"AI" Hallucinations de-hallucinating Ayn Rand

 There is a special place in hell for people who make Ayn Rand look relevant. I haven't read Atlas Shrugs, but will concede that it is a fucking great title for a book, a trailer in two words that promises drama. I have read "The Fountainhead" was given a copy of it, enjoyed it, but even as I enjoyed it, knew it to be trash. A smut like reading experience, a guilty pleasure.

Looking up Ayn Rand, I found some quote saying "objectivism is stillborn as a philosophy" and while that quote and review may be an apocryphal artefact of my imperfect memory, I believe I could defend it regarding "the fountainhead" - It is an argument from accident, the whole story precedes from presuming a protagonist that is basically omniscient. 

There's a grain of truth, I myself have brushed up against. People by and large, so the modal person, is risk averse - they are not entrepreneurial, they work for a salary under contract, they are not experimental, they seek out vocational training and credentials, they are not ambitious they make consumption choices based on what everyone else around them is doing. 

These are fairly good strategies to survive in the world we live in, but if someone is risk-seeking they swim in a soup of people who actively discourage them from doing so. Even something as simple as booking an international holiday can be met with misgivings, advice to get shots, join tour groups, plan your itinerary, look up trip advisor to make sure none of your experiences touch a frontier.

Then we can turn to reality TV to better understand the reality that renders Rand's objectivism, and to some extent The Austrian School of Economics, philosophically stillborn. 

American Idol, or Master Chef, or So You Think You Can Dance, or The Voice, or even popping down to your local Comedy open mic night and you will be confronted with the spanner in the works of a philosophy based on "everyone should get the fuck out of creative people's way."

That spanner I call "delusion" relative to gigging as a musician, or apprenticing as a kitchenhand, or building up a social media following for your dance troupe, these reality shows throw open the doors to a frictionless audition process where anyone can come join a line that is kilometres long, in their nearest metropolitan area and queue all day for the chance to be given a chance by a production assistant to audition in front of a panel of celebrities, we still see a curated sample of the most delusional people in regards to their own abilities. 

What we don't see are the vast number of hopefuls that turn up that are neither good nor interesting. From establishing shots of a camera showing the lines, we know that this is approximately 90% of dreamers. I would also point out, that the liberal application format of these shows has also produced largely mediocre results.

Kelly Clarkson, inaugural winner of American Idol can probably be described as modestly successful, what needs must be considered is the incredible success of American Idol then as a publicity campaign. I believe Harry Styles came out of a reality TV process, and there's probably a few others. I'm located in Australia and our inaugural winner Guy Sebastian is a small market analogue to Kelly Clarkson. Later winners were nowhere near as famous, many go financially backwards due to the exploitative contracts they sign and routinely are outperformed on a global stage by people who write their own songs, gig, send demos to record labels, crowdfund tours etc. 

The biggest source of friction a talented and creative individual can face, are all the untalented and uncreative people out there that vastly outnumber them but nevertheless compete for the same resources.

All of which is to say, Ayn Rand, The Austrian School of Economics etc. that rail against state interventions like protectionism and regulation and taxation for holding great men back. Its stupid, these things hold back the 90% of us that aren't great from making life hell, a bulwark against stupidity like the human propensity to keep giving money to people who don't need anymore. 

I could go on. Hopefully I've impressed upon you, that I in no way endorse making the writings of Ayn Rand the cornerstone of your personal philosophy. To do so requires wilful ignorance of reality.

Bringing me to Peter Keating, Peter Keating is the initial antagonist in "The Fountainhead" an antithesis to Red, I think his name was Howard Rourke. They both go to architecture school, and Peter Keating follows an elite-career strategy, acing his assessment and getting an entry-level position at the most prestigious architecture firm, whereas Red is "too real" for trendy architecture and seeks an apprenticeship with an underappreciated maverick architect. 

Peter Keating, and this is the relevant bit, has a viable strategy for gaming his career advancement - he offers to take over the workload of a sleep deprived colleague. That collegiate draftsman simply appreciates the help, being able to collect his wages without doing work. He doesn't realise, presumably because Keating covers for him at no cost, that Keating is making him redundant and taking his position.

This is another area where Ayn Rand is describing a true phenomena - use-it-or-lose-it, though her allegory is a cautionary tale against letting someone else take over the value-producing work you do, the Large Language Model based generative "AI" products apply more to how our brains function.

Yes, this is a comedy segment, edited etc. Also, I literally only use LLMs when coerced to do so, I find them by and large useless and annoying as well as unconscionable in terms of the environmental cost for the benefit they produce.

I'm so out of touch, that the idea that people use ChatGPT as an alternative to google baffles me. I looked up and found a reddit post about how I could set my browsers default search engine to exclude "AI" summaries, I scroll through youtube videos and am genuinely confused as to why screen space is taken up by "AI Summaries" of the video, presumably were they any good they would spare me having to watch a video, from Youtube's advertising based business model, this makes little sense to me, but they are not good the general pattern is that a video with a thumbnail and title "Nikola Jokic is the best basketball player in the world" uses litres of water and causes brownouts in New England to produce the "AI" generated summary "In this video a man makes arguments that Nikola Jokic is the best basketball player in the world."

So full disclosure, I don't understand the minds that are excited by "AI" and actually use it daily. I do not understand why people are impressed by these chatbots in any other sense than comparing them to chatbots from 10 years ago.

In the Daily Show remote segment, the last question asked of ChatGPT is "where should I get coffee?" This is actually unconscionable if you are not ignorant of the environmental footprint. It is more appreciable of the dude who asked ChatGPT to devise a meal plan or whatever, to be confused into thinking complicated nutritional bullshit requires excessive computing power. People can easily be beguiled by the promise that if they gain control of what they put in their mouths, they will gain control of their lives, but Ronny Chieng's "stop eating food" I would argue, though played for comedic effect, is actually good enough considering his intelligence runs off something like 100W of energy, and that this guy if I had to hazard a guess, is trying to optimise his calloric and nutritional intake while still drinking excess amounts of beer like some kind of college student every week.

Rename ChatGPT "Peter Keating" and suddenly Ayn Rand looks like a veritable prophet. Here is something that you think is helping you, when in actual fact it is harming you. 

Regulatory processes are famously and historically slow moving. Few people alive today appreciate that last century there was a time when a doctor would prescribe you cigarettes for nerves, and it was easy for 12 year old's to smoke. The adverse effects of smoking were known to medical journals, I'm going to guess by the 1960's at the latest, but Australia, that leads the way in many ways on regulating smoking - took half a century before cigarettes could not be sold from vending machines, could not be sold to minors, bore graphic warnings about the health effects of smoking and required generic branding to a specific scientifically determined least appealing colour of diarrhea greenish-brown.

Then vape came in unregulated to the point that my friend enjoyed a few months being able to vape in the cinema and it has in a few short years completely undone all the gains made in half a century of cutting smoking rates.

Maybe by 2060, presuming the AI investment bubble doesn't short circuit the product market, people under 18 or maybe 25 will not be allowed to use AI. We will probably know by then, if regular usage of LLMs significantly increases risk of conditions like dementia, and early onset dementia and generally lowers life expectancy. Due to the environmental impacts, where we already face ecological crises, maybe by 2035 laws will pass that mean you cannot ask an LLM for trivial bullshit like "where do I get coffee?" which is seriously, like asking someone to drive an SUV to the Library and do a google search on "coffee near me."

I have raised it before, and maybe "when did tohm last mention Gordon Neufield on his unsearchable blog?" is a valid question for LLMs to be used, but I'm going to repeat it here so don't - Dr Neufield pointed out in a talk on peer-orientation and all the issues it causes children-come-adults, that by the 90s parenting hadn't figured out TV. TV posed a challenge to raising healthy adults and we hadn't figured out how to incorporate this new reality when we were hit with the internet, a decade later and the internet came on phones, then social media, like the tech sector has literally just been lobbing fucking grenades at parents every couple of years for 3 straight decades.

Alas, it is worse than that, because parents aren't having grenades lobbed at them, but instead they are giving their children grenades thinking it is somehow a good idea.

Peter Keating the LLM maybe bad enough when he is "helping" you lose your job and cognitive capacities, but its worse when you are rolemodelling "how to charge headlong into redundancy" for your children. It may be time to seriously reconsider pulling out your phone and saying "hey Siri, make a reservation at 5.30 for dinner at McCheesables Family Restaurant." because you are teaching your kids not to know shit, and not to do shit, only how to consume.

And what would be truly terrible, in making a prophet out of Ayn Rand thanks to these electronic Peter Keatings, is that Peter Keating is the minor antagonist of The Fountainhead. He is a tragic cautionary tale, as while he plays the game to attain honour and prestige and promotions in his architectural firm, he has no real interest in what he does, he fails to produce any social goods. He loses his glamorous wife and career and winds up trying to rekindle his creative spirit by taking up painting, taking it to the protagonist Red for hopeful validation, whereby Red-the-omniscient uses his fictional omniscience to scare the world by telling Peter that it is too late for him to get into art now. 

Red our protagonist "wins" in the end by marrying a horrible woman who was married to or shacked up with both antagonists of the novel, and finally getting the financing to build a skyscraper in Manhatten, the pinnacle of human accomplishment, you know like Trump Tower. Ayn Rand is trash, but the trap of convenience is real and I humbly beg, via a blog post that people stop stumbling into that trap it is getting embarassing.

A Naive Series Part 1: Chauvinism

 "Naïve" is something like French for "childlike" and in this series where I ponder the unanswerable question: "what are people?" I'm employing the prefix in the sense of being a default psychological disposition.

