Abstract

Most models of learning use some version of the storehouse metaphor: learning is understood primarily as accumulation. That model breaks down when learning requires not addition, but the ‘death’ of an old frame and the emergence of a better one. Drawing on Cognitive Transformation Theory, I examine two obstacles to such learning: knowledge shields and frame blindness. I argue that the real question is not how to induce transformation in favorable conditions, but how to form a learner who can increasingly undergo transformative learning without them. That argument leads to a portrait of the transformative learner, whose revolutionary curiosity is stabilized by identity into character. Everything said up to this point forces a corresponding educational conclusion: foundational education should be judged by the learner’s future capacity for transformative learning.

The Storehouse Model

The typical model used to think about learning is described by Klein and Baxter (2009) as the storehouse model. In their words:

“It assumes that the learner is missing some critical form of knowledge—factual information or procedures. The learner or the instructor defines what knowledge is missing. Together, they add this knowledge via a course, a practice regimen, or through simple study. Instructors provide feedback to the learner. Then, they test whether the new knowledge was successfully added to the storehouse.”

A richer version of the storehouse metaphor1 includes not only stored contents, but also the mind’s operations on those contents: memory, recall speed, procedural fluency, and other forms of processing power. Learning, in this view, is both accumulation and the strengthening of the mind’s capacity to handle what it knows. This is a highly intuitive picture of how minds improve.

This commonsensical metaphor of the storehouse fits with many learning experiences we encounter in life, and in those cases is adequate. As Klein and Baxter themselves draw an analogy to Kuhn’s model of science. And you can compare learning with the storehouse model roughly to the work inside a paradigm that Kuhn (1970) describes ‘normal science’ to be.

But the storehouse metaphor is deeply inadequate in describing many types of learning, including the most significant ones. This is because the model does not include many important affordances.

• Interactivity of knowledge: The storehouse metaphor leads the mind to consider units of knowledge to be discrete. It does not make salient the relationality between different patterns of thought, especially how the arrangement of concepts within a conceptual network can determine radically different outcomes in understanding and receptivity to new information.

• Subtractive knowledge: The storehouse model makes it seem like abandoning knowledge, or unlearning, has a maximal utility of negating a mistake, and does not acknowledge that negating knowledge can lead to positive gains in understanding, and certainly does not recognize the possibility of transformative effects.

• Abstraction and Deconstruction: The storehouse model lacks the capacity to express how many pieces of information can be condensed into one abstraction, nor how an abstraction can be deconstructed into smaller pieces.

• Perceptual Growth: The storehouse model does not invite the mind to consider how pieces of knowledge can alter the capacity for the assimilation of future knowledge.

• Environment: The storehouse model also fails to capture the dynamic relation between learner and environment. As the learner changes, both the quantity of what can be learned and the kinds of things that can become intelligible or extractable from the environment change as well.

These considerations are not impossible within this model, but they involve serious friction.

An Alternative to the Scientist Metaphor

Cognitive Transformation Theory, as presented by Klein and Baxter, therefore rejects the storehouse model in order to emphasize the revision aspect of conceptual networks2 and suggests using a “scientist” metaphor. Klein and Baxter (2009) write:

“Cognitive learning is not simply a matter of adding additional beliefs into the existing mental models. Rather, we have to revise our belief systems and our mental models as experience shows the inadequacy of our current ways of thinking. We discover ways to extend or even reject our existing beliefs in favor of more sophisticated beliefs. The scientist metaphor is much more suited to cognitive learning. This metaphor views a learner as a scientist engaged in making discoveries, wrestling with anomalies, and finding ways to restructure beliefs and mental models…”

I have a few objections to using the scientist metaphor. First of all, consider a person with a storehouse model of learning. By implication this person understands the mind, knowledge and learning to fit that model. For them, a scientist is merely a container of a specialized set of knowledge. Which is to say, for those who do not understand the problematics of the storehouse model, the ‘scientist’ metaphor is uninformative. Hence it fails in the pedagogical task that the metaphor aims to accomplish.

Moreover, while the scientist metaphor saliently captures the idea of experimenting, it drastically fails to evoke the aversive dimension of transformation. Subtractive knowledge, reorganization, and the development of new awareness are all experiences that most people shy from, and for a person with a storehouse model, they seem especially threatening; they appear as a loss of wisdom, a growth in ignorance at worst, and as meaningless at best.

Because of these considerations, I suggest using a death-rebirth metaphor; it better fits the lived structure of the experience. It cannot be subsumed in the storehouse model, the way the scientist metaphor can. Hence, while it may not be immediately understandable for a person who is locked into the storehouse model, at the very least it defends itself from being misinterpreted.

Transformative learning is never a simple swap out of one proposition for another; it is a radical reorganization of the network of concepts that form the mind in a domain. A way of organizing attention, meaning, and expectation breaks down so that a better one can emerge. It is not an overstatement to say that part of the mind has died and is reborn anew. We can label the competing learning metaphors or models storehouse vs. transformative, while using death-rebirth as the metaphor for the lived structure of transformation.

The dramatic aggression of the term is not a mistake either. The threat of transformation, that is, the death-rebirth moment, is typically frightening. Feltovich, Coulson, and Spiro (2001), report the reactions of medical students to the educational procedures aimed at transformative learning:

“A testimony to the degree of discomfort the challenges caused the students was the amount of anger and frustration that was elicited within the experimental procedures.”

But beyond the fear and anger that transformative learning brings, it is also experienced as disorienting and rejuvenating in relation to the importance of the domain to the learner and their inexperience. The joy of the ‘aha!’ is powerful and readers can surely recall moments of ecstasy in which confusion was reconstructed into a comprehensible pattern.

Knowledge Shields

When discordant information that challenges a current frame or conceptual network enters awareness, typical responses that protect the incumbent from threat are invoked. These epistemological responses are analogous to the colloquial psychoanalytical “defense mechanisms”. To avoid destabilization, the mind protects itself by deploying what Feltovich et al. (1994) call knowledge shields. In the appendix to ‘Learners’ (Mis)Understanding...,’ Feltovich, Coulson, and Spiro (2001) list 23 such shields. Among them are (paraphrased):

• Illegitimate subsumption: this anomaly is a special case of what I already know; I can account for it with my current model. The new concept I am encountering behaves just like the ones I am already familiar with.

• Argument from authority: This new data is simply wrong because authority X has informed me otherwise.

• Impertinent Complexification: I will be able accommodate the new material, because there is more to it than what is present. With more data, it will fit my current model. We just won’t go into the details right now.

They also explain why knowledge shields are so problematic:

“If the application of Knowledge Shields is catch-as-catch can, as our results suggest, then conceptual change should be especially difficult for concepts of the kind we have examined. This is because in this kind of structure there are so many places to hide the effects of discrepant information. For example, there can be no such thing as a critical challenge to some key part of the network because of the multiplicity of influences on belief. This kind of conceptual network provides so many sources of resiliency, that some way can be found by the learner to accommodate the implications of a challenge to credibility. Changing belief probably requires a multi faceted, systematic affront, a process of dismantling and reconstructing a large part of a belief system.”

In other words, trying to dismantle a structure of a person’s conceptual network is very difficult because each concept of the learner is reinforced by others, and any attempt to reshuffle the conceptual network is defended by knowledge shields, which are deployed willy-nilly—anything to keep the structure safe.

Frame Blindness

Even if the problem of knowledge shields were bypassed with instructional design, which would be an exceptional feat, this still only deals with conscious and surfaced resistances to the death and rebirth of the mind that is constitutive of transformative learning. Another, perhaps more severe problem is that the salience landscape, or frame, of the mind shapes what becomes visible in the first place.

A mind’s frame, constructed by the learner via their conceptual network3, makes some aspects of reality salient and others negligible. Transformative learning, as I am using the term, is the pursuit of better frames and the abandonment of poorer ones. It is well-structured attention that is the object of education and learning. The implication of the fact that we are always embodying a frame means that certain features of reality never present themselves, and it is particularly the features that would instigate a call for revision that are typically left in the dark.

Hence, before knowledge shields can even be deployed, there needs to be a way for the anomalous information to surface past the frame blindness4.

In the examples discussed by Klein and Baxter (2009) and Feltovich, Coulson, and Spiro (2001), frame blindness is largely a non-problem; the context evaluated is a learner who is being actively taught by an expert. The teacher is able to force the anomaly down the throat of the learner, which evokes the gag of knowledge shields. But the ability to simply ignore the incongruent data is not an option that needs to be addressed.

For various reasons, the assumption of learning involving an active teacher is inadequate in thinking about transformative learning for the present and future state of our contemporary world. For starters, many people today are autodidacts in several domains of their lives. Mediums like YouTube, Substack and various AI bots are used to learn and all of these systems are opt-in; hence incongruent data can be ignored or deflected with knowledge shields. Incongruent data can be avoided by shaping one’s own curriculum in a way to avoid the toil of transformative learning.

Moreover, there are many domains where transformation is highly valuable, but does not even have clear accessible lineages—learning is autodidactic by nature, and authorities that can press do not exist. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, as the scientist metaphor suggested by Klein and Baxter implies, an inquirer into novel fields is a learner, but has no authority to rely on. Hence, any resolution to the problems of transformative learning needs to take into account the challenge of both knowledge shields and frame blindness, and contextualize them in a world where autodidactic learning is the norm.

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Institutional Supports for Transformative Learning

Because it is so hard for learners to engage in transformative learning successfully, it is often only done at scale in expert institutions that are specifically designed to accommodate this. Consider the immense effort invested in medical students, or Buddhist monks. While we can be assured that much transformative learning (and perhaps even most of it) happens in the wild, these cases are too diverse and unpredictable to be documented.

These teaching institutions assume learner motivation to progress in their practice, whatever it may be. In addition, they typically filter out any student who is not thought capable of acquiring expertise. So these institutions select for highly motivated and already intelligent students.

Within the motivation to learn generally, the motivation for transformative learning is subsumed. Hence there is no need to inquire what the students’ motivation is to engage death and rebirth. In order to facilitate this difficult learning, instructional design of these institutions scaffold the learning in various ways that are assumed in Cognitive Transformation Theory research typically.

• Identity is retained through transformation and is explicitly not threatened. (You will not lose any sense of identity by engaging in this paradigm shift)

• Peers that have already gone through the process show that what you are learning is both learnable/comprehensible. (This assumes a standardization of the education, which is usually granted.)

• Experts allow one to keep a critical identity frame—trust in authority is legitimate. New authorities do not need to be recognized, nor does the concept of trust need to be reevaluated. (Consider the pedagogy of going through Freudian analysis.)

The research on conceptual change and knowledge shields studies people under relatively favorable conditions: the students want proficiency and have teachers who are trying to transfer their expertise, they have a definite end they know to be accessible, and they trust the relevant experts enough to let themselves be corrected.
But the autodidactic reality lacks all of these things.

Curriculum vs. Character

Even with all of these supports, CTT expresses constant laments at the difficulty of transformative learning. I would like to suggest that an underdiagnosed aspect of their problem lies in the capacity of the learners. This is natural, given that CTT focuses on creating domain specific learning environments. We already recognize a variance amongst learners’ capacity for transformative learning; it is only natural to ask what might contribute to this variance. If this capacity is impacted by experience and history, we can then begin inquiring how to cultivate such a capacity in learners and stabilize it as a character.

So instead of asking how to create an environment where knowledge shields can be bypassed for highly motivated learners, we can ask what the character of a learner proficient at transformative learning looks like and how to cultivate one5.

These questions of curriculum design for a domain and cultivation of a character overlap, but diverge in important ways. The answer for character formation cannot be limited to domain-specific curriculum design; it must involve the cultivation of a more general and stable capacity. This cultivation may be actualized via a curriculum, but it cannot be one aimed merely at the delivery of content. It would be a curriculum for the formation of character, with the learner themselves as the object of inquiry. This is analogous to the difference between trying to explain to a student how to solve a specific mathematical procedure versus giving them a general understanding that would allow them to solve all such questions in the set, or better yet, how to approach new domains in mathematics.

Conservative and Revolutionary Curiosity

Highly structured environments for transformative learning support revision externally by surfacing anomaly, sustaining attention, providing sequencing, reducing the cost of destabilization, and legitimizing the new frame. But if the educational aim is not better environmental design for learners who generally struggle with transformative learning, but the formation of a character who can increasingly internalize revision, then some scaffolding that these environments provide need to be located in the learner’s history, rather than in the present environment. In other words, the learner needs to have internalized mechanisms that drive to transformative learning; the learner needs to be actively seeking the death-rebirth of transformative learning. Below I sketch some of what I think to be the most important parts of the character of a transformative learner.

Curiosity is defined as “a pleasant motivational state involving the tendency to recognize and seek out novel and challenging information and experiences” (Kashdan, Steger, and Breen 2007). Both additive learners and transformative learners can be curious. However, because of the different frames between these two camps of learners, curiosity manifests itself in different ways.

For the storehouse learners, curiosity drives one to seek additive concepts that do NOT require any significant reformation of the mind6. Most school learning fits this category. This curiosity seeks addition, extension, clarification, enrichment, or stimulation without threatening the basic frame. We can call this, additive or conservative curiosity.

However, transformative learners are driven by a different kind of curiosity. They seek information that destabilizes and offers better conceptual networks. This second type of curiosity, at the very least, seeks data to subtract errors from itself and be less wrong; in more sophisticated and fuller versions, this curiosity is driven by the motivation for a radical reshaping of the mind, and strives for novel frames that unearth new affordances from old territories. It is more than willing to endure the negative moment in which an old frame becomes unstable, inadequate, obsolete and incoherent; it is precisely a quest for such experiences. We can call this, transformative or revolutionary curiosity.

Revolutionary curiosity serves to resolve many problems that the educational environments researched by CTT resolve implicitly, as well as obsolete some of the problems they seek to resolve in these spaces.

As explained above, in highly scaffolded settings, the learner does not need to generate the full motive force for transformation from within. But a learner in a state of revolutionary curiosity has the internal motivation that can drive transformational learning.

Earlier, we noted a list of structural features that make transformative learning easier in the institutions researched by Cognitive Transformation theorists:

• Motivation

• Credible end-goal/standardization

• Structure of information

• Identity protection

• Peer normalization

• Trustworthy authority

• Coercive mechanisms for overcoming shields and blindness

Revolutionary curiosity makes motivation for transformative learning endogenous. Because confrontation with anomaly is itself experienced as valuable, it does not need the external motivations of the institution to undergo transformative learning. Similarly, it weakens, or even completely dissolves, the need for a fixed endpoint; the learner who embraces and pursues the death-rebirth cycle of learning does not need the endpoint to be clear in order to seek the information that can trigger such an experience.

Institutions use authority, carrots, and sticks, amongst a variety of tools to make learners confront information that catalyzes transformative challenges. Revolutionary curiosity is a motivational state that seeks out, remains with, and even invites disturbing data rather than flee toward simpler explanations. In that sense it substitutes for forced exposure to anomaly, containment from escape to distractions, and some of the struggle against knowledge shields.

When considering frame blindness and shields, the sophistication of the learner in a state of revolutionary curiosity comes into play in interesting ways. For some individuals, information with transformative potential will still be actively sought. In a sense, an excellent transformative learner will be able to successfully identify and consider alternative frames that emerge from data. While this cannot possibly resolve the problem of frame blindness completely, it is clearly valuable.

As for knowledge shields, a learner in a state of revolutionary curiosity treats them with suspicion. While every knowledge shield is possibly functioning to protect one from degenerating into a worse frame, it is also potentially a barrier to forward evolution.

What it does not replace are the supports tied to structure, peers, and authority. Curiosity does not itself sequence information well, normalize the process socially, or solve the problem of identifying trustworthy guides. It may reduce dependence on these things, but it does not make them unnecessary. Revolutionary curiosity is therefore not a substitute for the whole scaffold of transformative learning.

More importantly, revolutionary curiosity is an unstable motivational state. It must be stabilized as a character trait in order to replace the institutional scaffolding in a reliable way.

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Identity and Stabilization of Revolutionary Curiosity

I suggest considering identity as a stabilizer of revolutionary curiosity. Borrowing from Sfard and Prusak (2005), identity may be understood as a set of significant, reifying, endorsable stories about who a person is and who that person is becoming. In the terms of this essay, the transformative learner comes to understand themself through stories in which being revised is not a humiliation or a threat to selfhood, but an integral part of learning well. These stories form part of the learner’s frame and pattern of interpretation of their own experiences. When revolutionary curiosity becomes part of the learner’s self-understanding, anomaly, disorientation, and the possibility of frame change are actively pursued. In this sense, identity is one of the means by which revolutionary curiosity becomes durable enough to begin taking the form of character.

