Schools II:Very Unfinished Drafts

I figured I would just put these here as is because I have no idea when I will finish this.

Things grow and fill the framework around which they are built, water conforms itself to the shape of its vessel, our skin and guts don’t really go much past our skeletal framework, economies follow and shape themselves around the presence and absences of regulations, people adapt themselves and operate within the confines of the mores and traditions of their communities,,, and schools and everything which they do and don’t accomplish all conform and build themselves around the basic unit structure of the traditionalclassroom.

For uniformity or convenience or modularity’s sake, almost all public schools that I know of take the of form of scheduled daily instruction, in a centralized location, in yearly or bi-yearly intervals, segregated by age. This is a very convenient and easily reproducable model because various ideas and educational objectives can be plugged into these set schedules, all you theoretically have to do is vary the curriculum and or the teacher.The problem with this solid and simple model is that it forces students to conform to the needs of the model instead of the model being able conform to the needs of the student.

Through the first 12 years and particularly the first eight, all students, except a few outliers, are grouped and taught according to age. period. In a centralized tiered school sytem where success as a person basically means advancing to the next level, everybody has to move at the same pace. This single speed instruction model means the kids who don’t get it are made to feel dumb and inadequate (and become dismissive of learning, for their own self defense), the kids who do get it feel entitled and unchallenged. And because it’s a one-size-fits-all non-voluntary system, almost everyone is bored out of their minds and could care less.

In seventh grade, one of the most exciting things(schoolwise) was being able to pick your own “electives”, the excitement kindof wore off when you realized that the elective classes were all basically filler “skill” classes and all the core classes were still being force fed to you mass production style, but the notion of choice was still very enticing and even more importantly, it was engaging. Choosing a goal for concrete reasons is the definition of caring about something. If you are just doing something because someone told you to do it, not only do you not care about the actual success of what you are doing beyond its ability to pacify whoever told you to do it, but you are also imprinting the counterproductive moral lesson that success comes from doing what you are told and not from doing what you care about. Though maybe in too many cases that is unfortunately true..

But imagine an education program where students really want to participate, and not in a cheesy let’s sing songs, eat candy, do arts and crafts kind of way, but in a way that is truly meaningful and rewarding on a substantial level.

Many people have recognized and pointed out these problems with the traditional school system before, even suggesting means of mitigating them, but the problem is that most of these solutions don’t really fit into the current framework and end up stifled and unsuccessful or difficult to scale up to a relevant and meaningful size.

I think in order to really make education what we want it to be, the whole organizational design principles of the system need to be flipped. The current system is one in which the objectives of the course have to fit themselves into the predetermined structure of a typical class framework. But If you build a system where the time, shape, composition and curriculum of all courses are all designed around the explicit objectives of the designers you will allow for infinitely more effective and efficient and innovative means of doing whatever it is we as nation decide education should be doing.

Honestly the closest thing to what I am envisioning that exists today is the Boy Scouts education system. I was in Boy scouts as a kid, I didn’t like it and eventually quit for reasons that don’t affect this comparison, but once I had developed some of these ideas, I was surprised to realize just how similar they were to the Boy Scout way of teaching. At the heart of it I am talking about badges, a badge is essentially an assisted self-taught class that the student pursues of their own volition. Once so many badges have been earned in so many areas according to the student’s own pace and ability, the emotional reward of “graduating” in rank is given as a rite of passage.

The beauty of this system is its openness. From an educational policy perspective the overall goals can be set, and then it is up to the millions of students teachers and parents to determine how best to achieve them.

To examine how this might work, we can look at math education. My personal first memory of math education was in kindergarten, and each student had to go individually sit in a chair in the back of the room with the teacher and count from one to one hundred, I remember at the time being amazed that there were kids in the class who couldn’t do this, obviously there were, but it just illustrates the point that teaching one thing to an entire age level of students at vastly different developmental and cognitive levels is an exercise bordering pointlessness. If however, instead of each student following a uniform course and rate of learning, they were just given a set of goals to accomplish at which point they would receive their “badge” at which point new badges would be available to them as well as old badges in other areas. Say we wanted to teach multiplication for example, you could set up a badge where the student had to accomplish some task according to the proper application of a knowledge of multiplication. It could be as simple as a set of tests or it could be something more complicated like building a structure in which using multiplication is necessary to do correctly. By incorporating a larger goal like structure design to which the knowledge of mathematics is integral, you do two important things.