Intro over, let's get into part one - Chauvinism.

Naïve Chauvinism

In the prefix sense, I know "naïve" mostly from its use in "naive dualism" dualism basically is the belief in the soul. Slightly longer is to say dualism is a belief that self and body are separate, hence you can watch those movies like 'Freaky Friday' with suspended disbelief.

Generally it takes education to become a monist, people don't really default to that.

"Chauvinism" I'm going to be guessing, most English speakers would know as the suffix from "Male Chauvinism" and often "Male" can be dropped and people can just refer to "Chauvinism" as a synonym for "sexism" like in the title of the book "Female Chauvinist Pigs" which is about the rise of sex/porn culture and women participating in their own oppression. 

At this juncture, I should say, that I am not a pedant who believes dictionaries to be sacrosanct and that people can get language wrong. I think dictionaries do not define words but document usage, and that the standard of communication is understanding. So long as you are understood, frankly anything goes.

I just hope you understand that I don't mean that people are born sexist, though they may be. I mean people are born chauvinist in the older, and now less used sense of the word :

The unreasonable belief in the superiority or dominance of one's own group or people.

So let's get into that.

Your Grandma's Chocolate Cake

There's likely a generational divide here. I know chocolate cake still exists, but it was probably also a fairly 20th century thing. Reality show Master Chef came out when I was an adult already, and here in Australia (and I presume everywhere) at the height of its popularity, it produced a spin-off "Masterchef Kids" which was my introduction to a new world where even children can be fucking pretentious.

So maybe, shortly after publication and for so long as the internet endures, you will be reading this being someone whose family tree is white as alabaster but for some fucking reason you took "bento boxes" to school with a dozen compartments of crap prepared anxiously by your mother who you just euthanised because the pressures to keep up status in an economy that transfers wealth from the young to the old increasingly has rewarded her agreeability with MS or ALS, and you don't know what I'm talking about when I say "you're grandma's Chocolate Cake" because Grandma's of your era don't bake chocolate cake they bake shoe pastry and temper chocolate to make sure you have a pistachio croquembouche for your birthday or something.

But, as recently as last century naive chauvinism could manifest by a widespread belief that your Grandma made the best chocolate cake in the world!

Naive chauvinism is no more complicated than that. Most of us, prefer to be us even though this is largely irrational. 

A relationship will struggle, if you ask your mum for a recipe that is the epitome of comfort food for you and you serve it up to your partner and they are like 'it's not my favourite thing.'

If you travel, hosts will take you to some local spot and give you the local treat and if you are unlucky the local treat will be a) shit, b) offensive or worst of all, c) a pale comparison of something you find readily available at home.

To boot, naive chauvinism I feel is likely universal enough, that we all intuit that the polite thing to do is not disillusion others of their naive chauvinism. We eat the horse penis, the salmon sperm, the ox eye or the vegemite sandwich, smile and say 'mmmmm...' to their expectant faces.

Only actual children come home from a sleep over and share their confusion with their parents that "The Grosbys make grilled cheese sandwiches with Kraft singles in the microwave and they seemed to think it was a treat..."

George Carlin

-said "have you ever noticed when you're driving that anybody who goes faster than you is a maniac and anybody who drives slower than you doesn't know what they're doing?" 

I'm asserting this phenomena is both real and can be described as an example of naive chauvinism. If you think about it, it makes sense, you have to pick a point on the speed continuum to prefer driving at, and because you can't be wrong about your preferences you go on to assume that your preference is universal.

After that, everyone who doesn't share your preference is explained away by some sort of cognitive deficiency, either gross incompetence - they want to drive at your speed they just lack the know how, or some form of reckless disregard for the sanctity of life - this person knows driving faster than you is too dangerous but they just don't care.

Carlin's insight was that this worked as a bit because it is true of everyone no matter how fast they drive.

Even I, a cyclist who rides a single speed and thus never caps 30km an hour, experience this psychological phenomena. I despise 'safety Petes' who are cyclists that wont run a red light even in the absence of all traffic and who ring their bells for everybody they pass on a shared path regardless of whether the path is obstructed by peds or not. But I also disapprove of those riders who bike salmon and ride out into a busy intersection expecting other cars to stop or who ride up to lights and position themselves in front of me even though the last set of lights determined empirically that I have the faster take-off, acceleration and top speed.

The thing is, if you asked me why I break the exact right amount of road laws that effect cyclists, I would be tempted to confabulate an answer. And there are reasons, like the laws I break have never resulted in a collision or accident or any other kind of penalty, whereas the laws I observe when I haven't observed them have gotten me at least a talking to by the police.

But in my sobriety I understand that just because I observe a rule (generally) that you only wear a bike helmet if you are touching a bicycle, it doesn't really bother me that much if a friend of mine dorks it up and puts their bike helmet on before they reach their bicycle.

I also wish I could wait for tram doors to shut before advancing up to the lights, instead of simply waiting for all the passengers to get on and off but I can't because tram drivers seem to have a habit/be instructed to leave their doors open until the light changes to green, after which they shut their doors and then slowly accelerate and if one fucking straggler runs up to the tram in a place like Melbourne's CBD you can potentially get stuck behind a fucking tram with open doors forever. So I just ignore the law and watch for people. Other people, including car drivers, don't stop and I'm sure they are both maniacs and don't know what they are doing.

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Effect

Just upfront, I rate MBTI as just above Horoscopes. I'm not a big believer, though unlike horoscopes mapping personality traits arbitrarily onto people based on birth dates, MBTI contains personality traits that are in robust personality models like OCEAN or 'Big 5' like extroversion-introversion spectrum of ambiverts, and one of the 4 axis from memory maps pretty well onto some combination of openness, conscientiousness and neuroticism such that I would be surprised if people with MBTI 'high S' is somewhat predictive of low openness to experience etc.

But even if not scientifically robust, nor particularly predictive of anything useful like career or relationship success, the MBTI is out there, it is popular and as far as I know career guidance counsellors and recruiters may still employ it. 

I think you could probably sub in as an exercise a "know your horoscope" activity, but in terms of naive chauvinism MBTI and also the more common and more useful 2 factor personality models (where you might be told you are a "Type A" or "Driver/Dominance" personality etc.) are a potential invitation out of naive chauvinism.

Think about it, you are sitting in a room of 40 people, and you learn that only a quarter of that room (or a sixteenth for MBTI) care about and value the same shit you do. What an opportunity for people on the job who are 'not there to make friends' and 'get results' to learn that many of their coworkers, don't give much of a shit about getting results at all especially if they and their friends hate the process of getting those results.

Simultaneously, an equal opportunity for somebody who cares about their coworkers weekends, relationships, children and pets to realise that they share a workspace with people that find such discussions tedious, boring, intrusive and annoying. That there's people outside the HR department that find 'mandatory fun' a gross infringement on their human rights and dignity.

But it has been my experience, that naive chauvinism overrides the empathic utility of such exercises, dubious or not. People more readily learn about their personality, than learn about the existence of personalities. The results come back for them as something akin to a disabled parking permit and a pro-forma rider for a rock star. They learn more about their own preferences and immediately begin explaining to others how to best accommodate them.

Remembering that chauvinism is "unreasonable belief in the superiority or dominance of one's own group or people" similar to how Jane Elliot's Brown Eyes/Blue Eyes produces results that are way less powerful than what we might intuit; most people on balance can't imagine having preferences other than their own. 

Helen Fisher a researcher into relationships that created a 2-factor model of relationship styles similar to MBTI but based on primary hormone drivers - dopamine, oxytocin, endorphins something else... relates assuming that some types would want to be 'cured' into another type and had the personal revelation that people's personalities tend to be aligned with what they already value and desire.

So there's two ways to react to discovering different people value and desire different things:

1. You take a chill pill, recognizing that there are many people and one planet and that life is going to be a series of negotiations.

2. You circle the wagons, inside the circle is "us" and outside the circle is "them", you remain sceptical that people actually desire and value different things, there's just people who "get it" and are good at it like you, and people who are dumb and ignorant and getting things wrong like "them" and realise that life is going to be a battle for your rightful dominance.

Why I think naive chauvinism is a thing, is that I have literally had a guy explain in excruciating detail, with diagrams his understanding of the theory of personality and how it effected his own life and what he learned from it, who rode his preferences roughshod over everyone and everything every time including in that very meeting where he explained personality to us.

Naive Chauvinism in the 21st Century

Our education system isn't that good. I suspect I am simply lucky to have come of age prior to Malcolm Gladwell's publication of "Outliers" which changed the paradigm from all-rounder to specialist. 

I remember in my late 20s meeting a guy who played in indie bands and identified largely as a muso who didn't want anybody knowing that he was into footy (AFL) for fear of being shunned. Being only slightly older than him I was incredulous, having gone to a school where one was expected by parents to land the lead role in the high-school musical production and be a member of the rowing first's crew.

A few years later and I met an increasing number of people in the arts scene who used terms like 'sportsball' unironically (though I'm sure they were trying to be ironic) and reinforced this arbitrary divide. 

A few more years and Brexit and Trump's first term happens and well, we've been living it so you and I know everybody went nuts. Crucially though, polarisation caused political identities to collapse onto a sounder foundation of naive chauvinism. 

I had the privileged vantage of being a white heteronormative male to observe becoming homeless on the left. Despite prominent leftist media figures being white men like Jon Oliver and for new media David Pakman etc. but these tend to operate a kind of "turn-and-point" progressive identity politics, if you know what I mean, which you probably don't but its where you turn and point to another white guy and sort of say "hey everyone look, that's a white guy over there! Do better white guy!" so you can still be host of the show and it seems a sufficient fiction to quash any questions of diversity and representation being applied to you.

