[ExI] instilling ambition

Mike Dougherty msd001 at gmail.com
Sat Jan 19 17:37:24 UTC 2013


On Sat, Jan 19, 2013 at 8:56 AM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:
> I think this is an important concern. Guarding and maintaining our
> infrastructure of life is not the only vital goal: instilling ambition and
> dynamical optimism in the next generation is perhaps even more important.
>[snip]
> Any other ideas of how to instil grand ambition in people? Force them to
> read a bit of Rand, Nietzsche or von Braun?

Force won't work.  We force kids through 12 years of public school and
then 4+ more years of college/university and it produces little value.
 We know education is broken, but nobody seems to know how to fix it.
I believe the problem stems from the education "system" being stuck in
a local minimum (aka: a rut, depression, etc.)  and the effort/work to
climb out of that well requires more speculative investment than
anyone is willing to afford.  There are small-scale alternatives but
they're still so new and unproven that We won't risk scaling up to a
national program.

Children learn.  We don't have to make that happen.  What they learn,
however, is a matter of the environment into which they are placed.
Can we better control that environment?  Is there a way to diversify
the educational landscape so each child is able to pursue their
interests and still contribute to the benefit of society?  The
assembly-line/manufactured education we have now churns out a
consistent product, but does that product provide any value after
graduation?

Is grand ambition even really desirable?  If a society of insatiable
consumers is the desired programming, would ambitious producers be as
easily and predictably controlled?  Those interests that profit from
the status quo stand to lose an empire if a generation of children was
encouraged to challenge the current equilibrium.  I realize that may
be fundamentally extropian; however, there exists considerable inertia
to overcome in the resting mass of "how it's always been."



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