ToK was my favorite class in high school, thanks to having an amazing teacher, one of two teachers in the school to complete a Ph. D. I’ve heard it said that, if you put Michael Vassar in an empt concrete room, he would soon start pontificating on the influence of the Enlightenment on putting people in empty rooms. I think the same is true of this guy.
We read parts of Man is the Measure and a 60s philosophy textbook , discussed the nature of causality, picked apart Max Weber’s Verstehen argument, and reflected on the panopticon. We then did segments on each area of knowledge, with lively debates, discussions, and presentations.
It’s still the case that ToK was subservient to our other classes. In March, the class turned into time to polish our Extended Essays (the 4000 word paper required of all candidates), some class time was spent starting a yearly tradition of painting the wall with the names of the candidates, and we had a party in place of a winter final.
I wanted to jump in and say that I liked ToK purely for the social bonding rather than the learning, and that the material covered was rather disjoint from LessWrong, but upon reflection, neither is true. My opinion on suburbia has been permanently altered from discussion of a documentary on Levittown, and it was in ToK that “utilon” became a regular part of my vocabulary. I actually became a reader of what was then Overcoming Bias while taking ToK, in part because I saw words like “ontology” and got the warm feelings from its association with ToK. I shared a few OB articles with my ToK teacher; he got a huge kick out of reading about phlogiston theory.
In summary: There are a lot of ways to make ToK good, and some of them don’t look like LessWrong.
ToK was my favorite class in high school, thanks to having an amazing teacher, one of two teachers in the school to complete a Ph. D. I’ve heard it said that, if you put Michael Vassar in an empt concrete room, he would soon start pontificating on the influence of the Enlightenment on putting people in empty rooms. I think the same is true of this guy.
We read parts of Man is the Measure and a 60s philosophy textbook , discussed the nature of causality, picked apart Max Weber’s Verstehen argument, and reflected on the panopticon. We then did segments on each area of knowledge, with lively debates, discussions, and presentations.
It’s still the case that ToK was subservient to our other classes. In March, the class turned into time to polish our Extended Essays (the 4000 word paper required of all candidates), some class time was spent starting a yearly tradition of painting the wall with the names of the candidates, and we had a party in place of a winter final.
I wanted to jump in and say that I liked ToK purely for the social bonding rather than the learning, and that the material covered was rather disjoint from LessWrong, but upon reflection, neither is true. My opinion on suburbia has been permanently altered from discussion of a documentary on Levittown, and it was in ToK that “utilon” became a regular part of my vocabulary. I actually became a reader of what was then Overcoming Bias while taking ToK, in part because I saw words like “ontology” and got the warm feelings from its association with ToK. I shared a few OB articles with my ToK teacher; he got a huge kick out of reading about phlogiston theory.
In summary: There are a lot of ways to make ToK good, and some of them don’t look like LessWrong.