But if you weren't already at the top when the right thing to do was pull the ladder up, the subjective experience of naive chauvinism on the left was one where there just was no place for you in the promised neverland. 

Historically marginalised groups went straight from being underrepresented, silenced and erased, to chauvinism. Tragically, many people on the left, faced with this surging chauvinism were not so much recruited by, as assigned to an increasingly chauvinistic conservative circle because few people can cope psychologically with being homeless tribe wise.

And now we see it, though if you've been indulging your naive chauvinism, algorithms may have assisted your blindness, in election results where people naively feel that anyone outside the chauvinistic political in-group can legitimately govern, so when the election outcome is announced no matter who wins or who is defeated roughly 50% of people who live in democracies around the world experience a kind of existential terror.

This is not to say that election results are arbitrary. Regarding the things that are broken everywhere like campaign financing, there is a degree of arbitrariness. With 2+ years now of weekly protests against the Israeli military offensive on the Palestinian Gaza strip (in which Palestine became recognized as a state by more nations) many people find in their own country no actual choice come voting time on foreign policy regarding Israel-Palestine foreign policy. But there's plenty of non-arbitrary meaningful differences.

Chris Rock once described George W Bush as "the first cable president" with previous US Presidents being I guess "network presidents" where even civil war president Abraham Lincoln, and post-war reconstruction presidents like Ulysses S Grant who accepted the surrender of General Lee, understood that they were the president in service to both the people who cast their vote for them, and all those that didn't, and even tried (and in Abe's case succeeded) to kill them. Bush, according to Chris Rock was basically like "Fuck everyone who doesn't watch Fox News" and while Bush was the first, I think we are observing now an even more extreme chauvinist administration as evidenced by where the national guard is deployed versus where crime is actually really bad.

Conclusion

Naive chauvinism is really really bad, because democracy is really quite good. Demonstrably so. It is so much better to live in a democracy and it is especially nice to not have constant civil wars. 

In the 20th century, or pre-internet age, the benefits of democracy could be imposed upon us without us needing to understand what strapped all that democracy together.

It kind of worked with zero-understanding among the general public because without the internet and smart phones it was so much harder to book ourselves a one-way ticket to chauvinistic crazy town. Globalization was hard, so people bought local newspapers because news had to be printed and shipped daily. 

Yes in the 1990s it was possible for Saddam Hussein to get all the major newspapers of the world delivered daily to Baghdad, Iraq, but most people in wealthy free democracies simply couldn't be fucked going the extra steps necessary to get a copy of The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Asahi Shinbun and Neinkampf!

Then we built the confirmation-bias superexpressway and globalised the competition for media such that your local paper has to compete with all the resources of The New York Times and a much more dramatic and higher stakes political scene, as opposed to your local broadsheet's in-depth analysis on the debate in parliament about the proposed changes to the sheep tax.

Such that when I log onto my local broadsheet, it is full of clickbait headlines behind paywalls - global competition has dragged it to headlines like this: "Time and again, the men in my life fail me when it comes to this simple task" just shy of finishing with "You'll be shocked by what it is!"

Basically the attention economy is a petri-dish for growing the influence and impact of naive chauvinism and naive chauvinism basically makes bloody conflict inevitable because children create visions of the future that have no place for outsiders. If politics is beholden to naive chauvinism, then unless the superior values of the in group suit you - be that being a tradwife married to a white Christian nationalist husband, or passing as a pansexual to maintain your place in a polycule of fours, someone is going to resist. 

It's not even the diminished rights of individuals, but the suppression of whole communities through sheer neglect, thanks to the personal incredulity of why anybody wouldn't want to live beachside wearing athleisure to the local cafe when it's just a 2 minute drive in your german SUV/anybody wouldn't want to live in a gentrifying former industrial slagheap where you can deliver your genderless short-adults to a Steiner school on a dutch e-bike via the reclaimed rail-trail where the community got together to replace the graffiti piece by "Cuntzcrew '98" of King Neptune as a pimp paying his Mermaid hos, with a mural of a genderbent Paolo Freire, where what was really working for democracy 20 years ago was that there was space for all these subcultures to do their own thing, while sharing a common media and the real issues between progressive suburbs vs materialist narcissist suburbs being wealth inequality was less bad than it is now.

Democracy is good, and it can only be sustained where the electoral cycle doesn't begin with telling the people who voted the other way that they can go fuck off and die.

You've probably heard the legend of the inventor of chess in India having the Sultan promise him anything he wants for inventing such a marvellous game and the dude is like "a grain of rice doubled for each square of the chessboard" and the Sultan is like "how modest" and claps his hands or whatever, and then the treasurer comes back and says that he calculated it and to fulfil the request would more than empty all the granaries in India? Well naive chauvinism is kind of the same maths but opposite - that priests poem about "first they came for the communists and I said nothing, then they came for the jews..." 

In-groups are relative. No group can actually "win" which is why there's a general consensus that totalitarian regimes are inherently unstable. Intersectionality basically tells us this is the case. So if in a scenario of actual female chauvinism, Patriarchy was "smashed" and replaced with an equally chauvinistic matriarchy (as opposed to a new feminist egalitarian world), that victory would be cashed in for a further schism. 

Often enough, narcissism of small-differences takes effect faster than chauvinist attacks on the outgroups. 

So I'm just bringing a notional concept to your attention. I'm asserting that chauvinism a) has to be unlearned as a default, and b) is worth unlearning.

Revisiting "Epic-Pooh"

I stumbled upon a youtube channel that was interesting, one of the many that talks about books and writing.

In my personal opinion, most literary youtube channels are terrible, albeit watchable. They often represent an extreme form of "those who cannot do, teach" and there is both tragedy and comedy in the fact that so many people can amass half-a-million to a million youtube subscribers by posting regular content about how to write fantasy, in some part (or rather often) as a vehicle to promote the youtuber's own literary effort; which with a little investigation usually results in a book that has a dozen reviews most of which disclose that they were given a copy for review purposes.

Most of these how-to-write-fantasy channels resort to formulas, what they try to impart is some way to turn a crank on a wheel and a fantasy story comes out. I suspect on an intuitive level that this is the whole trap. One can learn much in terms of formulas and tropes to move from the insane incoherent ramblings of a fantasy consumer that doesn't understand why they like what they like, to putting it into something coherent with a beginning middle and end...that nobody wants to read because ultimately all it says is "I like something better, that already exists."

Here I am now going to struggle with my own ability to articulate. The most common subject to be substituted into "something better that already exists" is "The Lord of The Rings" though it may be challenged by Harry Potter if we are including fan-fic.

This most recent channel I stumbled upon, was interesting because it didn't push formulas, didn't have clickbait titles like "NEVER DO THIS when writing a..." and "5 Tropes to avoid..." sighted research papers when making arguments that something was good or bad etc.

I get an instant sense that the youtuber and I are going to have different tastes because so many book enthusiasts fit themselves into a trope of books, cats, coffee and witchcraft. This is fine, that you like chocolate and I like artificial strawberry flavour doesn't mean I'm getting nothing from your video on how to make icecream.

What throws a spanner into the combobulation works, is when somebody drops out of the blue that they think LOTR is great. Not in a passing acknowledgement of its important place in literary history, much as say, Hegel deserves acknowledgement for his important contribution to philosophy but nobody would commend reading Hegel unless out of sheer necessity. For me a more apt analogy for LOTR is The Wright Brother's Aeroplane. Historically incredibly important, but there is no necessity for anybody to ride it ever again, and yes there's plenty of room to agree that most air-travel is as a passenger on an Airbus or Boeing and the experience is now utterly shit, but much better to pine for a Spitfire, or the Concord or Stealth Bomber or whatever jet plains were in Top Gun or Top Gun Maverick or even a hang-glider or wingsuit.

But to actually refer to LOTR as a great read, knowing what books are out there. Not a "sure go on read it, it won't hurt you" but like "this book is really great, you should read the books even though we have movies of them that are better."

Now, for me personally, to explain that LOTR is a "masterpiece" I will receive this explanation as plausible but one of the form "Wagner is better than it sounds." As in sure LOTR may be great, it is not however for me, a great read. But a great deal of people seem to feel it is "the greatest" read and being honest, I tend to assume this phenomena is easiest explained by these people being nerds so beguiled by the tedium that is LOTR that they've never moved past it.

(This post is already getting out of hand, and I fear I fail to convey that all I want to say about LOTR is that it sucks, and that that shouldn't be controversial or demand explanation. That is generally all I say, or perhaps qualify it with "I think it sucks" and offer as argument that it is long, tedious and boring, so I am actually unpractised at discussing LOTR. What I feel strangely compelled to mention, is that I was only recently made aware of a stereotype that autistics love LOTR, and mentally when I compare LOTR to a train timetable this stereotype checks out. And I have nothing against people with autism loving trains and finding train timetables captivating, magical and enchanting and so too a perfectly valid argument to boost LOTR is that it is captivating, magical and enchanting like a train timetable, where GoT or A Wizard of Earthsea is chaotic, surprising, disordered, emotional, messy, empathetic, sensual, passionate etc. then we are firmly back in Chocolate and Artificial Strawberry Flavoring territory.)

One of the least successful expressons of algorithms in my Youtubing experience are the frequent recommendations of channels "Jess of the Shire" and "In Deep Geek" that will produce hour+ long videos on some tedious detail of LOTR and I notice that such videos get view counts that often approach 1M. 

