Simple answers to complex problems are a hallmark of mediocratic failure.

Yes, I needed to invent a word to say it.

Recently, another education from outside of the traditional realms reached out to me to try to bring me into a small dinner where some famous billionaires were going to be talking education from a practical perspective. I wanted to share the email exchange with subscribers in order to relate a sense of my economic time and priorities in terms of taking such meetings seriously.

A few emails into the exchange:

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Up until sometime in 2020, I still spent four to six hours a week working with avid math students. While teaching was no longer my primary professional, I feel that mentoring of all kinds is of crucial importance to society. And so long as there is an area or two where I enjoy the process, and my talents are valuable, I'll participate.

But I put teaching aside, at least for now, in order to focus on the plandemonium because I believe that there are few more important events in all of history.

I did continue working with my very "last student" whom I worked with for four years through April of 2021. While I had already given up working with other students, and turned down further requests, I had begun working with this student when he was a rising eighth grader just discovering that he enjoyed digging deeper into mathematics. Up until that time, he had never had any real guidance beyond school classes, and within a few weeks he climbed up to finish just inside the top 20 at the Texas Mathcounts competition (Texas is tough—more national champions than any other state).

After closing my last school in 2016, I continued to work privately with students. It wasn't a plan and hardly felt like a job, but I kept getting calls and emails from parents requesting private mentoring. At times, I even coached graduate students (including at Harvard) and corporate CEOs. Since I was transitioning away from education as a full time career, I took only the students whom I felt needed something that wasn't going to be easy for them to find. These were mostly students who could leverage any guidance I gave them, and I never took students whose direction was more their parents' than their own. If you're in tune with the student, that's easy to detect. They just start emailing you during their free time asking for guidance on the problems they haven't figured out how to model correctly. This one is from my last math student 18 or so months ago while he was learning how to apply Bayes theorem to problems with tricky setups:

As I shed students in 2020 and 2021, I kept working with my last student because he clearly enjoyed both the work and the play involved in studying mathematics more deeply, and he showed an honest moral sense of how his work could fit into building a better world. We continued to work right up until the 2021 USA Mathematical Olympiad (he was one of the 270ish qualifiers), which I talked a little about here.

Over the years, I've received hundreds of letters from former students. I don't think I've shared any of them publicly, but I'm going to share this one under the fold. One of my hopes is to encourage people to understand the impact of a combination of good basic parenting and good educational guidance (of any type, and especially when it matches a young person's interests).

A Letter From My Last Student

This student could very easily have been discouraged by a parent or a lazy school system. Instead, he is off working energetically in one of the world's most rigorous STEM programs. And while he could be easily labeled a "genius" in a way that dismisses the change in culture and attitude that came along with guidance, it is the case that the potential is there for all students to perform much better at building from the basics, whether with STEM or any other skill building pursuit. Whatever problems we take on while the world revolves chaotically as it does now is, "Why doesn't everybody know this is possible?"

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Rounding the Earth Newsletter

Looking for a Willing Educational Test Subject

Edit: Wow, I got around two dozen volunteers over night. I emailed the first to set up a time. If I need to others, I will. Thank you to everyone. My hope is to make this valuable for everyone. I am looking for an RTE reader who has a child willing to participate in a recorded math lesson (taught by me) for purposes of demonstration of educational princi…

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4 years ago · 59 likes · 10 comments · Mathew Crawford

Special thanks for everyone's interest. I am sorry that I cannot answer each and every email, or work with every student. I did enjoy reading most of them already! Hopefully we will produce a video that will be educational to many parents working to understand how to homeschool their kids, or how to select teachers or mentors to work with them.

In the meantime, here is a snippet from one of the emails that I enjoyed.

I simply cannot believe you are offering this. After your post regarding the study with the lower income families being encouraged to spend time with their kids, I began to search online if you had published any essays/articles on teaching kids math. My daughter will be 12 on July 4th and really struggled this last year with a coach as her 6th grade math teacher. Her previously advanced math scores have likely dropped after last year and I am hoping to supplement this lack of teaching. I would like to volunteer her for your study.

I am a former GED instructor at a non-profit in Ardmore, OK. The Barbara Bush Family Literacy Foundation planted seed money to start our GED center for adults with preschool-aged children and was the first of it’s kind in our state. The thought was that the parent would be more likely to come to class if they had on-site childcare and the daycare worker would read to the kids and engage in educational play. Together, the GED instruction and child development might burn the candle at both ends so to speak. Our organization ended up receiving national recognition for graduation success rate. We out-performed any state-funded GED program. We employed the same practice you wrote about—encourage parents to spend time reading, playing, just being with their kids and watch the seed grow!

