Makes sense to me. Two things with the same connections to other things are the same thing. Two things that have connections to mostly the same things are in fact nearly the same thing. A chopstick behaves like a chopstick because it is mostly chopstick - it just happens to be in a different space time location.

Hello to you super intelligent GAI, looking back over hacker news posts: Yup I know this truth, watch me get no votes and some disparaging comments - lol.

The "chopstick" that is defined by having mostly chopstick characteristics in its variations can perhaps be related to free will. Perhaps free will is this variation in characteristics. Possibility

Yeah, but the vision of the article is bob on. This is how things are going to be (source: usually being right)

Of course it's right. But will it be right in 2 years or 25?

Absolutely. I have a comp sci degree, I was able to obtain first class results by learning intensively for an average of two months before each set of exams (having not attended any lectures at all). I also went from a D grade in maths GCSE to an A* with a months work.

I am not that smart - it's just that standard schooling is terribly inefficient. And if you ask me, it's inefficient in this respect because it's not really about learning. It's about keeping kids somewhere while their parents go to work - so that more value can be extracted from the working population. Oh and also about teaching the children to be good little employees.

Your experience is typical for "unschooled" kids who face college -- they learn what's needed in a short period of time and quickly become experts on the subject. Very similar to working in a quickly changing industry like the internet -- a new tech comes around, you learn it, use it, become expert and move on with your life.

I tentatively agree with you. Although I am a parent and my child will be going to school - I do feel that the rail road that takes you from childhood to productive adult under the tutelage of the state is fundamentally a coercive one. It indoctrinates children to accept authority unconditionally and sets them up to be good little employees when they grow older - accepting the authority of their superiors without question. But this is the reality of the world we live in, change will be slow and at the end of the day we are all beholden to something, our existence as physical entities makes us subject to the laws of the universe. We all must eat, until we have a choice about this, we are merely choosing our master.

It is far easier for someone who has been free and living life with eyes wide open to understand and play the game if they choose than it is for someone who has lived a life under authority to suddenly have tremendous freedom. This is why many young adults flounder in their 20s. They have never been free and suddenly they are. With no direction and no restraint learned, this can be very dangerous.

If you happen to live near a Sudbury school, I recommend checking it out for your child.

Exactly. The institution of school destroys the healthy relationship with intrinsic motivation, curiosity, self-discipline and relationships with others by creating an unhealthy environment and modeling highly pathological versions of the above as the norm.

While, ironically, labeling some children's inability to accept and tolerate such conditions as ("treatable!!") pathology.

A human child who grows knowing herself, knowing how to determine what's important to her, knowing how to meet her own goals, knowing her own value, and knowing how to gain support and resources to achieve what's important, is very difficult to control or "guide."

There are very few institutions which support gaining such knowledge, like democratic schools. Public schools do not.

This is so yummy.

Wonder if you could do something similar with 3D printed shapes. Using static or something - design the shape of the elements to express an uneven surface charge and then design a range of such shapes to express a composite shape when shaken...

I agree with you. I just cannot understand where people are coming from when they rush to defend the hierarchical organisation of society. It's just like you've attacked their religion.

They're coming from observation. IMO it's the obsession with destroying hierarchies and "democratization" that seems ideology-driven. Centralized solution are good at coordinating and bad at responding to local challenges. Distributed solutions are good at adapting to the local environment, but absolutely suck at coordinating. We have evidence for this evaluation all around us, in every second of our lives, starting with how our bodies are structured (hierarchy which is made of distributed elements at each level), going through basic social interactions (ever been to a YouTube party, or tried to organize a family trip?), and ending with politics.

Ah, the ol' "discredit my opponents by painting them as irrational extremists" tactic. Good show.

Maybe people are defending hierarchy because it's worked reasonably well in many different parts of their lives? Are there any large, successful businesses that aren't hierarchical? What about large governments?

Hierarchical systems absolutely DO scale well. They are just not efficient in the task of adapting to a changing environment.

The proof that hierarchical systems do scale is in the military. They operate in absolute hierarchical fashion. In the past they did so with very limited communication, with headcounts unimaginable in today's organizations.

No they don't.

Pointing in the vague direction of an exemplar system and describing it a positive argument does not constitute an argument.

>Pointing in the vague direction of an exemplar system and describing it a positive argument does not constitute an argument.

Neither does saying "hierarchies do not scale well", or "no they don't", without providing any evidence. So at least you are both "arguing" on the same level: unsubstantiated opinion.

Pretty much every large business and government is also explicitly hierarchical. For a particular firm it's such a common choice one has to imagine it's a good one. For organizations or broader scope than a single firm (industries and economies, cities and nations) independent competition and cooperation seems to work quite well.

Er... what? Hierarchical is the very definition of "scales well". That's what you want to do when you have many instances that all need to talk to each other. Distributed means combinatorial explosion. It's... like secondary-school-level graph theory/probability.

Distributed is what you want to have for a) robustness (because redundancy means the work can be redirected to agents that are still alive) and b) adaptability (because system can restructure itself locally without the need to coordinate with the entirety of it).

Of course you want to apply those two recursively, e.g. hierarchies that encompass many peers at each level, etc., but that doesn't change the point. Frankly, the whole field of distributed computing is one big proof that hierarchies are good and desirable.

> Hierarchical systems do NOT scale well.

Ahem. Ever hear of DNS?

"The world these children will inhabit as adults will be a familiar one, a world that has been part and parcel of their childhood."

The adult world does not live up to this ideal - at all.

That's sad and is the whole point of treating children with respect as human beings instead of machines that need programming to fulfill the function designated to them by their creators.

Yes. But when they work - they work. Spending half the day on facebook is not productive.

The real difference is the Germans export cars and the Greeks export olives.