I don't think you're all that evil, so long as you don't think I'm trying to force you into a philosophical discussion:)
But here we are, so might as well get on with it!
I think individual rights are ultimately more important than the "rights" of a society. In fact, when I put it like that, it seems doubtful that societies have rights in the same sense that individuals do.
However, I also think that an individual's rights are best tempered with a willingness to sometimes sacrifice those rights for the good of others. Individuals who insist on their rights at any cost seem... wrong.
Would I abolish slavery, even if it meant the annihilation of the human race? Yes, assuming an absolute moral code. My moral obligation is to help those I can. I'm not the master of what will be, or what could be--I'm only the master of my own actions, ethics, and moral choices. Confronted with a slavery I could end, I'd be wrong not to end it. The present generation is real, and their suffering is real. The future generation does not exist, and their happiness is completely fictional.
All this assumes free will, of course. If everything is predestined, and I know that the future outcome of my decision has already occurred--for better or worse--then I will simply make whatever decision was preordained for me to make. Since I perceive myself as having free will, then I would exercise that will to make the best moral choices I can. Again, my moral responsibility is to those that exist, not to those that hypoethically could exist (or not).
If there's anything I've learned from Civilization, it's that different times call for different solutions.
I still can't justify slavery on those grounds, though (as I suspect you know and agree with). If heavy labor is needed to provide for the survival necessities (shelter, food, &c.), then rational communities will voluntarily do the work. Forcing someone else to do the work of ensuring your own survival doesn't seem like a justfiable disregard of their liberties to me.
And if your survival is assured, and you need heavy labor to produce luxury items, then either pay a competitive wage on the open market, or do without. A society that would collapse without slave labor probably should.
After making a cheap shot, you look up at the opposing team and apologize.
That's funny, after I make a cheap shot, I look at my opponent and expect him to develop a counter for it--delivering a painful demonstration of how weak my cheap shot actually is, and forcing me to improve my own game in response.
If my opponent can't counter it, then I'll just keep using it until they mount an all-out defense against it that I can't penetrate, forcing me to revert to other techniques that my opponent can counter. Then I'll mix it up, alternating between cheap shots and other shots unpredictably. If my opponent is playing in the same way, then it becomes a truly exciting mental contest, rather than a simple memorization and repetition of a single keystroke sequence, or spin shot, or whatever. And this, to me, is much more challenging than imposing an arbitrary rule against "cheap" techniques.
This generally works out for me, and I've yet to find a cheap shot in any game that was any good against an opponent who was more interested in playing than in whining.
I always figured games should be played to the limits of their rules and mechanics. Failing to do so means lost opportunities to improve one's skill, and ultimately leads to an artificial limitation on one's ability.
Some people are uncomfortable with this level of competitiveness, and prefer to play a much more relaxed game. This is fine, of course, though I don't understand it. I always want to characterize it as "having more fun imposing arbitrary restrictions on gameplay, rather than constantly challenging yourself and your opponents to higher levels of performance". Me, I like the challenging bit. Others don't. As long as I don't accidentally end up playing with such a person, or get punished for being more competitive than my opponent, the two of us can coexist peacefully, I think.
Interesting. Personally, I can't make a reasonable connection between my argument and a justification of slavery. Of course, this may be a side effect of my anti-slavery bias. Certainly slaves are co-opted against their will, which seems different from voluntary communities which put the communal good ahead of the individual good. And forcing someone to do your labor is different from kicking out uncooperative individuals to fend for themselves. In a sense, my scenario emphasizes individual freedoms, by giving each member of the community a choice to cooperate or not. Slavery denies those freedoms by making cooperation mandatory. I must admit that the distinction is blurry, though.
I'm not sure how this leads to the need for two Testaments in the Bible, though. I always thought the Christian faith pivoted around the coming of Jesus Christ, who (among other things) claimed to be abolishing the old ways and replacing them with new ways. The convention is to read the Old Testament as the story of the old ways, and the New Testament as the story of the new ways. The separation of the scriptures on this basis seems sufficient and complete to me, without bringing the issue of slavery into it at all. But I could be wrong, and anyway would like to hear your argument.
I suspect that much of what we call "ADD" is simply misunderstanding, laziness, or unwillingness to place responsibility where it belongs, on the part of the diagnosers.
