly the same age and social class and one authoritarian teacher, trapped with no option but to return day after day, is your ideal of social skills learning, as opposed to learning to interact with people of all different ages in all different situations? If so, why are homeschoolers getting preferred admission to many colleges these days?
Another place to start: http://www.holtgws.com/teachyourown.html "...I have used the words "homeschooling" to describe the process by which children grow and learn in the world without going, or going very much, to schools, because those words are familiar and quickly understood. But in one very important sense they are misleading. What is most important and valuable about the home as a base for children's growth into the world is not that it is a better school than the schools but that it isn't a school at all. It is not an artificial place, set up to make "learning" happen and in which nothing except "learning" ever happens. It is a natural, organic, central, fundamental human institution, one might easily and rightly say the foundation of all other institutions. We can imagine and indeed we have had human societies without schools, without factories, without libraries, museums, hospitals, roads, legislatures, courts, or any of the institutions which seem so indispensable and permanent a part of modern life. We might someday even choose, or be obliged, to live once again without some or all of these. But we cannot even imagine a society without homes, even if these should be no more than tents, or mud huts, or holes in the ground. What I am trying to say, in short, is that our chief educational problem is not to find a way to make homes more like schools. If anything, it is to make schools less like schools."
Are you too a prime example of schooling to lash out so fast with no research behind your points, convinced you are right because you were told by authorities in school that school was best for you?
Still, the fact is, up until recently I used to believe much of what you are saying here. So, don't feel too bad. But please at least try to learn a little more about educational alternatives and why the current schooling system we have is essentially broken beyond repair. Is this is the kind of socialization you are saying is better than children being around people who truly care for their emotional and intellectual growth and have the time to help with it?
"The War on Kids - Trailer" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nlnwm11d6II Note the great socialization experience during the SWAT raid... Is that what
So true a poem, and so sad; a recent related documentary: http://www.thewaronkids.com/ Also related:
"The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher" http://www.worldtrans.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt """... After an adult lifetime spent teaching school I believe the method of mass-schooling is the only real content it has, don't be fooled into thinking that good curriculum or good equipment or good teachers are the critical determinants of your son and daughter's schooltime. All the pathologies we've considered come about in large measure because the lessons of school prevent children from keeping important appointments with themselves and with their families, to learn lessons in self- motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity and love and lessons in service to others, which are among the key lessons of home life.
Thirty years ago these things could still be learned in the time left after school. But television has eaten up most of that time, and a combination of television and the stresses peculiar to two-income or single-parent families have swallowed up most of what used to be family time. Our kids have no time left to grow up fully human, and only thin- soil wastelands to do it in. A future is rushing down upon our culture which will insist that all of us learn the wisdom of non-material experience; a future which will demand as the price of survival that we follow a pace of natural life economical in material cost. These lessons cannot be learned in schools as they are. School is like starting life with a 12-year jail sentence in which bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it.
I should know. """
See also the link betwen vitamin D deficiency (from an indoor lifestyle and no outdoor playtime) and mental problems...
"The problem we have here, in my opinion, is that we have an educational system that has been rewired to produce more conformist drones and fewer critical thinkers." See John Taylor Gatto for the details: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm "The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real."
Slashdot Mirror
These posts of mine lead to endless links about what is wrong with the current schooling system at all levels:
"[p2p-research] College Daze links (was Re: : FlossedBk, "Free/Libre and Open Source Solutions for Education")"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
"[p2p-research] The Higher Educational Bubble Continues to Grow"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005584.html
"[p2p-research] Rebutting Communiqué from an Absent Future (was Re: Information on student protests)"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html
But key ideas can be found at these links:
"Disciplined Minds" by Jeff Schmidt
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
"The Big Crunch" by David Goodstein, Vice Provost, Caltech
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream" by Noam Chomsky
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm
"University Secrets:Your Guide to Surviving a College Education" by
Robert D. Honigman
http://web.archive.org/web/20060707100524/www.universitysecrets.com/us.htm
http://web.archive.org/web/20060710145531/www.universitysecrets.com/table.htm
"The Kept University"
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2000/03/press.htm
"We're NOT Off to See the Wizard: REVISITING THE IDEA OF COLLEGE"
http://unconventionalideas.wordpress.com/?s=wizard
"The Underground History of American Education" by 1991 NYS Teacher of
the Year John Taylor Gatto
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
"In Defense of Childhood: Protecting Kids' Inner Wildness " by Chris
Mercogliano, who spent thirty-five years teaching at the Albany Free School
http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm
And there are many more I link to in the posts, but these are starting points.