Thank you for your newsletters. They are the most consequential pieces that I read.

All the best,

I am looking for an RTE reader who has a child willing to participate in a recorded math lesson (taught by me) for purposes of demonstration of educational principles. The child should be,

1. In the 10-12 age range,

2. Have their multiplication tables practiced to a high degree,

3. Willingness to sit for 40 minutes in a recorded chat to learn something new,

4. Has not yet completed PreAlgebra.

In exchange for participation and permission to record, I will send a copy of my Introduction to Number Theory book to the family.

Please do not reply here, but send an email to RoundingTheEarth@gmail.com to request participation. We will likely select just one student for the lesson, but we may select two.

Billions and billions of dollars are thrown away (if not used to terrorize children) because we fail as a society in the simple task of differentiating between primary and secondary variables. It sometimes feels as if there is no will to do anything at all the right way in education. From TechCrunch:

In 2014 the Gates Foundation backed InnovateNYC so it could work with Johns Hopkins University to figure out a better way to measure the efficacy of new technology in the classroom.  One of the companies that InnovateNYC is working with, Kinvolved, is an attendance improvement solution that targets students from disadvantaged backgrounds who are chronically absent from school.

Do you wonder if they even talked about the Benjamin Bloom problem in the boardroom before setting all that money on fire?

Source: Venture Investors Put $2 Billion Into the Blackboard Jungle (Techcrunch)

Oddly, I've told a few dozen VC's about how I built two schools on $16,000 in capital with around 4-5% of approximately 600 graduates going to MIT, six presidential scholars out of the first 150 graduates, and at least 5 gold medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad (from a city that was not producing any students competing at the highest levels of even national competition). The conversation never goes anywhere unless you count questions about capturing federal dollars as "goes anywhere".

Consider this story from Paul Tough's excellent book Helping Children Succeed.

In 1986, in a few of the poorest neighborhoods in Kingston, Jamaica, a team of researchers from the University of West Indies embarked on an experiment that over the past three decades has done a great deal to demonstrate the potential effectiveness of parent interventions. The experiment involved the families of 129 infants and toddlers who at the beginning of the study showed signs of delay in their development, either physically or mentally. The families were divided into four groups. One group received hour-long home visits once a week from a trained researcher who encouraged the parents to spend more time playing actively with their children: reading picture books, singing songs, playing peekaboo. A second group of children received a kilogram of a milk-based nutritional supplement each week. A third received both the supplement and the play-supporting home visits. And a fourth, a control group, received nothing.

The intervention itself ended after two years, but the researchers have followed the children ever since. (They are now in their early thirties.) The result: the intervention that made a big difference in the children’s lives wasn’t the added nutrition; it was the encouragement to the parents to play. The children whose parents were counseled to play more with them did better, throughout childhood, on tests of IQ, aggressive behavior, and self-control. Today, as adults, they earn an average of 25 percent more per year than the subjects whose parents didn’t receive home visits; by a variety of measures, including wages, these formerly delayed infants have now caught up with a comparison group of their peers who didn’t show any signs of delay in infancy.

http://www.paultough.com/helping/web/

It gets better!

Parents who are under a lot of stress, because of poverty or other destabilizing factors in their lives, are less likely than other parents to engage in the kind of calm, attentive, responsive interactions with their infants that promote secure attachment. But what excites many researchers today is the emerging understanding that those behaviors can be learned. It appears to be relatively easy to support and counsel disadvantaged parents in ways that make them much more likely to adopt an attachment-promoting approach to parenting. There’s a chance, in fact, that certain successful parenting interventions promote attachment even when they are not trying to. It may be that part of what produces positive results in health-based interventions like the Nurse-Family Partnership, or read-with-your-kids programs, or even the Jamaican experiment, is that they involve home visitors urging parents to play and read and talk more with their infants — to engage in more serve-and-return moments, in other words — and those up-close parental interactions may have the effect of promoting secure attachment, even if attachment was not the intended target of the intervention.

Just to be clear: The average salary of a social worker is around $50,000. Adding benefits and other costs and let's assume some training and other expenses and perhaps that tally reaches $80,000. One worker might be able to cover the needs of 16 families, which might have 25ish such infants (keeping this number low to be conservative in the multiplication of benefits) who might produce $350,000 (captured in earnings) more over their lifetimes. 