But it seems to me that anyone who can understand things they do not see working in front of them has a distinct advantage over anyone who cannot. Claiming that there is no disadvantage there sounds about as silly as claiming that being a twelve-year-old is some kind of disease that needs to be treated with modern drugs.
The ability to reason coherently in the abstract is a powerful tool. I doubt its usefulness can trivially ignored.
It seems like your argument is that the only thing between us and Utopia is a corrupt government. Yet you pointed out that politicians are in it for themselves, rather than the good of the nation. Since eliminating the corrupt government would do nothing at all to eliminate the corrupt people in our society, it seems much more likely that the only thing between us and Utopia is ourselves, and that we will always fail to produce that Utopia with any form of governance (or non-governance).
The Greeks may not have had tabloid media, but somebody must have whipped them into a frenzy over Socrates's "corruption of Athenian youth" with his "unorthodox and offensive philosophies". And in their frenzy, they killed him. Nowadays, we just sue, or censor (unless you wear a tinfoil hat--then we kill).
The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.
Ooh! Ooh! I've got another one! Imagine a mountainous island nation, with limited farmland, an inhospitable climate, and primitive agricultural technology. The only way to survive is by forming small communities, and preserving the copmmon good at all costs. Failure to sacrifice individual freedoms for communal welfare results in death--not just for the individual, but for the community that supports that individual in spite of such uncooperativeness. Anyone who doesn't put the community ahead of themselves is exiled, and almost certainly doomed to die during the next harsh winter (and all the winters are harsh, on this island). This makes perfect sense, since everyone has the liberty to live like an individual. The only restriction is that they also get to die like an individual. The communities, meanwhile, thrive and grow, and technology advances, and one day the community can afford the luxury of individual liberties. This is, of course, after many generations of eschewing those liberties in favor of communal well-being.
Are these people giving up their liberties because they're delusional, or because they're clear-headed pragmatists? Is the extreme individualist truly any more laudable than the extreme conformist?
Edmund Burke's statement is absolute (note the use of the word "never"), and therefore logically unsound. It is also, I think, provably untrue.
See, I always thought of "Government" as being a regulatory entity, where Regulation=Standards+Enforcement. While I see the logic behind the "legal monopoly on violence" statement, it always struck me as inflammatory rhetoric, rather than a realistic or productive assessment.
Furthermore, monopolies aren't necessarily bad, and while enforcement sometimes requires violence, it doesn't follow that all enforcement, or even all violent enforcement, is bad.
Take the electromagnetic spectrum, for example: without standards specifying its use, airplanes wouldn't be able to fly, cell phones wouldn't work, and televisions would receive nothing but snow. And without enforcement, pirate radio stations would freely override airport navigational beacons, cell phones, and television programs. It'd be the whole "Mexican Radio" problem, writ large.
Overall, I'd say that any community that did not establish a "legal monopoly on violence" (or, as I like to call it, "regulation") would collapse under the weight of its own malefactors.
You'll need to get rid of the malefactors before you can begin to think about getting rid of the government.
[Insert whole other debate about the efficacy of this or that specific government, the proper limits of a government's power, gun control, and the obvious superiority of the libertarian point of view.]
Theoretically, you only need a few thousand respondents on any survey, to get a statistically valid result. If that's the case, you only need about 1% of the population to actually vote, in order to determine what the population as a whole really wants. IANAS, of course, so it's possible that the politicians are actually voting for you, or something.
I admit I simply assumed nobody needed it. I also didn't mean the Ozarks literally, so much as symbolically; a figurative example of the kind of place I assumed wouldn't want or need cell coverage.
I guess my response was driven largely by my belief that--unlike water, electricity, and standard phone service--cell phones are a luxury, not a necessity. I could be wrong in my beliefs, though.
Your counter argument is strong, and supported by facts, so I'll happily concede my purely speculative point.
Also, I'm all in favor of less government privacy. Wasn't it David Brin who proposed last year that government snooping on private citizens was fine, so long as the citizens had equal snooping powers over the government? Or was it Bruce Sterling? Anyway, whoever said it, I like it, and should probably start voting for it.
Thanks for clarifying the cell phone issue for me. I'll go away and contemplate things in greater detail, now:)
Why on earth should the government regulate this? It seems similar to suggesting that as rail transport becomes more popular, the government should force national railroad coverage. Or that the government should force the telcos to deploy true national broadband coverage.
How about this: as cell phones become more popular, the service providers will accumulate enough revenue to put in more cells and better capacity. As cell phones become more popular, the demand for coverage in remote areas will grow, until it becomes good business to put cells out there.