It would take years to read through all the references I link to in the three posts (and it has. :-)
AERO is one place that catalogs most of the alternatives:
http://www.educationrevolution.org/
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with him, but for perspective, contrast with with Daniel Quinn, Ishmael, and "Beyond Civilization":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishmael_(novel)#New_Tribalist_Movement
http://books.google.com/books?id=bHP9ztHuWmwC
"With the publication of his trilogy of novels (Ishmael; The Story of B; My Ishmael), Quinn became something of a cult figure in visionary fiction. In those books, Quinn explored the self-sustaining nature of tribal societies and his belief that the current worldwide ecological and economic crises are due to the agriculture-based organization of civilized societies. He now turns his hand to nonfiction, with an appeal for universal renewal through a "New Tribal Revolution." Acknowledging that it would be impossible for most civilized humans to return to the hunting and gathering typical of tribes, Quinn argues that modern men and women need to invent a completely different mode of existence. To do this, they must question a basic assumption of all civilized societies: "Civilization must continue at any cost and must not be abandoned under any circumstances." Quinn, borrowing from Richard Dawkins, calls this assumption a "meme," the cultural equivalent of a gene. Quinn's main examples are peoples like the Maya and Anasazi, who returned to tribalism after unsuccessful attempts at other types of social organization, and the communal structure of traditional circuses. The author has a knack for stating the obvious with tremendous personal conviction. His articulation of a simpler way of life will appeal to those made frantic by globalization and all the forces conspiring to make people dance as fast as they can. (Oct.) "
As well as someone else's related point:
"New Tribalism" By Royce Carlson
http://www.zenzibar.com/articles/newtribalism.asp
On rethinking public funding: http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html
"An outdated scarcity perspective in the non-profit community is still manifesting itself, however. There remains a continued emphasis on charitable projects which include plans for restricting access to the resulting publicly funded digital works now, in the hopes of creating revenue streams later. The funded organization usually proposes continuing to improve the work itself under its solitary control using money derived from selling licenses to the work. Contrast this with, for example, the post-scarcity development of the GNU/Linux operating system, made by thousands of volunteers contributing improvements to an initial base contributed by Linus Torvalds and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) GNU project.
The old scarcity criterion towards selecting what makes a viable project (based on a recurring royalty stream for static content) is completely at odds with the new post-scarcity model (based more on streams of attention, status, service, and customization). The new collaborative development process made possible by the internet (resulting in a work made by sharing licenses to copyrights made by a distributed network of authors funded indirectly by other means) is fundamentally different than the old process (resulting in a work made by centralized copyright ownership with a development process funded by selling licenses to the result)."
Some ramblings I don's see an obvious place to put; they are only tangential to your comment. :-)
See also my other comment in this thread with some related "hard" sci-fi ideas that seem "magical" just now: exploiting a bug in the VM simulating us, building natotech/biotech, and/or tapping zero point energy:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1733076&cid=33042664
Has anyone mentioned Edward Fredkin yet, by the way?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Fredkin
"Fredkin's digital philosophy contains several fundamental ideas: Everything in physics and physical reality must have a digital informational representation. All changes in physical nature are consequences of digital informational processes. Nature is finite and digital. The traditional Judaeo-Christian concept of the soul has a counterpart in a static/dynamic soul defined in terms of digital philosophy."
And an article about Fredkin (taken from the book "Three Scientists and their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information" that the late Jim Beniger, a professor of mine, got me as a promo copy back in the 1980s, so thoughtful of him to suggest me for one, and it is a great book, and I especially liked the section on Fredkin):
"Did the Universe Just Happen?"