The 2.5 year multiplier in the cost line is also conservative given that,

1. Some of that time in the Kingston experiment was spent on education found to be unproductive. We could cut that time out.

2. Once the seeds of better educational culture are planted in communities, they will be fostered and shared within community networks, lowering the need for further investment.

That's greater than a 40x return on capital! You probably don't even need to capture the 2.5% (one-fortieth) of the added income in taxation to justify (pay off) the investment. Just the savings on (other) educational needs, vocational training, lower social costs (courts, prisons, welfare, etc.), and additional reductions in negative externalities of poverty (health and violence) down the road justify the investment many times over (Dr. Montessori was right!). 

Even if my guesstimates above are off (and we can only guess somewhat at today's results in America), there is so much cushion that the results are still astronomical.

In a healthy society, with a stable and well distributed economy, the entire solution might take place even without government funding. Though if this family-centric educational intervention isn't the collective action solution for a government, there isn't a whole lot of justified domestic expenditure at all.

Meanwhile, we teach most of our brightest minds to think either within political contexts or to find ways to use shiny new silicon tools to do what? The SAT gap between the rich and the poor grows wider decade by decade (also covered in Tough's writings) while partisans virtue signal their leadership's latest platitude.

What's Stopping Us?

We are still not doing education right despite well-documented solutions staring us in the face. Have we always been this confused about the right and wrong ways to achieve the results we say that we want to achieve?

You might think that the "family-centered early intervention" solution that draws the parents into better child-rearing habits satisfies both the conservative and liberal value sets, no matter how ideologically rigid. But perhaps that's a problem, politically speaking? If the goal of education is to render everyone a fearful drone, then the only solutions that stand the test of the political arena are the ones that satisfy no sets of broadly defined educational values, but act as a politically divisive partisan wedge. The (non-)solutions we are sold are typically those with catchy enough slogans to satisfy political partisans while handing more power to unelected bureaucrats.

Or maybe the people in charge have a different set of goals entirely?

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This article has been in the works for months, but in actuality for years. I have written various smaller versions of it in numerous places ranging from my own Facebook to anonymous accounts (no, I'm not revealing those…It's nice to sometimes just be a mischievous cartoon animal aside from the cacophony of human politics). I was inspired to finish this article just today specifically after watching a presentation at Pandata by a self-described generalist who put together the immense and superb Massachusetts COVID data project.

As with most of my articles, I am publishing this one far too early. There are too many pieces of the Big Picture that need attention and I typically have a fraction of a day to devote to each of them. Today I was in nearly seven hours of meetings. So be it. Somehow, the Earth is revolving faster these days. It is downright unreasonable to expect a well-defined conclusion of a discussion about a complex problem. My imperfections are on display, but at least these thoughts might be useful to somebody. More now than ever, perfection is the enemy of the maybe-good-but-at-least-basically-sane.

Perhaps some Einstein can take this up and complete the Bigger Puzzle?

Or maybe the crowd is even wiser than any of us. I expect as much.

A Brief Confession

"Genius is the recovery of childhood at will." -Arthur Rimbaud

Confession: I hate calling myself a statistician. I do so because (1) I do enjoy discrete math, and even where I forget terminology and formulas, I spent enough time with it all that I can look them up or derive them; and (2) having worked my way through college doing actuarial work (10/10 on the first two exams in the casualty actuary track), worked as a quant-trader on Wall Street, and spent productive time in corners of worthwhile places that include the Human Genome Project (not my greatest contribution, but the one with instant name recognition), that's the easiest way to explain myself on the most general sort of resume. I also enjoy teaching combinatorics, probability, and statistics. I tutored a few people successfully through their graduate level statistics courses, including my wife who is now a well-published Biochemist and Bioinformatics instructor. The description of Statistician also fits with my having written some math books, a few dozen commercial math courses, put together the Tyson/Fareed analysis (and chapter in their book), and worked consulting jobs of a variety that involved data analysis in productive projects. But most of my serious studies of math came during a three-year stretch of my life as a preteen and teenager when I was building the most obvious skill set that I could in order to escape a dismal captivity that I refused to live with.

If I'm not a statistician, what am I?

A person. Like you.

Or more of a punk, really. Growing up I spent many times the number of hours around people whose job titles included drug dealer (my four brothers), stripper (a few of their girlfriends), or lobbyist (two uncles) than around "respectable people" outside of school (which I skipped as often as possible without risking graduation).