Identity is not merely adjacent to learning; it is a powerful part of the learner’s frame itself, and thus shapes the learning process dynamically. It affects what the learner notices in the information landscape, how they interpret data, and their emotional responses to threats to their current conceptual network. Recognizing oneself as a transformative learner animated by revolutionary curiosity is a game changer; it reorganizes not only motivation, but the learner’s attention and their whole stance towards revision.

Character of the Transformative Learner

We are now ready to define the Transformative Learner:

The transformative learner is a person for whom revolutionary curiosity has been stabilized by identity into character, and who can reliably sustain revision toward better frames.

The transformative learner matters both inside expert educational institutions and outside them. Such learners reduce some of the burdens institutions typically carry because they do not depend on coercion, externally forced anomaly, and heavy motivational support. A population of transformative learners will ease the job of curriculum designers and teachers. Such a population would also make possible more radical visions of what expert educational institutions can be. Institutional scaffolds will still play a large role in the learning of transformative learners. But if such a character were more common, institutions could spend less effort overcoming basic resistance to transformation and focus instead on other pedagogical functions in order to better leverage resources.

As noted earlier, autodidactic learning is increasingly becoming the rule rather than the exception. In autodidactic conditions, frame blindness and knowledge shields are harder to overcome because there is no expert forcing anomaly to the surface. The transformative learner is better able to seek, notice, and remain with threatening information without institutional support.

It is important to discriminate between a genuine transformative learner and its confused imitators. The transformative learner is not merely open to revising their conceptual network willy-nilly; such a character would be easily manipulated or unstable. Novelty addiction is another misleading vice. While it is a close look-alike to revolutionary curiosity, it lacks the discretion to care whether the new frame is not simply shiny, but also better. Another failure mode is a tendency toward skepticism that paralyzes judgment and cultivates disengagement.

Like any virtue, this character suffers from the Gorgias Problem: it is easier to appear to be a transformative learner than it is to be one. Varieties of performative anti-dogmatism or heterodoxy are real temptations that must be recognized as false presentations of the transformative learner.

The portrait of this kind of person raises a new question: how should we judge an education?

A New Standard for Foundational Education

Educational institutions are typically judged by the storehouse model. In that sense, a successful program ends with a learner in command of the relevant stock of knowledge. The transformative learning model and the introduced character of the transformative learner unveil a more sensible criterion: how driven and capable is the graduate at transformative learning?

Cognitive Transformation Theory leads us to judge an educational institution or program by its capacity to successfully induce transformative episodes in a specific domain. Our account here takes it one step forward and asks us to judge the success of foundational education by looking at the graduate’s capacity for future transformative learning, inside and outside of official educational institutions.

Education typically aims to internalize in the learner some knowledge that is currently outside. This can be seen in domains as varied as spelling tests, calculus and philosophy. The description of the transformative learner described here invites us to see the general capacity for transformative learning as a foundational proficiency to be internalized.

We should therefore judge a foundational education not by what knowledge it transmits, nor by what transformations it induces under scaffolded conditions. Instead we should examine whether it graduates a learner capable of meaningful self-revision. The deepest educational question is not what the learner merely knows, but what kind of learner the education has made.

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Open questions

Open empirical and conceptual questions obviously remain to be explored. Below, I list only a few for the consideration of future research.

• What are the domain limits of transformative learning? Can one be a generalized transformative learner, or is one limited to bounded domains? How are these domains best constructed and understood?

• What observable behaviors, conversational patterns, or learning trajectories would distinguish a genuine transformative learner from a merely performative one?

• What kinds of educational experiences most reliably increase a learner’s future capacity for transformative learning, rather than merely inducing isolated transformative episodes?

• What can help autodidactic learners reliably surface anomaly in the absence of expert guidance, especially under conditions of frame blindness and opt-in information environments?

• To what extent can revolutionary curiosity be a vice and not a virtue?

Thank you to Shoshana Gabbai and David Campbell for comments on an earlier draft.

Thank you to my peers at ORI for cultivating an environment that makes me excited to write.

Thank you to Joe Edelman—a constant source of my transformative learning.

Glossary

𝗔𝗱𝗱𝗶𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗰𝘂𝗿𝗶𝗼𝘀𝗶𝘁𝘆: See 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗲𝗿𝘃𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗰𝘂𝗿𝗶𝗼𝘀𝗶𝘁𝘆.

𝗔𝗱𝗱𝗶𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴: Learning that adds information, procedures, or fluency without major reorganization of a learner’s 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗰𝗲𝗽𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹 𝗻𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸 or 𝗳𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗲.

𝗖𝗼𝗻𝗰𝗲𝗽𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹 𝗻𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸: The dynamically activated organization of concepts, expectations, and relations through which a learner understands a domain. It helps structure the learner’s 𝗳𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗲, and when threatened by anomaly it is often defended by 𝗸𝗻𝗼𝘄𝗹𝗲𝗱𝗴𝗲 𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗲𝗹𝗱𝘀.

𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗲𝗿𝘃𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗰𝘂𝗿𝗶𝗼𝘀𝗶𝘁𝘆: Curiosity that seeks addition, clarification, enrichment, or stimulation without threatening the learner’s basic 𝗳𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗲.

𝗗𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗵-𝗥𝗲𝗯𝗶𝗿𝘁𝗵 𝗺𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗹 / 𝗺𝗲𝘁𝗮𝗽𝗵𝗼𝗿: A metaphor for the lived structure of 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗻𝘀𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴, in which an old 𝗳𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗲 breaks down so that a better one can emerge.

𝗙𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗲: The organization of salience, expectation, and interpretation that shapes what a learner notices, ignores, and treats as significant. A 𝗳𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗲 is partly structured by the learner’s 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗰𝗲𝗽𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹 𝗻𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸, and 𝗳𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗲 𝗯𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗱𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 occurs when it prevents relevant anomaly from appearing as significant at all.

𝗙𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗲 𝗯𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗱𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀: The condition in which a learner’s existing 𝗳𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗲 prevents relevant anomaly from appearing as significant in the first place.

𝗜𝗱𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝘁𝘆: A set of significant, reifying, endorsable stories about who a person is and who that person is becoming, helping stabilize 𝗿𝗲𝘃𝗼𝗹𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗿𝘆 𝗰𝘂𝗿𝗶𝗼𝘀𝗶𝘁𝘆 into character.

𝗞𝗻𝗼𝘄𝗹𝗲𝗱𝗴𝗲 𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗲𝗹𝗱𝘀: Defensive maneuvers by which a learner protects an incumbent 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗰𝗲𝗽𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹 𝗻𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸 from threatening anomaly once it has surfaced within the learner’s 𝗳𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗲.

𝗥𝗲𝘃𝗼𝗹𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗿𝘆 𝗰𝘂𝗿𝗶𝗼𝘀𝗶𝘁𝘆: Curiosity that seeks information with the potential to revise the current 𝗳𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗲 or 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗰𝗲𝗽𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹 𝗻𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸 toward a better one.

𝗦𝘁𝗼𝗿𝗲𝗵𝗼𝘂𝘀𝗲 𝗺𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗹 / 𝗺𝗲𝘁𝗮𝗽𝗵𝗼𝗿: A model of learning in which the mind improves primarily through 𝗮𝗱𝗱𝗶𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴: the accumulation of contents, procedures, and fluencies, along with growing skill in handling and applying them. It is therefore linked to 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗲𝗿𝘃𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗰𝘂𝗿𝗶𝗼𝘀𝗶𝘁𝘆, which seeks extension, clarification, and enrichment without demanding major reorganization of the learner’s 𝗳𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗲 or 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗰𝗲𝗽𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹 𝗻𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸.

𝗧𝗿𝗮𝗻𝘀𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗰𝘂𝗿𝗶𝗼𝘀𝗶𝘁𝘆: See 𝗿𝗲𝘃𝗼𝗹𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗿𝘆 𝗰𝘂𝗿𝗶𝗼𝘀𝗶𝘁𝘆.

𝗧𝗿𝗮𝗻𝘀𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗲𝗿: A person for whom 𝗿𝗲𝘃𝗼𝗹𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗿𝘆 𝗰𝘂𝗿𝗶𝗼𝘀𝗶𝘁𝘆 has been stabilized by 𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝘁𝘆 into character, and who can reliably sustain revision toward better 𝗳𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗲𝘀.

𝗧𝗿𝗮𝗻𝘀𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴: Learning that revises or reorganizes a learner’s 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗰𝗲𝗽𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹 𝗻𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸 and 𝗳𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗲, rather than merely adding new content.

Bibliography

Adler, Mortimer J., and Charles Van Doren. How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972.

Feltovich, Paul J., Richard L. Coulson, and Rand J. Spiro. “Learners’ (Mis)Understanding of Important and Difficult Concepts: A Challenge to Smart Machines in Education.” In Smart Machines in Education: The Coming Revolution in Educational Technology, 349–375. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI/MIT Press, 2001.

Feltovich, Paul J., Rand J. Spiro, Richard L. Coulson, and Jans F. Adami. Conceptual Understanding and Stability, and Knowledge Shields for Fending Off Conceptual Change. Technical Report No. 7. Springfield, IL: Southern Illinois University School of Medicine, 1994.

Kashdan, Todd B., Michael F. Steger, and William E. Breen. “Curiosity.” In Encyclopedia of Social Psychology, edited by Roy F. Baumeister and Kathleen D. Vohs. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2007.

Klein, Gary, and Holly C. Baxter. “Cognitive Transformation Theory: Contrasting Cognitive and Behavioral Learning.” In The PSI Handbook of Virtual Environments for Training and Education, Vol. 1, Learning, Requirements, and Metrics, edited by Jack J. Cohn, Daniel Schmorrow, and David Nicholson, 50–65. Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2009.

Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.

Sfard, Anna, and Anna Prusak. “Telling Identities: In Search of an Analytic Tool for Investigating Learning as a Culturally Shaped Activity.” Educational Researcher 34, no. 4 (2005): 14–22.

The Open Research Institute (ORI) is an open and public network of researchers working on anything and everything1.

It’s best to think of it as having an informal and formal meaning. In the informal sense, it is the human project of growing in wisdom, aspiring to perfection. You can count Socrates, St. Augustine, Maimonides, Machiavelli, Newton, and Dawkins as part of the informal ORI. But in the formal sense, it is a collective of people who have organized themselves in order contribute to this project in the best possible way.

Academia, right?

Wrong.

Academia is a gated institution. For example, there is a whole economy credentialization and legitimation that is not defined by the practitioners themselves. This doesn’t make it a bad thing, but these features do contrast it with ORI. ORI, is not gated in any way. Each node in the network is accessible to each node, and is responsible for its own filtering of noise and signal.

Currently, there are two chapters of ORI2, each in a separate discord, with an overlap of some people. But Discord isn’t the homebase for ORI—the whole idea is that ORI is not medium bound to any form. Some can create a chapter of ORI using Slack, a Whatsapp group, and if it tickles their fancy, a physical republic of letters.

So in one sense, every researcher is part of this network as far as their research is public, and this would include academics. But in a narrower and more formal sense, there are people who identify as ORI researchers, and benefit from being part of the formal network. This network has both active researchers who self-identify as part of ORI, as well as a network of supporters. I, personally, fit in both buckets.

The Researcher Profile

As someone who strives to make this network as powerful as possible, it needs open organizational structures that support it. Below, I’ll walk you through what a researcher can do in order to fit the form of ORI in a way that will help them and the whole network wisen.

As a researcher, the most important thing is to be able to connect to other progress that has already been made. The method for ORI is for each researcher to have a public profile page that helps us find each other. That’s how we actualize the power of ORI. (Otherwise were just a bunch of people with three capital letters in our twitter and substack bio, hardly something efficient in moving human towards greatness.)

This profile page needs to be quickly legible, and have all the information so any person, be it researcher, funder, or student, can discern if your research is what they are looking for.

This is not as simple as it sounds. It’s not easy to be properly legible. Luckily, all we need is for the researchers to be legible enough, to enter an efficient positive feedback loop.

There’s two parts to consider in what to include in a profile page. On one hand, you want enough information so that you don’t miss anyone important. On the other hand, you don’t want any information that’s irrelevant. There’s no way to do it perfectly; the point is to be as good as possible. Good as possible means that we don’t want a researcher to be wasting time optimizing for publicity over their actual work.

I’m going to walk you through as I write my own ORI Researcher Profile and show you how easy and fun it is.

C’mon, let’s go!

WRITING PROCESS

Northstar

What is your ultimate goal, or the best concise description of your research trajectory? This will work best if kept to 40 to 200 words.

The first thing I’ll write is my Northstar. Writing this up is really fun, because it forces me to see myself as the bright light I am. What am I trying to do? What do I care about? Who am I as a researcher?

Seeing another person’s Northstar is a great vibe check, as you can imagine. Just look at mine!

Shadow_Rebbe’s Northstar

The deepest educational question is what kind of person we should be trying to form and what kind of pedagogy would make that formation real. My work focuses on aspirational human excellence, especially forms expressed in unusual wisdom, curiosity, power of thought, and intellectual excellence that carries across domains and across a lifetime. From there, I am interested in the qualities, habits, and patterns of mind that constitute such excellence, and in how they can be taught, cultivated, and spread.

A central obstacle is what I think of as the Gorgias problem in education: a system that rewards seeming over being, substitutes shallow metrics for reality, and trains people to outsource judgment to external authority. Part of my work is therefore both pedagogical and epistemological, exploring whether and how Socratic conversations, epistemology for children, and accelerant habits can help form people who are exponentially wiser than ourselves. This is part of a larger vision in which humans can consistently generate individuals and societies that are consistently more capable and producing more intelligent and beneficent humans.

Live Questions

Now that my Northstar is articulated (SO MUCH F**KING FUN!) the next thing to track are those live inquiries and questions that I am working on. Of all the information I’ll be plugging in, these are the most dynamic.

Seeing someone else’s live questions lets you orient yourself to their research. They might tell you that this researcher is way beyond yourself and that you can learn from them, or that they are way behind and you can help them.

In fact, one way of thinking of these live questions are like requests for an answer from the collective human intelligence. Any fellow ORI researcher who sees these live questions and has something to contribute to a response will be happy to do so!

For some researchers, the list of live questions and inquiries are very tight and concise. It could literally be just one item. For others it might be tens of questions.

My suggestion is just to write down what you think are your live questions and start with that. This list is meant to be very dynamic, and change as you progress3.

Here’s my list, with the most passionate inquiries in bold:

Frame

• What is the right unit of analysis for intellectual excellence: virtues, habits, dispositions, moves, attentional styles, discourse practices, identity structures, stages, or something else?

• Is intellectual excellence better presented as tools, habits, stages, or some combination?

Core cognitive patterns

• Which patterns of thought most accelerate future learning?

• Are introspective epistemic skills built first by noticing structure in others and only later in oneself?

• What distinguishes fruitful questions from shallow, performative, vague, or inert ones?

Schooling and its distortions

• What educational practices do not merely fail to cultivate understanding, but actively block it by rewarding the wrong inner signals?

• What exactly is the schooled mind as a coherent structure to surpass?

• What would a pedagogy of vigor, freedom, and agency look like as opposed to a pedagogy of submission and neutering?

Environments and formation

• What kinds of initiation produce seekers rather than conformists?

• How can environments of high intellectual formation be made accessible to ordinary parents and non-elites without becoming formulaic and dead?

People and traditions to study

• Who has given a serious account of the excellent human that does not reduce excellence to shallow productivity, credentials, or conformity?

• Who has tried to identify traits or habits that produce long-term learning gains rather than short-term intervention effects?

Defining the Domain

The next step is to use my Northstar and my Live Questions to articulate my domain. In universities this is easy because of all the institutional mechanisms like faculties, certifications and journals. These are a source of strength as well as a weakness; some forms of knowledge are not pursued simply because they don’t fit any box.

In ORI you can use key-words that will make it clear what you are doing, just like many academic abstracts do. Personally, I like hashtags, maybe because I missed out on the craze when it was happening. But nobody is limited to what they use as keywords or how many. The function is to make yourself immediately legible with regards to your domain. You don’t want people wasting time looking for you nor wasting time trying to figure out if you are relevant.

Tier 1:

#Philosophy-of-Education #Epistemology-for-Children #Metacognition-for-Children #Developmental-Psychology #Socratic-Method #Intellectual-Virtue #Human-Excellence #Educational-Theory #Schooling

But besides my main domain, there are other facets of my research that are important enough to mention, even if they aren’t core, these secondary features get mentioned in a (drumroll) secondary tier list.

