[ExI] common core educations standards, was: RE: far future

[Adrian Tymes]

On Jan 21, 2014 10:49 AM, "Kelly Anderson" <kellycoinguy at gmail.com> wrote:
> Put another way, just imagine how incredible the results would be if we
spent as much extra on the top 5% of students as we now spend on the bottom
5% of students. What if Special Education were bi-polar? What would that
look like?

Speaking as one of those top 5% who got Special Education because he stuck
out from the crowd...

Look up "gifted children".  This is far from a new concept, and arguably
what you are asking for is already the case.  It is no panacea - and does
not result in all or even many of those top 5% being placed in charge or
even given much post-education support.

More generally, though, your comments point toward all but abandoning the
bottom 95%.  Having most people labor for the exclusive benefit of the top
few has been tried, repeatedly, under many many many names, and it never
works well.  ("Slavery", "communism", and "feudalism" are some of the best
known forms.)

The main recurring problem is selecting the top few: those who are first in
get to decide the incentives for deciding the next top few, and very few of
them (a few, but small enough that they mostly get overridden by their
peers) have the benefit of society as their goal in this.  The result
quickly deviates from the founders' ideals, assuming those founders were
competent to implement them in the first place (they often aren't, so the
subsequent deviation just makes a bad situation worse).

If we must have an underclass then let it be subsentient AIs.  Let all
people be promoted to the upper class.  And that means more than just
material wealth: let them live as long, rich, and full lives as they
desire.  Should we some day develop sentient AIs, be they uploads or
birthed purely from computation, let them be "people" too, for this and all
other important purposes.
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