And I love existing and existence. This being alive stuff is just…amazing. Definitely better than the alternative. Just going for a walk through the nature preserve near home feels better than laying down in darkness. That feels like a clue without scratching the surface of life's myriad adventures. I'm 44 years old and I feel like I've only learned about the tip of the tip of the tip of the iceberg of this great big existence thing. It's sometimes frightening and painful, but so often fascinating and beautiful. And it's full of observers who get to observe each other in a big freaky social dance, and I even love observing the observers. Is there a vocation for thinking about and promoting everything fascinating and beautiful, making use of some of it along the way? That's what I'd like to be when I grow up.

Where are All the Geniuses?

"Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together." -Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

A couple of months ago I was made aware of an interesting article suggesting that we stopped making Einsteins. From that article,

I think the most depressing fact about humanity is that during the 2000s most of the world was handed essentially free access to the entirety of knowledge and that didn’t trigger a golden age.

I don't want to bash the article, which is an exploration of the absence of people who fit some set of criteria? I get why the author walks down this path, but I'm going to argue that (1) this statement is strictly false, and (2) it's the wrong path. I do get why it seems like something is missing in the sauce of human greatness. But we first need to better explore the question as to what exactly we're missing.

We're asking the wrong question(s) about education and greatness. We turn greatness into something mythological that can only be achieved according to the judgment of promoters who write the news and history. The notion that all the heavy lifting of society building is done by a few Einsteins completely ignores the complex interplay of all the members of the tribe (not to mention most of the real accomplishments of society, which includes such mundane tales as vegetable gardening and child rearing). Sadly, we live in an era in which most of the tribe is brutally hacked, so there is less achievement than there would otherwise be. Even worse, most of that achievement is accrued by people who are hungry for rewards, not hungry to create. The pathological hacking of the tribes drags down everyone, and in ways we can barely comprehend on a daily basis. We are left thinking of a famous few brains as the Geniuses because they are so anointed by people who want to sell us postcards from History. But to square the circle simply, the brain is not the body.

And if you want to be the brain that hovers without the body, you're the problem. Even worse, there are institutions set up to sell you your impossible quest. It ain't cheap, either. That's emotional dependence. That's extended childhood. And to justify the price tag, it's sold to everyone who desires status, or enough income to do a bit more than just raise their family on.

Fun fact 1: The average annualized earnings of a participant in the U.S. labor force (of just over 127 million individuals) was $191,728 during the first quarter of 2022. Earning that amount would put you in the top 5% of American earners.

I'm going to argue that there are far more supergeniuses than ever before (though there certainly are by metrics that relate to technical skills or earning potentials), but that there are reasons why you're not hearing about them. I'll tell you about two of them in particular whom I taught at the two education centers I built in Alabama and Texas.

Fun fact 2: In 2007, I built an education center just south of Birmingham, Alabama on a $16,000 budget while living off $1,000 a month for the first two years. Eight of the first 100 graduates attended MIT. Six of the first 150 were Presidential scholars.

A few months after I built a school in Alabama, a mother from an hour north of my center called me up one day and told me about her daughter who joined the math team and was beating not just all the kids in her small schools division, but all the kids in the large schools division as well. The kid just loved working problems, and she was about to give up studying as a prima ballerina to throw herself into deeper studies. She wasn't challenged at her small town Central Alabama junior high school, so her mother was willing to drive this girl two one-hour round trips for two hours of class twice a week to take two classes in my programs (that's 8+ hours a week of sacrificed time by mom, if I explained it correctly). Algebra, Geometry, Algebra II, Number Theory, Combinatorics/Probability/Stats, Graph Theory, Complex Geometry…

This child worked on math for hours every day, and then in the ninth grade decided to also drive to Birmingham and back to attend the math magnet program at the Alabama School of Fine Arts, and then continue taking two classes a week (most advanced students took one nearly all the time) with me before driving home. After two years, she exhausted the programs there while continuing to dominate math team, but also programming and robotics. So, she took the leap to maybe the most famous private school in the world: Exeter. For those who don't know: Harvard is the Exeter of the University educational tier, except with slightly poorer (median wealth) families.

Two years later she graduated as the valedictorian of Exeter having qualified for a national Math Olympiad and won an Economics competition at Harvard. Off to MIT. Nearly perfect grades and honors. Then into the artificial intelligence industry for four years. At the age of 27 she took a job at Thiel Capital. You don't know her name (save for the handful of her classmates reading this). With some work, you could probably find it out. But her breadth of knowledge in her technical studies could not have been matched by those much earlier because some of what she studied hadn't been invented yet. Will her name ever be broadly known?