Tier 2:

#Virtue_Epistemology #Cognitive_Transformation_Theory #Educational-Psychology #Institutional_Critique #Live_Players #Qualitative_Cybernetics #Straussian_Esoteric_Education

For me, this seems like enough to cut out my space. But there are other ways to do this. You might want to list your lineage as a way to define your space. That’s what Neo-Freudians and Jungians do, right? Or you might want to list the people you are paying attention to and why.

What You Want

Lastly, you might want to include what you are looking for: funding, collaborators,or whatever. I don’t have anything clear on my profile, because while I’d always like some $, right now I’m just looking to be more visible. What’s nice is that that you can always update your profile.

PUBLIC WORK

ORI’s ethos is that the research is public. Hence, to be part of ORI’s network you should display some public research, and contact information.

This work doesn’t need to be an academic article. Here are a few examples to show you how broad the range of public research can be.

Here’s my latest essay:

The research I want to make accessible is on my substack. That plus my X handle should be enough to make me accessible to anyone that wants to reach me.

All done! THAT WAS FUN!

Now, look at my final version: as PDF!

If you want to collaborate, DM me here or on X!

Other Profiles

Here are two more examples of ORI researchers.

https://othmangbad.substack.com/about

https://observertheory.substack.com/about

Naturally, they didn’t follow my exact formula (they made their profile pages before this post!). That’s ok!

The ORI Network

Imagine seeing another researcher’s keywords. Just from a glance you can tell if they are relevant. Even better, in a database (not yet existent) it would be easy to search and find the people who are working on the things you need.

The idea is that keywords help you find the people working in the domain you care about, so you can filter out what’s irrelevant. The higher resolution Northstar, Live Questions and public research allow you to get higher resolution on how you can collaborate.

If this piece helped you notice that you are a researcher, then welcome to the club! Now’s a great time to create your profile page and accelerate towards a more beautiful world. Or maybe you already know you are a researcher, but you’ve never put in the effort to make yourself legible. For you too, now’s a great time to make yourself a profile page.

Once you have a profile page, (or if you already have one), please feel invited to respond to this post with your page. The next step is to start creating directories—and that can only be done with visible artifacts.4

ORI is here to help open you up to to knowledge that you are reaching for.

So, watcha waitin’ for?

C’mon les go!

Stay Tuned…

In my next post, I’ll discuss what happens when this doesn’t work—we already have an anti-fragile model that will make every unfruitful onboarding into a data piece that helps us improve our system.

Update May 1st 2026: My next post was actual research, and this is not likely to be written up in the near future. But in one sentence: imagine researchers of community building using you as data to solve problems. Your problem is their problem. In return for the right to document you as a case study, they help.

Open and Insulated Discourse

Nobody is born inside a discourse. We are initiated into them by the communities already practicing them. We are exposed to basic numeracy and literacy by our parents, and more complex discourses as we grow. These discourses1 were born to help us grasp at something real as a community. There was something that hurt the world and an antidote was found; a way of seeing was made accessible and could be communicated. These real points of contact with the world made this discourse so fruitful and valuable, hence participating in these new discourses meant learning to see what we could not yet see or do what we could not yet do.

But discourses do not remain unchanged as they grow. Each participant and each utterance is a small mutation from the previous state. The discourses accumulate terminology, commentary, rituals of entry, and internal hierarchies—it’s not just the content of the discourse, but the internal structure that is ever shifting. These mutations are often evolutions, where patterns of discourse are chunked and made quicker with new jargon, or explicit rules are transformed into implicit culture. But evolution and degeneration are two sides of the same coin; where change exists, it can be for the better or for the worse. What began as a way of making contact with the world can drift into a discourse that is severed from reality and serves insulated power structures. This essay is about that drift, and about what it means for initiation into a discourse, both for the teacher and the learner.

Being fluent in a discourse proves that one is a peer, but it says nothing about the value of the discourse itself. Even a sophisticated discourse can be an insulated one—a discourse that has close to zero representation in reality. In fact, it is likely that as a discourse gets more and more sophisticated, it drifts away from reality and becomes insulated, layering itself with self-referentiality, and losing contact with the extradiscursive world.

Think of Sigmund Freud’s first discoveries in psychopathology. They were valued because they were effective for extradiscursive use; his practice healed people. As his theory developed, it still had extradiscursive functionality, often in its explanatory power of lived experience, or its predictive power for dealing with psychic problems. But as the psychoanalytic discourse gained prestige it accumulated interlocutors and commentators who focused on mastering the discourse, without regard to the reality that was supposed to contact it. This process accelerated until psychoanalysis is hardly a field of psychology. Observing the current situation of psychoanalysis and Freudian literature one cannot but be impressed that it has drifted away from reality and has become a closed discourse. Empirical, extradiscursive utterances are hardly used to invalidate theories, and most intellectual energies are devoted to textual inquiries.

A similar process can be said to have happened to Socrates2. It is rare to find a direct discussion asking if Socrates is correct. The discourse of most Classical Scholars is focused on understanding what Socrates said, and the context of his utterances; the most ambitious may draw implications or point out conflicts between Socrates and other thinkers. Rarely will we find in the discourse a thinker challenging Socrates. In fact, much like some psychoanalysts or Marxists, many members of the discourse openly proclaim that they are scholars, not philosophers3.

One might argue that this is a new field—the historical analysis of Socrates. But the scholarly discourse is exactly the drift that is so concerning. Astronomy used to be a unified field with astrology, and rightly so. There were good reasons to consider these astral beings to have influence on our lowly earth4. But as we made progress in considering the movements of the planets, astrology was generally dropped. To be an astrologist is not the same things as being an astronomer5. And yet, to be obsessed with the person of Socrates at the expense of the ideas of Socrates, is analogous to astrology instead of astronomy. The research is about who said what, has little empirical rigor, and does not ask what is true, but what was said.

The degeneration into an insulated discourse begins with good intentions, and even with good deeds. If we look at those insulated discourses, we can see that the genesis of a discourse and its initial value is always rooted in contact with reality. It is as more individuals join the conversation that the discourse itself becomes an object of mastery. As this discourse develops it creates a loop that expands it, demanding more energy to master. Hence, new members are barred from joining the conversation until they have mastered large bodies of commentary which focus exclusively on interpretation of texts and are isolated from contact with reality. By the time one is considered by the community of the discourse to be qualified to have a voice, the training has done its job. The individual has mastered a prestigious literature, and to subvert it all would be costly. More so, they themselves have found a functionality of their discourse, namely to communicate with other masters of the language. The degeneration of the discourse to mere fancy is hard to see once one has invested so much effort and has gained a fluency that gives access to peers.

Note that the genealogy of insulated discourses presented here points to their parasitic nature; there is something valuable at the root that the insulated degeneracy is able to feed off of. Socrates and Sigmund Freud both had valuable contributions to the world, and it is precisely because of this that they can bear so much weight of empty words. Similarly, vast mystical corpuses have been written, expanding a few worthy insights into a sea of incestuous texts.

The spectrum between insulated and open discourses has infinite shades, but by presenting a fictive binary, we can get a better sense of how they function. Open discourses are ones where new utterances regarding extradiscursive facts are valued when they have implications for the discourse. The open discourse invites these moves in order to anchor it down into reality. Over a long enough time period, facts and assumptions are added to (and others are removed from) the discourse, helping make the discourse congruent with reality6.

If you think about mathematics as an open discourse, and perhaps one of the most intellectually honest discourses that we as humans know, you’ll notice that there are mountains of self-reference. Division turns into fractions, negative, imaginary and irrational numbers turn from imaginary procedures into objects that are referred to. In fact, we often start our learning by thinking that these things are ‘real’ first, and only later come to understand that these nouns are a strange shorthand for verbs!

This is the same type of recursive discourse that refers to itself in order to become more efficient. However, in math, the sophistication of the discourse is rooted deep in reality, and hence drift is minimal7.

The challenge in maintaining an open discourse is that the sophistication and distancing from the immediate reality and most primitive elements is often a good thing, as mathematics makes evident. Layers of abstraction allow for conceptual development and make communication more effective. The problem arises when the previous utterances of the discourse itself become an object and this recursive action continues until there is a rupture between discourse and reality. When taken too far in a reckless manner, a rift appears between theory and reality. As long as the discourse maintains a chain of substantiation that returns to the original contact, the tower can be constructed. Ironically, the discourses that have avoided contact are the ones most protective over their lack of touch with the ground.

Each discourse has its own particular angle on how it sees itself answerable to reality. What I mean, is that until a discourse becomes fully insulated8, the contact it posits with reality is considered to be verified or disputable, but these extradiscursive facts need to fit the form of the facts posited. This is a reasonable situation, where neurological facts shouldn’t be considered significant for trying to relate to the Oedipus complex. However, it is exactly in the negotiation of the shape of the pathways extradiscursive facts need to fit that a discourse can deceive and isolate itself from its own destruction or major upheavals. If neuroscience cannot say anything significant to a psychoanalyst, what can? The question should always be at the ready: “What kind of information would make you change your mind about this?”

The plurality of discourses combine into a broad social structure, and a measure of the health of this society is their response to outsider critique. What is the legitimacy of critiquing a discourse from ‘outside’ entirely? Critics often attempt to present why the origins of the discourse are either unimportant, misinterpretations, or simply false by extradiscursive measures. A healthy society will protect its discourses by demanding some sort of proof of familiarity of the outsider. If it demands full expertise, we rightfully suspect the emperor is naked. If it demands none, we suspect that the society has poor epistemic norms, and is pulled more by fads and convenience than rigorous inquiry.

Upon Entering

No discourse is an island, but the bridges that an individual might have access to when they are still newcomers to a certain domain may be scant and may be rich. Compare an individual who is immersed in the Bible, Mishna and Tosefta and begins studying the Babylonian Talmud to another person who has never even heard of Jews. Naturally, the ability of one person to become a participant in the discourse will be different.

The way a person enters a discourse will have an impact on their entire trajectory. Did they enter the discourse seeking a solution to a problem or confusion? Or did they enter the discourse due to social pull? In the first case, the newcomer is continuously sniffing for hints that lead to the contact that will solve his mystery. In the second, it is about acclimating oneself to the discourse and mastering the rituals that lead their progression.

Someone who enters a discourse without a passion for finding the contact will likely never find it. The points of contact are hidden in the dark. Even those discourses that have managed to maintain strong contact with reality don’t usually reveal these points to the novice9. This can happen in even the most physical of science: one can be introduced to Newtonian physics without ever moving an object and measuring anything! It is precisely at these points that the whole conversation can be overturned. And it is often at these points that the beginner can see things that the expert cannot. Their vulnerability is the reason to keep them hidden.

But it is also true that it is often at these points that the beginner fails to see the value of the purposeful blurring of the expert. The expert has already encountered and can practice using extrapolations of the base knowledge, and has found it beneficial. Whether their judgment is correct, and whether they are sacrificing a better opportunity with their commitment is a question left open. Regardless, because the expert knows the value of the structure, they protect the base from attack.

How to Invite

One of the signs of a pedagogical master is to introduce new participants to a discourse, beginning from the closest point of contact to reality accessible to the newcomer. By beginning there, all future discourse is rooted in a place of sanity.

As I wrote, these points of contact are the most vulnerable and precious pieces of knowledge in any discourse. It is in striving to make them visible that one makes enemies of the experts who fear their expertise, built from layer upon layer of words, will collapse upon inspection. And the experts who never cared for prestige, but for truth, are the rare voices who admire and invite the beginners to inspect the foundations of their palace.

For a seeker of truth, an illusory palace is best left deserted with a sign that says “look closely before entering.”

Thank you to Sam Senchal for feedback, David Campbell for both discussing and helping me articulate these ideas, as well as helping make this essay better, Omar Shehata, CEO of Open Research Institute for generating and hosting a special space.

If there is a ubiquitous facet of global culture, a water we swim in that is at once unique to our time, yet so pervasive that we can hardly see it, it would be schooling. Especially considering that our most formative years are spent in that institution for many many hours, that most of our life trajectory is determined by what happens in it, and that these institutions are nearly identical in structure around the world.

It’s worth noticing what is strange about schools. Well, the truth is, there are so many bizarre things about schools that such an inquiry would be beyond the scope of a simple substack essay. But one really weird thing about schools that I want to talk about is grades.

Grades function as a shallow metric for our capacities in specific domains. But notice that we are trying to give numbers to the kinds of things that don’t fit shallow metrics at all. It’s true, one person can be competent at math, and another ignorant, call the first 100 and the second 0. but ask any mathematician to give scores on math research and he’ll laugh you away. What grade would you assign the godel incompleteness theorem and the Pythagorean theorem? How can you turn something so rich into a one dimensional vector? lol.

The solution is to fit the knowledge that is tested so that one number can capture it. so math becomes solving problems, and never about comprehension and discovery, which is what you would focus on if you wanted to cultivate mathematicians. Spelling and vocabulary tests can have a simple number, but literacy cannot; so we simply do not attempt to measure a person’s capacity to deal with rich texts, and focus on those questions that have a simple right or wrong.

So one crazy thing is the idea of giving one number to capture a capacity that is rich. Another crazy thing about grades is how they function. For a student, they are ways of understanding yourself. Who am I? How should I see myself? Where do I fit in society? all these are answered by your grade, which lets you know who you are. but notice that these grades are given to us from an outside source. we don’t create the tools for placing ourselves. Instead we give an input and the authority-number-complex pops us an answer that is legible for ourselves and others. “this is who you are”

So here we are, adults, trying to figure out where we belong and who we are (essentially the same question), and it’s no wonder that we are attracted to those high legibility makers we grew up with. even those that complain that the “test isn’t fair” show their marks. Nobody asks what the function of a test like this is, and why they took it. what they hoped to get out of it. and of course we do not ask. we, the world, have schooled minds.

To be told who we are with a number is a comfort, a warm cozy cabin in the wilderness of the modern era that consistently denies us the pleasure of simple answers.

A public research project to identify the habits of mind that make learning compound.

The stakes: A vast majority of humans spend their most formative years of life in schools, where the explicit aim is to instruct them how and what to think. Taking this institutional situation for granted, it’s imperative to ask how schools are performing as a whole. The answer is “not good.” This proposal is not the place to go into depth into the specifics of the critique of schooling as is practiced now.

In this proposal, I want to start by discussing schooling on its own terms as a starting point, and from there the critique and possible ways of upgrading the whole of humanity (via education) will begin to sketch out, if still only fuzzily.

Problem

Most educational interventions do not create lasting effects. They might produce gains for a year or two, and often less, and then fade to dark.

An effective intervention causes students to improve on a specific metric, often a standardized test, or a test designed for the specific intervention; but there is no permanent shift in their trajectory. This is a scandal!

If educational interventions don’t stick inside schools then they likely have zero effect on the cultivation of the child into a better adult, in any meaning of the word.

Explanation

At the very least, this should make it clear that an important underresearched question needs to be examined. What interventions actually stick?

My hypothesis: the reason interventions fail is because they improve performance without changing the learner’s operating system.

By “operating system,” I mean the habits of mind that shape how a person notices, interprets, questions, understands, and updates information. If those operational patterns don’t shift, then the gains will only be short lived.

Education is a societal issue; how it’s done has extreme implications for politics and culture. Our current schooling reliably cultivates the kinds of minds that can’t understand, reason, and agentically learn and self-develop. Hence, sets up a system where masses of people live in a hubristic illusion of intelligence, while acting as stooges for more sophisticated manipulating elements. To improve education in any meaningful way, we need to know what habits of mind create compounding returns on learning over time?

I christen these Accelerant Habits.

An Accelerant Habit is a habit of mind that changes the conditions of future learning for the better. Literacy is a basic example: once reading and writing are acquired, they exponentially increase the quantity and quality of future learning. My bet is that there are other habits like this—especially in the domains of metacognition, epistemology, and understanding itself—but we do not yet have a clear enough map of what they are, how they differ, how they can be cultivated, or how they might scale.

Note: Hypothesis—once these accelerant habits (numeracy is a good example, too) are clearly articulated, they are not likely to be forgotten, the way literacy is likely to survive almost any world disaster. I’m not sure about the details of this, but I think that this is true of many goods acquired that become stabilized and entrenched in a society.

The problem: education rewards seeming over being

A central obstacle here is that education systems are very good at producing the appearance of learning. All the incentives are set up for this.

