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Are we still talking about schools?

Okay. This is a valid point. Can we talk about a new trap now? What about bear traps? They're definitely tools of the machine.


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Okay. So. It seems to me that this argument is about the wrong thing. Maybe its just me.

I have a linguistics degree. I program computers for a living. The most important thing I learned in school? How to learn!

Really, I think it's sort of immaterial WHAT you teach people in school. It's nice if it's something interesting (they'll want to work at it more) or useful later (useful things are always, you know, useful), but they key is not learning (read: memorizing) some equation, but knowing that, if you don't know about a topic, there are ways to find out and if you don't want to look it up every time you need that piece of information, ways to help yourself remember.

I didn't realize that this was the point of education until I'd gotten my degree already, but either I had a happy accident and learned it anyway, the system worked, or I figured it out on some kind of instinctual level (or, I suppose, some confluence of more than one of those).

Here's the wonderful paradox: Schools should teach you how to learn (and, thus, how to think... implied "for yourself"?)... but that's actually BAD for The Machine, right? Thinking cogs are bad, right?

I think The Machine benefits from overtesting because people learn that leaning is hard, and school sucks and thinking is rough work and, man... flipping burgers is easy. If you can be socially engineered into having negative associations with using your frickin' brain, you are going to be easier to tell what to do ("Trust us. We know better..."). So maybe this is why national governments have become so over-emphatic about testing and regulation? They're benefiting from ruining their own educational systems?

I mean--people who don't get conditioned by the education system being jacked up were probably not going to need all that hand holding anyway, so there's no loss if you teach them how to think, you can always catch them with, say, the money trap or the need-to-be-accepted trap (which is nasty, since it's biological, to some extent) or any of the other ones laid out.


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This is awesome material. I read some of it to my friend. It made me angry and it made me laugh. I can't believe, on some level, that people actually interface with the world in this manner. On the other hand... I know people like this. NICE people like this. People I love. That point about ability to change is very important, though. My best friend's wife was super high RWA when they met. He (chiefly) and I have been chipping away at that with surprising ease. It's not that logic was unknown to her... it's that she'd never been taught to self apply it (the merging files mentioned above). So frequently, merely pointing out an inconsistency is enough to get her thinking and that's almost always good.

My wife, on the other hand, started at a lower RWA than her (though still higher than he or I) and has had some RWA-lowering experiences naturally. She was a Catholic. Then, one Sunday, the priest said, "You should all, as good Catholics, vote to make gay marriage illegal." We live in Texas. Anyway, after that, she basically said, "No. Fuck it. I'm out."

Anyway, great read.


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