One of the other significant problems of public schools is the student culture, it is the inevitable outcome of forcing large groups of students into a system in which they don’t really fit and where they do not want to be.

*******************************************************
A totally different draft
\Alright here goes…

School-
School is growing up. The environment of school is where almost everyone spends the majority of their waking hours up until they are essentially adults. To call it a formative experience would be a collosal understatement.

I think most people would agree that growing up involves learning lessons about life that teach you how to both live a life that is beneficial and rewarding to you as well as lessons on how to beneficially participate in the well being of greater society. That is pretty much by definition what we all want both ourselves and everyone else to be.

How to get to this point, what lesons should be taught to get there, and so one, is of course a more difficult question. But it is also, at this point, a question that society at large seems to never ask. And even if there a body of educators out there discussing these things, I and the rest of the world don’t seem to have been included in the conversation and I don’t really remember seeing much evidence of an overarching philosophy or philosophy of any sort reflected in the either the lessons or assignments of all of my mandatory education.

Philosophy is, according to my definition, the attempt to answer or at least ask: why. Why am giving this assignment why am I saying this, why am I reading this, to what end. Only by having real answers to these questions can we even start to evaluate how effective our policies and practices are. This stands in almost rediculous contrast to judging the effectiveness of our methods and schools by how well students do on standardized test which are basically fixed IQ tests. One would assume that the dominating role these test have in our growing up factories that we must be trying to increase the IQs of our children and therefore we need to massively monitor how well we are doing at this basically impossible task. I know that people have complained that these test measure innate ability more than “real learning” and have tried to rework the test to reflect some other notion of “things kids should know” but, to use the metaphor du juer, that just amounts to putting lipstick on a still oinking pig.

I’m not against the concept of tests, I think an absolute pass fail, either suceed or suffer the consequences, rite of passage, form of testing is vital to the growth of human beings and is analagous to the most useful way to approach so many situations in adult life or I guess life in general. I just think the kinds of tests and the consequences of failure should be vastly different from what they currently are. test where failure or success is more equivalent to winning or losing a championship football game than to whether you’re smart enough or care enough to retain x amount of information.

By winning a championship football game, I mean spending a considerable amount of time effort and emotion honing skills and ethics, both personally and within a team, for the purposes of acheiving a goal which has real value to the people involved.

To acheive this situation we would have to completely rewrite what kids spend 8 hours a day doing everyday of theri lives.

I hate compare something to the Boy Scouts that I think could be profoundly beneficial, but i think our education system should become loosely similar to the Boy Scouts; As in an elective “badge” system but with tangible rewards for completion of “badges”. We should probably call them something less cheesy than badges, maybe certificates, for now.

To start you would have to get rid of ties to campus based schools. You could get rid of grades. You would get rid of rigid classrooms and to a certain extent career teachers. Actually you wouldn’t get rid of career teachers, but hopefully you would add a significant number of freelance type teachers.

In a certificate system, all of these institutional infrastructure systems become largely unnecessary because the instruction of each course begins and ends with that particular course.

schools

This is going to be mostly for my own benefit. (this place seems to be turning into a giant sticky note)

Originally one of the main ideas in my head which might be [delusionally grand] and, as such, need some sort of repository, is a fundamental rewrite of the entire notion of education. Basically this is just a reminder to myself to like get to work on that. But also a reminder that I just read some agreeable thoughts on this subject in “Fact and Fiction” a collection of Bertrand Russel’s writing. I don’t remember what part of the book it is in , but it is somewhere near the middle. The point the he and me wis trying to get across is the idea that education should be based on a real and substantial philosophy of life and knowledge and how the world works on a deeper level. And that “education” is the process of growing whole human beings and is far far more complex than a generic and uncontested set of things that it would probably be good if kids knew.

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Digital Direct-Democracy (The Plan)

My Fello Amerricns,

The time for change has come. The time for hope has come. The time for hoping for change has come.