A student can memorize multiplication facts, follow procedures for adding fractions and pass tests while lacking real understanding. This gap will be present when the child needs to go beyond the direct sequences the child memorized.

This ‘seeming’ over ‘being’ is not a side issue, to be regarded lightly. Schools are heavily incentivized to optimize visible metrics, because those metrics are legible, comparable, and cheap. Goodhart’s law: when a measure becomes the target, systems learn to produce what looks like success rather than the real thing.

It gets worse.

In education, this often means training students in symbolic performance rather than understanding.

A simple example: a child answers 1/4 + 1/4 = 2/8. The common correction is, “Remember: when you add fractions, add the top number and keep the bottom the same.” The child then gets all the next problems right, scores well, and is praised. But what has actually happened? In many cases, the student has not come to understand fractions at all. He has learned to manipulate symbols according to authority.

The real invisible disaster is much worse than a misunderstanding about math. The student now confuses successful rule-following with understanding itself. They are blocked off from the actual capacity to understand things, because they are constantly being bombarded with data that pushes them to see these two things as the same.

This is the kind of fake learning that current systems systematically reward. It does not just fail to build deep competence. It can actively distort a student’s picture of what knowledge is.

Educational discourse needs to shift from “Which curriculum works?” but “What kinds of minds are we producing?”

The moonshot

The moonshot is to help education shift from optimizing for short-term performance to cultivating the underlying habits that make real learning compound.

I do not claim to already know the final answer. The first problem is more basic: we do not yet have a strong public map of the candidate habits that might matter most. Different thinkers point to pieces of this problem from different angles—metacognition, epistemic humility, intellectual self-monitoring, concept formation, theory of mind, transfer, sense-making, self-explanation, error detection, and more—but these literatures and traditions are scattered, poorly integrated, and rarely framed around the central question:

Which habits change the long-term trajectory of learning itself?

In other words, we have lots of literature on the specific skills, but no answer on if they are actually important, and if so in what way.

My goal is to found a more serious inquiry around that question.

What I will do in the next 1–3 months

I will build the first phase of a public research-and-publishing project around Accelerant Habits.

1. Build a candidate map of learning accelerants

I will collect and organize possible candidates for learning accelerants from a variety of intellectuals: educators, psychologists, philosophers, developmental theorists, and more from very different traditions. The goal isn’t to pretend these people all mean the same thing, but to start mapping out possibilities. By doing this preliminary map, we can then begin to see which possible learning accelerants feel most promising.

Of course, this includes investigating what already exists in the academic literature, where evidence is stronger or weaker, and where genuine gaps remain.

2. Publish a public collection to spark discourse

Step 2: assemble a collection of essays or invited responses from serious thinkers on this question: what habits of mind, if cultivated early, would most accelerate future learning?

The aim beyond contributing to the map above is to force a high impact question into public view in a way that is serious enough to attract better collaborators, sharper criticism, and eventually better experiments.

3. Articulate my own framework

Alongside the broader collection, I will publish my own account of the problem. This will include:

• why most interventions fade

• why schools systematically reward seeming over being

• what fake learning is

• what I mean by understanding

• why understanding may itself need to be treated as a central educational target

• why metacognitive and epistemic habits are especially promising candidates

• and how some of these habits might eventually be implemented and tested at scale

I think I can contribute significantly to the project with my perspective.

Long-term vision

The first phase is conceptual and field-building, but the long-term goal is practical and high-stakes.

If this work succeeds, we turn the most promising candidates into testable research programs and eventually into scalable interventions.

That means asking questions like:

• Which candidate accelerant habits correlate with long-term learning gains?

• Which can be intentionally cultivated in children?

• Which are cheap and high-leverage?

• Which can be taught in ways that survive contact with real classrooms?

• Which collapse into shallow performance when schools operationalize them badly?

• Which could be embedded into assessments, curriculum, teacher training, or classroom culture without being instantly Goodharted?

If we can identify even a small number of habits that reliably improve the quality of future learning, and if those habits can be cultivated early and at scale, then the returns are compounding. A child who becomes better at noticing confusion, distinguishing understanding from performance, updating on evidence, or forming real concepts rather than pseudo-concepts will become easier to teach in every year that follows, across many domains, for life.

What success looks like

In the short term, success would mean:

• a clear and compelling public framing of Accelerant Habits as a neglected educational question

• a curated body of responses from serious thinkers across disciplines

• a preliminary taxonomy of candidate learning accelerants

• a stronger synthesis of existing academic work and open gaps

• a well-articulated proposal of my own, including possible implementation paths

• a visible enough body of work to attract further collaborators, critics, and researchers

In 6–12 months, success would mean:

• a more mature research agenda around the most promising candidates

• collaboration with people stronger than me in academic research, experimental design, and educational measurement

• identification of one or more candidate habits that are concrete enough to test

• the beginnings of pilot designs or observational studies aimed at long-term learning effects

In the longest horizon, success would mean helping shift education toward a better target altogether: away from short-term symbolic performance, and toward the cultivation of minds that can genuinely understand and keep learning.

Why me

I have spent years circling and deeply thinking about what makes a person ‘wise’ and how it can be cultivated. Beyond the theoretical talk, I have over 17 years of experience in educational capacities, both in schools and out.

My passion has always been the cultivation of greater humans. We should leave this world with a generation more capable and wiser than us.

What I need

I need time, legitimacy, and runway.

Funding would allow me to dedicate serious time to:

• research across academic and intellectual traditions

• writing and publishing the core essays

• outreach and correspondence with thinkers who should be part of this inquiry

• building and organizing the candidate map

• creating a body of work substantial enough to earn further collaboration

Just as important, support from a funder would provide enough signal of seriousness to help me get a foot in the door with academics and intellectuals who might otherwise not engage at this early stage.

Learning circles. The whole point is that we are learning together. Experts and novices together. It’s totally fine to make it exclusive: only people who’ve done the reading, can solve these kinds of problems or have x years of experience are invited. Most importantly, every circle has one fundamental rule of exclusion: only those that come to learn are welcome. These are fine gates. But once we enter, the students need to be as entitled as the teacher to think and explore.

Imagine it like this: by acts of thinking, asking, provoking, explaining, challenging, conjecturing, guessing, answering, demanding, claiming—a web of energy is formed between the learners, each contributing their own magic. When the spell is properly cast (and the same spell cannot be cast twice), a portal is opened. Now the influx of wisdom from on high comes and overflows into the circle, pulling the mages into an ecstasy.

If you’ve ever been in a circle like this, you know this is hardly a metaphor.

Compare it to the domineering lecturer, who cannot handle an exchange that lasts more than three minutes, because “we have material to get through”. Is there any greater slayer of wisdom than rushing? Is understanding so whimsical that it can be pushed aside in order to whoop an empty victory?

Not only do we mourn the wisdom that is lost, and the contact with reality that flees the halls of the blind and deaf. There is also the loss of mages. If you’ve been in enough circles, you can cast spells with a child. And you can train them to be a wizard, too.

What good is a life without magic?!

A world without mages will quickly become a world of beasts.

And knowledge of a skill feels like something inside us. We have mastered a skill and can deploy it, perhaps analogous to the way a master can command a loyal and competent slave.

To teach is to give another person knowledge. Something we own knowledge and give it as a gift. Like a fire being passed on, we lose nothing.

Alternative Story:

We are in the world and look around, amazed and in wonder of what we see. Knowing something means looking at it and seeing. If we really know it, we know where it is in the world, and can find it, following the subtle trails in the jungle to see it again.

Knowing a skill means being able to shift our attention salience and see reality in a different lens.

To teach is to walk along with our students in the world, stopping and pointing at things worth noticing.

Is knowledge in us, or are we immersed in it?

A third story:

We are in the world and look around, amazed and in wonder of what we see. But sometimes, we need to climb a mountain. So we bring other knowledge with us—boots, water and so on, to help us reach the summit and look.

And then we can see.

The Gorgias Problem: Why Seeming Is Cheaper Than Being

My main focus is still on the Gorgias Problem:

It takes less energy to make something seem than it does to make it really be.

With regards to information movement this becomes:

It take less energy to make a person convicted of a belief than it does to make them understand.

Gorgias Problem = Shallowness Discounting

This problem needs renaming as and have argued. For now, I’m thinking of naming it ‘Shallowness Discounting’ because shallowness is an apt metaphor for seeming, and discounting points to the fact that it costs less resources than depth. I’m not sure it’s the best name because shallowness implies a weakness, but one can have incredibly strong conviction without understanding. All suggestions welcome.

Richard Skemp on Shallowness Discounting in Math Education

In the context of education I’ve been reading “The Psychology of Learning Mathematics” by Richard Skemp. Good book, I’ll probably read some more of his work. You can get the gist of his direction by reading this great paper on mathematics. He makes a distinction between automatic vs mechanical skill. The idea is simple. At first, there is a big gap between someone who is trying to understand and gain conceptual knowledge and someone who is working on sheer symbolic manipulation. The conceptual learner is much slower, spending lots of time and energy to understand what is happening here. In contrast, the symbolic manipulator will quickly be able to solve problems that fit the structure taught; they are gaining a mechanical skill. But the conceptual learner, with practice, will gain such fluency that they will be able to do the skill automatically. The Shallowness Discounting at work in math education! But notice another mess, that for an unsuspecting observer, the automatic and mechanical mathematicians look identical. And even tests won’t catch who is doing which. It’s only when you raise the bar and ask a new type of problem that the difference surfaces. But just read his 8 page paper above and enjoy.

Vygotskyian Pseudo-Concepts—Good or Bad?

I’m also always circling back to Vygotsky’s concept of pseudo-concepts1 and how shallowness can serve the creation of depth. My hunch is that pseudo-concepts can be useful in discovering a concept, but that there is a difference between pseudo-concepts that are reality formed vs those that are symbolically formed. Two different kinds of pseudo-concepts, if you will. So as you are trying to figure out a concept and watching reality, you’re likely to conceive of pseudo-concepts on the way, and this is fine (what Vygotsky noted). For example, you might come to think that emotional resonance is the criteria for good decision making. And then later on, you’ll see that this concept is actually false, and that it’s only one factor to be weighed, but not the actual criteria for a good decision. But if you are building pseudo-concepts through symbolic manipulation, there’s some sort of block that makes your mistake not only misleadingly conducive, but also restraining for getting to the true (or better) concept. I get stuck here with some hunch that people who use symbolic manipulation end up distorting their operating system in a way that makes their contact with reality worse. Really not sure what to make of that.

Socrates, Egan and I

I am convinced that a method for educating past the Gorgias Problem is via Socratic Conversations, as pioneered by Socrates! And as a tool for teaching children by Michael Strong. I designed and taught a Socratic Parenting Course with Michael in the past, and I have been thinking about how to create a better and more user-friendly presentation of the craft. For that, I’m working with Alessandro Gelmi, and using Egan’s ideas to help map out what is going on here.

Metaphors for Knowledge

Lastly, (but actually quite frequently,) I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of knowledge and how different metaphors capture different aspects. I’m currently enjoying this contrast

1. Seeing vs. Having

2. Being immersed in a knowledge field vs. containing a knowledge field

3. Standing in wonder/awe/horror vs. pride

4. Boundlessness of knowledge vs scarcity

I greatly encourage you to go out and see if you can apply these metaphors to yourself and your own stance towards knowledge.

Well, that’s most of it. Any feedback, encouragement, critique, or whatever welcome!

Judge: How can you steal from people that trust you?

Criminal: It’s actually much harder to steal from people that don’t trust you.

6. As a rule, we have a hard time understanding anyone who is far above or below our intelligence1. It would be nice if the more intelligent interlocutor would always be able to match the level of the dumber one, but they can’t. Case: my 9yo, bless him, often has a hard time saying things that make sense to his 5yo and 3yo siblings. And he doesn’t have enough intelligence to understand how different they are. Not his fault; simply put, not all people have an advanced enough theory of mind with regards to the plurality of manners of thinking2.

7. For an educator, the question of how others think is one of the most important ones. And it is in the how that stupidity lies. This is important.

8. Neil Postman wrote an essay titled The Educationalist as Painkiller. The rundown is that instead of focusing on cultivating wisdom, which is hard, we should focus on stupidity and try to root it out, because it’s easier to spot stupidity than wisdom. Interestingly enough, everybody will generally agree that it’s easier to identify stupidity over wisdom—HOWEVER(!!!) the word ‘stupidity’ means very different things to different people. In fact, one of the stupid symptoms is thinking that everyone who disagrees with me on things that I cannot imagine otherwise is stupid. At a slightly higher level, one considers that anyone who is not in the know (You didn’t know that the Mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell?! Retard.) The wiser version is that stupid is as stupid does, and what matters more is how you think, not what you think. And I would make the case that a good educator needs to know this, at the very least implicitly. There is possibly an even better definition of stupidity, but alas, it is hard to identify wisdom, and this is my ceiling right now.

9. If the job of the educator is to snipe stupidity, then he or she needs to develop a sensitivity around what the typical process errors are. There are oh, so many. I do not have a clear list, and most educators don’t, because we are performance artists, and because making a list like this is damn hard. A great research project would be to get excellent educators, have them teach things (to a broad variety of capacities) and record their interventions and make this list. It would be great.

10. Neil Postman’s list, sadly, does not impress me. Much like lists of cognitive biases and the like, they are only useful for people who already have an intellectual digestive system that can process that information into new practices. For that sliver, it’s great. For the vast majority, it simply doesn’t do anything. For an educationalist, this list would be useful for a specific high-quality level of students who are at least sixteen years old.

11. What would be useful is a ladder that starts with “Can you do A? Can you do B?” where A, B, C… are next steps on the process of the most serious ailments of stupidity to the most subtle ones. A, B and C, are not facts, but processes or habits of thought3.

12. See this and this. And the question is if when you see stupidity if you can understand what is wrong? And here’s where Postman fails again. Not all stupidity is a type of illness ailing a healthy body. Many types of stupidity are simply from bad eating and no exercise. Which is to say that you need to add something positive in order to make someone less dumb.

13. And while some people who can’t do cognitive tasks are lacking information, more often than not we are actually lacking a stance. The whole ecology of our mind is simply unable to deal with the task at hand.

14. And so, with regards to our advanced version of Theory of Mind, an educator needs to understand that a way of thinking that is obvious for him or herself is not accessible for the pupils. A simple example: not everyone can notice if they understand something. Some people are so insensitive to their own reading comprehension, that they can read something, substitute the meaning of the words for whatever sorta, kinda fit, and have no clue that this is what happened. Of course, we all can make this mistake, but for some people, the ability to realize that this is a type of mistake they can make is simply beyond their grasp. For them, the text says whatever came to their mind when they read it.

15. I agree with Michael Strong that hereditary IQ is not the problem here. It is a problem of education institutions that simply do not understand the nature of stupidity nor wisdom. Because even well-schooled people can be idiots.

16. If you agree that how people think is more important than what people think, ask yourself which parts of schooling were focused on the how? Did you have classes that focused on reasoning skills in real life situations? Were there any incentives in the structure to actually make you better at thinking and not to regurgitate facts and mathematical algorithms?

17. And with this in mind, it should be clear that the relatively harsh judgment of the current state of many people’s intellectual capacity is not a verdict of despair but of hope. Because we haven’t even tried fixing it yet, not on scale at least.

Thank you to for Inkuary and useful comments on my rough draft!

1. Sometimes I meet an emotionally mature person, with high intelligence and a lust for life AND that same person is not raising a family. I get bummed out from that.

2. Changing diapers is a practice in gratitude. Somebody did this for you, many, many, many, times.

3. Cultivating the love of your own parents is underrated. There are usually obstacles in the way. Sometimes like bad guys in a dark alley (possible real danger), sometimes like ghosts of an abandoned castle (fictitious danger).

4. Parents should brag about their children more, the way entrepreneurs brag about their successful start-ups. “That killer is my genes AND my education, with more than 10,000 hours of investment, thought and worry. YEAH! THAT KID KICKS ASS!”

5. Hence, it is also beautiful to compliment other people on their wonderful children.

6. Bitching about your kids and how hard it is might be honest. But maybe your second-order desire should be figuring out how to change that. Honesty and wisdom do much better together than separate.

7. Don’t be disingenuous with the compliments you give your kids. And if you aren’t able to find real successes, either help them become more capable, or help yourself see beauty!

8. When my children were born, I did not have that ‘I will die for you’ epiphany. But long-term, I have a very strong voice in my head commanding me to stay safe because I have people depending on me for a flourishing life.