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/88apr/wright.htm
"In addition to being a self-made millionaire, Fredkin is a self-made intellectual. Twenty years ago, at the age of thirty-four, without so much as a bachelor's degree to his name, he became a full professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Though hired to teach computer science, and then selected to guide MIT's now eminent computer-science laboratory through some of its formative years, he soon branched out into more-offbeat things. Perhaps the most idiosyncratic of the courses he has taught is one on "digital physics," in which he propounded the most idiosyncratic of his several idiosyncratic theories. This theory is the reason I've come to Fredkin's island. It is one of those things that a person has to be prepared for. The preparer has to say, "Now, this is going to sound pretty weird, and in a way it is, but in a way it's not as weird as it sounds, and you'll see this once you understand it, but that may take a while, so in the meantime don't prejudge it, and don't casually dismiss it." Ed Fredkin thinks that the universe is a computer. "
Sounds like quite a guy. It would be fun to chat with him someday. This was way before the Matrix. When the Matrix came out, I was like, that's the kind of idea I'd been thinking about for some time (inspired by several sources, including Fredkin) and it was nice to finally see it in the public consciousness in a big way.
Guess it would be good to cross-link this comment thread somehow to the recent slashdot article on computer game designers burning out from overwork (and I think lack of vitamin D and lack of healthy whole foods).
http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1731650&cid=33026262
So, were the "planet builders" of "digital physical universes" burned out from overwork and ill from an unhealthy lifestyle. Is that where the "bugs" came from? Or just the general philosophical problems we wrestle with from a poorly though trough plot line? ;-) Or, is it all just sublime and wonderful beyond our knowing?
A comment I made on the "game design" we are stuck in:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/a-rant-on-financial-obesity-and-Project-Virgle.html
"... I agree with the sentiment of the Einstein quote [That we should approach the
"You jest..." Well, not exactly. I don't know what to believe for sure. That is just one of the obvious possibilities at this state of our understanding of information processing. It may be true, or it may not. Enumerating it as a possibility at least is a bit of an antidote to fundamentalism of other kinds. I think you may be right on the bugs though. :-)
I've thought about writing a sci-fi novel based around three interacting groups (taking off on Arthur C. Clark's ideas of any advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic):
* Those who have expanded human consciousness in a transhumanist technical nanotech/biotech direction and can do magical-looking things like with nanotech (like when nanites rebuilt the Red Dwarf).
* Those who have found this debugger link or just a bug and can affect reality in magical seeming ways (so, like Harry Potter or Earthsea, where words an incantations and symbolic movements and symbolic devices like wands are combined to create patterns that invoke complex programs written in arcane symbols, such as from "lumos" causing light to all sorts of complex spells invoked in complex ways -- maybe with a high degree of secrecy involved in who makes these things and who is told about them).
* Those who have just expanded humanity in a brute-force sort of way throughout the solar system and beyond through self-replicating space habitats duplicating themselves from sunlight and asteroidal ore, and maybe also have recently learned to tap zero-point energy and so create energy and matter in empty space (so, they can duplicate things out of thin vacuum as it were).
I have no idea where that would go. But those are the major sorts of "magic" things I can imagine in our future, and all are hard-sci-fi "plausible". Would the mystery of consciousness be an underlying theme?
In keeping with the theme of this article of interacting "alien" civilizations in space, maybe it could be humans plus two other "alien" races from other stars that meet, each with a different technological approach as above, and they try to understand each others tech? On the other hand, it's likely that humans will radiate into multiple species if we expand, so the "aliens" may just be some form of us, in terms of, say, a cyborged person-whale hybrid that travels through space, or human mental patterns copied into robots (and then changed further in there?), and biotech variations, and Amish-like "pure strain humans" (a term used in the Gamma World role playing game of the 1980s which had a diversification of human forms). So, there could be three very different species of humans to go along with those three technological approaches.