Sorry, that didn’t really have much to do with anything…. just amusing myself; if you can call it that.
(the rest of this article has nothing to do with any vague pointless references to the present political circus. It has everything to do with the fundamental redemption of the world’s collective political soul)

Direct Digital Democracy:DDD:D3
(no those are not emoticons)

Representative democracy has become the world standard for communal governance and the defence against abuse of power(don’t laugh, it’s true). There are many people however who would argue that an even better system would be a direct democracy, where everyone get’s a vote on everything. Instead of just getting together and picking some guy to send off for four years and crossing our fingers that they don’t spend too much of our money or bomb too many of our neighbors we could have a constant check or even active participation in the application of government powers through direct democracy. The biggest problems with building a direct democracy have been practical ones, it has just always been too hard and too messy to do effectively….Untill Now

maybe.

The argument has been made, by both myself and presumably many others, that the logistical impediments to the implementation of direct democracy have largely been rendered void by the near ubiquity of the internet. It is now theoretically possible to collect, marshal and moderate the knowledge and desires of the electorate through a networked system of moderated participation and voting; ultimately allowing for constant and total control of the decision making process by an involved and informed citizenry without the need to vest all (or any) decision making power in a single representative.

i.e. We don’t need politicians anymore because we have internet forums and optimizable voting algorithms. hoo ray.

That being said – the questions become: would/could direct democracy enabled by networking and software be an improvement and if so how would we go about implementing it?

The Tentative Plan:

First choose a government position like small town mayor or city councilperson.

Then Determine what powers that position entails and the choices that someone in that position faces.

From this information construct a set of software encoded rules to govern exactly what powers this elected official will contractually grant to their citizen constituents.

These rules will be a combination of participatory voting software, political platform, and one-person constitution, and will represent a legally binding contract with the voters to legislate according to the will of the will the voters as evidenced by the voting system.

Once this software is finalized, someone will run as a candidate, having signed this contract to uphold the integrity of the pre-agreed processes, encoded in their “mayor-ware”.

This approach means we don’t need to have a violent revolution and bloody overthrow of the existing government in order to drastically change our mode of politics, we simply quietly go about the business of drastically changing our mode of politics.

The other extremely important aspect of this plan is that each candidate will compete on the strength of their contract in the eyes of their constituents. This means the software will continually evolve and improve in order to better meet this need; with each candidate running on the strength and utility of their latest and greatest version of digital direct democracy. This market pressure will become particularly powerful and productive when it gets to the point that multiple D3 candidates are competing with each other.
(D3=test run of possibly lame, but concise and easy term)

In it’s initial form, the contract could be as simple as saying that registered members of the electorate can force their Representative to vote a certain way on a bill by preregistering for a decision and then acquiring a majority of some specified size behind a yes or no vote. By requiring preregistration say a week in advance you might curtail abuse by vote flooding.

Obviously, the larger the number of people involved in this process, the more complex the systems and controls need to be. That’s why it should be initially implemented in a small, low tension environment and start out simply as a citizen’s veto power.

Once proven as well as certain flaws highlighted, the candidate and possibly new candidates can rerun on new rewritten and improved contracts which learn from the previous implementation.

And finally, to avoid the legal attacks that the signing of a binding legal contract would invite, the contract with the electorate would stipulate that any breach of the contract will be mediated by the votes of the electorate and not sent to a judge.

This will take a lot more thinking and probably a lot of trial and error, but it is entirely possible to build a system that accurately and continuously reflects the will of the people, and in so doing, change the fundamental nature of democracy and civic involvement without changing any of the structural underpinnings. That’s a pretty amazing thought though I think.

Some more notes:

Legislation-
Legislators are rarely elected for their ability to craft quality legislation of long-term value. So there is very little selective market pressure to produce and swear in the best executors of the task which they are ostensibly elected to do: write and pass good laws. There are way more citizens than legislators – presumably some of them could write much better bills than what is currently produced.

Given the above – All that is then required is a system of allowing anyone to propose legislation to the body of participating citizens who can then choose what ideas to further develop and refine until the point that some agreed upon majority percentage is willing to agree to the final wording of a piece of legislation.

Voting-

On the surface, this one is a no brainer. If representatives are elected to vote the will of the people, it makes much more sense to just let the people vote the will of the people.

Executive function-

This ones a little tougher and such powers will likely have to remain vested in a single individual.

What would/could change in a D3 system is much greater oversight and constructive powers of the electorate over the various bureaucracies that are traditionally entirely run by and comported to the will of the head of the executive powers. On a national level, this would mean that major institutions such as the CIA, the Fed, the Department of Education would/could be forced to submit to oversight by the D3 in what would essentially amount to a (or all) seats on what would be the board of directors of these institutions if they had boards of directors.