Once the demand is high enough, the providers will increase the coverage freely, without government intervention, because they know people will pay for it--enough people to make the added coverage profitable.
And if the demand isn't there yet, but the government forces the issue anyway? Who will pay for it? We already know the consumers won't pay for it, because if they would, the phone companies would have done it on their own. We know the providers won't want to pay for it, since they know that without demand they'd only be losing money. So the government would have to pay for it--which means we'd have to pay for it. My taxes would end up paying for a cell deep in the Ozarks that nobody wants or needs or cares about. Or the government would convince the providers to pay for it after all, probably with subsidies (my taxes, again), or concessions that would grant the providers even greater power to exploit the citizenry--the citizenry that doesn't even want true national coverage yet.
Or the government might entice cell phone providers with subsidies--and the caveat that the Office of Homeland Security have administrative access to the cellular networks. "The bad news is, you must provide true national cellular coverage. The good news is, we'll give you taxpayer money to do it, and make a profit. But we get to listen in on everybody's calls."
This country has gotten along pretty well without true national cell coverage so far, and it can probably manage to muddle along a few more years until the market is mature enough to make such a thing plausible without government interference.
Argh. I'm rambling on in an increasingly belligerent fashion. My point is made, so I'll stop now, before I become completely insufferable:)
That is too bad, and I can understand why people are so upset. Like the article says, the fact that the number still rings seems especially cruel.
But the last line of the article really caught my attention.
"If I had to do this all over again, I would do it very differently," he said. "I would keep it very, very quiet."
This I don't understand at all. Sure, the Pay Phone in the Middle of Nowhere is gone, but there are still many functional pay phones out there.
Why not pick an arbitrary payphone on some New York street corner, and start calling it? And don't keep it quiet, either--publicize it just as much as the first one. It's bound to be interesting, and fun, even if it isn't the same as calling the original phone.
Better yet, he could have a "pay phone of the month": select a different arbitrary pay phone each month. Imagine the people flocking to call it, and the people flocking to answer it.
It's a simple concept, but I don't think he's even begun to explore its full potential. The original phone had a certain stark beauty to it, but it should be viewed as the beginning, not the be-all and end-all. The end will come when there are no pay phones left to call.
Nothing like a post that points you to a site where all the articles are "offline for editing". Boy that was worth my time.
It's called "Preemptive Slashdotting", and you should be grateful. Instead of waiting for the page to not load, you can read the "offline" statement in the article, and save yourself time by going straight to the discussion.
Wait... you don't go straight to the discussion without reading the article? What's wrong with you?
You know what pisses me off? Nobody ever bothered to explain the underlying formal logic system that makes the multiplication tables true.
I went through school learning arithmetic, algebra, and all the rest by rote. Sure, I could see some of the patterns, but not the system of rules that made it all work.
It wasn't until I was well into my adulthood that I realized that math was much more interesting than I'd thought, and that all the boring bits weren't the real thing that was going on. If students were introduced to the idea of math as a system for expressing information, rather than math as a set of rules for doing sums, they'd probably get along much better.
But if you can't do basic multiplication, you'll probably be kinda slow at picking up the richer aspects of mathmatics. I say, make the kids memorize those tables (suffering is good for the soul, after all), but tell them why the tables work sometime before they get into High School.
...so why not let them learn via computers in a less structured way?
Why not, indeed. My initial response was "learn what via computers? Last time I checked, there wasn't that much useful teaching software out there, and close to nothing that improves on human interaction between student and teacher.
If computers are of little use as teaching aids for "normal" students, why on earth would we want to use them as teaching aids for students with apparent learning disabilities? The risk of compounding the problem seems (to me) fairly high with that approach.
If the smaller classroom solution doesn't work because of poor teaching methods, then clearly our current educational system has a significant problem. If we can't even get our human teachers to educate effectively, what makes you think we have the skill and wisdom to build a computer teacher that does any better?
Not to mention that a transition to computer-based teaching would be costly. Taxpayers won't be happy about it, but corporations would probably love to sponsor such a move. I won't go into the implications of that here, but they should be obvious.
Slashdot Mirror
"All these works are yours, except Europe's. Extend no copyrights there."
I don't think you're all that evil, so long as you don't think I'm trying to force you into a philosophical discussion :)
But here we are, so might as well get on with it!