Maybe ZeroExistenZ's other comment on Terry Pratchett has gotten me to think again on this. But I don't have the story-telling skill or attention to humanistic detail of someone like the late James P. Hogan. I just finished rereading his "Star Child" to my kid as a way to honor all the great stories he had written, and how they effected my own life in a positive way. His "Entoverse" has aspects of what you suggest -- computational processes in a big computer start moving out into the real world through what one might think of as a sort of "bug" in the computer system.
Your point on bugs etc. raises another issue. At what point is something running on a virtual machine really just a contained item? If it can do things that affect the outside world, then patterns in it can migrate outwards into an enclosing virtual machine (or "real" machine). So, sims evolved in a VM could be copied into robot bodies (or even biological bodies) in the outer enclosing world. Or those in an economic simulation used to decide policy in the outer world could choose to act differently to effect the economics of the outer world (or the morality or whatever is being learned through simulation).
I can wonder what the ethics might be in relation to simulating worlds? I think about that even now, in playing computer games with "sprites". We don't really know what c
Thanks for the example. Sounds like a fun read. :-)
In another comment, someone linked to this, which is a somewhat related idea in four frames of comics: :-)
http://amultiverse.com/2010/07/26/infinite-pest/
In the recently late :-( James P. Hogan's writings, there is a scene at the end of one of his Giants novels where an archeologist finds a (legitimate) advanced watch-like piece of technology in an archeological dig and throws it away, assuming it is a joke by someone on his staff. :-)
Anyway, it's interesting how humor and creativity are often intertwined, with humor often related to breaking out of our current mental sets.
On: http://amultiverse.com/2010/07/26/infinite-pest/ Could be. :-) Of course, how many levels of simulation go above them? :-) Who are their implementers? And the implementers of their implementers? Etc. An infinite chain? And then what levels in other directions make that chain possible? And those other dimensions work? How infinite could all that be? And is their any commonality, like Consciousness?
When I was a psychology undergrad around 1984, I read a (recent?) paper my advisor (George Miller) had laying around about levels of mind simulation, but I can't remember the author (Roger Shepard, Philip Johnson-Laird, Geoffrey Hinton, maybe a philosopher?). I looked through references in my own senior thesis just now, but nothing jumped out about that, and looking up those three authors doesn't lead me easily to such a paper. I'd like to read that paper again. The basic idea was that there could be levels of mental machinery that each supported the next level somehow. It was applied to intelligence (AI-ish?), but it might have been the first place I saw such an idea of multiple levels of intelligence myself, sort of as nested virtual machines. I'm thinking it must have been from a philosopher.
On whether the simulation argument is like creationism, well, science can't really prove or disprove stuff about what caused first causes or by definition access any context outside a virtual server and firewall (if such exist), since science requires experiment, prediction, repeatability, accessibility, and so on. Access to those mysteries outside a simulated sandbox we might live in would probably be precluded by a well-written virtual machine (unless we found the debugging hooks? :-) Although who knows at what point someone might network our server to others? :-) Maybe when we "discover" other civilizations around other stars? :-) We also have to accept that everything like the fossil record could be faked (or at least just evolved once and then put in place billions of times from backup copies, same as you or I might provision a billion Virtual Servers in a cloud all from a standard GNU/Linux distribution configured once). And I say that as someone who was in a PhD program in Ecology and Evolution for a time. :-) Although with that said, about accepting the possibility of a God who is into fakery, it doesn't get us very far to pretend evolution does not happen given we can see it happening every year with various diseases evolving, so it's not really that useful a mental construct to think that a God exists who is intentionally misleading (or cruel) in that way (whether it is true or not). Evolution is a really useful idea in science and design and prediction, so it makes sense to work from that basis, given all the evidence (although there remain the mysteries of consciousness itself, identity, and a host of other related issues). Besides, with lots of CPU, it might just be easier to grow everything from scratch (a big bang?) each time anyway, maybe just altering seeds or constants a little here and there, sort of like booting up a GNU/Linux box; so on a practical basis, evolution might be a reality in each simulation essentially from a big bang.
