I continue to be amazed at the avenues your wee noggin takes in your path of the cognitive dissident. I don't react in either way as your story tells but my response is WTF? How does he go there? I can read this stuff then walk out into my garden and happily pick up chicken shit for the rest of the day. I think the future needs both of us.
I find myself fascinated, Martin, but I'm not sure how much is related to AI as opposed to another factor. In the year 2000 or so, I took the career aptitude test provided by the Rockport Institute. I don't know what it is like nowadays, but then it tested about 11 pretty much orthogonal factors. Most people have a few factors at which they excel and several where they lag, and that helps identify the careers or work that they should focus on. Some are high-rated in all factors, and they have a tougher job figuring out what to do with their work lives.
There was one factor that stands out in relation to your article today. That one was whether the test taker was a team player or a maestro. Team players naturally use normal language to communicate with others and build or at least participate with others in a team. On the other hand, maestros follow their own path, make up their own language many times, and tend to go way out in their arc through life.
There is a real and fundamental difference between team-type people (which is most people) and maestros.
I am high in all factors, and yes, I have done all sorts of things in my life, having difficulty settling on any task in particular but simply liking to read and think and sometimes discuss material with others. I'm a generalist. Further, it's easier for me because I am a team-leaning person despite the fact that my cognition regularly goes way out away from what most people can easily follow or even want to follow. However, because I lean toward normal language in my communications, I rarely feel lonely or divorced from the rest of the world in a cognitive sense.
I will hazard a likely guess that you on the other hand are a maestro. Your life is likely filled (as is your recent work) with symbols, new words, new use of existing words, all of which fit to and express in your eyes what you are trying to communicate ever so precisely. However, the use of special words and contexts without rooting it all in normal "team" language creates a chasm between you and those you seek to enlighten.
AI may aggravate that division between "team-normal" and maestro, but it has not created that chasm. That chasm has been around for millennia.
Although it may feel in a way foreign to you, or perhaps more precisely, lacking in discrete conceptual boundaries, if you were to use AI to write your new insights and systems into fuzzier team-language posts, my belief is that you would be able to reach (many) more people in ways they can follow and perhaps feel the natural chasm between you and everyone else rather less than you do now. Further, you will reach more people and spread your concepts more easily (though less precisely than you might wish).
In this sense AI not only can help you go out in a great arc of intellectual exploration almost nobody other than you can pursue successfully but might also perhaps then become your translator, your Boswell, to bring back the rich lode of new concepts you have discovered and make them into team-language communications (more) easily accessible to far more people. Maestro work, brilliant as it might be, is largely useless and lost unless it can be made accessible to the normal people who are the ones who must apply it in the human world.
Think of Tolkien, who had a massively interlinked network of thoughts and concepts brilliantly operational in his head. He could have written a massive scholarly tome like Aquinas' Summa Theologica. He chose instead to write one of the most soaring, unforgettable epoch novel sets ever written in all of history and has in some way or another enlightened literally a billion people through that human touch.
You need to finish fleshing out your current work (which I still believe is not yet finished because it does not account for or cover how psychopathic predation naturally is advantaged as societal systems degrade and how psychopaths are therefore incentivized to degrade such systems faster) and how to fix that issue *first* so that normal people have a real chance to fix things longer-term with some likelihood of success.
But then you need to figure out how to gift it back to us all with the necessary human touch. For all I know at this point, you may find that the toughest part of the work. :-)
I just finished reading your "From ∆Q to ∆R" article and was truly fascinated. It struck me that the military approach, which includes a "hostile actor" input, is an approach which when applied to civilian governance, causes the predators to be identified as the hostile actor input. Maybe I'm wrong, but I like that entire approach.
Using the military approach to engineering our governance institutions and processes completes the systematic approach you are taking by rounding it out with the hostile actor identified explicitly as those who would abuse civilian governance for their own advantage and to do harm to others. We need to engineer them and their impacts as much out of the picture or as we can or insulate our governance systems and processes as much as possible to remove or at least minimize their impact.
The US Constitution is explicitly and implicitly designed to remove or relocate the damage power-hungry people would otherwise do to the country. The 17th amendment explicitly removed one of the most powerful parts of the original power system, the fact that the states would tend to ally with the citizens against the central government trying to expand its power at the expense of the other players in the power hierarchy.
Martin, I love your idea of a Bell Labs equivalent for Civilization. Powerful idea.
Like the Wharton study and, indeed, education as a whole, your cognitive chasm theory is generalising entire cohorts for the convenience of a neat conclusion. My inclination is that the problem (and, one way or another, it is a problem) is simply quantity over quality.
You ask what is education actually for? I smiled when I read that but I wonder, have you ever really sat with that question. One answer I might give is education is for turning cats into dogs. For turning free thinking, sentient young children into conforming adults.
Another answer I might give is that education is a game. You're required to achieve a certain mastery at each level to get the reward and unlock the next level. What never occurred to me at the time was that the optimal way to play is to follow their rules and get the right answer as quickly as possible, even if you don't really understand why it's the right answer. Perhaps that makes me a slow learner.
For me, and people like me (possibly Debra?), the only point to cognition is to understand something. Outsourcing any cognitive function is like fitting wheels to a tomato (to borrow from Blackadder), a completely pointless exercise. However, unlike fitting wheels to a tomato, outsourcing cognitive function is potentially deleterious.
I've watched my son use AI to great effect whilst trying to discover and learn the vast history of England's common law traditions and constitution. What he didn't do at any point was outsource cognition to the AI. He acquired a deep knowledge and understanding of the great scholars and jurists that he could contrast against the sorry place we find ourselves in today. His use of AI, possibly like your own, would have made him an outlier on the Wharton study but it likely wouldn't have affected the conclusions.
