Zak Stein: “Values, Education, AI and the Metacrisis” | The Great Simplification 122

I can’t wait for round 2 on the question about how to adapt among all of the paradigms shifting around us. ❤

Thankyou for discussing this as not many are speaking about the after effects of our humaness in an AI driven world. I was fortunate to attend an open plan school in the late 70s and have a lifelong love of learning. Very glad I took my daughter out of school at 13 and she homeschooled herself. She knew what she was doing. Kids are way smarter than adults in many ways. Love the idea of Youth Lead civic leadership.

This was such a great conversation. I didn't know about Zak before this episode, but what he says and the way he thinks are fascinating.

Hearing a discussion about non-relativistic value somehow eases anxiety about how I interact with the world. I usually think about integrity as a principle of personal behavior to minimize my cognitive dissonance. Hearing it discussed as an organizing principle for the structure of the universe, as proof of the existence of intrinsic value is revelatory…I've heard Zak's name before but this is my first time hearing him speak. Grateful I came across this conversation.

22:05 …or places where folks recognize it's all a racket, perhance…? 😆Great discussion.

Zak is excellent. Thanks for introducing him to us.

As an aside Ted kazinsky was freaked out about ai many years ago. Really freaked out.

I really appreciate this conversation. I was wondering if there are any pieces in this collection about toxic personalities and interactions as a symptom or microcosm of the larger superorganism. I'd be interested in insights about the psychological impacts and expressions of the crisis.

Great conversation! It shifts paradigms.

❤

This is maybe the most important show, yet. Does life actually have value, or is it all in the living?

It'll be hilarious once AIs start teaching kids wrong things. lol

One clickbait headline I came across recently said (something like), "Teen refuses to get a smart phone". May this (inferred) perspective deepen and grow!

Many thanks, Nate and Zak, for this challenging and inspiring podcast. I taught for 14 years in a school very much aligned to the values and principles set out by Zak. See: C Walker, As if size mattered: the evolution of the human-scale approach to education for sustainability in Journeys around education for sustainability, London South Bank University, 2008. And The Small School in Regenerative Learning, Global Resilience Publishing, 2022

Once again, when a middle-aging white man is asked whether history can teach us anything about the current pivot point he draws on western history. What a farce! He appears ignorant of the Chinese, Persian, and Indian histories. But he presumes to provide a path forward for the planet. 😭🤣 Is this not a perfect demonstration of conceit and arrogance?

Wow, I love where this man is coming from…

I wrote the following thought three years ago : For a very long time, men and women lived with very few changes in habits and ways of thinking from one generation to the next. Even within a single generation, the same person lived the same way in childhood and old age. What was taught at school in childhood remained valid in old age. The animals around us operate very much like this: they don't revolutionize their behavior in the course of a single lifetime. I've come to think that our need to change and revolutionize everything is an effect, a by-product of growth, which is itself a by-product of fossil fuel consumption.

The French Revolution coincided roughly with the massive use of coal. Since then, we've been in a permanent state of revolution. We revolutionize to adapt, in the Darwinian sense. We're adapting because we're changing our environment on a massive scale. We need to put some slowness back into all this, if only because we may end up exceeding our brain's capacity to adapt. We may exceed the plasticity of our synapses. One might wonder whether some of the mental illnesses (the "uneasiness of civilization" that Freud spoke of in the German title of "Civilization and Its Discontents") could correspond to this. So I think the task of politicians, aided by scientists, is to put some slowness back into the system. It's not for nothing that some people talk about "slow food" instead of "fast food" and so on.

Hi Nate and Zak, I thought you might like this from Roman Guardino, 1925, Letters from Lake Como, 9th Letter……
"It has to do with image (Bild) and education (Bildung). We have the sense that everything around us presents no clear image. From the time of the Enlightenment there has been much talk of education, a sign that it is disappearing. What we find is only a caricature. Education has become just a matter of knowledge, very complete if questionable knowledge, well rounded, but becoming mixed on the margins, so that we no longer have pure knowledge but also things that are a matter of imagination, taste, and judgment. Yet the essence is still knowledge. Our educational institutions are means of passing on knowledge. Educated persons are those who have acquired knowledge of all kinds at these institutions. Yet all of this has little to do with true education, since true education is rooted in being, not in knowledge. The German word for it (Bildung) tells us this. The educated (gebildet) person is the one who has been shaped by the inward law of form, whose being and action and thinking and deeds and person and environment conform to an inner image. Such persons thus have unity in great diversity. They have the possibility of always finding themselves again in all that they do and in all that happens to them. But educated persons today, thanks to the Enlightenment, lack any such inner image or form,.
The next paragraph is equally enlightening….does anyone want me to post it here?

Thanks for what amounts to a resurrection of "Deschooling Society" (1971), the first of Austrian Catholic priest Ivan Dominic Illich's four slim but earth-shaking books. It is a watered-down resurrection – Illich, though wildly popular in the 1970s and 1980s, was like many dissidents at that time, able to be far more forthright than is possible now. Illich et al knew AND SAID that our whole way of life is essentially mass slavery of the uneducated by the educated, and mass enslavement of the natural world by high tech and Artificial Everything (A.E., not just A.I.) Anyone attempting to "do good" within such a framework, seemed to them delusional at best, actively harmful at worst – despite having good intentions or being "Bien Pensants" in the sardonic French phrase. Illich included church "busybodies" in his criticisms, preferring the monastic lifestyle, which was less dependent on both monetary donations and young novices from the outside world of money creation and baby creation. Of course monasteries and convents are slightly dependent on money and young recruits, which is just as well because they should not withdraw completely from the secular world and neither should other "drop-out" communities, I suppose, such as kibbutzim, "Eco" villages, and Universities come to that, which work best when they copy the architecture and rules of monasteries (as they always used to before the 20th century).