Much of the argument of vesting power in a single executive comes from the fact that some decisions simply have to be made right now. Timely decision making is not generally a feature of any system that allows and encourages dissent, therefore we occasionally need a momentary totalitarian. However,presuming this is the argument for having a part-time king, one would have to accept that once the timeliness factor is no longer an issue, the power to overturn any choices made by the executive should return to the democracy; something like a six month time delay on the ability to overturn an executive decision. This will needs to be fleshed out quite a bit more but the overall result would be that a significant chunk of the sovereignty of both the executive and legislative functions of government would be transferred directly to the people.

Judicial-

Obviously there is no way this system should be allowed to touch the actual judicial process.

If anyone manages to read this in its entirety and sees some of the at present unaddressed concerns that adopting such a system would bring up, please weigh in..

World Music “Olympics”

Yeah it wouldn’t be called the Olympics because that would be (for lack of a desire to be more articulate) stupid.

Somewhere between competition and pageant, though neither of those are at all appropriate either. I’m sure there is some old retired half-dead word out there that would serve admirably in this role. That’s the thing about words, a lot of times the older and deader the words are, the more useful they become.

What these not-Olympics would be is a contemporaneous gathering of the greatest musicians in the world from each country. It would happen concurrently and uh co-spatially with each of the regular olympics but would be separate from the IOC.

The basic thought behind this came while thinking about the athletic Olympics and the idea that this gigantic world interaction really doesn’t really provide any real permanent benefit. All we get out of it, at least from the content of the actual Olympic events, is who is better than who at what. I think that that is a actually a worthwhile thing and not as dumb as it sounds. But I also can see a situation in which each country, each culture, puts forth its most striking examples of its own music, its own rhythmic interpretation of life, where, when it was over, we would not only have seen who was the best but we could take the best home with us; it could enlarge the world and open it in a way that the long jump never could.

I think it should be a competition of sorts because nationalism and pride and a desire to be the very best are (at least in this format) good and useful and even great things. I’m not sure how the categories would be set-up or how each country would decide which musicians would be sent but something could certainly be worked out.

Amortized Insurance Loans : You’re in good invisible hands

I have a fairly substantial backlog of ideas which would conform to the stated objectives o’ this site but I have always sorta had a thing for this one so it will be my first (post) (on this site) (actually my second but my first substantive non-administrative one anyway). And it just so happens to be on the prosaically fascinating subject of non-actuarial risk management.

So here goes. Insurance, as far as I am aware, only exists significantly in the form subscriber-compensation plans, i.e. I pay you some money at regular intervals in the hopes that someday you’ll give me a bunch more money when I really need it. This is obviously a good thing and has done a great deal towards lubricating and standardizing the wheels of capitalism. However there are some fairly significant economic disconnects with this system (a term I am rather fond of though I’ve never heard anyone use it except me). An economic disconnect is anytime a person makes a decision when they have little or no stake in the outcome of that choice. The easiest example is a government functionary of some sort who decides to take money from one person(taxes, fines) and give it to someone else (government contractors) the politician feels no personal loss from the appropriation of the citizens assets and likewise no personal gain from the proper or profligate spending of those assets, so instead bases their choices on whatever he or she does have some emotional stake in which may or may not be anywhere near what the tax base gives two shits about. This isn’t about the merits of collective taxation though, it’s just a useful way of illustrating an economic disconnect.

In the case of insurance the disconnect comes in the scintillating form of risk ownership. Basically the people who are taking the risks are not the same people who are paying for them.
“That’s the whole point” says anonymous detractor, “the risk takers couldn’t otherwise afford to take risks so we need an overarching system of available guarantees in order to foster basic decision making confidence”.
“Yes but that doesn’t mean the wrong people have to own the risk” says me, somewhat repetitively and unhelpfully.
Basically if I crash my car or intentionally set my widget warehouse on fire, you have to pay for it. Likewise if you crash your car or intentionally set your widget warehouse on fire, I and the rest of the insurance collective have to pay for it; not really a good system for encouraging accurate and beneficial decisions. So because Johny’s bumper was scratched and he claimed the full replacement cost even though he is really just gonna use the money to buy weed, my premiums go up and I have to deal with a bunch of understandably skeptical and combative insurance adjustors. Essentially, the fact that the person who wants the car to be fixed (Johnny) is different from the person actually paying for the car to be fixed (insurance collective) means that the value of fixing the car becomes completely distorted because normal economic rules of supply, demand and opportunity cost cannot come into play. Meaning that a minor scratch that no one in their right mind would pay to fix, suddenly entitles johnny to a years supply of premium marijuana at the expense of everyone else who contributes to the insurance fund.