In one of Kevin Smith's Q&A comedyesque-specials he does a bit about how nothing LOTR story is, which he then adapted into a Randal scene in one of his Clerks sequels, expressing his ire that LOTR was displacing Star Wars as "the trilogy" in younger generations. As overrated as Keven Smith is, and the number of turkeys he has created, his reduction of LOTR is in essence, on the money.

Similarly, the video-essay I watched was on the death of the fantasy genre. The main culprit in that essay is Lester Del Ray, but then later moved onto Michael Moorcock's essay "Epic Pooh" which for anyone who is not into LOTR just the title of that essay will resonate and you may remark "Yes! Exactly" without needing to read the rest of the essay.

Exposed to this essay, I found myself at a crossroads, a Disney-like crossroads at the beginning of the animated "Beauty and the Beast" with one incredibly obviously unattractive way - re-read the Lord of The Rings, which immediately prompts memories of the chapter "A Shortcut to Mushrooms" and then I think of Tom Bombadil and become frustrated and annoyed at my memory of reading Fellowship of the Rings. 

Or I could re-read Epic Pooh, this is the sunny, well lit path with butterflies, largely because however bad the essay may be, it is going to be mercifully short, even relative to the opening chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring. 

There was another hook, as it transpires that when Michael Moorcock originally wrote "Epic Pooh" in 1978 or earlier...maybe it was revised in '78. Moorcock confessed that he had not actually read LOTR, merely skimmed it.

This is enough, no doubt, for much of the LOTR fanbase to simply handwave Moorcock's influential essay away. But for me the question is: 'how much LOTR does somebody need to read?'

As in, how much shit does someone have to eat before they are qualified to say they do not like it. LOTR probably benefits from enough word-of-mouth to suggest someone need to read up to at least the Prancing Pony and the introduction of Aragorn (Strider) and if they aren't feeling it by then, then by all means give up, the book is not for you.

I do not think it is a legitimate position to demand that people read all of LOTR before they can pass judgement on it. This is special pleading, the high drama of Gollum biting off Frodo's finger before falling into some lava does not retrospectively justify the tedium of everything that proceeds it, the characters that range from pitifully unlikeable (Frodo, Sam, Gollum) to wooden (Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, Arwen, Elrond). 

After the tension, or spine of the story collapses, the post-climax simply drags on and is a complete mess. Asking someone to read all of LOTR is as illegitimate as demanding somebody not read all of LOTR and instead omit the chapters featuring Tom Bombadil, the scouring of the shire, Sam's wedding, and Bilbo's departure with the Aryan master-race, in order to appreciate how good it isn't.

As such in rereading Epic Pooh, there's this delightful enticing hook - could Moorcock still offer a valid thesis having only skimmed the subject on which he wrote?

Writers like Tolkien take you to the edge of the Abyss and point out the excellent tea-garden at the bottom, showing you the steps carved into the cliff and reminding you to be  a bit careful because the hand­‐rails are a trifle shaky as you go down; they haven't got the  approval yet to put a new one in. ~ Epic Pooh pg. 5

So the answer is yes. I think this is a fair characterisation of LOTR even though Moorcock writes "like Tolkien" and so simply could be referring to all the Del Tor LOTR wannabes (eg. Terry Brook's 'Sword of Shannara').

Having now reread Epic Pooh, the essay is mostly a survey on the state of fantasy and remains, I feel, relevant. In revisiting it, the only shift in my perspective came from time affording me the ability to identify Marxist terms like 'petit bourgeoise' 'reactionary' etc. 

I was first put onto Epic Pooh, by China Mieville who is a radical left-wing writer maybe going off memory a full-blown Marxist. Mieville summarised Epic Pooh as defining a schism between a Tolkien-camp who think fantasy should be pure escapist comfort, and for-better-or-worse a Moorcock camp that feel fantasy can be used to challenge people.

I don't begrudge people liking LOTR, but personally I begrudge their market power and I find there to be something irresponsible in the chauvinism of the Nerd who simply want more of the same.

(Actively, I would bet that if I used fanfic or something as a barometer of fantasy taste, JK Rowling's Wizarding World would be on top, and I feel that that's probably because JK wrote nothing but Hobbits and no LOTR. But if we cordon off that and did a pie chart of 'Epic Fantasy' I wouldn't be surprised if the interests of the general population of Epic Fantasy fandoms are 80% LOTR, 16% GoT, 2% WoT and 2% for everything else. While GoT has new media going to air, I wouldn't be surprised if these pie-charts get flooded with what we might describe casuals, and it may seem like there's some genuine 50-50 diversity in the Epic fantasy fan base, but I expect over time, the fanbase to uneven out into the LOTR dominated market. Another barrometer are DnD party-art, and this is what is depressing: The prevelance of people with an interest in fantasizing, given the tools to literally imagine themselves as anything they want and how often people choose to imagine themselves as Legolas, Arwen, Gimli and Aragorn.) 

I am sticking up for, in other words, the Elayne's of this world, who are oppressed by a majority who think "The English Patient" is great, and deny Elayne's right to say that it sucks. 

I've watched The English Patient, and it's not bad, there's a lot to commend it, but it also isn't great. Certainly it isn't anything anyone should be forced to sit through twice, and I'd never wish it to be longer.

LOTR I can acknowledge occupies an important place in the history of the fantasy genre, this does not make it worth reading, and it doesn't mean it doesn't suck. 

Briefly, I will bring in GRR Martin's Song of Ice and Fire for a brief comparison on the most curious aspect - LOTR movies are better than the source material, Peter Jackson used the medium of film to realise fantastic visions of Lothlorien, Gondor etc. in the vacuum of Tolkiens dead prose. He excised crap from LOTR like Tom Bombadil, picked up the pace and although the movies are still long and a drag, where not much interesting happens, they make the source material look good.

The Hobbit was the opposite, and so too was HBOs Song of Ice And Fire, being trash relative to the source material. Where the showrunners seemed to put supreme effort into talking down to their audience and making everything as obvious as possible "more wine!" and that scene where Littlefinger explains his plot to two whores he commands to fist eachother, the infamous 'sexposition scene'.

Again it is a curiosity that, and I stress, in my opinion a skilled filmmaker is required to take a bad book and make something out of it, whereas a good book is almost inevitably adapted into a piece of shit.

I must admit, that I stopped watching GoT as early as maybe 4 episodes in. I checked out when Peter Dinklage did his confession at the Aerie, and probably no coincidence given that most of the show felt like I was being forced to watch cosplayers act out their fan-fic, and once Dinklage an accomplished actor joined in the fun I enter the Twilight Zone. The show may have found its legs like Seinfeld or something, I don't know, I didn't need an adaptation so I never gave it a chance to redeem itself, my understanding is that whatever high it reached, it plummeted inevitably into an abyss thanks to whatever genius agreed it was a good idea to produce an adaptation of a series that hadn't concluded yet.

But I'm sure MANY people have written at great length arguing about which is better GoT or LOTR. Since I haven't referred to Epic Pooh much, let me draw on China Mieville's interpretation - that Epic Pooh argues whether fantasy should be comforting pap, or be about stuff, and contextualise that debate historically for mere substitution of "which is better the Ramayana or the Iliad" having had both read to me in Audiobook form, I like the Iliad better, and have written about it before because of its moral ambiguity. The Ramayana has flat characters because Rama is good, so is his brother, women are the root of all evil, the Demon king is both bad and impotent and the only character that comes close to being two dimensional is the monkey king, who is chastised for any times he forgets to act as one dimensional as Rama.

There is no Hegellian dialectic going on of "Tolkein-Anti-Tolkein-Anti-Anti-Tolkein" if you can find both Tolkien and Anti-Tolkien precedents in the Proto-European root story that likely explains both the Iliad and the Ramayana.

I would rather compare LOTR to Hemingway's "Old Man and The Sea."

The Old Man and The Sea is arguably an escapist fantasy. I cannot imagine what people would argue to me, makes LOTR good, after I have read it, and found it, not forgettable, but somewhat regrettable and feel the same about the much much better movies.

One potential candidate is just the sheer depth of worldbuilding, and that maybe I can't appreciate how great LOTR is, until I have read the Silmarillion and forced myself to learn elvish, or some of the other 32 languages Tolkien created as backstory (Train timetables anyone?). However impressive Tolkien's worldbuilding of a world derivative of European mythological traditions, The Old Man and The Sea is a fantasy set in a much richer world because it is based on reality, hence we have an elderly fisherman in Cuba who escapes by listening to baseball on the radio. 

Appreciate how complex that world, our world is, whatever expert on Tolkien thinks they can exposit about the various ages, the creation of Middle Earth the various races and history of conflicts, it is going to be bare-boned compared to the backstory of the world a Cuban fisherman lives in, and Hemingway knows that world, perhaps not with the academic rigour of Tolkien the linguist, but because he had been to Cuba.

For all the Bestiary of middle earth, with goblins, orcs, balrogs, wargs, nazgul whatever, in Hemingway's water we know there is more than just marlin and sharks. It is the gulf of Mexico. 

The story is simple, just as LOTR's story is. There's an old man on a losing streak in terms of catching anything, he goes out on the day he breaks this streak. LOTR is a sequel, and it turns out an invisibility ring from the previous book nonsensically is what the bad guys want, and then some guy has to walk to a place and drop it into a special disposal chute.

A big difference is the pacing, The Old Man and The Sea is engaging, captivating, and succinct. For a book about fishing, there is never a dull moment. The LOTR with its much more mechanical plot, plods on for three books that simply have to be slogged through.

Moorcock's essay is a polemic. He clearly doesn't like this incumbent crowd that holds LOTR as its North Star. Having said that, I actually feel it should be safe for any individual to not just criticize LOTR and its impact, but safe for them to lose their fucking mind. 