We do something like that with growing plants from a seed in our PlantStudio software -- each time you grow it, we regrow it from scratch using a seed number for the random number generator that translates into a specific branching pattern for the plant that goes repeatedly with that random number seed and other parameters you have chosen.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/
One alternative to thinking we are living in a "simulation" is a "many worlds" quantum viewpoint, but maybe they are essentially the same in implications anyway? :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation
The recently late :-( James P. Hogan wrote about these kinds of ideas -- both life in a simulation (in Entoverse), and many worlds interpretations in his other works (Star Child, Paths to Otherwhere, etc.).
http://www.jamesphogan.com/
I hope his spirit (if such exists) is onto better things (if they exist, either in otherwheres, other virtual machines, or other planes of reality, or something beyond our imagining).
With just one seeded civilization: http://www.simulation-argument.com/
That's a rather materialistic view on "the good life".What happened to the value of singing, dancing, telling stories, eating food you enjoyed, having free time, not having someone bossing you around, time for communion with nature and the infinite, doing comprehensible work you enjoyed doing at your own pace, having time to raise children, and so on? The Sahlins article shows how most hunter/gatherers most of the time had no want for food. Would you trade, say, having time for singing and dancing and friendships for some hot water? You can always put hot rocks in a basket of water if you want hot water. And while you don't have hot water on tap, you also don't have property taxes to pay or dioxin in the food supply to digest.
Also, you've overgeneralized the point. There is a big difference between saying there were a lot of good things about a period in human history and saying *everything* about that period was wonderful or that we should just abandon other aspects of our current lives that we enjoy. But clearly, these game developers are not enjoying their lives. So, something is wrong. Looking to the past helps give us some perspective on that.
By the way, life expectancy after age five in hunter/gatherers may have been comparable to today. It is only in the last 100 years that human skeletons are now as tall as they were 10,000 years in the past (because agriculture was a big step backward nutritionally and culturally):
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/6812.html
Some things like sewage treatment are only needed because of high population densities today.
Many people don't have access to medical care, and even when they do, the for-profit medical system harms them compared to simpler approaches (whole foods diet, fasting, sunlight, meditation, good sleep, etc.). Many chronic disease today are caused by eating poorly or not getting enough sunlight (cancer, diabetes, heart disease, mental illness, depression, influenza, autism, etc.)
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
http://www.alternativeratreatments.com/eat-to-live.html
so it is not completely clear how much happier most people are now compared to people 10,000 years ago.
Also people back then did not know what was possible, so someone from now sent back to those times might feel different than people did who grew up then.
And young children in the USA spend more than a decade in prison, so that can't be happy for them compared to back then either:
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2445404/the_war_on_kids_a_polemic_against_public.html?cat=9
So, sure, there are some good things about today (the internet overall seems to be a wonderful thing). But there is plenty of bad too, so the equation of how different times stack up is not so simple.
A little bit on what America was like before Columbus (describing Haiti): ... brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells. They willingly traded everything they owned... . They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features.... They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane... . They would make fine servants.... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want." ... The Indians, Columbus reported, "are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncol1.html
"""
"They
Vitamin D deficiency can lead to depression and mental illness (as well as all sorts of other medical issues including joint pain), and I would expect most game developers working such long hours indoors are suffering from it. Here is how to get treatment for pennies a day using supplements:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
A better diet than chips and diet soda would help too, like Dr. Fuhrman recommends:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPiR9VcuVWw
http://www.alternativeratreatments.com/eat-to-live.html
Related funny video:
"Code Monkey"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4Wy7gRGgeA
If you have modern health issues, please see:
Dr. Fuhrman on healthy eating (as we almost all eat too much junk):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPiR9VcuVWw
Dr. Cannell on curing Vitamin D deficiency (as we almost all spend so much time indoors):
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
As far as population density, you are right that it can be an issue, but that is what space habitats and ocean habitats are for. :-)
"Growing a Space Habatit with a Lichen Composite"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4XFqyKx4BM
"1st Seastead Design Contest overall winner by András Gyrfi from Hungary"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCCStJ8a7pg
If we have the technological capacity to change the planet's atmosphere as a geologic force, surely we have the capability to create a few self-replicating space habitats and seasteads?
