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I think it's a mistake whether for financial reasons or in terms of personal satisfaction. You go into a field because you are interested in learning and engaging with the problems in that field. Not for status or rewards.
You can't enter a profession on the basis that it will be personally rewarding. You can only leave because it turns out not to be.
Going into a career because it's noble, rewarding or because it "helps people" seems like a mistake.
Just have lots of different toys available to begin with and get more of whichever are played with the most. Don't restrict the use of computers.
Don't worry about outcomes or what people should be playing with. Actually "should be playing with" is almost a contradiction in terms since play is undirected.
Wrong, perhaps, but 'badly' wrong? Despite the accident, building Fukushima saved lives and reduced atmospheric pollution relative to other power sources.
Part of the reason we haven't improved reactor designs as rapidly as we should is due to irrational fears surrounding nuclear power. In other words, such fears have to some extent been a self-fulfilling prophecy.
How can it be 'elitist' if the education is not only cheaper but its graduates are allegedly doomed to be exploited in their 'bubble'?
The reality is that school leavers are more likely to be exploited. Once cast out of their enclosures, which resemble almost nowhere else in the wider world, they are mentally unable to pursue their own interests.
I personally think they are a little bit crazy for doing what they are doing
All moral progress looks crazy in the beginning.
True, except that it's more the case in unschooling for adults to be guided by the children, being available to give help or find help when required.
It takes years for the average adult to break his school conditioning and find the courage to follow his own direction. Most never manage it, and of those that do, most don't till retirement, which is tragic.
My daughter is unschooled and taught herself to read and type mostly from the web browsing.
Most people somehow assume that because they learnt to read and write at school that one cannot do it out of school, and more efficiently. This despite the fact that they themselves didn't get good at reading until they found books they were excited about and wanted to read for their own reasons (reasons, btw, that might include hunting and fishing).
And if they think about it they'll correctly predict that asking adults on the street what 7 times 8 is will yield the wrong answer, or no answer at all, despite many years of compulsory arithmetic and socialization. Yet the commonly proposed solution to this deficiency is more compulsory education rather than less.
Considering one's future self as a different person could have the opposite effect. We might then sympathise with that person, and take measures not to be mean to him, in the same way we wouldn't be mean to a friend.
But it's a nice idea. Another tendency we have is to shed our skins and not remember what it was like to be a child. This effects the way we interact with children.
Oh, c'mon, the word "community" is thrown around willy nilly nowadays. Every day I read something about the "tadpole-owning community" or whatnot.
It could be the other way around: we are born into families and nations and therefore we post-hoc accept and value them.
We can't wait to leave and get away to the big city and then, eventually, from time to time, we yearn to return home. Not due to some innate preference or unexplained genetic mechanism but simply because that's how we grew up.
However, few are willing to give up their new-found freedoms for a circumscribed tribal existence. Which doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't honour our pasts.
I'm not a consumerist. Nor do I suffer from social anxiety. Who are you talking to, and giving advice to? Nothing in your comment addresses any of my points. Why not engage -- otherwise you remain 'isolated', surely?
How is my dismissal 'easy'? I haven't heard it from anyone else and it acknowledges an unpleasant truth. What I dismiss are sentimental media ideas about 'community' which are all too common.
What both arbitrary socialising and consumerism have in common is that they are focused on selves whereas truly important activity primarily relates to abstract ideas. It is ideas that create the solutions to local problems.
Btw, none of this is inconsistent with a smile and a nod to people you see about you in daily life! And mingling with new people if one feels lonely.
I wish my neighbours well, but for me socialising is a distraction from work and family. Those are my contribution to the (wider) community. Besides, I have trouble enough keeping up with relatives and schoolmates without introducing new, geographically-oriented relationships.
Communities, rife as they were with gossip, ostracism and superstitious cruelty, were always based on mutual need, not on acting out some supposedly gene-based pantomime. I daresay when the next drought or plague comes along I will get to know my neighbours and we'll pull together for mutual support.
This is a fantasy of course, which is a defence mechanism for frustrated minds.
However, the quasi-religious defence of Science as a settled body of knowledge which people must be forcibly 'educated' about is becoming depressingly common. Becoming more like a religion isn't a good way to counter superstitious falsehoods.