On the other side of the coin, from the provider standpoint, when someone actually does need money for something, once again the person deciding how much to pay for it, what the value of the damage is, is not the person who will benefit and so has really no idea what fixing that need is really worth to the claimant. “oh you need a double bypass, well we really think you only need a single bypass and we would like Dr Seuss to handle it” I have no real first or second hand knowledge of this process and my sense is that insurance companies aren’t generally that evil but I know it happens to a certain extent and it is entirely because the incorrect person owns the risk.

Get to the point. Ok. It’s a problem, but really you can only call something a problem if there exists a viable solution which is an overall improvement at least from the perspective of the problem solvers, otherwise it’s just um you know…life. So here’s my solution: amortized insurance loans; essentially you take out a loan for access to money in an emergency situation, so instead of renting access to disaster recovery you own it. The benefits and drawbacks are very similar to the cost/benefits of owning a home verses renting one. The system would work like this. Say I am a small business and I need $1m worth of asset risk protection. Instead of renting protection like I normally would, I go down to a bank or some other sort of capital accumulation/distribution entity and and I take out a loan for $1m but since I don’t need the money right now or hopefully ever, the interest rates and credit terms can be very favorable because the money will technically stay in the hands of the bank. I then pay a monthly rate exactly like I would if i were renting protection and if a “disaster” occurs in a manner described in the terms of the agreement, I can then access as much of the funds as I deem necessary to cover my losses. The numerical value of my policy then goes down by an equal amount. The very cool thing about this system is that when the coverage is payed off, it now belongs to the policy holder free and clear with no need to be permanently chained to an insurer and inevitable monthly payments. it can even be sold or passed on to children etcetera.

The first and most significant question someone would wonder about this sort of set-up would be, what happens if the disaster occurs in the early stages of the loan process? Meaning I have only paid a few thousand towards my policy but now I need access to the whole of the coverage. The answer would of course be that you are given as much money out of the principle as you require but you are now in debt.

ex: Jill gets $1m insurance loan

she pays on it for a while totalling $100k

she then needs to repair her fire damaged home for $300k

Jill now owes $1m-$100k=$900k

and still has $1m-$300k=$700k worth of coverage

Now, if Jill needs the full $1m she will then be $1m in debt with no coverage whatsoever and that is a risk that both Jill and her banker will have to take into account when figuring out the terms and amounts of her loan policy.

The true worth of this system is that a) Jill never loses any money that she doesn’t get some return on, i.e. she is not buying Johnny a year’s supply of weed with her monthly premiums.
And b) she only spends as much of the disaster funds as she actually really needs because it is her money not someone else’s

The second question is of course, how does one handle costs over or equal to the amount of the loan. A possibility would be that you are covered through your loan up to some multiple of the principle you have paid. say you have paid $20k, you would be able to use the loan to pay up to $40k and the rest of the total would be provided by a standard protection rental policy which would slowly diminish and eventually disappear as the principle got closer and closer to being paid off.

The ultimate goal here would be to create the legal and financial institutions for people to buy and own “risk” the same way they buy property. “Hi I’m jill, I own .4 acres and $90k worth of risk.”

The other question one might ask about is: what about the usury value of the money that is being payed on the policy? If it’s my money shouldn’t I get a return on it? Uh..yes. That’s something that I think the individual lenders and borrowers would have to hash out, not to mention a means of indexing the payout value to inflation in some way. Of course once the money is paid off, it would then be the owners to invest as they saw fit presuming the money met the liquidity requirements to be available in a disaster and thus could still qualify as an insurance replacement.

Really this is just a fancy, more rigorous, fleshed out and robotic form of a rainy day fund. The major difference is that the money would be tied to a usage protocol so that it is not wasted frivolously. The legal basis of that usage protocol would allow (in the version of the future that I am proposing) the money to replace the legal as well as common sense need for monthly insurance rental. And the structure of the businesses who provide these loans would allow for the money to be used in a much more effective and profitable yet still liquid manner than if it was stuck under a bed or even in a savings account.

The end.