Anyway, this is not to disagree with your larger points about bad aspects of many hunter/gatherer societies in the past (infant mortality, disease, even wars). Ideally we want the best of both cultures -- an end to "work" and a return to "joy" and "community", along with an end to needless suffering that advanced technology can help prevent as well as a chance at transcendence to whatever the better aspects of technology can, in theory, provide.
"Punished By Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise and Other Bribes" by Alfie Kohn
http://www.amazon.com/Punished-Rewards-Trouble-Incentive-Praise/dp/0395710901
"Have Fun at Work" by W. L. Livingston
http://www.amazon.com/Have-Fun-at-Work-Livingston/dp/0937063053/
"Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-battering System That Shapes Their Lives" by Jeff Schmidt
http://www.amazon.com/Disciplined-Minds-Critical-Professionals-Soul-Battering/dp/0742516857
And something I organized on why work as we know it is going away (according to Marshall Brain and many others, given that the same technology that makes fancy computer games with fancy game AIs possible is also reducing the value of most human labor relative to automation and better design):
"Beyond a Jobless Recovery: A heterodox perspective on 21st century economics"
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
Ultimately, there will be no greener pastures to leave towards as robotics spreads; see for example Marshall Brain's "Manna":
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
See: http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm "Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times."
For the future, see Bob Black:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
Or me: :-)
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
On how charitable givers should insist on a post-scarcity copyright and patent policy for the results of anything they fund in whole or in part (from a document I wrote): ... This physical public works paradigm is unfortunately then applied to thinking about most digital public works, and there is a major flaw in the analogy. A bridge does not require much marketing. ... ..."
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html
"For example, where can one go to get a freely modifiable design including CAD files for even a simple health-related appliance like a wheelchair? Or worse, where is the community freely collaborating on improving wheel chair designs? Are a few dozen intentionally-vague patents on wheel chair design the best to be hoped for given the trillions of dollars of investments into public works, including vast amount of money spent on medical research?
Consider again the self-driving cars mentioned earlier which now cruise some streets in small numbers. The software "intelligence" doing the driving was primarily developed by public money given to universities, which generally own the copyrights and patents as the contractors. Obviously there are related scientific publications, but in practice these fail to do justice to the complexity of such systems. The truest physical representation of the knowledge learned by such work is the codebase plus email discussions of it (plus what developers carry in their heads).
We are about to see the emergence of companies licensing that publicly funded software and selling modified versions of such software as proprietary products. There will eventually be hundreds or thousands of paid automotive software engineers working on such software no matter how it is funded, because there will be great value in having such self-driving vehicles given the result of America's horrendous urban planning policies leaving the car as generally the most efficient means of transport in the suburb. The question is, will the results of the work be open for inspection and contribution by the public? Essentially, will those engineers and their employers be "owners" of the software, or will they instead be "stewards" of a larger free and open community development process?
Open source software is typically eventually of much higher quality
http://www.fsf.org/software/reliability.html
and reliability because more eyes look over the code for problems and more voices contribute to adding innovative solutions. About 35,000 Americans are killed every year in driving fatalities, and hundreds of thousands more are seriously injured. Should the software that keeps people safe on roads, and which has already been created primarily with public funds, not also be kept under continuous public scrutiny?
A shorter version of that:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
"Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely
To support your point, maybe they would find these links on Rat Park experiment from the 1970s that shows how addictive behavior arises from distressing environments?
From:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
"""
Rat Park was a study into drug addiction conducted in the late 1970s (and published in 1980), by Canadian psychologist Bruce K. Alexander and his colleagues at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada.