9. Don’t let schools or homework steal your children from you, or you from them. It’s not fair that your interactions are labor instead of play.

10. Your children are likely to have your own flaws, and this is usually fine. They are also likely to have your spouse’s flaws, and this is a much trickier problem. Be kind, as you would be to the younger version of your spouse. Help your kids grow up without the scars your spouse probably suffered at the hands of his/her own parents.

11. Clowning has been one of the biggest parenting upgrades for me. PLAY MORE! LAUGH MORE! EVERYTHING IS SILLY!

12. Kids are much funnier than you think, but you might need to look sideways.

13. Don’t let your kids embarrass you in public. This does not require discipline. This requires loving them, and being OK with growth being a process (duh!). It also might require you to stop judging other people and their kids.

14. Parenting advice is usually good for some people, and bad for others, and it takes discretion to know how it will play out for you. It also takes trial and error. You might need to clown to mitigate the damages. But that might also make it worse.

15. I have a hard time trusting people who investigate what a human is (cognitively, emotionally, developmentally, etc.) that don’t spend a lot of time around kids. It’s kind of like investigating the current state of a government without doing any history research.

16. We lie to kids, because the truth would be just as dishonest. That’s ok. I often tell my kids ‘When you’re older I’ll explain it, or you’ll understand yourself.’ It lets them taste the wonder and excitement of life.

17. Children are beautiful. Adults are beautiful. People who can only see the beauty in one are missing out. Help them.

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But that’s not what I observe. Instead, I notice that I can pretty quickly tell from a quick interaction with somebody else (and sometimes just from reading their writing) what kind of conversation they are capable of. Certain types of communication make it evident that other types are available or not. That’s why it seems to make more sense to me to talk about epistemic stages instead of tools.

This is strange at first glance. After all, we can imagine a person who is good at detecting one fallacy but blind to others. We can imagine a person who knows all the names of biases but cannot introspect accurately. The popularity of podcasts and books about these things implies some sort of toolkit for sale. But then, why does my experience ring true? And I know it’s not just me–I can tell that certain people can immediately tell about me that I have good epistemic game.

My answer is elitist in a sense: people in lower epistemic stages systematically misinterpret these supposed tools. They don’t integrate them as tools at all. They absorb them into an entirely different operating system. Their vocabulary might have the same symbols, but what they refer to is drastically different. And the things you are trying to refer to don’t exist as hard items for them.

Let’s call the lower level “Q’s” because they think in quotations that feel right. For Q, the categories true/right/good collapse into one bucket. The opposite false/wrong/bad is also one bucket. A Q hears something and put it into a bucket. They check if it fits well with the good one or the bad one.

So when you introduce a critical-thinking concept to a Q, like a fallacy, they don’t hear “This refers to a structural error in reasoning that I might commit,” because they don’t have a truth bucket. And errors are BAD. Instead you get: “this is a bad thing that bad people do. The other team.” In those rosy places where there is no other team, its little kids, or just uninteresting and dropped.

The point is that Q’s cannot imagine themselves committing a fallacy, because their epistemic structure doesn’t have a space for truth independent of good/bad. So “fallacy” is just a moralized tag. It’s not introspective.

This explains why, when you inhabit S-thinking (that what I call the higher tier, where you think in symbols, with awareness of the symbolic nature of thoughts) you experience Q-thinking people as having a low conversational ceiling.

You might say something like: I know people who are great lawyers/engineers/doctors/scholars etc. And you need to be smart to do that, and Q people can’t do that! So they must be S!

Sucks to be wrong.

Q people can learn tools of rationality and apply it to specific domains. But they stink at carrying it over. At least that’s the research I found,but would love to be proven wrong. I would need to rethink all of this.

If I’m right then the pedagogy changes. You realize if you want to help Q → S, you need to smash the collapsed buckets. Knowing if something is good is not the same as knowing that it is true. And knowing that it is false, does not mean it is bad to even entertain seriously. Until you break this frame Mr. and Mrs. Q will misinterpret every epistemic tool you give them. It won’t mean what you are trying to say. At all! (This explains the misinformation slop)

Once I realized this I noticed how awesome it is that Maimonides starts The Guide (Section 1 chapter 2) by distinguishing between things that are “true/false” and “good/bad”. Essentially, he knows that without clarity on this, you won’t be able to read his book. (Or any other book for that matter.)

But Q’s need scaffolding. You need to give them stepping stones. But note: the stepping stones are about creating the distinct category of truth/false. They need their own feedback loop that uses different tests than good/bad. This is not the same as teaching them about fallacies. That does not help this split.

The base is a freakish introspective metacognition:

• Knowing what you actually know vs. what you merely affirm. Understanding vs Belief.
  

• Recognizing that you can believe something without understanding it. The nature of belief.
  

• Distinguishing “I understand this because I can reconstruct it” from “I believe this because it feels familiar.” Feeling the difference between explanation and mere recitation. The difference between Understanding and Belief.
  

Once a person can do that, then teaching them fallacies works and makes them think better. You’re giving them good shortcuts that will make them more effective. And without it, you might not be doing much. An interesting research question is if it’s easier to first teach people to identify this in other people or with themselves first1.

If you mix this with the Gorgias Problem, it should be evident to you why schools will consistently push for Q thinking in almost all domains (including math!). This is actually an important fact, because it makes it seem more plausible that people don’t need to wait until they are in their 20’s to get out of Q thinking. They just need a different environment. I have some reason to believe this, because I’ve seen different environments (like my home) that makes a 9yo’s S-level put most adults to shame.

Final note: I kind of hate this, because I’m rooting for Egan’s tools over Kegan’s stages. It also means that my idea of creating a tool that would help identify fallacies would be useless at cleaning up the epistemics of a space.

I used a lil’ AI to take my notes and put them as an essay, and then went over it and changed it a bunch. But if some of it’s annoying voice comes out, it’s not me!

He came from the stormy ocean. Thunder and lightning his allies. In his cloak of fog, with his musical voice, the Spirit of the Storm proclaimed:

You have fled from the mouths of beasts into the cages of the schools.

You make slaves out of children to cure them from being beasts. But your medicine is itself an illness to be overcome. You tame your children with sticks and carrots, and yet what type of beast can arise from such treatment but one whose eyes are ever searching for the next master who holds pain and pleasure in his hand.

In trying to escape barbarity, you have made compliance and conformity your idols. Now all are timid and scared.

Each is fearful of what the neighbor thinks of them, and the fear of being called a slur terrifies them to the bones. The slaves are wary of the eyes of their neighbors, lest they shift upon them with disapproval. For with just those evil eyes, the slaves can be outcast.

Isolation is the greatest fear of the slave. Isolation is to be excluded from the world of sticks and carrots. Isolation is to no longer know who you are- for what are you without approval from your superiors and peers?

The teachers themselves are mere slaves driving slaves. They are no more free than the children they mold in their image. Chained prisoners chaining the next generation to anxiety.

The parents, too are slaves driving slaves. They are no more free than the children they mold in their image.

Have you not seen how parents will labor to purchase fabrics of the latest fashion, the ghoul of rejection pursuing them if they fail? For the parents fear more than all else the chorus declaring “You are weird! You are abnormal!”

Have you not seen how parents will give their children poison screens, the ghoul of rejection pursuing them if they fail? For the parents fear more than all else the chorus declaring “You are weird! You are abnormal!”

Those strange children who cannot bear the fetters flee this prison. But all that's left to run to is the wilderness and they become parasites, reckless beings amongst automaton masses. They become the lowest muck; the prostitutes, the drug dealers, the criminals. They cannot create. Pity them.

And so I call to you and declare that no more shall you chain your children. Rather vigor and strength shall be your target, your children your arrow, and your love your bow.

With a love of flourishing and accomplishment, you will erase the words of ‘normal’ and ‘weird’ from your books, and release the true good and bad from being their hostages. You will feed your children encouragement and faith in their power, and with their overflowing power they will learn from your example to empower others. And so the seeds you plant will rise to mighty trees and give fruit, and those trees will disperse their seeds all over the earth, and create a luscious and beautiful paradise.

Do not hold your child back, rather call out to him, “Go on, and be greater than my mind can fathom. Take all my virtues and cherish them, but do not dare to leave them as they are, but add more and intensify the good you have received.” See if your child will not in love call his children with your name.

Your children will mock those who would rule them with remarks of approval and dismay. They will laugh and pity them from afar, then with soft steps approach these failed tyrants and appeal to what good is accessible in their hearts. “Come walk with us a little, for the ills of yours cannot harm us, but our light and health may spread to you, so that you may dance and play with us.”

I present to you the conversation from that night my soul caught a glimpse of Hades’ kingdom.

Lycon: You imagine that a person can be taught to think? Ha! 

Socrates: And what is so preposterous in that?

Lycon: Is it not already the case that men already think? Do we not speak, and is speech not the effect of thinking! Why, just like men naturally sing, and to sing they breathe, so do men think! Will you be teaching how to breathe next socrates?

Socrates: Well, Lycon, if I knew how to, perhaps I would teach men to breathe, but I’ve hardly enough practice at doing it well. While thinking well is something I believe I have more experience than others.

Lycon: Socrates, I’m listening. Please explain to me how you teach people to do things they already are capable of doing.

Socrates: Lycon! You imagine you can first attack me as being ridiculous and then expect me to launch into a lecture? I am not that man– rather, I will need your help. After you’ve pushed me down, I shall need your hand to help me up.

Lycon: Whatever you say Socrates. But it is quite a request to ask a man to make a speech defending what he has just proven to be falsehood. 

Socrates: You misunderstand me. You do not need to give a speech. Rather, help me examine the question from the root. Perhaps we will be surprised. (Pauses)

Lycon: Go on.

Socrates: Well, You said that he that can speak must surely think beforehand. Hence there is no reason to teach thinking.

Lycon: Yes. We already know how to think.

Socrates: I wonder, Lycon, is there such a thing as excellent speech versus poor speech? I mean to ask if one can speak better or worse.

Lycon: Surely this is so. I, for example, speak much better than you Socrates. Hahaha.

Socrates: Where is the higher quality of speech to be found? Is it in the voice, or in the choice of words, or is it something other than those?

Lycon: Socrates, how you match your reputation! You truly know nothing about how to speak well! I will tell you— a great speech is to be found in the voice. One should use a proper voice that is pleasant to hear, not too nasal, nor too loud, nor too quiet. And once one has the proper voice— there is control of the voice to be attended to. There is an art in emphasizing certain words, in saying certain things slowly, others quickly, some loudly, and yet others quietly. And beyond this of course is the choice of words. Certain words have certain flavors, and just as a cook will choose the most precise spices to flavor their food, so that the tasters of his food will feel delight and joy, a good orator will choose his words with the highest precision. And Socrates, there is more! For all of these things must serve the general thrust of the speech. For it is no good to add the wrong herbs to the meat. The art is to match the way one says things to be most pleasant to the thing one says.

Socrates: I see there is much in this art of which I am ignorant. 

Lycon: I can teach you, of course.

Socrates: So please do. It seemed to me to be the most important thing to choose a general thrust wisely. Can you tell me more about this?

Lycon: Why Socrates, surely you know the obvious facts here. It is easier to defend and express the opinions of the listeners. For example, it is no big deal to tell people that they are brave or wise, when they think so themselves. Similarly, to explain why a beautiful thing that all agree is beautiful, is no great deal. Rather, a great speaker will be able to convince his audience of things that they do not truly agree with in the beginning. He may convince the cowards that they are truly brave, and in doing so, he makes them thus. Or he may show what is beautiful in something that others do not recognize as thus. In such a way, he convinces them of new things. But there are more considerations here, besides this simple fact. I hope this serves as a good starting point for you.

Socrates: Why yes, it most certainly does. It seems to me that you claim to have the art of convincing people of things they thought otherwise. 

Lycon: My experience proves it. Although, Socrates, you seem to be impervious to my magic.

Socrates: Whether I am impervious is not a question that lies only with me, for if you can convince all of Athens one thing, I am not impervious to Athens’ will. But let us return to the topic at hand. Lycon, if I prepared a speech, I, who has no skill in this art, would you be able to use only your voice to make it convincing of others?

Lycon: Surely not. I could make it perhaps slightly better than before, but there is a limit to even my skill.

Socrates: And so the art of speech is not to be found only in the control of the voice, but rather in the words that the soul commands the larynx and lips to form.

Lycon: Yes.

Socrates: And if so, the art of good speech is a result of a specific excellence in the soul.

Lycon: Yes.

Socrates: And is this excellence something other than thinking?

Lycon: Socrates! Please! Do you really think I meant that there is no such thing as teaching any thinking of any kind? For surely one can be a better boxer or wrestler, and we know that the better fighter is not only stronger and quicker. And if this virtue is not in the body– it is surely of the soul! And this we see everyday, how boxers and wrestlers do not only train their strength and speed, but also their skill. For they do not simply lift weights and sprint and the like, rather they prepare their soul for a fight by fighting with others, often stopping to discuss and evaluate the wisest action in the fight. No, Socrates, only a fool would argue that no thinking of any kind can be taught. 

Socrates: If that is the case, then why do you find me so preposterous?

Lycon: Because you claim to be teaching thinking in general! And how is such a thing possible! For thinking must always relate to a certain content. And that being the case, how can you teach thinking without any specific art?

Socrates: You mentioned before that the fighter practices by lifting weights– is that true?

Lycon: Yes, Socrates, with your silly questions.

Socrates: Humor my silliness, please. And he practices speed with other exercises?

Lycon: Yes.

Socrates: And as practice to fight against his most skilled opponent- how does he do that?

Lycon: He fights against his friends, and others that are available to him.

Socrates: And what good does this do him?

Lycon: Why Socrates, are you really such a fool?

Socrates: Please, simply answer me Lycon. I am no fool, and I know what I myself think. But I will not assume what you think. And so I ask again, Lycon, why does a fighter practice on his friends before his fight with another contender for his same rank?

Lycon: So that he can become a better fighter.

Socrates: And are his friends equal to this greater fighter?

Lycon: No.

Socrates: And in being unequal, they are unequal either in strength, speed or some other physical power, or in skill.

Lycon: Yes.

Socrates: And the purpose of fighting his friends is not to increase his strength, but rather his skill. For if it were to increase his strength, he would instead do exercises for this. 

Lycon: I suppose so.

Socrates: And so he fights his friends in order to increase his skill?

Lycon: Yes.

Socrates: But yet they are of lesser skill than the opponent? 

Lycon: Of course. But by practicing with them, our fighter becomes more skillful!

Socrates: I completely agree! But why is it possible for our fighter to improve with regards to an excellent opponent, while doing something different?

Lycon: What do you mean?

Socrates: Haven’t we agreed that the opponent and the friend differ in their skill? And yet fighting the friend is useful for fighting an opponent.

Lycon: Yes, this is so. Fighting against a friend is similar to fighting one’s opponent!

Socrates: I agree! And it is because of this similarity that this training is useful?

Lycon: Precisely, for playing the flute would be completely useless in becoming a better fighter!

Socrates: So we can agree, that as a rule, practicing on easier things will help us be better at doing the difficult things, on the condition that they are similar!

Lycon: Certainly.

Socrates: So let us return to the question of thinking– is it possible to practice becoming a better thinker?

Lycon: Socrates you snake! Do you mean to argue that all thinking is alike enough that improving in one field is consequential for improving in another?! This is what I claimed your mistake is! Each topic has its own thinking– distinct from the others! Hence fighting has its own way of thinking, and flute playing its own way of thinking, and oratory its own way of thinking and so on. 

Socrates: Yes, I see what you mean. But I’m baffled- what did you think you heard of me when you heard that I teach thinking in general?

Lycon: What do you mean?

Socrates: Did you imagine I claim to make men better dancers? Or Tanners?

Lycon: What?! No! Of course not! I understood that you wanted to claim that you made men better at thinking.

Socrates: But what did you expect me to teach? For certainly not how to dance?

Lycon: No, not that type of thinking. Rather I imagined you to claim to teach men how to think about dancing and discuss it.

Socrates: And so what would my professed craft be? Please, Lycon, describe it with minimal words, but enough so that I can understand what you are trying to say.

Lycon: You would say thus: “I Socrates will teach you how to think, and by this I mean that I will teach you how to look at your actions as if you were a wise judge from the outside. Just like a musician will benefit from a teacher who will listen to him and say ‘you’ve missed this note’ or ‘you played this sloppily, repeat it!’, I Socrates will listen to your opinions on matters, and chastise and praise you for your opining!” 