I continue to be amazed at the avenues your wee noggin takes in your path of the cognitive dissident. I don't react in either way as your story tells but my response is WTF? How does he go there? I can read this stuff then walk out into my garden and happily pick up chicken shit for the rest of the day. I think the future needs both of us.
I find myself fascinated, Martin, but I'm not sure how much is related to AI as opposed to another factor. In the year 2000 or so, I took the career aptitude test provided by the Rockport Institute. I don't know what it is like nowadays, but then it tested about 11 pretty much orthogonal factors. Most people have a few factors at which they excel and several where they lag, and that helps identify the careers or work that they should focus on. Some are high-rated in all factors, and they have a tougher job figuring out what to do with their work lives.
There was one factor that stands out in relation to your article today. That one was whether the test taker was a team player or a maestro. Team players naturally use normal language to communicate with others and build or at least participate with others in a team. On the other hand, maestros follow their own path, make up their own language many times, and tend to go way out in their arc through life.
There is a real and fundamental difference between team-type people (which is most people) and maestros.
I am high in all factors, and yes, I have done all sorts of things in my life, having difficulty settling on any task in particular but simply liking to read and think and sometimes discuss material with others. I'm a generalist. Further, it's easier for me because I am a team-leaning person despite the fact that my cognition regularly goes way out away from what most people can easily follow or even want to follow. However, because I lean toward normal language in my communications, I rarely feel lonely or divorced from the rest of the world in a cognitive sense.
I will hazard a likely guess that you on the other hand are a maestro. Your life is likely filled (as is your recent work) with symbols, new words, new use of existing words, all of which fit to and express in your eyes what you are trying to communicate ever so precisely. However, the use of special words and contexts without rooting it all in normal "team" language creates a chasm between you and those you seek to enlighten.
AI may aggravate that division between "team-normal" and maestro, but it has not created that chasm. That chasm has been around for millennia.
Although it may feel in a way foreign to you, or perhaps more precisely, lacking in discrete conceptual boundaries, if you were to use AI to write your new insights and systems into fuzzier team-language posts, my belief is that you would be able to reach (many) more people in ways they can follow and perhaps feel the natural chasm between you and everyone else rather less than you do now. Further, you will reach more people and spread your concepts more easily (though less precisely than you might wish).
In this sense AI not only can help you go out in a great arc of intellectual exploration almost nobody other than you can pursue successfully but might also perhaps then become your translator, your Boswell, to bring back the rich lode of new concepts you have discovered and make them into team-language communications (more) easily accessible to far more people. Maestro work, brilliant as it might be, is largely useless and lost unless it can be made accessible to the normal people who are the ones who must apply it in the human world.
Think of Tolkien, who had a massively interlinked network of thoughts and concepts brilliantly operational in his head. He could have written a massive scholarly tome like Aquinas' Summa Theologica. He chose instead to write one of the most soaring, unforgettable epoch novel sets ever written in all of history and has in some way or another enlightened literally a billion people through that human touch.
You need to finish fleshing out your current work (which I still believe is not yet finished because it does not account for or cover how psychopathic predation naturally is advantaged as societal systems degrade and how psychopaths are therefore incentivized to degrade such systems faster) and how to fix that issue *first* so that normal people have a real chance to fix things longer-term with some likelihood of success.
But then you need to figure out how to gift it back to us all with the necessary human touch. For all I know at this point, you may find that the toughest part of the work. :-)
I just finished reading your "From ∆Q to ∆R" article and was truly fascinated. It struck me that the military approach, which includes a "hostile actor" input, is an approach which when applied to civilian governance, causes the predators to be identified as the hostile actor input. Maybe I'm wrong, but I like that entire approach.
Using the military approach to engineering our governance institutions and processes completes the systematic approach you are taking by rounding it out with the hostile actor identified explicitly as those who would abuse civilian governance for their own advantage and to do harm to others. We need to engineer them and their impacts as much out of the picture or as we can or insulate our governance systems and processes as much as possible to remove or at least minimize their impact.
The US Constitution is explicitly and implicitly designed to remove or relocate the damage power-hungry people would otherwise do to the country. The 17th amendment explicitly removed one of the most powerful parts of the original power system, the fact that the states would tend to ally with the citizens against the central government trying to expand its power at the expense of the other players in the power hierarchy.
Martin, I love your idea of a Bell Labs equivalent for Civilization. Powerful idea.
Like the Wharton study and, indeed, education as a whole, your cognitive chasm theory is generalising entire cohorts for the convenience of a neat conclusion. My inclination is that the problem (and, one way or another, it is a problem) is simply quantity over quality.
You ask what is education actually for? I smiled when I read that but I wonder, have you ever really sat with that question. One answer I might give is education is for turning cats into dogs. For turning free thinking, sentient young children into conforming adults.
Another answer I might give is that education is a game. You're required to achieve a certain mastery at each level to get the reward and unlock the next level. What never occurred to me at the time was that the optimal way to play is to follow their rules and get the right answer as quickly as possible, even if you don't really understand why it's the right answer. Perhaps that makes me a slow learner.
For me, and people like me (possibly Debra?), the only point to cognition is to understand something. Outsourcing any cognitive function is like fitting wheels to a tomato (to borrow from Blackadder), a completely pointless exercise. However, unlike fitting wheels to a tomato, outsourcing cognitive function is potentially deleterious.
I've watched my son use AI to great effect whilst trying to discover and learn the vast history of England's common law traditions and constitution. What he didn't do at any point was outsource cognition to the AI. He acquired a deep knowledge and understanding of the great scholars and jurists that he could contrast against the sorry place we find ourselves in today. His use of AI, possibly like your own, would have made him an outlier on the Wharton study but it likely wouldn't have affected the conclusions.
Oh, baby, that was a big one, baby, baby, baby...now I need a nap.