The patient-doctor relationship has waned, IMO. Here in the UK for most ailments I see a GP for about 10 minutes. I never see her again. No follow up, no chat, etc. Different GP next time. Perhaps social media could help build trust within practices.
Fusion has been 20-30 years out for the last 50 years.
Michael Labgerge's chart gives a more complete picture of progress in fusion research:
Sure, it isn't ethical to experiment w/o consent. But in order to program an AGI, you need first to conjecture an explanation of how the mind works. One may be able to deduce from that explanation some of the ways in which minds can go wrong. Also, assuming consent is given, it will likely be easier (and less physically invasive) to observe the internal state of an artificial person.
Nah, I don't assume it. Hence 'may' and 'attempts'. But the explanation is simple enough. If you can discover what it takes to code a mind then you're also going to learn some of the systemic faults that minds, qua minds, can develop. Of course, I could be wrong about this. It could be that mental diseases are all purely down to hardware issues (brain health). But it seems like a bad bet. For example: addiction, or at least specific types of addiction, depend on people's culture and choices.
None of your examples entail building a mind. Also there's a kind of irony in my example, since as a branch of computer science it is independently funded and seemingly unrelated to mental health.
Strangely enough it may be that our attempts to create artificial people (AGIs) will permit us to understand what mental disorders are all about.
But note that conforming itself requires creativity. One has to (consciously or no) conjecture what is the appropriate, conformist thing to do in any situation. There's no easy way around this since most of the rules are unwritten.
What really gets society's goat is innovation, most of which fails, and all of which encounters resistance. And I think the reason for that resistance, ironically, is that new ideas and new things require other people to re-direct their own dwindling creativity into understanding or at least coping with them.
Equilibrium lifestyle for humans? It amounts to saying that we could run out of problems. Since we can't, we'll continue to create new ideas and new technologies. And then deal with the unforeseen consequences. Etc.
This is great news. I've read about so many great nuclear projects in the past few years. Three thorium initiatives in China, India and Norway. ITER in Europe. Bussard Electrostatic Fusion. Travelling Wave Reactors. General Fusion's Steam Hammer Design. And there are many more. So it looks like an increasingly bad bet to say that they will all fail. Which is good, because we're going to need lots of energy in the future.
Feynman was in fact critical of the Soviet Union:
I think that Russia represents danger in saying that the solution to human problems is known, that all effort should be for the state, for that means there is no novelty.
(from 'The Meaning Of It All', Ch. II)
Creative people by and large don't have "day jobs".
An excellent argument for the Universal Basic Income:
Your child will, as ever, learn your true values. If you try to manipulate him into being honest then you are implicitly asserting that honesty is bad. Correct this by understanding that honesty is its own reward. The world is a beautiful and a dangerous place and honesty helps you to see it correctly.
James Dyson's twin-drum contrarotating washing machine was a huge improvement over normal washing machines but failed to take off because it was much more expensive.
The Privilege of Incumbency is tough to beat. To convince the public to adopt a new technology you must have something that's cheap, reliable and yet performs overwhelmingly better than the existing design.
Every tyranny is predicated on saving civilization.
Also, every idea that actually helps civilisation is incubated in a tiny minority (perhaps in just one mind). Since that minority is engaged in creative work, it is almost certainly an out-group. Adopting the morality of the ruling class and building connections with it are the surest way to power. But these are a full-time job.
I think the idea of quantifying morality might be improved by basing it not on cooperation but simply upon communication, e.g. how well do you know the opinions of those you disagree with? Note that this is almost the opposite approach of the path to power.
No, I think even groups I do on later reflection agree with are acting questionably if they try to influence my early education. They probably think it's usually wrong to do so but they make an exception in the case of their ideas because they consider them uniquely urgent and important. That's just an old mistake. Twas ever thus. The more important an idea is, the more important it is to be able to think freely about it.
Worth remembering though that there are many cultish aspects to the mainstream, e.g. political movements fight tooth and nail to influence what young children are taught at school.
You're right. It's a bit like evolution. The overwhelming majority of mutations led nowhere but we absolutely relied on the tiny few that got us to where we are today. That said, people who can't truly relax and daydream (most people I think) are never going to get started. And children who are made to sit still in school can't think so well.