I think we probably agree on how far the existing system is from the ideal. I wanted to point at the opposite end of the scale as a reminder that we are even further away from that.
When I was at the first grade of elementary school, they tried to teach us about “sets”, which mostly meant that instead of “two plus two equals four” the textbook said “the union of a set containing two elements and another set containing two elements, has four elements”. In hindsight I see this was a cargo-cultish version of set theory, which probably was very high-status at that time. I also see that from the perspective of set theory as the set theorists know it, this was quite useless. Yes, we used the word “set” a lot, but it had little in common with how the set theorists think about sets. Anyway, we have learned addition and subtraction successfully, albeit with some extra verbal friction.
Compared to that, when I tried to learn something in my free time as a teenager, people around me recommended me to read books written by Däniken, the Silva method of mind control, Moody’s Life after Life, religious literature, books on meditation, and other shit. I have spent a lot of time practicing “altered states of consciousness”, because (from the perspective of a naive teenager who believed that the adults around him are not utter retards, and the people they consider high-status are not all lying scumbags) it seemed like a very efficient intervention. I mean, if you get the supernatural skills first, they will give you a huge multiplier to everything you try doing later, right? Haha, nope.
So while I hate school with a passion, as many people on Less Wrong do, the alternative seems much worse. Even the books I study in my free time now were often written in the context of the educational system, or by the people employed by the educational system.
I don’t trust societal consensus at all. Look at the YouTube videos about quantum physics, 99% of them is some crap like “quantum physics means that human mind had a mystical power over matter”. Even if you limit yourself to seemingly smart people, half of them believe that IQ isn’t real because Nassim fucking Taleb said so. Half of the popular science does not replicate.
I think you’re comparing apples to oranges here. When people get into topics where they have no personal contact with reality, you should be comparing to fields where experiments aren’t feasible and people are mostly pontificating. When people read books written by people that are crazy or lying but popular, you should be comparing to fields where professors are faking data to get publications—while also trading citations, of course. When you compare individuals to something like experimental physics or civil engineering, you should be comparing that to something like cooking food.
I think we probably agree on how far the existing system is from the ideal. I wanted to point at the opposite end of the scale as a reminder that we are even further away from that.
When I was at the first grade of elementary school, they tried to teach us about “sets”, which mostly meant that instead of “two plus two equals four” the textbook said “the union of a set containing two elements and another set containing two elements, has four elements”. In hindsight I see this was a cargo-cultish version of set theory, which probably was very high-status at that time. I also see that from the perspective of set theory as the set theorists know it, this was quite useless. Yes, we used the word “set” a lot, but it had little in common with how the set theorists think about sets. Anyway, we have learned addition and subtraction successfully, albeit with some extra verbal friction.
Compared to that, when I tried to learn something in my free time as a teenager, people around me recommended me to read books written by Däniken, the Silva method of mind control, Moody’s Life after Life, religious literature, books on meditation, and other shit. I have spent a lot of time practicing “altered states of consciousness”, because (from the perspective of a naive teenager who believed that the adults around him are not utter retards, and the people they consider high-status are not all lying scumbags) it seemed like a very efficient intervention. I mean, if you get the supernatural skills first, they will give you a huge multiplier to everything you try doing later, right? Haha, nope.
So while I hate school with a passion, as many people on Less Wrong do, the alternative seems much worse. Even the books I study in my free time now were often written in the context of the educational system, or by the people employed by the educational system.
I don’t trust societal consensus at all. Look at the YouTube videos about quantum physics, 99% of them is some crap like “quantum physics means that human mind had a mystical power over matter”. Even if you limit yourself to seemingly smart people, half of them believe that IQ isn’t real because Nassim fucking Taleb said so. Half of the popular science does not replicate.
I think you’re comparing apples to oranges here. When people get into topics where they have no personal contact with reality, you should be comparing to fields where experiments aren’t feasible and people are mostly pontificating. When people read books written by people that are crazy or lying but popular, you should be comparing to fields where professors are faking data to get publications—while also trading citations, of course. When you compare individuals to something like experimental physics or civil engineering, you should be comparing that to something like cooking food.