Socrates: What a queer way to put it! But what do you think of it?

Lycon: But I do not agree at all! For on topics that you are ignorant of, you could say nothing of value- for example in dancing or breathing. Haha. But on topics where both you and your student are ignorant you could trick them. And on topics where there is no one who knows better than the other, where we are all opining are own way, you will simply train them into agreeing with you.

Socrates: Fascinating. And so what would it look like, these lessons of mine?

Lycon: It would just be you and some young men talking. 

Socrates: And how would it differ from what we are doing now?

Lycon:... Well in fact, it would not differ much.

Socrates: And let me repeat your words. “Just like a musician will benefit from a teacher who will listen to him and say ‘you’ve missed this note’ or ‘you played this sloppily, repeat it!’, I Socrates will listen to your opinions on matters, and chastise and praise you for your opining!” Does this fit how I speak to you now?

Lycon: (Pauses) Perhaps. I’m not quite sure. 

Socrates: Well, how would you describe the way I am now? Don’t flatter me, but neither do me dishonor.

Lycon: Very well. “I will ask you irksome questions that will give you pause and lead you into saying things that don’t make sense.”

Socrates: There is no audience here, why do you jest?

Lycon: Fine. “I will ask you irksome questions, and like a dog who will not release his bone, I will continue asking questions until you agree with me.”

Socrates: How do you know when I will finish asking questions?

Lycon: If your aim is not to force others to agree to your opinions, what else can it be? When else will you stop?

Socrates: That is an excellent question! I would love to answer you, but I prefer if you answer yourself. And I think you have enough information to do that.

Lycon: Socrates! Always the trickster! I have no way of knowing when you will finish asking your questions– as I’ve never seen you do it!

Socrates: Have you ever seen anybody agree with me?

Lycon: There are such silly men, yes.

Socrates: And do I ask them questions?

Lycon: They allow you to irk them even more than you irk me.

Socrates: How does this fit with what you said my aim was?

Lycon: I see now. You ask questions without aim! For you ask questions and challenge even those that are your friends! You must be a madman!

Socrates: You are right on one count and wrong on two. I ask questions with an aim, and I am no madman. But I certainly do ask questions to my friends, and with even more zeal than to others. 

Lycon: And why would you disturb their souls such! Look what you've done to me– confusing me, bewildering me- and contradicting everything I say!

Socrates: When have I contradicted you? 

Lycon: Just now! In saying You’ve not contradicted me!

Socrates: But that’s not what I said. I merely asked when I have contradicted you.

Lycon: And how does that differ from contradicting?

Socrates: You can choose to answer as you like. I will travel with whatever goods you give me. However, I cannot put both a wolf and a sheep in my bag. So when you contradict yourself, you must choose which of the two you’d like me to keep.

Lycon: And if you are so indifferent to the answers, why do you ask questions?

Socrates: I am not indifferent! 

Lycon: But didn’t you just say that you will take whatever answer anyone gives you?

Socrates: I did!

Lycon: Is that not a sign of indifference?

Socrates: No!

Lycon: You baffle me! Explain yourself!

Socrates. I will accept any answer, but I am a dog, like you said. I will keep chewing and exploring more, searching to make sure all of your answers fit together and do not contradict.

Lycon: So you only care about my answers in how they relate to each other?

Socrates: I would say that is a fair description. Although to be honest, sometimes I hear an answer so confusing that I compare it to my own answers- and wonder how you can think differently. But I assure you, my questions are not there to convince you of what I think, rather to discover together what is hiding.

Lycon: And so I ask you Socrates, why do you ask questions?

Socrates: Sometimes, I think asking questions is my nature, and it would almost be like asking a bird why it has feathers. But to answer your question with regards to our discussion, I ask questions so as to teach thinking.

Lycon: Asking questions teaches thinking! Incredible!

Socrates:...

Lycon: Very well, let me teach you how to think Socrates! How does asking questions teach thinking?

Socrates: (Pauses) Answering questions is a very serious type of thinking. 

Lycon: Explain yourself better! Or must I prod with more questions?

Socrates: No no, you ask correctly. My words are short and ambiguous. Answering questions forces one to take the contents of our soul and place them in public for evaluation. Each answer is a clay jug exiting the oven of our souls. Now, that you have my answer, you can test it by throwing it to the ground and seeing if it shatters. What I consider to be the truth is now on display for all to check.

Lycon: And how does one test the answers? How do we test the quality of your jugs?

Socrates: First and foremost by checking if it is consistent with the rest of what I say. If there is an inconsistency, you point it out. I am forced to either explain why the inconsistency is only apparent and not real, or to discard one of my claims. 

Lycon: Have you grown wiser from my questions yet?

Socrates: Sadly, I do not think so, and if I have it is not a discernible improvement.

Lycon: Aha! I’ve proven that it doesn’t work!

Socrates: What doesn’t work?

Lycon: That me asking questions doesn’t make you smarter, of course!

Socrates: I do not think that asking questions makes one smarter, if by questions you mean every question. 

Lycon: And my questions?

Socrates: Alas, you are just beginning your journey in this art. And so, it seems your questions do not have much effect on my wisdom. Although perhaps if you hadn’t been so impatient and had asked more, you would have struck a blow that would have made me wiser. 

Lycon: And what type of questions would have an effect on your wisdom?

Socrates: Aha! That is an excellent question. This question has an effect on my wisdom. (Pauses) I think of my mind as a wilderness, full of beasts. When I think a specific thought, it is like putting the beast in a room. And sometimes, a question can force me to judge this beast, to check if it is healthy and well. I evaluate the beast and define its features.  But other times, your question can call two beasts at once into this room. If these two beasts are enemies, that is, if they contradict each other, then I must choose one and discard the other. Or perhaps, in feats of great skill I can place them in harmony. Sometimes, I see that even the stronger beast is a wicked thing, and I discard him as well, and go seek a new one. 

Lycon: And I presume my questions would be one that had you evaluate a beast?

Socrates: Precisely! You forced me to seek the answer, of which I had not yet considered in precision. And in speaking it to you, I’ve now presented it to be judged, by you, and by myself as well. For it is almost as if I’ve just birthed the beast by speaking it.

At this point Lycon began to pace back and forth, deep in thought, but already his bones were dressed in nearly full flesh. He walked out of the cave and I followed him out to the starlit open fields. A great gust of wind came and blew me back into the cave, where Socrates’ sat in thought, and I am not sure if his face had a smile.

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It’s a trope: we learn by doing. But it’s only a trope in speech. In practice, most people attempt to learn by passively consuming information on the skill they want to acquire. They read essays, watch youtube videos and listen to podcasts. Not that this is useless. But the trope survives and is repeated because it's so rarely intentionally followed in educational practice. So let’s pretend for a second that we seriously think that we learn best by doing. How should we go about learning new things1?

The first thing that comes to mind is the goal of placing oneself in a position to actually do the thing. And if you try to do that, you’ll notice some typical obstacles in the way. The first obstacle is that doing the thing is often a risky endeavor. We don’t want to learn how to negotiate and end up making bad deals, or learn how to swim by sinking. We certainly don’t want to learn how to build bridges by… building bridges.

What we need is a dojo of sorts. The place where we can fight our hardest, but the downsides of losing are not death or broken bones. These simulations are hard to find. When we can find them, they are an incredible educational resource.

Another obstacle is that the opportunity to do is often too rare. We can’t wait for fights in order to get better at fighting. And since the quantity of practice is important, we need a place where doing is accessible with ease.

These two conditions (1) low-risk and (2) accessibility are both graciously present in programming. This is probably one of the reasons why coding education is booming compared to many other fields2. People finish a boot camp and can reasonably code and work. This doesn't exist in medicine, agriculture or whatever.

A Network of Dojos

Here comes my main argument. Some of these spaces already exist in the medium of games. Games have little risk3 and are accessible. And most importantly, they create a place where one can practice skills. If you are convinced that games can function as high-quality practice spaces for skills, we can take the next step and say that educational design overlaps highly with good game design. The best game-education designers can create dojos that can outperform fake educational institutions.

Here’s an example from a philosopher who was a big inspiration for this. C. Thi Nguyen describes the game Spyfall in his book “Games, Agency as Art”4 The fact that games have transferable skills as Nguyen autobiographically describes is of immense importance5.

●     Consider Spyfall a charming recent design from the world of party games. In Spyfall, the players are each dealt a single card from a special deck of cards. Say there are eight of you. Seven of you will receive location cards, putting you on a team together, and the other player will receive the “SPY” card, making them the dastardly spy. The seven cards will designate the same location. Perhaps the team players will discover they are all in the Opera House together. The spy player, however, has no idea what the designated location is. The team’s goal is to work together to figure out who the spy is. The spy’s goal is to ferret out the team’s location while avoiding discovery. But, ofcourse, no team player quite knows who else to trust yet.

●     What follows is a delicate and hysterical dance of verbal probing bullshitting and obfuscation. The team players must ask and answer one another’s questions, quietly signaling to the others on the team that they know the proper location, while trying to trip up the spy into answering incorrectly. But the team players can’t be too explicit in their question and answer, or the spy will catch on. …

●     The game is, as it turns out, exceedingly funny. But between the gaffes and hysterical laughing fits, the game offers a very delicate and focused epistemic dance, using a very particular set of skills. The team players focus on a very specific kind of informational transfer. They need to hint at their insider knowledge, without giving it away. The spy needs to crack that code while bullshitting their way through conversation with knowledgeable-sounding,but informally noncommittal content. And the team, of course, must become hyperattentive for exactly that kind of bullshit. …

●     Once I play Spyfall enough,and internalize the agential mode which is utterly obsessed with listening for obfuscation and pretense, I can don that agential mode during university committee meetings, in order to be more sensitive to those sorts of deceptions.

Now let’s take a very different game that was designed with a particular aim in mind. Here is Out of Character. It’s an insanely powerful game designed by Joe Edelman with the goal of doing some horrifically insightful introspection. I’d say something close to 90% of people who play this game get a life-changing insight, besides having fun.

Out of Character is my favorite game. I cannot sing its praises enough. Notice that while it's not designed like a game with points, it fits the structure of a game enough to be a party game.

Here’s a third game— the psychedelic We-Ness. In this game, players slowly abandon their individualized vocabulary until they meld into a hive-mind unity. It too has an intentional aim in the design. While the words “education” doesn’t appear in the design or rationale, it's essentially a game that teaches you about connection6.

If you've played games like these, you can see how they are effective educational tools. Games like Spyfall require multiple times to acquire a mode that we are inexperienced in. Once we’ve played the game enough, we have a mode we can enter at will. Other games like Out of Character and We-ness, can impact our relationship to reality immediately by broadening our horizons. Texts and videos can also have this effect of explosively destroying the boundaries of our thought and opening up new vistas to explore. But these openings are more often than not sterile. This is simply a consequence that reading and viewing are at a large distance from doing. But games cover that ground. Playing a game is an exercise in doing something.

Educational Design 

If you think about it, a well-designed game solves many pedagogical problems.

I already said that games give people access to practicing a skill or mode with high frequency and low stakes.

Beyond that, one of the hard steps in learning something by doing it is an imposter-syndrome self doubt. Many people won’t even attempt something without the explicit legitimization by an authority7. But most people are open enough to play games.

The Problem and the Solution

A big problem in using games as an educational resource is that it’s a mess. It’s really hard to find good games that match the skill or capacity you’re trying to acquire. And hence I propose crowd-sourcing the solution.

The plan: to create a catalog that will help you find the perfect game. You can search the agency/skill you’d like to practice, and get a list of potential dojos (games). Even better than that, you can scan the agencies and see what you might like to improve in. Even better (I’m getting excited!), you can look at games you already play and find the agencies you’ve been learning without knowing. It’s like talking prose. but now that you know, you’ll be able to transfer the skill better8.

As the understanding of games as educational mediums becomes more and more popular, we can hope to see more designers creating high-quality games that match what we want to learn9.

For now, I’m using the following intake form. Just punch in your favorite games!

https://forms.gle/xJaLLHszTYBxB8GWA

Thank you to Asaleh for feedback on an earlier draft of this essay.

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An education where there is no certificate. You will not appear on any list of alumni. You get nothing but the education itself. There is no signal that you can do the thing, but your capability to do the thing.

This education is expensive. You hire your teacher. Most of the time (<90%)  this teacher won't teach you anything. In fact, they make you tell them what you learned in between your lessons, and ask you a few questions. They may give you a little perspective shift in a lecture of under five minutes and then discuss the theory for five more. Sometimes the teacher will give you a practice they think will help grow your capacities. Maybe they will give you feedback on your report. 

This already exists. I am referring to coaching. 

Coaching goes against what most people think is necessary in education, namely that people won’t pay for education without certification. People are aware that they can grow in capacity and wisdom with outside help, and are willing to pay for it- even when they are given no opportunity to signal- just the thing.

Coaching, however, cannot scale. 

Imagine what an educational institution of scale would look like if it had just one rule: nobody can ever be verified as a graduate. Call it anti-certification. 

The only product is the actual change in the capacity of the student. What would you sell? How would you teach? How would you scale?

If you were the customer- what would you buy?

The answer to these questions is the next step in the evolution of our current institutions. 

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It’s crucial to understand that the mind's fire can’t thrive on static information. Pumping your kid with facts and trivia won’t generate the activity of the flame. The process of kindling requires a different approach. To ignite your child's intellectual fire, ask questions.

Make them do the thinking.

Gently encourage a step to a thought that hasn’t been thought by your child before.

Not every question will do2. Questions that are exciting and interesting to the child, no matter how banal they may seem to you, will do better than any high-brow question that bores them.

Believe me, kids aren’t getting this education in school. You’ll have to do it yourself. And it’s not that hard.

Do something different.

Inspired by Michael Strong’s Essay and Videos. The aim of this essay is to inspire a change in how people actually interact with kids. My hope is that short and sweet would do better than long and analytical. But I’m not sure and would love to hear your thoughts on what would make people shift their behavior.

I read An Ethic of Excellence in one day. Teacher memoirs can make me emotional, but this one stood out even more than others. Something unique was Ron’s methodology in education. Neil Postman and Charles Weingartener are great critiquers of the system. But Ron is just telling his story about how he is a great teacher. 

Ron’s method can be summed like this: Instead of working on knowledge and tests, the students are given real projects to display publicly. This can be creating a profile for a fictional character including a drawing, a description and a design of their house. It can also be a class project measuring poisons in the water of the city. 

It’s a model of what teaching can be. The few points that I want to keep with me are:

• Focus on creating things, not only acquiring knowledge. 

• Critique is a group practice that increases everybody’s capacity when done right.

• Draft. Lots and lots of drafts. It’s something kids can do, and adults can do, and it makes the product incredible. On this note, I’m curious what being able to simply edit easily in a docs makes us lose. There’s a certain intentionality of holistic drafting that is different from constant micro-editing.

I’d suggest this read for people interested in teaching, especially child education. Including homeschoolers and instructional design. 

Note: I would love to know if alumni of Ron actually fare better in later life and in what ways. I don’t even know how to do the research on that. I am confident that if everyone was educated like this we would see huge cultural shifts for the better. But I wonder how much of an edge it gives to the drop of students in the sea of prison-like schooling.

The thing that pisses me off with John Dewey’s “How We Think” is that it only addresses such a slender part of how we think, and it’s not the most important part. Dewey seems to think that we think alone, with sensory data in front of us, and some sort of apparent problem. A typical thing we might think about according to Dewey is why my fan doesn’t get unscrewed or how come hot dogs change colour when they cook. These are some of the things we think about. But even those things aren’t best thought about alone.

We think with other people, almost always. And there are present and distant people (books). Mortimer Adler already mentioned this in reference to Dewey’s book. But there’s more to critique here.

The first part of thinking well, especially in the context of education is a very very basic skill. It’s about being able to generate problems. Once you can do that, it's about solving them. But generation is the first place to start. Generally speaking there are two ways to go about doing this. There is the social and the individual. Both are interesting.

The Social way to generate problems is to talk to other people and notice where you diverge. You have to have some self-awareness of what you think, and be able to hear what other people are actually saying and not just what you want them to be saying. But once you can do that, you’ll see that everybody thinks differently than you. This is a problem! Because at least one of you is wrong. 