I am not a big fan for yet another example, of Shakespeare, a Shakespeare play is not something I would read for fun. Yet it is easy to recall arguments for why I should read Shakespeare, it would be easy for me to articulate why Iago from Othello is one of the most unique and greatest villains of all literary history. 

Peter Jackson's film adaptation of LOTR took a boring story (on account of me being bored) and made it slightly less boring via spectacle. I subsequently have a reference point from which I can imagine how much room there is to fill with arguments as to why I should read LOTR (again) because of all the brilliant reasons why it is so brilliant...

All I can recall, and this is a flawed availability bias, is that people don't argue for LOTR, they just really like it. It even seems easy to conceive of a rebuttal to Kevin Smith's visual comedy gag on what happens in the three movies - translated here into words:

Movie 1: Kevin Smith sets off on a walk at a gentle pace.

Movie 2: The walking Kevin Smith briefly stumbles then continues walking.

Movie 3: Kevin Smith arrives somewhere and then drops something into something else.

Because indeed loads more stuff does happen, there's the Balrog scene, the magic door, a horse chase, a siege battle, betrayal, a battle between orcs and trees, a giant spider, Gollum stalks some guys a long way... I haven't even heard someone articulate this defence of LOTR.

But to justify its dominance in fandom, and in fantasy markets, I would need to hear an argument not to the effect that it is better than Kevin Smith makes it out to be (and there's an argument that it is worse, because the same story takes 9 hours on film) but that it is intrinsically a great book, an argument remotely like the ones made to suggest one should read Shakespeare, Dickens, Brontes, Elliot, Woolf, Plath, Le Guin, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Joyce, Eco, King etc.

Feeling a pang of guilt for a lack of due diligence, I decided to check out a channel that explains "great literature" usually succinctly, in 15 minutes, that channels video on LOTR runs for 30+ minutes, and from what I have watched so far it is mostly autobiographical, contextualising all Tolkein's middle-earth works in his life story, particularly the influence of World War I.

If anything though, the first half of the 30 minute video's argument validates Moorcock's criticism. It contextualises LOTR and its taking us to the edge of the abyss to point out the lovely tea-garden at the bottom and says "mind the handrail it's a bit wobbly" as basically Tolkiens fear of actual, real, distressing danger. Like LOTR is an attempt to explain trench-warfare in France to a 6 year-old without making them too scared, but scared enough to never go do it because it is better to live in a rural countryside. 

I think Moorcock in his essay, articulates to the limits of his ability to write, the pernicious safety-ism of LOTR. In the video on Great Books Explained, it points out that the plot of LOTR is quite singular, and I'm going to rearticulate what interests me this way: What if the story was about the kid in class that wasn't popular and nobody paid attention to, what if the story was about that kid taking 'popularity' and destroying it so nobody would be popular or unpopular again?

Sub what you will for popularity, aggression, charisma, make it better or worse. But I suspect that is why Moorcock (maybe), Mieville (maybe) and myself and others experience LOTR as a story of 'fear and safety' Frodo's epic journey being an expansion of a door blowing open in the night and maybe a raven flying in, and a kid having to get out of bed, investigate, shoo the bird out and shut the door.

In which case, sure at some point invest the time in reading LOTR to appreciate its place in the history of the fantasy epic. Do not stop there, also read Epic Pooh, read Epic Pooh and watch TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE both requests combined being a lesser ask than LOTR.

I raise Team America because I think the famous "Pussies, Dicks and Assholes" speeches articulate the fundamental flaw of LOTR, that I will suggest Moorcock in Epic Pooh is getting at as the 'condescension' that comes through in both Tolkien and CS Lewis' prose, that "Pussies think they can handle assholes in their own way." vulgar though the terms may be, that is what over decades LOTR and its fandom reek of...

I have to cut myself off, because I realise I omitted a thought that was leading to this conclusion. My brother told me that somewhere JK Rowling expressed regret that she had Ron and Hermione become a couple in the end, that in a world where teenagers drink butter beer and shout "expellidocious" at eachother and fly around on witch brooms but never finger eachother in the bus sheds and sniff eachother's fingers nor even talk about the guy that fingered a girl in the bus shed and what he said his finger smelled like, felt the pairing of Hermione and Ron was 'unrealistic' and I'd actually agree. 

Ron and Hermione are but a detail, totally peripheral to the plot of Harry Potter which was...confront your fears. 

Frodo being entrusted with the ring and tasked with its destruction is the plot of LOTR, and mechanically the plot works - the Eye of Sauron is fixated on power and so is blind to the humble unassuming camouflage of Frodo and Sam. 

Frodo's goodness though is based on absences, rather than the presence of heroic traits. Frodo is by Team America's term, a pussy, selected to bear the ring because he is not a dick nor an asshole, and everyone at the council of Elrond is overly concerned with a dick making a cock ring out of it and going fuck crazy.

I'm not going to accuse Trey and Matt of being Nietzsche fans, but aware that many will find pussies, dicks and assholes too crude to entertain that maybe the metaphor has depth and value, Frodo is more like a celebration of 'Slave Morality' and in Peter Jackson's film moreso than the books, with or without intent this is made clear - Sauron is a towering giant clad in heavy plate armour such that we see no part of him fighting on the frontlines of an Army destroying his opponents. An actual hero succeeds in severing his finger and Sauron is undone, Frodo is short, weak, soft and a man of leisure, walking around barefoot, he has no acquisitive traits whatsoever and when Gollum severs his finger Frodo is saved.

Crucially, all the stuff heroes are doing, is either protecting Frodo, or after the breaking of the fellowship, is merely stalling for time or distracting the impotent eye of Sauron. It is hard to say that Aragorn puts 'his body on the line' in a manner that Frodo doesn't. But the difference is that of Aragorn charging into the fray and Frodo hoping nobody and nothing notices them.

LOTR in some respects, has the same foundation as 'if women were in charge there wouldn't be any wars' a theory that is untested, or perhaps has been tested as the history of Feudal Europe has seen women in charge or defacto in charge as regents or matriarchs. Regardless, I am highly sceptical that Matriarchies would have no wars, though they may be of a significantly different nature. In the same sense, I am not sure if the 'neither the good guy nor the bad guy, give the McGuffin to the nobody!' has ever played out in history, apart from maybe Steven Bradbury winning Australia's first ever Winter Olympic Gold Medal, when his entire field of competition crashed out on the final stretch of the final bend.

It is perhaps, the specific conditions necessary to make Frodo a worthy hero of his own story, that perhaps makes LOTR such a widespread bog for the genre, and also could explain a fandom that hates antiheroes, flawed heroes, moral relativism, ambiguity, sympathetic villains etc. largely because the plot becomes a power struggle, instead of anti-power. Don't scour the Shire, Don't take my headphones I'm sensitive, don't take my smart phone I'm anxious, don't shame my lack of power, the only thing wrong with my lack of power is all the other people who have it...

That's far more than I wanted to say on this topic, and the conclusion is that Epic Pooh holds up, it holds up despite being half a century old now, it holds up despite being penned by someone who didn't even read LOTR. It shouldn't even be threatening to LOTR fans, because LOTR fans have LOTR and appear to be content with it. But Epic Pooh might shake a LOTR fan loose from The Shire and send them on their own adventure, and that is a great literary service. Now, let's finish with some Pussies, Dicks and Assholes:

Drunk in Bar: See, there are three kinds of people: dicks, pussies, and assholes. Pussies think everyone can get along, and dicks just want to fuck all the time without thinking it through. But then you got your assholes. And all the assholes want is to shit all over everything. So pussies may get mad at dicks once in a while, because pussies get fucked by dicks. But dicks also fuck assholes! And if they didn't fuck the assholes, you know what you'd get? You'd get your dick and your pussy all covered in shit!

And:

Gary: We're dicks! We're reckless, arrogant, stupid dicks. And the Film Actors Guild are pussies. And Kim Jong-ll is an asshole. Pussies don't like dicks, because pussies get fucked by dicks. But dicks also fuck assholes — assholes who just want to shit on everything. Pussies may think they can deal with assholes their way. But the only thing that can fuck an asshole is a dick, with some balls. The problem with dicks is that sometimes they fuck too much or fuck when it isn't appropriate — and it takes a pussy to show them that. But sometimes, pussies get so full of shit that they become assholes themselves... because pussies are only an inch and a half away from assholes. I don't know much in this crazy, crazy world, but I do know that if you don't let us fuck this asshole, we're going to have our dicks and pussies all covered in shit! 

Space Time Anomaly

I recently read "Prosperity Without Growth" by Tim Jackson. My library copy, I got my hands on the first edition which must have been published some time in 2009. 

In 2009 I had started my Economics & Finance degree. Part of it was an insatiably stupid curiosity as to whether the Economics profession would show any contrition. Whether my lectures would be delivered in any kind of panicked uncertainty. I even posed the question to one lecturer, as to whether Economics was in crisis, he related an anecdote about another economist being asked the same question and saying "no".

I would grow disillusioned with what impressed me as Economics (& Finances) performative natures. From the hip-hop duo Black sheep lyric, I began to describe myself as a "certified fool" the Global Financial Crisis was unlike the War on Terror which had dominated the previous 7 years of the Bush Administration and largely defined the political climate of Y2K, though a mostly abstract war it had ended the "end of history" period of the 90s, and while the Berlin Wall did come down in my lifetime, I was too young to bestow any significance upon it. I would grow a little older in the early 90s and be more salient of the first gulf war in Iraq's outbreak taking over broadcast television and depriving me of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and whatever else I wanted to watch at the time, and the first I can recall my mum ever being interested in television.