I think individual rights are ultimately more important than the "rights" of a society. In fact, when I put it like that, it seems doubtful that societies have rights in the same sense that individuals do.
However, I also think that an individual's rights are best tempered with a willingness to sometimes sacrifice those rights for the good of others. Individuals who insist on their rights at any cost seem... wrong.
Would I abolish slavery, even if it meant the annihilation of the human race? Yes, assuming an absolute moral code. My moral obligation is to help those I can. I'm not the master of what will be, or what could be--I'm only the master of my own actions, ethics, and moral choices. Confronted with a slavery I could end, I'd be wrong not to end it. The present generation is real, and their suffering is real. The future generation does not exist, and their happiness is completely fictional.
All this assumes free will, of course. If everything is predestined, and I know that the future outcome of my decision has already occurred--for better or worse--then I will simply make whatever decision was preordained for me to make. Since I perceive myself as having free will, then I would exercise that will to make the best moral choices I can. Again, my moral responsibility is to those that exist, not to those that hypoethically could exist (or not).
Well played.
If there's anything I've learned from Civilization, it's that different times call for different solutions.
I still can't justify slavery on those grounds, though (as I suspect you know and agree with). If heavy labor is needed to provide for the survival necessities (shelter, food, &c.), then rational communities will voluntarily do the work. Forcing someone else to do the work of ensuring your own survival doesn't seem like a justfiable disregard of their liberties to me.
And if your survival is assured, and you need heavy labor to produce luxury items, then either pay a competitive wage on the open market, or do without. A society that would collapse without slave labor probably should.
That's funny, after I make a cheap shot, I look at my opponent and expect him to develop a counter for it--delivering a painful demonstration of how weak my cheap shot actually is, and forcing me to improve my own game in response.
If my opponent can't counter it, then I'll just keep using it until they mount an all-out defense against it that I can't penetrate, forcing me to revert to other techniques that my opponent can counter. Then I'll mix it up, alternating between cheap shots and other shots unpredictably. If my opponent is playing in the same way, then it becomes a truly exciting mental contest, rather than a simple memorization and repetition of a single keystroke sequence, or spin shot, or whatever. And this, to me, is much more challenging than imposing an arbitrary rule against "cheap" techniques.
This generally works out for me, and I've yet to find a cheap shot in any game that was any good against an opponent who was more interested in playing than in whining.
I always figured games should be played to the limits of their rules and mechanics. Failing to do so means lost opportunities to improve one's skill, and ultimately leads to an artificial limitation on one's ability.
Some people are uncomfortable with this level of competitiveness, and prefer to play a much more relaxed game. This is fine, of course, though I don't understand it. I always want to characterize it as "having more fun imposing arbitrary restrictions on gameplay, rather than constantly challenging yourself and your opponents to higher levels of performance". Me, I like the challenging bit. Others don't. As long as I don't accidentally end up playing with such a person, or get punished for being more competitive than my opponent, the two of us can coexist peacefully, I think.
Interesting. Personally, I can't make a reasonable connection between my argument and a justification of slavery. Of course, this may be a side effect of my anti-slavery bias. Certainly slaves are co-opted against their will, which seems different from voluntary communities which put the communal good ahead of the individual good. And forcing someone to do your labor is different from kicking out uncooperative individuals to fend for themselves. In a sense, my scenario emphasizes individual freedoms, by giving each member of the community a choice to cooperate or not. Slavery denies those freedoms by making cooperation mandatory. I must admit that the distinction is blurry, though.
I'm not sure how this leads to the need for two Testaments in the Bible, though. I always thought the Christian faith pivoted around the coming of Jesus Christ, who (among other things) claimed to be abolishing the old ways and replacing them with new ways. The convention is to read the Old Testament as the story of the old ways, and the New Testament as the story of the new ways. The separation of the scriptures on this basis seems sufficient and complete to me, without bringing the issue of slavery into it at all. But I could be wrong, and anyway would like to hear your argument.
Well, I did say "apparent learning disability".
I suspect that much of what we call "ADD" is simply misunderstanding, laziness, or unwillingness to place responsibility where it belongs, on the part of the diagnosers.
But it seems to me that anyone who can understand things they do not see working in front of them has a distinct advantage over anyone who cannot. Claiming that there is no disadvantage there sounds about as silly as claiming that being a twelve-year-old is some kind of disease that needs to be treated with modern drugs.