The social generation isn’t just about noticing the divergence. Because often even to understand the divergence you have to be able to dive into the uncomfortable murky waters of their mind and poke around the squishy and gross thoughts there in order to see exactly what they mean. I mean, you disagree with Nazis right? But do you even know what they think? This is an important part about thinking well. And while there are intellectual skills here, it's actually one that’s more emotional. How well can you handle the friction of entertaining divergent takes? How intellectually honest can you be when you do it?

The individual manner of generating problems is about being able to generate a sense of doubt- verbally this manifests as “Is this true?” or “What’s missing here?” or “What are the underlying assumptions here?” or some other subversive question that will typically lead to alternatives or other destructive elements to an idea. 

This individual path is the way of the philosopher. It’s why they’re dangerous (read Leo Strauss or Arthur Melzer’s awesome book). They know how to find the weakness in what’s in front of them. 

So here are a few things that Dewey misses so far. First, it’s the skill of discovering/generating problems that is foundational to thinking well, not solving them. Second, this is typically in a social context, be it living people or books. Third, the skill is more emotional/temperamental than intellectual. It requires the ability to handle friction. It’s also about patience (which Dewey does mention, but he considers it an intellectual virtue of sorts, when it should really be considered part of a general character I think). Fourth, the solution is often done via other people. Haven’t talked about that yet.

My main point is just that this book seems like Dewey sat down and thought about Robinson Crusoe. But that’s whack. He seems to completely ignore the interpersonal aspects of wisdom.

This type of thinking that Dewey discusses is of course easier to teach than the kind that I’m talking about. Because his thinking can be fragmented. The teacher can model it in a prepared manner. But that's exactly the weird aspect of this type of thinking. Real thinking can’t be prepped, and presented, because it involves other people. 

Okay, so let’s get serious here for a second. Let’s ask how this book should be written. Let’s define somewhat new goals: What is the good way of thinking and how do we teach it? The answer is that we need social, emotional and intellectual capacities. If I was making a list it would be in that order, because it seems to me to be the most conductive to start by being part of a scene, then creating the emotional skills to cooperate in thinking, and then mastering the individual tools. 

Social: Can you find intelligent people and ask them good questions? Can you understand what people are actually telling you? Can you contrast different takes and find where they converge and where they diverge, both in reasons and in outcomes? 

Emotional: Can you handle being in a state of suspended judgement? Can you be patient before you talk? Can you inhabit rival positions? Can you notice your emotions and uncover what they might mean with regards to your biases, and take the best moves that keep you open to discovering the truth and continuing the conversation productively? Can you notice your interlocutor's emotions and take the best moves that keep them engaged in the conversation in an open way?

Intellectual: Can you summon doubt when all is certain? Can you stay with a problem longer than necessary? Can you notice when things are fuzzy and when that’s OK? Can you make make conjectures and then test them?

All in all, it’s not a read I would suggest. But it did help me see how much the book that needs to be written, a catalogue of the capacities necessary for good thinking in the world that we are thrown into, would be a boon to society.

After hosting a mini-salon on “What is the best way to engage in intellectual disagreements?” I’ve come to see some things that were surprising for me. But now, they seem self-evident. I hope this is a sign of their truth.

Most of our discussion that night was about how to have productive disagreements where your aim is to reach the truth. We spoke about techniques for clarity. We psychologized about why people even argue in the first place. 

One of the things we spoke about is focusing on getting agreement on what the disagreement is about. This is not something very easy to do in many conversations. Listening to “Minds Almost Meeting” with Agnes Callard and Robin Hanson is a great example of two incredibly intelligent people who often struggle over just this point. 

It seemed like any conversation under 20 hours wasn’t going to get you anywhere near consensus, what with there being so much work involved in making a conversation properly attuned towards truth. Our salon left me feeling extraordinarily confused. 

But after some more thinking, I’ve come to the conclusion that there was a fundamental error in my assumptions. Arguing over intellectual theory is not about arriving at a mutual truth. Arguing is rather a very egotistical game. Not necessarily in a bad sense. When a truth seeker plays that game, it's about getting himself new items for later thinking. That later thinking is where all the real magic happens. 

The game of the debate is “let’s pretend to strive towards consensus on truth”. You play as if that's what you care about. But the prize for playing is not at all arriving at a consensus. It’s unlikely anyway, and not a good reason to have a conversation around an intellectual disagreement. 

Here’s what I mean by that. 

We play by presenting arguments and answering. Neither of us plan on being converted by the end of the conversation. Probably not even deeply challenged and left in a state of “if I don’t get an answer to his hard question I’m turning over.” All the points and counterpoints are just part of a game.

But we leave the arena with goodies. These are smaller items. New ways of thinking about things. Points we hadn’t considered. Perspectives and frames that we didn’t consider enough or at all. These and the like are the booty of the argument- not a change in sides.

For the non-truth seeker, the sophist, the point is to look good and smart. For the truth seeker the point is to leave wiser — not to leave convinced. Nobody goes into a conversation to convince or to be convinced unless they are complete idiots. If this is what Socrates meant, then he was a complete idiot. I think the Socratic perspective is not about abandoning views during a debate. It’s about learning interesting things to think about. It’s a mode of openness.

That’s why it's actually the non-truth seeker who’s hunting for consensus. A conversation is a win if the other person concedes, a loss if they look like they should, and a tie if nobody budges. And it's an especially easy game against a truth-seeker, because they want to be proven wrong in a sense. They want to find interesting things that they haven’t thought about. These are ‘wins’ for the sophist. “If only you had thought of this point you would think like me. But you haven’t. Therefore I am right and you are wrong. I am smarter and you are dumber.”

But it goes sour when the sophist takes the easy wins. When they raise obvious points. In that case they are BORING! The truth-seeker is disappointed by these conversations. “I wanted something new and interesting, not just the typical talking points that don’t convince me.”

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All this is surprising for me. It’s surprising that even though the game is played as if we’re trying to convince each other, what I really want is something different. And knowing this now (tentatively at least) I’ll be approaching conversations
differently1. 

2020

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Dedicated to my mentors, who remain anonymous like me.

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(Light)

I cannot trap the light

And hold it in a cage

To give to you who dwells

In a cave of grief and rage

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Feel the walls around you

Strong stones that hide the day

Know the bonds that tie you

Destroy the jar of clay

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1

Dear Elisha,

You write to me, asking a question that has been asked in all generations. 

“How should one live?” 

However, this question was in past times a purely philosophical or religious question; today it is a common question. It seems that no one knows how to truly live correctly.

The common answer is well known. A man should strive to the highest point on the hierarchy. But this response is rubbish for us. Perhaps those living in a clear hierarchy could swallow that trickster answer, but we don’t live in an obvious pyramid now. Each man creates his own hierarchy these days, and elects himself as king, as it were. Beyond the impossibility of this choice, in truth, this is precisely the foolishness the wise men of old chose to abandon. Socrates found no greater pleasure than calling a tyrant miserable.

And so we enter a labyrinth of choices. How shall we proceed? Should we introspect and see what we intuit to be best? Perhaps we should seek some authority to guide and point us in the direction of a proper life. Or perhaps rather like Socrates, should we take a dialectic approach of rational inquiry?

All in all, this leads us to the first conclusion. The way to live requires one of inquiry, or at the very least some reflection. Perhaps much good luck would suffice as well. This may not be the end destination, and it is possible we shall conclude that ignorance is bliss. Nevertheless, if we are already in a place of reflection, let us praise the stage we stand upon. 

Sincerely,

Alpha

2

Dear Elisha,

You didn’t quite appreciate my little barb at the end of the letter and so you ask me:

“How can a man live to the age of forty and still not have a concise guide for living? In Greece they exhorted ‘Know Thyself’ and ‘Nothing in Excess’.

You are shocked (although perhaps somewhat sarcastically,) that men as myself today have no star to guide them. And so we seem in your eyes like drunkards wandering this way and that.

Well Elisha, it’s a good thing I’ve affection for you as well as patience enough to make up for your lack of it. Many of my mentors would have promptly tossed you out the door for such offenses. 

Alas, you couldn’t be more right, and yet more wrong. It is true that I am still a seeker with no definite path, but I am far from your drunk as East from West. No, not a drunk, but rather a cartographer am I. But how you are right is less important. Listen well boy, to how you are wrong!

Just because I play chess with you doesn’t mean that I am on your level of skill. And even if I were to lose it would not mean that you are a better player than I. It only means that I am playing a different game and my goal is far beyond the confines of the eight by eight board you limit your sight to. 

If it seemed I was only reflecting your question rather than quoting others’ maxims like yourself, you are not to come to the conclusion that I have none in my possession. What good would these maxims be for a child like you who has yet to bleed for them? Do you imagine wisdom to be a magical incantation? Perhaps like those silly childish fairy tales where some artifact gives its holder supernatural powers? Such foolishness and idiocy even I did not have at your age.

Listen well boy, wisdom is like strength. You ask me to make you strong and then insult me for not flexing my muscles for you to admire! Well, training you and showing my strength are very different things, are they not?

But the analogy ends there. Because while a bodybuilder can show his physique to all, wisdom cannot be appreciated but by the wise. And this you are not.

I hope my light rebuke stings you, but not enough to abandon the honey. Everything worthwhile has a price.

I trust that you have learnt at least one lesson from this letter. The wisdom of men stays hidden.

Sincerely,

Alpha

3

Dear Elisha,

I’m glad to see you undeterred by rebuke. A man who falls from one blow is hardly a man. You write to me:

“I understand that seeking for oneself is often considered a necessity for a good life, yet I am skeptical of this. Although I do see that for myself it is at least a necessary stage. But surely this seeking aspires to its own demise. A suicidal aspiration is the spirit of any question. Yet you deny me the answer; to where does the seeking lead to?”

Well said, young boy. But based on a gross misunderstanding of how one should live. You’ve yet to understand that in the depths of the search itself lies the answer.

The philosopher’s questions are not separate from himself. They are not like arrows slung from his bow, rather he is a sun and these are his rays. The questions flow from his essence. Let me explain.

What is a question? It is the denial of knowledge. It is a hack at the jungle to clear your path. It is a negation and drawing of one’s attention to the formulated void.

A question is never wrong in the sense that one can’t be in a state of knowing and still truly ask. If one asks, then they have noticed a void in their subjective state. It may be that the assumptions of the question are all false, but that would hardly be a filling up of the void, rather more like a blunt blade hacking at the growth. 

This ignorance is dangerous. In fact, as you well know, Socrates was killed for his questions. A question is not only the self knowledge of ignorance. It is also a light shined on the ignorance of others. 

When a child asks his father ‘why do we laugh at some jokes?’ he is asking for a deeper understanding of the human and his relation to the world. But the father does not know, more so, he has no patience to inquire. To be frank, he is too weak to address the world or himself. This question is an act of aggression. Children know no expectations to follow, unlike grown men who act as expected. This is their charm. To inquire into reality is much too strong an act of subversion for a weakling.

Deeper yet. A question can repeat an inquiry with a known authoritative answer. We all know what the best form of government is. In fact, all men throughout the ages have consistently known this. And they all agree that the current one is the correct one. To ask this question is an explicit denial of the status quo. It is to demand a justification of a different type than the echo and cries of the rabble. It is an appeal to a mysterious force beyond social consent and conformity.

Do you now see how seeking is a great man’s destiny? What is seeking if not questioning? What is questioning if not a nobility of the soul? The mock-noble separate themselves from others by virtue of riches and force. But the philosopher distinguishes himself by denying the masses control of his thoughts. He climbs a mountain to reach isolation. Alone, he breathes in the crisp mysteries of reason, rather than the foul stench of the commoner.

Sincerely,

Alpha

4

O’ Dear Elisha!

I am glad to read that you have been practicing the simplest and yet most devastating of Socrates’ techniques. You have been cross examining your fellows, interrogating them to see what they know. You’ve found them wanting.

Strangely enough, this fills you with despair, as opposed to the more typical conceit. 

“It seems I’ve been fed nursery stories my whole life by people who’ve been told these stories themselves, and the chain lasts forever. No one knows how they started or where they come from…”

No more fellow country men for you! It seems those man made borders no longer enchant you as they did before. Yet neither does the equality of man nor the abolition of divisions between groups seduce your mind. It seems you are beginning to awaken from your winter hibernation. Good boy!

Inquiry into these concepts is no trivial matter. But more than the concepts themselves, there is a lesson to be learnt on the topic of mankind. We are fools! Idiots! Drunkards! Asleep! It takes much effort to exit the state of foolishness. Most men never attempt, and fewer live lives in accordance with wisdom. 

Well Elisha, have you got what it takes to live as an exile? If you think disillusion will bring you a multitude of friends  and allies, you couldn’t be more wrong. These inquiries will bring not company, but hatred. You will forever be cursed to hate the fools, with their drunken vomit on their tongue. They’ve no drive for truth. And your open eyes will only be repaid with hatred. For you question their beliefs that make them who they are. Loneliness is the reward for an insight on how men are constructed. This mountain of isolation has good air. Cheers!

And if you have bled a bit then you are a vessel. There is room for some drops of wine after spilling out your own putrid blood. 

Study this:

Trust none. Not even yourself. 

Take this maxim to heart and plant it deeply. Let us see what flowers bloom.

Sincerely,

Alpha

5

Dear Elisha,

You claim that

“People talk so much yet say so little.”

So I’ll take you up to your challenge. Let’s see how this game plays out. I’ll write back some of your inquiries, and add some glosses. 

“What is this power of money? I went to the library to see what I could learn on the topic.”

Fools read before they think.

“Is it justified that I am rich just because my father is? Isn’t it unjust for a man to be rich because of his father?”

Yes. Yes. 

“There is nothing more frustrating than being forced to act in a world without understanding the meaning of what I do. I am forced to live before I have had the chance to know how!”

Don’t worry. Time solves this problem for all.

“No wonder the world is so broken. Everybody just moves without any premeditation.”

And those that premeditate are those that burn the world down.

“Leisure is a prerequisite for philosophy. If there is no free time to think, there is no free time to think.”

Good. 

“Must there be slaves for there to be men who can conceive justice?”

Good.

“How can good be born of evil?”

If good was only borne of good, it seems we would still be waiting.

Dear Elisha, I hope I’ve said much with little. And I hope this letter finds you in good health. Keep on climbing, it’s likely you’ll get there.

Sincerely,

Alpha

6

Dear Elisha,

You seem to have come to a place where you have begun digging deep enough for pain. 

“Things that have been taken for granted have now become absurd. I hear reports of how many die of war, how many of our soldiers, and how many of theirs. But why the distinction? Is death less tragic for a human somewhere else?”

And later on you write:

“What does it even mean for me to be who I am? I am heir to this tradition that never asked me if I want to join, but won’t let me leave either. I used to ‘know’ that I am a son, a brother, a citizen of my city and state. I used to ‘know’ my ethnicity. Now, I know what a feeble construction this is. But not that there is nothing, just that the criteria is ridiculous. It is as if we decided to identify with our height, and become a group together for it. Is there anything as ridiculous?”

Why the distinction? Why, if you’ve spoken to enough people it should have become obvious. I believe I told you before that people are fools. Now, the study of foolishness is quite a science in itself, perhaps equal to the study of wisdom. Clearly, this is not the question you ask. Why people think like fools is because we are born as fools and we drink the milk of fools from our mothers’ breasts. 

So what is the question you ask then? It is not a question. So let me ask you a better one: Is there a distinction of the value of life of men that can be based on their citizenship? This is a well formulated question. It is one that can begin to be answered. If you wish to express how you feel about something, do it in your journal alone, and don’t waste the time of others.

Let me help you again with the next segment as well. 

You seem to have stumbled upon the problem of your identity. This means that you have begun to reflect upon who you are and how you fit into the strata of society. Now, in days past, it was clear to each person where they belonged. A slave is a slave, and a farmer is a farmer, and a king, a king. What could be more simple?

Our times, however, force each man to be a nomad. You cannot be as you were born, whether you like it or not, as we are born of plastic material, destined to be free. This is part of the problem, and why your shock is natural and common to this generation. As each person enters a transitory stage, if that person reflects, they will begin to see their past in a new light. What was once taken for granted is now seen from a new angle. Everything has an arbitrariness attached, as if it could have been different.

I am glad to see that you didn’t fall into the naive trap so many others do. It is all too easy to begin to view yourself as an atomic individual, disconnected from the world. While there is a sense of independence of each man from the rest of the world, it would be ludicrous to pretend that each man is a complete and whole being unto himself. Clearly man is part of a society; the social animal as it were. 

