The New Wonder Of The World
Wednesday • June 9th 2021 • 6:29:28 pm
What we need to talk about,
is Art.
Somehow,
in all this incredible complexity of our Universe...
A set of lectures by a magnificent teacher,
will always beat the snot out of the best AI.
That is why I say that our Life and Mind,
should be a Masterpiece, that it is a work of art.
The best lessons, that teach us the most,
must be crafted by an artist.
A powerful, knowledgeable, wise, and inspirational teacher,
someone that knows the weaknesses, and loves to help.
There is one itsy-bitsy little bit, that is highly computerized,
and that is the path that students take through the lectures.
See not everyone is interested in all the things the lecture holds,
so a set of lectures has to be flexible, and that means computerized.
And this is great, because it means the teacher gives the lecture once,
and then it becomes infinitely re-playable, by an infinite number of students.
But please note that this is the simplest lecture model,
it is best used for teachers that are deeply connected to their lecture.
Single-teacher lectures,
are primary for the purpose of honoring the teachers and their art of teaching.
The standard lecture format,
is very similar to a wikipedia category.
There are many students,
continuously improving the various lectures in the set.
And let me just say that they are all volunteers,
money-making or hoarding has no place in education.
School and Knowledge is meant to be free,
otherwise it is just fraud, perpetrated on the future generations.
It is more than volunteers,
and quality of the lectures.
It is also the usefulness,
and the clarity.
Today, when a student does not understand mathematics,
they are encouraged and forced to pretend to understand it by memorization, by acting.
The force is pretty formidable,
they will be punished with grades, that will destroy their GPA, and in some cases sent to prison, the prison of repeating a year.
The future generations will never forgive us for this,
I don't event want to tell you what they will think of us.
In a real school, when actually learning for real,
getting snagged on something is no different then discovering something uniquely interesting about a subject.
Not understanding something very well,
and wanting to understand something very much, is the same thing.
In today's schools, one leads to being told to pay attention, or else,
and the other to the barbaric act of actually being punished.
I think the first subject that people have difficulty with,
is mathematics.
Mathematics, is actually taught wrong,
the lectures are so broken, that they likely transformed into a memorization dog an pony show.
And memorization is not education,
it is just make-believe, it is just acting.
There are teachers out there that can help students understand,
but it is actually really bad for the classroom.
Because lovingly teaching all students to understand all the concepts,
will require far more time then what a class has before the final.
There will not be enough time to cover all the concepts,
the class curriculum is not meant for real education, but mere memorization.
The bureaucracy of the school,
does not care that you are educated, they only care that you pass the tests.
What is there to be done in this situation?
that part is really easy.
I call it "The Million Student March",
but don't worry, you don't have to get up from your chair.
What you have to do is stop pretending,
your willingness to cram, to memorize, is helping this strange theater carry on.
You have to stop pretending that memorization is an education,
and start learning for real, on your own.
And this part is really, really, important,
there are some subjects that are so important, that without their knowledge you will be immanently tricked.
Stop memorizing for school,
and start learning for real.
Learn Chemistry, Microbiology, Your Biology and how the Human Body operates,
and either take up an interest in Astrobiology, Medicine, or Combinatorial Genomics; follow your curiosity.
You need to know about physics, don't worry about the formulas - as that comes next, and it can't be easier,
learn about circus, electricity, and build your own models that for example recharge batteries with solar power.
For the love of all things amazing, get some wires, batteries, a multi-meter,
and especially analog Amp and Volt gauges to see them come to life.
You need to learn how to built a radio,
and you need to build a tiny transmitter.
You are free to learn all the cool things now,
you can lean anything.
And there is a very special subject,
that as everything else has been horribly misrepresented.
And this particular goodie,
grants you the ability to get inside any system of any complexity.
This subject is so powerful that you can do experiments on spacetime it self,
by actually simulating sustained acceleration for prolonged periods such as Project Orion describes,
and run tests on things like gravitational singularities.