The ability to reason coherently in the abstract is a powerful tool. I doubt its usefulness can trivially ignored.
It seems like your argument is that the only thing between us and Utopia is a corrupt government. Yet you pointed out that politicians are in it for themselves, rather than the good of the nation. Since eliminating the corrupt government would do nothing at all to eliminate the corrupt people in our society, it seems much more likely that the only thing between us and Utopia is ourselves, and that we will always fail to produce that Utopia with any form of governance (or non-governance).
I think more of us Americans would be worried about this so-called "coup" if we didn't have a coup every four years.
The Greeks may not have had tabloid media, but somebody must have whipped them into a frenzy over Socrates's "corruption of Athenian youth" with his "unorthodox and offensive philosophies". And in their frenzy, they killed him. Nowadays, we just sue, or censor (unless you wear a tinfoil hat--then we kill).
Ooh! Ooh! I've got another one! Imagine a mountainous island nation, with limited farmland, an inhospitable climate, and primitive agricultural technology. The only way to survive is by forming small communities, and preserving the copmmon good at all costs. Failure to sacrifice individual freedoms for communal welfare results in death--not just for the individual, but for the community that supports that individual in spite of such uncooperativeness. Anyone who doesn't put the community ahead of themselves is exiled, and almost certainly doomed to die during the next harsh winter (and all the winters are harsh, on this island). This makes perfect sense, since everyone has the liberty to live like an individual. The only restriction is that they also get to die like an individual. The communities, meanwhile, thrive and grow, and technology advances, and one day the community can afford the luxury of individual liberties. This is, of course, after many generations of eschewing those liberties in favor of communal well-being.
Are these people giving up their liberties because they're delusional, or because they're clear-headed pragmatists? Is the extreme individualist truly any more laudable than the extreme conformist?
Edmund Burke's statement is absolute (note the use of the word "never"), and therefore logically unsound. It is also, I think, provably untrue.
See, I always thought of "Government" as being a regulatory entity, where Regulation=Standards+Enforcement. While I see the logic behind the "legal monopoly on violence" statement, it always struck me as inflammatory rhetoric, rather than a realistic or productive assessment.
Furthermore, monopolies aren't necessarily bad, and while enforcement sometimes requires violence, it doesn't follow that all enforcement, or even all violent enforcement, is bad.
Take the electromagnetic spectrum, for example: without standards specifying its use, airplanes wouldn't be able to fly, cell phones wouldn't work, and televisions would receive nothing but snow. And without enforcement, pirate radio stations would freely override airport navigational beacons, cell phones, and television programs. It'd be the whole "Mexican Radio" problem, writ large.
Overall, I'd say that any community that did not establish a "legal monopoly on violence" (or, as I like to call it, "regulation") would collapse under the weight of its own malefactors.
You'll need to get rid of the malefactors before you can begin to think about getting rid of the government.
[Insert whole other debate about the efficacy of this or that specific government, the proper limits of a government's power, gun control, and the obvious superiority of the libertarian point of view.]
I have no joke here, I just like saying
"The Supreme Court is structured like a geriatric Menudo."
Your theories only apply to Euclidian geometry, by the way. In the spooky horror of non-Euclidean space, three lefts make you insane.
Theoretically, you only need a few thousand respondents on any survey, to get a statistically valid result. If that's the case, you only need about 1% of the population to actually vote, in order to determine what the population as a whole really wants. IANAS, of course, so it's possible that the politicians are actually voting for you, or something.
Heh. "Slashdot==Truth" is very dangerous territory. I'd stay out of it if I were you :)
I admit I simply assumed nobody needed it. I also didn't mean the Ozarks literally, so much as symbolically; a figurative example of the kind of place I assumed wouldn't want or need cell coverage.
I guess my response was driven largely by my belief that--unlike water, electricity, and standard phone service--cell phones are a luxury, not a necessity. I could be wrong in my beliefs, though.
More reply here.
Fair enough. I got a little carried away, there.
:)
Your counter argument is strong, and supported by facts, so I'll happily concede my purely speculative point.
Also, I'm all in favor of less government privacy. Wasn't it David Brin who proposed last year that government snooping on private citizens was fine, so long as the citizens had equal snooping powers over the government? Or was it Bruce Sterling? Anyway, whoever said it, I like it, and should probably start voting for it.