To be a brother, a son, and more- all of these identities are relationships. And as a rule, all of our roles are relative to an external reality. If a man is strong, he is strong compared to other men we’ve met, there is no ‘strong’ without the ability to compare multiple men’s strength. If a man is a brother, he has another who would be his sibling. So it should be obvious to you that all of these things you describe yourself with are true. It seemed to me that you were treating the descriptions of man as arbitrary, but they are reflective of reality. 

But you did touch on something right, that not everything that is true is important. As you nicely put it, there is a distinction between men that is meaningful, and there are those that are not. I wish you luck as you continue on this path of inquiry.

Sincerely,

Alpha

7

Dear Elisha,

I will not bother quoting your specific question, but rather take the abstraction as worthy of inquiry. 

“What is ‘X’?”

This is a question with multiple interpretations, and context here is critical. The question is too amorphous without context to be of any value, and I’d say any philosopher worthy of the title will not ask this ridiculous question without expanding on its meaning.

Imagine I am not a native speaker of your tongue, and I hear you say the word ‘fire’, of which I am unfamiliar. If I ask “What is fire?” a translation to my language would be best. If you do not know that word in my language, you might say something like “That red heat that burns and consumes'', although one who does not know how to say the word fire would hardly be likely to  know how to say that. At last, you may wiggle your fingers in an upward rising motion and make the sound of burning to your best ability. If there is a fire near you, you may just point at it.

In this scenario, “What is ‘fire’?” is a way of saying that our man here knows the world, but does not know the conventional word that corresponds to a part of it. Show me that event or object that we designate that word to.

These are questions for a dictionary, and it takes expertise to be able to point to reality using only other words. This however, is not a task of philosophers.

Now, the dictionary has a difficult job, as it must describe how a large population uses a word. Naturally, there are fluctuations amongst individuals, not to mention different groups. Do a scientist and an artist use the words ‘science’ and ‘art’ the same way? There is some common ground, but they certainly diverge as well.

Some philosophers, as they call themselves, work as a psychologist or sociologist of semantics. They ask “What is X?” and search for a group or an individual they believe most qualified to define X and try to discover how they use the word. 

Once the speaker of this word is designated, then, there is room for debate via proofs and refutations. But on the designation of the speaker, there seems to be no judge to appeal to. One man says ‘science’ should be defined by scientists of all ages, the other only to those in the present century, perhaps a third would argue that the patrons of science should be analyzed. It doesn’t help that neologisms abound, and words aren’t constant enough throughout history. The only thing to do here is to clarify who one is asking, and much ink would be saved if authors would only transparently relay this simple and obvious point.

I don’t think I have to prove to you that not only does reality lead to descriptions, but that our descriptions of our language and how we use it impact reality, either by changing how we perceive or how we act. 

And so, there are crafty men who ask “What is X?” and mean to influence the world more than to faithfully describe it. They often have the facts of the past against them and they often have loyal followers as well, in a manner that those who work hard on describing reality don’t. (Don’t be fooled by those followers of the dictionary men, thinking that point to be a challenge to my claim. They say ‘Philosophy is a dictionary” and gather a following to that statement, and are guilty of ignoring how the word philosophy has been used in every other time and place!)

Of these men who prescribe rather than describe, there are those that are easier to catch, and those that are difficult. The professionals tend to bring many historic proofs, as if that is what they cared about, often distorting facts and ignoring anything that doesn’t fit their agenda. As in many places, conviction helps the job get done well. One who believes he is only describing or knows he is prescribing is more successful than the man who is in doubt as to the nature of his project.

But there is a fourth ‘What is X?’ and this one is royal.

First of all the question of ‘X’ is not placed in a vacuum, but rather is placed in context. What is ‘X’ in comparison with not-x, with y with z and more.

The purpose is not to describe reality, but to discover reality. The question is not on the word, but on the world. I seek to recognize a new concept that exists in the world, or to find the underlying truths. It is to ask ‘what is movement?’ in order to discover Newtonian laws of gravity. It is to ask ‘what is justice?’ in order to find the guide for our life and society. We do not ask what virtue is in order to know how people use the word, not even how saints use it. We ask what virtue is in order to know how to live, and the word is a placeholder for a concept that we do not clearly grasp. 

Now this one is very different from the crafty liars or fools I described before. Because they pretend to be giving a definition on the basis of conventional authority. They say ‘look! This is how that man uses this word! So should you use it too”. But here, we do not care how others use this word, because the word is just a means of communication for a concept that we want to understand. We want to know how the pieces of the world interact, and which frames are better for understanding it. It is a trifle if you call it a hippopotamus or a horse, I want to know how to ride it!

I do not know how to present this more clearly than I have, but I’ve noticed people have a difficult time understanding it. For once, I will be humble and admit that this may be a fault of mine.

I hope this will help you as you read those new books of yours. I’m sure you’ll recognize charlatans, dictionaries and philosophers, and many men with multiple masks.

Sincerely,

Alpha

8

Dear Elisha,

Your previous letter was interesting. You seem to have been reading much, and this would make me proud if not for the necessary offset that you’ve been thinking little. You should at least read my previous letter again.

It is all too common to confuse an ass and a philosopher, so common, that most people don’t think they ever do it. I’ll call the asses scholars, as that title is one they have toiled hard to deserve, and will hopefully help them be less offended by this important distinction. It is also true that some scholars are philosophers, although no asses are. 

A scholar is one who is concerned with what philosophers think. He stays awake burning oil and straining his eyes to read the great works of others, attempting to pierce through their words into the inner thoughts of the author. This is all fine and good. Yet, the scholar sees his mission as knowing what the other thinks. His pride is in his mouth and pen, speaking the words of others.

If this doesn’t make it clear how much of a fool a scholar may be, then it is only a sign of confusing philosophy for history. A scholar is essentially a historian, with a drive to know the opinions of others.

Granted, this is no easy task. It is no secret that philosophers have secrets. And so, this demands clarity of mind and a sensitive and powerful intellect. If a scholar is so tasked, would it be any surprise that he is admired? Nevertheless, it is important to rank him under the philosopher.

A philosopher wants truth, nothing less. If it is in a book, he cares not whether it is authored by an outcast or a celebrated genius. Anything can be a source for wisdom, be it dialogue through letters with a superior, or speech with a young child. But even as he would accept truth from all places, until he has conquered the truth completely he considers the chase on. Just because he knows the words, and perhaps even intuits the truth of a parcel of wisdom, he does not consider the job done. It must be so that he can proclaim the wisdom as if he himself were the discoverer alone. No authority but reason has any value. Is it truer from the mouth of Aristotle than from the mouth of an ape?

And so, when a philosopher reads and when a scholar reads, they are reading quite differently. A philosopher reads in order to learn about reality, the book is a passage. A scholar reads to know what the philosopher thinks, the book is the destination. As can be clear, many a philosopher is a scholar, and knows the words of his predecessors. But knowing what was said is not knowing truth. Even knowing what was thought is not knowing truth. Remember this, dear Elisha, and you will be saved from the traps of false pride.

Now, it should also be evident which of the two gains more prestige. Who would want a man who knows truth? But a scholar can quote and even explain the most difficult passages of the most inarticulate philosophers. Of course he will be celebrated. Of course all will ‘see’ his wisdom. But a philosopher sees nothing of the sort. He wants to know after the explanation if it is true. 

Hence, I admonish you to put down the books. I would quote tens of men greater than me who say the same, if not for the irony involved. Read slower, think more. If you cannot do this you have no hope as a philosopher, although you’ve shown your ability to be a scholar. 

I hope this rebuke will make you a better man.

Alpha

9

Dear Elisha,

You’ve made some points worth addressing.

“All language is a product of centuries of tradition. Why are these symbols acceptable, yet the specific names and terminology of philosophers not?”

In the reality of the human condition, there is quite a distinction to be made. Symbols represent thought, and the thoughts we try to make in harmony with reality. This process is an idealization of course. We often live in the world of symbols and our mind flies leagues above the earth. However, not all symbols are equal. ‘Finger’ is a symbol you can easily translate into the world of the concrete. 

But the philosophers and their ideas are quite beyond a simple man’s intellect’s ability to compare with reality they are supposed to be in congruence with. One who has toiled over their wisdom has learnt a new vocabulary and can use it with care. 

Usually this is not the case. People of below average intelligence love using words far beyond their competence as fancy feathers in their hat. It is, as it were, a symbol incongruent with reality. They are like a child who has memorized the product of two integers like a parrot, but has yet to understand sums. They like to taunt their fellows as if they are superior, when in fact they are only inflated with vanity and a vocabulary that exceeds their smarts.

“Isn’t part of understanding ourselves understanding history? How can we do this if not in reference to the great men of past times?”

You’ve hit the mark. My previous qualification not withstanding, we must know the past to know our present situation. 

It would seem we live in a time quite peculiar. We have a strong sense of how a ‘time’ affects our thought. We can, from our height, scan the generations and how they are shaped by their time. This is not to limit them to a birdcage. Clearly these men also shape their time. Yet we seem to be oblivious of how our time has allowed us to be the surveyors of the past. 

The most simplistic, and therefore likely wrong, explanation is our hollowness. We are empty of clear direction, and so our scholars, and some philosophers, with no passion in their minds can focus on the worlds beyond and snatch a picture with some clarity. 

Do not, Elisha, get the impression that we are at a place of objectivity. We have so many patterns intruding on our minds that we will buy filth, work filth, and swim in filth and call it the good life. With all this however, it should be clear that a ship without a destination can allow the crew to stargaze better than a crew being tasked by their captain towards a destination.

There is much to expand on this. With your erudition, this should be a task you are capable of bearing.

“What kind of hubris does a person like me need to have to judge between the most brilliant people that ever lived?”

I smell a stench when I read this.

Do you think you have a choice? Well then, choose blindness and put the needles to your eyes. Do not expect me to be your guide when you have chosen your own infirmity.

You had need be a fool to come to a verdict, but a coward or a sloth to stop the inquiry. No one asked you for a conclusion, and none would hope to get one of value from you either. The demand to be king of your mind stays. Those who shy from philosophy reveal nothing but their weakness. Suspend judgment, but not the state of passionate thirst.

To mistake yourself as a genius when you are not is common. But to absolve yourself from nobility and to seek a master is repulsively common. Do not flatter yourself with humility when you wear the robes of cowardice and submissiveness to man.

Be a slave to truth, not to flesh. This is the slogan of the philosopher. 

Alpha

10

Dear Elisha,

This you write me:

“The world of true-false and the world of good-bad aren’t the same, this much I know. But even if it’s secondary to the world of truth, the world of good is the one I struggle with. I don’t know where to aspire to. It’s not enough to say good equals truth, because truth is all theory and no praxis. How do I know how to act? The virtue systems that I know aren’t really compatible, and I have no way of figuring out which is better. Charity or Power? Love or Control? Some synthesis? A third way? How do I even begin to navigate these places?”

Good. 

I’d like to correct first. The truth of the good is what you struggle with. It is not a field completely separate, although this field may have aspects that are conventional and not pure. Regardless, you are a social animal, and as such, the conventions bleed into the truth for you.

The fact that you are able to see the incompatibility of these systems is a result of intelligence, and the training in the pursuit of truth. Don’t you know, Elisha, that most men die in ignorance of the question of good and evil? Well, what do you think has brought you the doors of this inquiry, if not philosophy herself?

You want to know what virtue is. Is it giving or taking? This is a good question. But I assume you weren’t expecting a direct answer. You know me better than that.

But perhaps some hints regarding the way to begin to navigate. 

Is this a discovery or a creation? Is virtue something that exists and man must conform to, or is a category that man decides, arbitrarily as it were? And if it is arbitrary, then what is the meaning here? Is it all just a nihilism of life?

If it is a discovery, what are the tools? Is there an authority with a divine word, as it were? Or perhaps rational dialectic like Socrates? Maybe we must appeal to our imaginative faculties and try to imagine the perfect man? Or perhaps only an embodied experience is the path? We should commit actions and try to see what the flesh says is good, and hope the spirit consents.

These are all very important questions, and the answers will lead us to different destinations. But I think you may be getting too haughty, imagining that the answers have any relevance for you. Perhaps a better inquiry would be to first discover what is common amongst these systems, and see if you are even living up to that. I assume that some of these even basic demands you are failing. 

I have fair reason to assume so. Have you ever invested time in virtue, even the most basic? When have you last meditated on living by the values that you cannot reject? I tell you Elisha, a man who does not prepare will certainly be killed in battle. This admonishment should be the first to move you practically, even if you have yet to find a path.

Now another mistake made by men of weak will is the assumption that rational inquiry can be had with a sick soul. No, no such thing can happen. A man who is obsessed with his vices will never be able to see them for what they are. Similarly, a man who is indifferent of his virtues will not be able to appreciate them. Yes, a paradox of virtue is that only the virtuous can find her. But that does not mean that we are doomed, only that we must know that our motives must be pure if we are to get anywhere in this hunt.

I hope this serves you well.

Sincerely,

Alpha

11

Dear Elisha,

It has been only a month since the diagnosis, and already I am dead. Every visit of yours gave me strength and a will to survive, even if the doctors gave me no chance. While struggling against the grave, I’ve also been preparing for the end. Another paradox that reality places upon a clear minded man is a fight against fate, as well as a preparation for her. I hope you have been experiencing my death similarly, with a mix of hope and acceptance.

Even now, I find it difficult to spell out my appreciation. It’s no surprise to you that I dislike complimenting others, the same way I dislike being complemented. All of that reeks of flattery. I would have thought that on my deathbed this feeling would be absolved, but a thought, even rationally sparked, if repeated enough becomes habituated.

With that introduction here is a letter that will only be delivered after my death. In a sense, this is a letter from a ghost.

I must say that in our brief exchange I’ve often lied. Not in content, as much as in tone. You’ve constantly surprised me for the better, and often I’ve seen in you a more successful version of myself. Your ability to perceive the problem may not always have been as exact as myself, but the passion in which you experience the problems of life has been a source of great envy for me. You are one of those rare souls, for whom the problems of life are not mere words to be read and written, but experienced in their fullest force. 

With that, I feel an explanation of my style is needed. Usually, I would not explain or excuse myself, but I am allowing myself to indulge at your expense. Let me explain.

My tough,  somewhat rude expression was meant as a challenge. Not as a test, so that if you were too weak you would not continue, but more like a stick, to make you trot faster and more intensely. I wished to see you grow, and so, I used the same means that were most effective with myself. I gave you a challenge, and I must say that you’ve grown to a mighty oak already. Surely you have more to grow, probably even more than you can now imagine. But still, you are quite an impressive mind for your age.

I wish to give you a gift. Here are some thoughts as I stand in this precarious place, expecting to be buried soon. If you’ve received this letter, I can only assume I have been already.

What is death? I do not know. It seems to be an end of life that is beautiful, and the closer I come to death, I see the wonders of this world and feel a passionate pull towards them. To live in fullest, the simple pleasures, like a smoke on my pipe with some whisky, or a conversation with a good friend. The joy in seeing a baby smile. The scent of rain. Even sweet revenge or a well placed insult. 

Even the things in life I engaged with in pain seem somewhat nicer now. Arguing over something trivial, like the nature of language or reading about another stupid politician (they all are, so I apologize for the redundancy) who said something stupid. The foolishness of the world has a charm that I didn’t quite recognize before.

On the other end, there is a feeling of release. A release from all the lies in this world. All the false flattery, that kindness that hides just another manipulation. A release from the pain in my body, and from the pain I feel when I see another suffer meaninglessly. All the corruption of the human soul, and all of the distance between my soul and the true and good will finally be done with.

You know I am not a believing man, certainly not in the classic sense. In truth, as I come closer to death, I feel any guess is as good as another. The frailty of the mind is clear to me now more than ever. Perhaps it is just an eternal sleep. Perhaps there will be judgment for every action. Who is to be the judge I do not know. How they judge, I do not know either. Perhaps I’ll be reincarnated. Perhaps, I am the world and with me you die as well. Perhaps this is just a dream, and I’ll wake up to a world so much more real than anything I’ve ever experienced.

With this mixed feeling of appreciation of life and the disgust with it I go.

I wish you the best Elisha. You are a shining star. You can bring much light to the world for others as well. Do not allow yourself to fall into the trap of conformity with the masses who seek to be special in the most trivial ways. This I see is the greatest danger before you currently. 

O sweet Elisha, blessings from the dead are a wonderful thing are they not? They are almost as wonderful as blessings from the living. 

May my library find good use in your hands. 

Blessings,

Alpha