More annoying were the 92 Barcelona Olympics, which I had no interest in beyond the mascot and some brief European buffoonery at the opening ceremony. I was shocked and appalled by what it did to the television schedule for two whole weeks and said so in a one page essay I had to write for school which displeased the teacher immensely and I realized school intruded upon subjective opinion. A child was not allowed to dislike the Olympics, and that was a year I had a cool, good teacher.

Princess Diana died, then the Twin Towers came down after the planes were flown into them by terrorists a few years later.

That changed things. And weirdly, it changed things even though it was directly inconsequential. On globe sporting 6ish billion at the time, those attacks killed people in the thousands, which is very deadly and it was disturbing and gruesome. But not as deadly as the 2005 Kashmir earthquake which also displaced 2.8 million people. 

The "war on terror" itself was much deadlier, just for US soldiers, cost trillions of dollars, destabilized the Middle East particularly Iraq and Afghanistan and beyond changes to Air flight safety making a second attack of that nature impossible as of September 12th, 2001 I don't think the world is any safer from Islamic violent extremism than it was before the US and "coalition of the willing" retaliated.

Yet it changed things, changed religiosity, changed discourse, changed media, changed immigration it changed a lot.

The Global financial crisis did not. It impacted just about everyone, everywhere albeit to differing degrees. Australia for example managed to insulate pretty well, and in turn in some ways suffers the most for being the odd one out with no market corrections. 

But you know people lost a bunch of their retirement savings, people in other countries lost their houses, I had friends that lost their jobs.

If you will, because I have planes on the brain though, the Global Financial Crisis, the Subprime Mortgage Crisis, the Global Credit Crunch (all the same thing) did not change things, despite the massive impact it had on people everywhere.

So it was like watching a plane go down after its engines, wings and landing gear fell off, the fuselage caught on fire and killed all the passangers overnight, then watching governments as an extention of society scramble to put it all together again so that same plane we had just watched catestrophically fall apart could get back up in the skies.

Creating a localized space-time anomaly.

The Anomaly is This:

If you aren't still stuck in 2008, you are living in the past. 

Tim Jackson's book "Prosperity without growth" 1st edition, is an interesting artefact because to suggest to the author in 2009 that society would not scrutinize the economic paradigms we have been living under (Neo-classical economics, neo-liberalism) he would be incredulous. 

It's actually what needed to happen.

I also have planes on the brain, because I think of how Dave McRaney explained "Normalcy bias" using a real life example of people sitting in a plane waiting to be taxied back to the terminal to disembark when the fuselage roof was torn open and a massive fireball singed peoples head hair off, most people remained in their seats. Apparantly to survive you had just a few seconds to pop your seatbelt (the seatbelt sign was gone) jump onto the wing, run along it and then jump off onto the grass or something. 

Now, I should explain that I tend to use "the economy" as a synonym for "what people are doing with their lives" I have not yet figured out how to talk about the economy, but people are notoriously myopic.

Your life, admittedly, might be about your family. Everything you do is for your family, to raise your children to give them the best chance of fulfillin their hopes and dreams.

Most people will be doing this, by working hard for some business in order to create access to food, shelter and education for their own children.

They may tell themselves a story about giving their kids opportunities, but we know, many parents don't want their children to take the "experiment with drugs, sex and poetry" opportunity presented to them, which would not have required their parents to work as hard, and are actively or passively aggressively shoving their kid toward doctor-lawyer end of the opportunity spectrum.

Someone can also fulfill this life-mission, by, for example, working in a tech-start up. Or not even, being an entrepreneur-accelerator where according to one guy on a podcast he comes up with an idea in his head and then sells it to someone else to get venture capital to start the business. 

It is true, that venture capital disproportionately finance the minority of investments that generate the vast majority of profits, but they have done so by borrowing $$$ at 0% interest and giving it out to a person who wants to make an app that converts any recipe to quantities suitable for a gold-fish he call "Phish Phood" and when that fails they write off $$$ against their taxable income.

So you could have been handed borrowed money carrying no risk by someone who knows that so long as 1/30 of their investments turns a profit and doesn't go bust they are in the money because they only have to beat 1% and they won't be paying any tax, and you buy a house and enrol your kids in a ritzy school on a salary you pay yourself to be CEO of a tech startup developing an app that will never work and will never sell.

And that's kind of the good part of any developed economies. If you are a CEO of an Automotive company, you have been one in a long line of people that have basically been running these 20th century companies into the ground since the late 70s. You've worked really hard to get to a point where you can work really hard on prolonging the death of your company.

Add to that, the Ponzi schemes and you pretty much have neo-liberalism.

The economic ecosystem that allows this all should have been stripped down, examined, discussed, redesigned, tested and evaluated in 2009 and we should be leading very different lives.

But instead, we rushed to live "normal" lives again, but normal doesn't work. We saw it fall apart. If you want to relive the last 16 years in under 5 minutes (give or take ad blockers) watch Beavis feed Butthead cheeseburgers and force him to run round the block after his heart attack.

The linked clip has one of those annoying edits, where they show you something coming up in the clip for 15 seconds, then start the clip which includes the first 15 seconds in it, making it an apt metaphor because this normalcy bias happened again with the Global Pandemic that kicked off this decade. 

By far the most depressing thing about humanity, was its collective rush to get back to "business as usual" literal business as usual. But it is not it's own space-time anomaly because the 2009 one supercedes it. We were already stuck living in the past.

It's weird, isn't it. If you are stuck in 2009, you are still living in the future, but 2010 onwards is stuck in 2007.

Charlie Kirk Symptom of an Education Crisis

I find myself in the camp of people who would hope it goes without saying that I condemn the murder of Charlie Kirk, as easily as I can condemn the content of most of what I've heard Charlie Kirk ever say.

In particular, on the one hand, I would hope it unnecessary for us to all check whether laws against murdering people should continue to be the law that governs our society, and on the other hand the content of Charlie Kirk's publicized speech I condemn as moronic.

That's about as much as I wish to say about the particulars of what I see as merely symptomatic of an education crisis I just don't think we've even begun to address.

Answers vs Understanding

"57" is the answer to the question, how old is Patricia Arquette. That this number signifies a measure of orbital journeys the Earth has taken around the sun since she was born, is to understand how we arrive at this answer.

I choose to make sense of the social world I live in, by entertaining the notion that one simply need answers to graduate from a tertiary education, answers suffice, understanding is optional.

Nor is this a dichotomy, where someone who can recite answers cannot demonstrate understanding, and that understanding is some meaningless artefact that cannot produce answers.

I suspect for numerous reasons, answers are the spine of our education and subsequent labour market.

Imagine if you can, handing out 30 copies of Hermine Melville's "Moby Dick" and then testing 30 students as to whether they understand it.

The best way, would be for a competent instructor to sit down and discuss the text with each and every student, and then accredit or discredit the student on their ability to comprehend a book about a whale that kills pretty much everybody.

Not only would a competent teacher find this assessment a considerable drain on their resources, but states would quickly find competent teachers in short supply.

So just due to sheer scarcity of resources, I understand how post-industrial revolution we could end up with an education system that treats recitations of answers as good-enough-proxy for understanding.

But that is only one factor as to how our education system permits people to apply effort to discovering the answers. Rather than generating their own answers through their own cognitive efforts.

Merit Systems

I'm a recent fan of Yale Law Professor Daniel Markowitz, who breaks down "merit" into three components:

1. Natural ability.

2. Effort.

3. Education and Training.

(I think) Natural ability is widely perceived more-or-less correctly to be distributed almost randomly among the population. Effort is also going to be largely genetic and thus distributed somewhat randomly, and crucially effort is incumbent upon an individual. 

Education and training is where someone can put dollars to work for their child. And I think as economies rapidly grew in the 20th century, it is the sheer appeal of this intergenerational advantage that did not see education moving away from a gameable answer-based system to an intensive understanding-based system.

To obsess over Moby Dick like Captain Ahab, I think the marking workload is managed not only through class sizes but by attempting an objective grading formula. Where a teacher can mark the student by counting the quotations per-paragraph and then simply checking that the sentences are somewhat coherent.

3 quotes per paragraph in a two page essay = A+, 1 quote per paragraph = C+. 

(I must confess, I do not have the teaching experience to know how a secondary teacher and upward grade an English essay. What I do have experience with was scoring Debates, where subjective though it is the process was largely a simplified method of grading participants relatively. The DAV standard practice was to give each kid a 75 then add or subtract points for basically whatever. One of my fellow adjudicators felt a kid was so shit at debating, they awarded them 0. This was a behaviour that earned them a "please explain" but on reflection, a score of 0 in debating should not just be theoretically possible, but probably considering how often students neglect to actually debate the issue at hand, or argue complete fallacies, particularly at the junior levels. The sport is, probably more failure than success.)

Crucially, this means there will be a market for study guides, that outline formulaic approaches to essay questions on Moby Dick in the same way one might approach quadratic equations.

For quite some time now, our schools could have been sending out report cards with really useful information like "tohm is highly competent at solving simultaneous equations with high level algebra but has nothing to say worth hearing by anyone."

Such a report could have been a collaborative effort between my Maths and Studio Art teachers.

I've heard Jonathon Haidt claim, several times, that critical thinking has been determined to be unteachable, hence education systems generally don't bother. My parents generation claims they had a subject that did indeed instruct them in thought, and perhaps it can't be taught, or perhaps one gets rusty without exercise, just as I'm sure I couldn't resit my high-school exams and still get into university.