Thanks for clarifying the cell phone issue for me. I'll go away and contemplate things in greater detail, now
Why on earth should the government regulate this? It seems similar to suggesting that as rail transport becomes more popular, the government should force national railroad coverage. Or that the government should force the telcos to deploy true national broadband coverage.
:)
How about this: as cell phones become more popular, the service providers will accumulate enough revenue to put in more cells and better capacity. As cell phones become more popular, the demand for coverage in remote areas will grow, until it becomes good business to put cells out there.
Once the demand is high enough, the providers will increase the coverage freely, without government intervention, because they know people will pay for it--enough people to make the added coverage profitable.
And if the demand isn't there yet, but the government forces the issue anyway? Who will pay for it? We already know the consumers won't pay for it, because if they would, the phone companies would have done it on their own. We know the providers won't want to pay for it, since they know that without demand they'd only be losing money. So the government would have to pay for it--which means we'd have to pay for it. My taxes would end up paying for a cell deep in the Ozarks that nobody wants or needs or cares about. Or the government would convince the providers to pay for it after all, probably with subsidies (my taxes, again), or concessions that would grant the providers even greater power to exploit the citizenry--the citizenry that doesn't even want true national coverage yet.
Or the government might entice cell phone providers with subsidies--and the caveat that the Office of Homeland Security have administrative access to the cellular networks. "The bad news is, you must provide true national cellular coverage. The good news is, we'll give you taxpayer money to do it, and make a profit. But we get to listen in on everybody's calls."
This country has gotten along pretty well without true national cell coverage so far, and it can probably manage to muddle along a few more years until the market is mature enough to make such a thing plausible without government interference.
Argh. I'm rambling on in an increasingly belligerent fashion. My point is made, so I'll stop now, before I become completely insufferable
But the last line of the article really caught my attention.
"If I had to do this all over again, I would do it very differently," he said. "I would keep it very, very quiet."
This I don't understand at all. Sure, the Pay Phone in the Middle of Nowhere is gone, but there are still many functional pay phones out there.
Why not pick an arbitrary payphone on some New York street corner, and start calling it? And don't keep it quiet, either--publicize it just as much as the first one. It's bound to be interesting, and fun, even if it isn't the same as calling the original phone.
Better yet, he could have a "pay phone of the month": select a different arbitrary pay phone each month. Imagine the people flocking to call it, and the people flocking to answer it.
It's a simple concept, but I don't think he's even begun to explore its full potential. The original phone had a certain stark beauty to it, but it should be viewed as the beginning, not the be-all and end-all. The end will come when there are no pay phones left to call.
Heh. Please understand that I wasn't flaming or nitpicking you. I just couldn't resist the obvious response.
Why is it mailing my system information to you? That doesn't seem very secure at all.
It's called "Preemptive Slashdotting", and you should be grateful. Instead of waiting for the page to not load, you can read the "offline" statement in the article, and save yourself time by going straight to the discussion.
Wait... you don't go straight to the discussion without reading the article? What's wrong with you?
You know what pisses me off? Nobody ever bothered to explain the underlying formal logic system that makes the multiplication tables true.
I went through school learning arithmetic, algebra, and all the rest by rote. Sure, I could see some of the patterns, but not the system of rules that made it all work.
It wasn't until I was well into my adulthood that I realized that math was much more interesting than I'd thought, and that all the boring bits weren't the real thing that was going on. If students were introduced to the idea of math as a system for expressing information, rather than math as a set of rules for doing sums, they'd probably get along much better.
But if you can't do basic multiplication, you'll probably be kinda slow at picking up the richer aspects of mathmatics. I say, make the kids memorize those tables (suffering is good for the soul, after all), but tell them why the tables work sometime before they get into High School.
Why not, indeed. My initial response was "learn what via computers? Last time I checked, there wasn't that much useful teaching software out there, and close to nothing that improves on human interaction between student and teacher.
If computers are of little use as teaching aids for "normal" students, why on earth would we want to use them as teaching aids for students with apparent learning disabilities? The risk of compounding the problem seems (to me) fairly high with that approach.
If the smaller classroom solution doesn't work because of poor teaching methods, then clearly our current educational system has a significant problem. If we can't even get our human teachers to educate effectively, what makes you think we have the skill and wisdom to build a computer teacher that does any better?
Not to mention that a transition to computer-based teaching would be costly. Taxpayers won't be happy about it, but corporations would probably love to sponsor such a move. I won't go into the implications of that here, but they should be obvious.