Alexander's hypothesis was that drugs do not cause addiction, and that the apparent addiction to opiate drugs commonly observed in laboratory rats exposed to it is attributable to their living conditions, and not to any addictive property of the drug itself.[1] He told the Canadian Senate in 2001 that prior experiments in which laboratory rats were kept isolated in cramped metal cages, tethered to a self-injection apparatus, show only that "severely distressed animals, like severely distressed people, will relieve their distress pharmacologically if they can."[2]
To test his hypothesis, Alexander built Rat Park, an 8.8 m2 (95 sq ft) housing colony, 200 times the square footage of a standard laboratory cage. There were 16-20 rats of both sexes in residence, an abundance of food, balls and wheels for play, and enough space for mating and raising litters.[3] The results of the experiment appeared to support his hypothesis. Rats who had been forced to consume morphine hydrochloride for 57 consecutive days were brought to Rat Park and given a choice between plain tap water and water laced with morphine. For the most part, they chose the plain water. "Nothing that we tried," Alexander wrote, "... produced anything that looked like addiction in rats that were housed in a reasonably normal environment."[1] Control groups of rats isolated in small cages consumed much more morphine in this and several subsequent experiments.
The two major science journals, Science and Nature, rejected Alexander, Coambs, and Hadaway's first paper, which appeared instead in Psychopharmacology, a respectable but much smaller journal in 1978. The paper's publication initially attracted no response.[4] Within a few years, Simon Fraser University withdrew Rat Park's funding.
"""
"A claymation short on the Rat Park experiment"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3swVNAaoDgw
Im Soviet Russia there were guards at the borders to keep people from escaping. In the Capitalist USA, there are guards at the medicine cabinets to keep people from escaping. We need to fix the society and its underlying economics to meet the needs of the 21st century, as discussed in this knol I put up:
"Beyond a Jobless Recovery: A heterodox perspective on 21st century economics"
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
I put together this Knol on the general issues you raise about the declining value of human labor:
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery/
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
According to NYS Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto, almost all school teachers scar children in common ways:
http://www.worldtrans.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
"Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class assignment, dulled responses, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are good training for permanent underclasses, people derived forever of finding the center of their own special genius."
See also: ..."
"State Controlled Consciousness"
http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html
"Schooling is a form of adoption. You give your kid up in his or her most plastic years to a group of strangers. You accept a promise, sometimes stated and more often implied that the state through its agents knows better how to raise your children and educate them than you, your neighbors, your grandparents, your local traditions do. And that your kid will be better off so adopted.
But by the time the child returns to the family, or has the option of doing that, very few want to. Their parents are some form of friendly stranger too and why not? In the key hours of growing up, strangers have reared the kid.
Now let's look at the strangers of which you (interviewer) was one and I was one. Regardless of our good feeling toward children. Regardless of our individual talents or intelligence, we have so little time each day with each of these kids, we can't possibly know enough vital information about that particular kid to tailor a set of exercises for that kid. Oh, you know, some of us will try more than others, but there simply isn't any time to do it to a significant degree.
"She used to enjoy discussing literature, now she only reads what's safe. I've got a lot of un-teaching to do, as a result. Perhaps there's a valuable life lesson burried under the pile of lost assignments this teacher never graded, ..."
Unschooling?
http://www.holtgws.com/whatisunschoolin.html
That schools are unreformable?
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"""
I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises--no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system.
Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there.
"""
That schools are more and more like prisons every year?
http://www.thewaronkids.com/
Sorry, you do not seem to know the first thing about homeschooling/unschooling based on any research or first hand experience. On what do you base such harsh opinions of two million or so homeschoolers in the USA? No doubt you could find some examples of what you say, same as I could find endless examples of school bullying (which is much more common), but are you suggesting the vast majority of homeschooled kids are suffering socialization problems? Are you suggesting that learning only to socialize with same age peers of roughly the same age and social class and one authoritarian teacher, trapped with no option but to return day after day, is your ideal of social skills learning, as opposed to learning to interact with people of all different ages in all different situations? If so, why are homeschoolers getting preferred admission to many colleges these days?