The claim is increasingly striking me as suspicious, like all the evidence I've seen that claim diet and exercise do not work for weight loss, which I know, personally, to be untrue. I am going to guess there may be a complicating factor, 60 hour work weeks and an economy based on feeling anxious all the time in the case of weight loss, and possibly that all the other subjects students are taught emphasize answer-based assessment for which thinking is costly and risky.

Until the late 20th Century

What people largely now call "AI" I have found eye opening. Chatting with a friend I mentioned that I looked up how to get rid of Gemini "AI Summaries" in my google search results, and that I must be part of a sizeable demographic because Google had (and continue) to now have a distinct results page "web" (as opposed to "all") that replicates pre-knowledge panel Google search.

My friend was surprised, seemingly, that I do not find the AI summaries useful. This I in turn find surprising that anybody does.

I experience them (AI summaries) as sucking an entire thrift-store into a gas-powered wood chipper, taking all the debris then sticky taping it back into something that looks uncannily like a t-shirt, when I can just go into a thrift-store and buy a t-shirt.

What was enlightening was that my friend suggested I was a natural "researcher" or something, and while it may not describe my AI summary using friend, it opened up the possibility of people who had gotten where they are in life, by simply figuring out what answer the teacher wants.

A feat that can be accomplished without understanding. 

Up until the late 20th Century, we could get away with an education system that largely trains people to imitate smart people. Which I suspect is why "AI" chatbots have proved to be a kind of Rorschach test, where people who find it useful see it as a perfectly good imitation of knowledge, which is all that possibly has ever been demanded of them. (I hope my personal bias is clear, regarding LLMs and as such if you feel I am calling you an idiot, you can use that bias to dismiss me handily).

As such, education is, possibly, dare I say even probably, by design highly gameable. And it is but an entrée to gaming a job market through credentialism, among other things.

One of my favourite pieces of commentary on our education system is "B-5 got the dinks" from greatest TV show ever The Wire:

The student has figured out the answer by observing the behaviour of the teacher, not by understanding basic arithmetic.

If my fears about education have any grounding, this might give rise to a scenario where people in occupations sometimes work to their KPIs and incentive structure, with complete disregard to the social good their firm ostensibly exists to produce. (eg. The CFO successfully cuts the budget by 30%, but the IT department then have to point out they've lost all their patient records when they cancelled the data warehousing subscription.)

By 1995 though, most public schools in most developed nations probably had a computer lab or library computer that gave students access to the internet.

Krusty Brand Imitation smart-people works when you can somewhat control what content is going in, where you can be sure your aerospace engineers are learning their physics from Da Vinci, Newton and Einstein and not Eric Weinstein on Joe Rogan podcasts.

By the time the dot-com bubble bursts in early 2000, there's been a massive overinvestment in internet infrastructure allowing India and Bangladesh to become tech-hubs and people to call internationally pretty much for free. From there, it seems likely that all control of information inputs, has been lost by the state. This includes not just propaganda, but also quality control.

The Last 10 Years

The last ten years I feel I've been watching how we do education getting its skull smashed in by Tumblr, Buzzfeed and Reddit. 

Increased polarization seems like a pretty uncontroversial claim at this point. Though election results in both the UK and Australia may belie how severe it is.

My feeling is, that we've had a disastrous run on successfully disseminating rhetorical tricks. 

In this case, I'm suggesting rhetorical tricks allow people to "win" arguments while achieving no understanding, just as brute-force rote learning answers to an exam can get you a desired grade with no understanding of the subject you obtained the grade in.

I'll illustrate what I mean by rhetorical tricks with examples from either polar extreme.

"Virtue signalling" is a useful idea, but somewhat redundant, we have other well-known words for the same behaviour like "lip-service" "all talk" or "hypocrite" but as a rhetorical trick, you first identify somebody you dislike, maybe they have blue hair, wear a rainbow flag patch or don't eat animal products. You then simply wait for them to assert some positive-value, then you accuse them of "virtue signalling" and they get flustered and confused BOOM! you "win".

"Mansplaining" is a useful idea, though the author of the collection of essays from which the meme is derived points out "you don't defeat condescension with condescension" or something to that effect. I see no reason "mansplaining" can't be appropriated and generalised to refer to all instances of a) explaining someone's own expertise to them as an amateur or b) defending the status quo as inevitable (such as Youtube channel Economics Explained, could all be described as mansplaining) but as a rhetorical trick it works thus - wait for anyone male to speak, attack them for mansplaining to you, they get flustered and apologetic BOOM! you "win".

The trouble being, the point of arguing isn't to win but to get at knowledge by having our own beliefs tested. Alas, I've been struggling with an intrusive and misanthropic thought of late which is...

That Most People Cannot Argue for Shit

This is a big problem. I mean, like I'm not confident most people can tell the difference between an argument and an assertion. 

I however experience this more in the form of you want to have an argument with me about the existence of griffons, this is just an example because I don't need to single out any actual example of unpleasant arguments I've had with friends and loved ones.

You open up the debate with "I think griffins really exist." To which I reply "What do you mean griffons? Like the mythical creature or maybe the fossils of reptillian dinosaurs that possibly inspired the myths?" 

While this might seem innocuous, I'm happy with the example, because in my experience the argument has already, and the relationship too, deteriorated beyond repair. A rapid fire of micro-expressions is exchanged via faces between just these two lines and as such allow me to articulate the subtext.

"So are you going to let me win an argument for once?" "You can win an argument whenever you like, but you haven't done even rudimentary homework, this is a waste of both our time."

And clearly, I'm fucking up, because this keeps happening to me but I'm starting to suspect that most people don't even realise that there is homework to be done.

The simplest theory I can concoct is a life-long learned habit of simply looking answers up as opposed to generating answers through cognitive effort. As such, once you have the google machine, for many, lacking an understanding as to why their teachers are authorities, everyone is a teacher. 

Further muddying the waters, is that you can probably get through education courses in the social sciences and arts, by rote learning whole arguments you don't understand, and simply regurgitating them onto the page. 

For example, if you got the essay question "Chomsky concedes that US military intervention was probably justified in world war II, why was that conflict exceptional?"

It's totally feasible to answer this in the same manner as a chatbot, with little (for a person) to no (LLMs) understanding of what you are saying. Where an LLM uses vast probability tables to form impressively coherent sentences, a student may simply answer:

"The US had a strategic interest in the European theatre of war that aligned with humane moral obligations, due to this alignment FDR's using the attacks on Pearl Harbour as pretext to military intervention in Europe was an exception to most nations track record of foreign direct intervention as an exercise in imperial power." or something, the thing is, that if we assumed in this made up example that we had sufficient resources to cross-examine my example answer, I could probably concede that the suggested alignment was not exceptional, and rather it probably was more exceptional in the cooperation between Soviet and British imperial powers to defeat the upstart empire of the Third Reich or something.

But our educations assessment capacities don't permit cross examination. Maybe in a history subject some fact checking can be done. (In year 7 I tried to fudge an essay on Nero used to being able to bullshit my way through humanities subjects by claiming Nero burned down Rome. A factual claim so egregious my SOSE teacher gave me an F) 

I probably cannot emphasise, how much of my conversations with people, involve someone repeating what they heard. In part this is to be expected, knowledge is collaborative. What I would emphasize is how much is just people repeating what they have heard.

This results in phenomena where it is a cheap and dirty trick to ask someone "what's Capitalism?" "what do you mean Wokeism?" "what do you mean god?" "what do you mean by patriarchy?" 

Such requests for clarity, are perhaps so poorly received and so often countered with indignation to suggest something everyone is talking about needs defining, that it can be missed that all the above examples are ideas either so broad or so vague that the invoker can't explain them to an educated adult, let alone a 6 year old child.

Taking the last one, about 5-6 years ago, awareness probably reached critical point to drive a rhetorical strategy extinct which was "it's not my job to explain it to you."

While the argument is on the surface sensible, if somebody is complaining about oppression under a system of patriarchy or whatever, then it increases the oppression via the cost of having to educate oppressors as to the nature of their oppression. It's just kind of strategically, a dead-end. Beneficiaries of the status quo have little immediate incentive to raise-their-own consciousness. 

The only sense in which it is not a strategic-dead end, is to make dialogue impossible which can provide cover for simply not understanding the issues at hand. 

I don't wish to single out and dump on feminism, rhetorical tricks are not something anyone has a monopoly on. Australia's worst unincarcerated export, Ken Ham founder of "Answers in Genesis" and "The Ark Experience" for example quite intuitively relies on "you weren't there, God was there and I have a special book that says what God says is true."

Ken Ham is kind of literally a very sad joke and while I am making sweeping statements, allow me to say that maybe, just maybe we are living in a world where we have allowed far too many people to gain credentials without understanding.

An Incomplete List of Examples

The first is heinousness creep. This has involved the appropriation of terms used to describe accurately specific heinous behaviour and applying it to behaviour that may be unpleasant but is perfectly acceptable. A popular one is "gaslighting".

Gaslighting was probably popularised by Brene Brown in reference to a movie where gas lights were used to create a real phenomena that was denied by a conspirator to convince a lady she couldn't trust her own senses. It is useful to describe the specific and heinous behaviour of deliberately attempting to convince someone else that they are going insane.

The term I feel, I can defend, was quickly appropriated to describe behaviour as banal as contradicting someone or lying. For example, in the final season of "You" The screenwriters have Kate, Joe's wife declare that she won't let him "gaslight" her anymore. I would struggle to think of a single example of Joe gaslighting Kate and the screenwriters have given us omnipotent insight into Joe's own state of deluded rationalization. 