I suppose a medieval "feudal" village was just as sustainable as a medieval monastery or university (or hospital, or school). So the model does not only work for Institutions. But could we go back to that voluntarily? It seems unlikely (until after a total Collapse anyway, and then it would not be entirely voluntary). Tribal and nomadic groups in the Developing World are also dying out – they were once sustainable, but the modern world is fast encroaching – not least because most of their fellow citizens are eager to embrace Modernity and Progress. In any case, no-one wants the infant mortality rate, the pregnancy mortality rate, or the war wound mortality rate, of the pre-industrial world. All the same, we are going to end up with something much worse, after this brief interlude of relative comfort, so we should be getting ready for Collapse, not pretending we can avert it by tinkering with this or that system within the System.

Are there modern equivalents of medieval monasteries? If not, there ought to be. I think Rod Dreher may have explored this in "The Benedict Option" (2017), judging by the title (I have not read it yet). Dreher has, I think, moved from Protestant to Catholic to Orthodox – a not uncommon journey these days, as people (and especially men) search desperately for institutions that keep a safe distance from the real world (whilst still remaining in it, because no other world is possible). In an odd way, the Armed Forces provide a refuge for some – even when War actually breaks out, because combat is still not the real world of "Getting and spending we lay waste our powers" as Wordworth put it. The soldier and the poet (and the priest) have always had much in common. Mainly, they do not attempt to change this world – they know they can't. They attempt to cope with it, somehow, and do it honestly, without withdrawing into fantasy, substance abuse, shopping, or whatever.

If Leopold Kohr (b. 1909), Ivan Illich (b.1926), E.F. Schumacher (b. 1911), etc., had hoped to change the world, they would have been doubly dismayed during their lifetime – not only had the MAJORITY (dreadful word) of the First World paid no attention to calls for De-Growth, but the MAJORITY of the emerging Third World had gone for Growth at ten times the rate of the First. They must have felt like the parents of teenagers having to witness them experimenting not just with a bit of alcohol and tobacco, but with oxycontin and fentanyl. Subsequent generations have witnessed even more greed in the Third World, so much so that many remain in complete denial and maintain that only the First World is rich and only the Third World is poor, despite mountains of stark evidence to the contrary. And of course, amongst the things people in the Third World avidly consume, is Modern Education and its perks. This is why our corrupted Universities are stuffed with people from the Global South seeking a career and a "better life" in the Groves of Academe or rather the Temples of Mammon.

Of course Education is part and parcel of the natural human drive to escape the drudgery of subsistence agriculture, of factory work, and indeed of hunter-gathering (which sounds OK but can't really have been). But it has gone too far, like other natural human drives. Surely there has to be a way of combining a low-tech lifestyle with simple pleasures and small comforts, made by people in your local area, and not made and then delivered by distant slaves? Similarly, reading, writing, arithmetic, art, music, science, etc., could be restricted to making life more pleasant, both on your own and in company, instead of being used to enhance careers and increase status. But we never seem to know where to draw the line – which is the hallmark of incurable addiction leading to complete Collapse.

Mass Collapse will at least force us to stop relying on slave labour to a degree that would have baffled the most unrepentant owners of slaves all over the world (i.e. every previous civilization under the sun). That alone would make Collapse a good thing – but there are other potential good outcomes too, as well as the inevitable very bad ones. I am certainly looking forward to it, and hope it happens within my lifetime – you really have to wear virtual blinkers every time you leave the house, these days, as if you were a highly-strung horse instead of a once-rational human being. I can understand why people have taken to ordering stuff (made by slaves) on-line to be delivered (by slaves) from a gigantic hub (built by slaves) the size of a small town. Not just food and drink – everything. It is "The Human Zoo" (Desmond Morris, 1969) and then some,. Or, even more prescient, the Machine in E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" (1909). We have innumerable distractions from reality, including cheap foreign travel – but they are still just distractions from the awful truth and don't help in the long run. Education has become another distraction, I am afraid. As Illich said in "Tools for Conviviality" (1973), scholars need to spend part of each day using actual tools of some kind, and I am glad to see that Zak Stein has resurrected this point amongst others.
I believe Chairman Mao banished all intellectuals onto farms, or down mines – but everyone is an "intellectual" now, it is not just scholars – few of us actually do manual labour, in the home or at work. It still needs doing, but we import slaves to do it, or get it done by them thousands of miles away. Lorry drivers seem more powerful than mere slaves – but delivery van drivers don't. And some lorry drivers have terrible pay and conditions, they may be King of the Road, but it is quite a hard (and sedentary) life. I was very struck by the fact that the road menders on that bridge in Baltimore that collapsed were all migrants – illegal ones, probably – from South or Central America. And who was crewing the ship that struck the bridge? These are our slaves – suddenly made visible, for once. if they have children, they hope that Education will provide better jobs for them – but this is a daft hope. They would do better to go home and try and live sustainably like their peasant ancestors, and raise their children to do likewise.

Irrelevant to the conversation but wow, Nate is the spitting image of Michael McKean

Okay…sorry for the typos ..i went back and changed some…and …yet ..some are still there …🤔😜

How to be a good person? It looks more like that may be a person that does not resist the depth of the knowledge that they are unimportant. Too many humans living large necessarily means they are not valuable in a planetary sense. More like destructive.