Just one of many starting points if you wish to break out of your schooling rut and really learn:
http://homeschooling.about.com/od/socialization/Socialization_How_to_deal_with_it.htm
Another place to start:
http://www.holtgws.com/teachyourown.html
"...I have used the words "homeschooling" to describe the process by which children grow and learn in the world without going, or going very much, to schools, because those words are familiar and quickly understood. But in one very important sense they are misleading. What is most important and valuable about the home as a base for children's growth into the world is not that it is a better school than the schools but that it isn't a school at all. It is not an artificial place, set up to make "learning" happen and in which nothing except "learning" ever happens. It is a natural, organic, central, fundamental human institution, one might easily and rightly say the foundation of all other institutions. We can imagine and indeed we have had human societies without schools, without factories, without libraries, museums, hospitals, roads, legislatures, courts, or any of the institutions which seem so indispensable and permanent a part of modern life. We might someday even choose, or be obliged, to live once again without some or all of these. But we cannot even imagine a society without homes, even if these should be no more than tents, or mud huts, or holes in the ground. What I am trying to say, in short, is that our chief educational problem is not to find a way to make homes more like schools. If anything, it is to make schools less like schools."
As to public school indoctrination, that is well documented here by NYS Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto:
"Underground History of American Education"
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
Or here, also by Gatto:
http://www.worldtrans.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
Are you too a prime example of schooling to lash out so fast with no research behind your points, convinced you are right because you were told by authorities in school that school was best for you?
Still, the fact is, up until recently I used to believe much of what you are saying here. So, don't feel too bad. But please at least try to learn a little more about educational alternatives and why the current schooling system we have is essentially broken beyond repair. Is this is the kind of socialization you are saying is better than children being around people who truly care for their emotional and intellectual growth and have the time to help with it?
"The War on Kids - Trailer"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nlnwm11d6II
Note the great socialization experience during the SWAT raid... Is that what
Off to a good start. To build on it, see my other posts here and http://www.alfiekohn.org/ and http://www.holtgws.com/whatisunschoolin.html
So true a poem, and so sad; a recent related documentary: ... After an adult lifetime spent teaching school I believe the method
http://www.thewaronkids.com/
Also related:
"The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher"
http://www.worldtrans.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
"""
of mass-schooling is the only real content it has, don't be fooled into
thinking that good curriculum or good equipment or good teachers are the
critical determinants of your son and daughter's schooltime. All the
pathologies we've considered come about in large measure because the
lessons of school prevent children from keeping important appointments
with themselves and with their families, to learn lessons in self-
motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity and love and
lessons in service to others, which are among the key lessons of home
life.
Thirty years ago these things could still be learned in the time
left after school. But television has eaten up most of that time, and a
combination of television and the stresses peculiar to two-income or
single-parent families have swallowed up most of what used to be family
time. Our kids have no time left to grow up fully human, and only thin-
soil wastelands to do it in. A future is rushing down upon our culture
which will insist that all of us learn the wisdom of non-material
experience; a future which will demand as the price of survival that we
follow a pace of natural life economical in material cost. These
lessons cannot be learned in schools as they are. School is like
starting life with a 12-year jail sentence in which bad habits are the
only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it.
I should know.
"""
See also the link betwen vitamin D deficiency (from an indoor lifestyle and no outdoor playtime) and mental problems...
http://www.thecaseagainsthomework.com/
http://www.holtgws.com/whatisunschoolin.html
http://www.thewaronkids.com/
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
http://disciplinedminds.com/
http://www.educationrevolution.org/
Related stuff with more links (my me):
"College Daze links"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
"The Higher Educational Bubble Continues to Grow"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005584.html
"Rebutting Communique from an Absent Future (was Re: Information on student
protests)"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html
Please tell all your collegues that vitamin D deficiency may affect test scores by being connected to depression and schizophrenias as well as ADHD and autism:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health/autism/vit-D-theory-autism.shtml
"[p2p-research] ADHD or lack of Vitamin D? Albany Free School connection?"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005083.html
How about correlating 25(OH)D (vitamin D related) blood levels with test scores?
"The problem we have here, in my opinion, is that we have an educational system that has been rewired to produce more conformist drones and fewer critical thinkers."
See John Taylor Gatto for the details:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
"The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real."