In 2016 an English teacher Nora Samaran wrote a blog post on "gaslighting" that cited as examples, just everyday lies that caused her to doubt her reading of non-verbal behaviour. Her example of gaslighting:

I phone a close male friend I’ve known for many years. I’m upset, and I’d like to vent, maybe hear some supportive loving words and maybe ask advice. This friend sometimes feels physiologically overwhelmed by emoting, and sometimes finds it brings him closer to people and welcomes it. In this moment, he snaps “I can’t talk right now, here,” and tosses the phone to his female partner, who enjoys these kinds of conversations.

I feel mildly hurt by the abruptness and since we’re all very close, I mention it to the partner, who relays that to him. He says from across the room “No no I’m not upset at all with you, I just am washing dishes and getting dinner ready, that’s all.” ~ Full example on her blog post here.

By this definition of gaslighting, every call center employee for decades is constantly gaslit every shift by men and women everywhere, every time someone tells them "I'm busy" when they actually mean "I don't wish to participate in this unsolicited call."

I assert, that the behaviour we might call "being short" with someone, and the behaviour of "lying" can simultaneously both be behaviours we condemn as falling short of ideals and virtue, but are banal rather than egregious. Nor do I accuse Nora of maliciously and deliberately skunking the concept of "gaslighting" to describe both egregious manipulation and abuse, and ordinary emotional incompetence. I think these rhetorical tricks are popular because they are intuitive.

So with heinousness creep, the rhetorical trick is to take something that is established as heinous and then expand the definition to describe quite ordinary, low-impact behaviour under that definition, so ordinary non-heinous behaviour can suddenly become heinous, like asking questions.

Similar but slightly different, is turning a useful construct into an ad-hominem. I'll switch poles to use "virtue signalling" again, where a dude sharing a feminist poem to express his feelings in the wake of a high profile murder of a woman in the streets who is known himself to be an abuser of women, is clear cut virtue signalling. A woman expressing the opinion "I believe women to be equal in dignity to men" is not, likely to be, virtue signalling unless they are a Supreme Court Justice about to overturn Wade v Roe. 

Turning "virtue signalling" into an ad hominem is when you neglect to assess it based on some discrepancy between what people say they care about, vs how they act and what they invest most of their efforts in, and apply it simply as a marker of tribal affiliation. To signal, to one's own tribe that this person is an outsider and therefore is not to be listened to.

Perhaps the big one though, that the far-right Christian Nationalist tribe in the United States and seemingly UK are seizing upon but has firm foundation in the far-left or regressive left, is "speech is violence" which we can regard as perhaps the weaponization of "non-violent communication."

As a rhetorical trick, it is basically just censorship, where on the grounds of safety discussion can simply not take place. I recently witnessed a good-will attempt at this very tactic, a speaker made an appeal to their emotion "I'm not comfortable discussing this anymore." They were fortunately overruled on the grounds that the classroom was a safe space, that we were all adults and these ideas being foundational needed to be discussed.

And it is not that exposure to content, including speech, cannot be damaging, but this was a solved problem pre-internet. For example, if a parent took their 8 year old kid to see Nightmare on Elm Street III in the 80s, it was recognised by society, that that was on the parent.

In Eddie Murphy's Delirious (or maybe Raw, but chronologically I'm confident it is delirious) he points to a child in the audience and makes a joke about how they probably thought he'd be doing all his SNL characters that were clearly child friendly, and not talking about men getting aids from their wives kissing gay guys in the club and coming home with aids on their lips.

However, the itself-skunked-term "trauma" can be appealed to censor and shut down discussion for safety reasons, and it just cannot be legitimate.

As an easy example, the current president of the United States clearly gets upset emotionally and physiologically by any criticism of him ever. Most people on the left who employ this same rhetorical strategy would never concede that the media needs to be mindful of the harm they are doing to this clearly traumatised individual. I suspect most would feel, that such an individual is unfit to hold an office that necessitates constant scrutiny and criticism for public safety.

Yet, a similar principle is not employed when judging the fitness of people to participate in further education. 

I feel it is legitimate for someone to say "I'm not comfortable with this conversation/where this is going etc." I feel it is incumbent on such an individual, to withdraw their participation from public discourse, on the most fundamental ethic - they cannot fail, they cannot lose an argument or even question and re-evaluate their own opinion. It is thus incumbent on others to accept the conclusions they have reached without justification. They are asserting their dominance.

Compounding Factors

One compounding factor making discussion and argument and subsequent knowledge difficult, if not impossible for many ill-equipped by an education focused on the industrious imitation of intelligent people capable of dealing with general novelty, is a strong interpretation of media effects.

Media effects are patently, observably weak. As Sean Penn portrayed Harvey Milk as saying "if its true we imitate our teachers we'd see a lot more nuns running around." and religion is one of the best examples of weak media effects.

Children have to be raised in a religious tradition, and religious communities often have to reinforce their messaging weakly at costly gatherings in order to sustain themselves. Religiosity declines with attendance and even with attendance we have numerous historical examples of persons no less immersed in a religious tradition than popes and bishops having illegitimate children right up to present day gay-homophobes.

Not to bash the bishop too much, a commonly cited example of media effects is how little boys media content is all about adventuring - pirates, knights, astronauts encouraging them to go out into the world on heroic adventures. Yet, look around you and ask how many men grow up to be heroic or adventurous? Most are risk averse, opting for safe careers, safe partners and keeping their heads down.

Little boys often don't become pro-athletes because of media effects, but instead have risk-averse wealthy organisations swoop in on the few that demonstrate early proficiency and pump more resources into their development with mixed results.

It is comforting to believe that the levers with which to move the world are as simple as the stories we tell, hence in my experience people overreact to discussion of 'dangerous' ideas. I'm going to go out on a limb here, and suggest that if you (on the left) were to read Mein Kampf, there is zero chance you will become a fascist neo-nazi skinhead. I credit you with having at the least, the tribal insecurities that render you unpersuadable by such media exposure, let alone the critical faculties to recognize a fallacious boring polemic. And you (on the right) are not going to be moved at all if exposed to Ibram X Kendhi's anti-racist baby, for the exact same reasons.

The problem is actually the opposite, when people only read Mein Kampf, and only read How to be Anti-racist. Yet, we have this massive compounding factor present based on a poorly evidenced but comforting idea that media effects are powerful. Tribal people everywhere are intuitively trying to avoid exposure to novel ideas.

The degree to which this is conscious, I do not know. While generally I feel the memefication of discourse into rhetorical tricks is an adaptive strategy for those who have not been prepared by life to argue, I also suspect that many experiencing some kind of cognitive dissonance in being socially invested in ideas that are, at least to them, incoherent and unintelligible, do employ these rhetorical strategies in bad faith.

The other compounding factor, I would refer to as the "Iago" effect, after the Shakespeare villain, who destroys not just Othello, but everybodies lives by creating non-existing threats. This is a tactic whereby you take a behaviour that didn't harm somebody, and then "educating" them to find insult and trauma. A  kind of perversion of consciousness raising. 

Usiing a right-wing example, getting people worked up over "they/them" pronouns, even though they revere defunct pronouns like "thee/thou" used in their holy books that are third person plural pronouns, or new plural pronouns like "yous" used in Australian English. (Yes, the only thing in Judaism and Christianity that God bothered to commit to writing was "Yous shall not kill").

The distinction is, Iago is not consciousness raising but shit stirring. Now there genuinely is a question of how charitable to be to the people who seem to think raising the salience of race (for example) was a good way to somehow reduce racism, and "educating" people into taking offense at the notion of color-blindness, or humanism.

That's been a big compounding factor, in just making people more sensitive and readier to take offense has made the institution of discourse far more socially fraught, even if we are no less free to exercise speech.

The Punchline

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." -John F. Kennedy, assassinated by a lone nut-job.

I cannot find the specific one, but there was a great talk at Google by a guy talking about difficult conversation. He opened his talk by inviting members of the audience to turn to the person next to them and tell them how much they earn, how old they think the other person is and how attractive they find the other person out of ten.

The purpose was to cut straight to cultural taboos, and while taboo there's no real harm in the discomfort they cause for both speaker and listener.

Charlie Kirk's murder simply validates JFK's assertion. Now, this is how confirmation bias works, but I am betting that if we can't discuss, and more to the point of this post, can't think and can't argue, people will turn to violence.

"People with guns don't understand. That's why they get guns, too many misunderstandings." ~ Jerry Seinfeld, episode "The Little Kicks"

I feel it's important to emphasize my real conclusion. I am not saying that teachers don't try to teach students how to think. I feel the problem is our education system assesses students on their ability to furnish answers, and this does not require any understanding on the students' part. 

This is the dark side of "what gets measured gets done" understanding is costly and tertiary places are scarce relative to demand. It is far more efficient for our students to simply brute force answers into their brains than generate them. It is also something money can easily buy and create more resource intensive forms of education with a narrower variation of results.

That was literally the secret sauce to my own secondary schools ability to have 30% of our year graduate among the top 10% of students state-wide. They handed us phonebook size print-outs of past exams and commercially licensed practice exams, so we could simply rehearse our final examinations until we all would get As.

They call this "spoon feeding" and I believe private (paid) school students have higher fail rates and drop out rates than public (free) school students, yet they obtain places at university in greater numbers than their hardier public school counterparts. 

This is also, I feel, likely why we can graduate so many people, with so many qualifications that in practice are not well spoken, not great thinkers and can't argue for shit.

At the extremes, these people, unable to argue like a Cambridge student, eventually grab a gun and defend the honour of their tribe.

If you want to make the world a more peaceful place, get into an argument and start learning how to argue.