I am of course describing,
Programming is how you learn mathematics for real,
for one, the notation is consistent, as Math As Code states: "Mathematical symbols can mean different things depending on the author, context and the field of study".
Don't worry, school wasn't teaching you real math anyway,
the real math is actually pretty cool and full of interesting mysteries.
But you can't approach, neural networks or combinatronics for example, directly,
the way school presents these subjects is basically toxic, insane, deadly, and crazy - it is deeply heartless.
The right way to approach neural networks,
is by looking at Simple Letter Detection or maybe Color Contrast examples over at brain.js,
and follow up with a couple of videos.
I think even more illustrative of the need for programming is combinatronics,
and the way you would get at it, is by cracking passwords in a cute little hacker game that you would program as part of learning programming.
The complicated subjects in mathematics,
are so trivial in the programming word, that no programmer dares to say a thing.
Start learning programming by taking to JavaScript,
and Learning how to mess around with P5.js.
Once you advance, even if just a little bit,
you will be able to create a lecture based on the path you took.
Other people working on the same subject,
will be able to help you more, if you collaborate with them on a beautiful interactive lecture.
A lecture is a work of art,
different people may wish to take a unique path through it, but it really comes down to the presentations and visualizations.
Biology is a very interesting subject to study and learn about from simulations on a computer,
it is only one little step to get to medicine, and if you can do both you, you can be pretty sure, that computers are the future.
Can you learn mathematics without Programming,
no, no you can't.
There are some people that like that kind of thing,
but for them complexity is something that they need, it is not just about learning math for them, they are choosing the hard way to meditate.
Programming is the first thing you have to learn,
as it wraps all the other things.
It makes everything simple,
and puts impossible things within your reach.
Computers provide the much needed info-graphics, visualizations, interactivity, control and interaction,
when it comes to the creation of lectures for the new class of real schools.
They also provide humanity with a program, that we can call School 1.0,
call it Virtual Reality School, call it school on a chip, call it a cool computer game.
A computer program that will be able to run on low powered devices,
that will gently step through the much needed real lectures towards a Real Education.
The subject I am looking forward to the most is not computers or programming but,
Philosophy.
Philosophy has been destroyed by schools,
it became irrelevant to our lives.
But Philosophy is actually the story of Humanity's Childhood,
it is the greatest story that has hardly ever been told.
And what is fantastic about teaching Philosophy from a little computer device,
is that it is a dramatized Audio Book, it is probably a thousand hours long, and recorded by countless students, in all our languages.
The Philosophy lectures on this portable school device that your generation will begin work on,
will be hailed as one of the greatest achievements of human kind, it will be seen as the New Wonder Of The World.
The way towards Wold Peace, and Unity,
is always near, but it requires collective courage.
It requires that you stop memorizing,
and stand up for your generation, and the future of this world,
that you stand up for real education.
Personal Note,
If I,
may.
Walk up to the students being punished,
and let them know you memorized and don't understand it either.
Help them understand that they are not stupid,
it is just that school is broken.
You don't have to become their friend,
just save them from the toxicity of stress, that can often destroy a mind by pushing them off-course into self medication, with food or alcohol, or worse.
Make sure that the students in the back know,
that there is nothing wrong with them.
Most of the time they are scared of becoming homeless,
which is exactly what the bully will drive them into.
Let them know that they don't have to be scared,
and it is actually kind of good that they are already upset at the dog an pony show.
As ultimately, all the A student will find that their work life ended up becoming toxic,
and that why they really needed was to work for themselves, where they could take better care of their mental health.
Just tell all the students being punished
to begin practicing to build their own company, by building dozens of little ones to help them understand how to do it right.
It is what everyone will want,
eventually.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,
to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die,
discover that I had not lived.
I did not wish to live what was not life,
living is so dear;
nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary.
I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life,
to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life,
to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms...
-- Henry