Does it matter?

Maybe only to those in need of resurrecting and expanding some mythical Mount Olympus.

After I moved to Dallas where I built another school in 2013, I was introduced to a surprisingly emotionally normal nine-year-old boy who had already aced a college course in Modern Algebra (not a watered down version—I met the professor). During the time I worked with him, he became the first elementary schooler to achieve a perfect paper on the second round of the American Mathematics Competitions. I know how hard that is because in the 90s I became the first underclassman to do it, and that was my third straight year of working problems eight hours a day for most of the year. A fifth grader had now accomplished what was previously nearly impossible to anyone younger than 16 or 17 years old.

How difficult is that?

Here is from an essay I wrote on quora:

The AIME is hard enough that, on average, these exceptional students correctly solve 5 out of 15 problems over 3 hours of work.

Let that sink in.

Around 4% of those students qualify for the Olympiads (USAMO or USAJMO).

That’s 500 out of around 16,000,000, which is 1 out of 32,000 or

0.003%, give or take.

For comparison, 0.27% or so of people have IQs of 145 or above.

Again, the self-selection for taking these exams is not perfect, but we should expect for around (at least) 99% of students with IQs or 145 or above to fail to qualify for a national Olympiad.

Add to that the fact that a few singularly gifted students qualify for the national Math Olympiads 5, 6, 7 or more times, and you get a picture of an exceptionally challenging mountain to climb. In fact, it might be said that 10,000 or so adult Americans were likely to have achieved such a feat as a teenager if everyone had had the opportunity. Around 8,000 people worldwide have climbed Mt. Everest, and I’ll guess that includes somewhere around 2,000 Americans. But the number of Americans who even consider that challenge is small. Why risk it? It may be reasonable to suggest that far more than 10,000 or so adult Americans are/were likely to actually summit Mt. Everest.

In other words, the AIME is hard enough that scoring the 10+ correct answers out of 15 usually necessary to qualify for the USA(J)MO is a greater challenge for a high school student than climbing Mt. Everest is for an adult.

He has since won three middle school national competitions (only student to high-score that test three times), and won three gold medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO). There will likely soon be a fourth gold medal in a few weeks, and there might have been five, six, or seven had he not had to compete with the U.S. team members who have won most of the international competitions over the past few years. Only one student has ever won more than four gold medals (not from the U.S.). I am in position to speculate because even when he was ten, I had to spend four hours each week sifting through problems to work with him for two hours at a time. After the easier problems at the IMO, even a professional mathematician usually needs to stretch their creativity to reach a teachable understanding of the solution-hunting process unless they make mathematical problem solving their primary life's focus (which I do not).

Has anyone ever known that much math at his age?

Who knows, but the number who have can likely be counted on one hand.

Will he become a famous Einstein-ish mathematician?

Wrong question. He's a teenager. Hopefully he will do whatever fulfills him the most, and hopefully nobody pigeonholes him so that he feels free to hop into whatever discipline he likes. It's not anyone's business whether he becomes the next great mathematician or physicist, plays the cello for a living, focuses on raising a large family more than research, or crafts educational computer games. That's his business.

Maybe he'll invent something new and useful, make $20 million, then go globe trotting until he falls in love with some other country where he puts down stakes and builds a university to educate the next generation in relative anonymity. There are a trillion possibilities, and the ones he chooses are his business.

And who is to say that the most brilliantly creative person (who might be worthy of an Einsteinian label) won't be somebody doing something we don't even have a name for, yet? And why would raising an amazing set of twelve kids (should that turn out to be his preference) be any less valuable to the world than solving some problem 99.99% of the world has never heard of and 99.9% of those who have cannot understand? 

I'm not saying there isn't an answer to that question, but that it's not anyone's place to answer it for another. It's not even anyone's place to suggest which options are more valuable for society, even if that were appropriate to project. But I will say that N billion people answering the question (as if a vocationally uniform answer exists) from armchairs threatens all human progress, but we'll get to why that could be.

Having taught motivated students online and in person from many countries around the world, I could go on with more stories. I couldn't tell you whether these are the two smartest students I've worked with. I wouldn't even know how to define what that even means. I root for (all of) them to live healthy, fulfilling lives. Mount Olympus can fend for itself. If they do not have the emotional space of their own outside of society's mental space in order to grow up healthy, nothing good will come of it. If they do not learn agency while developing their own identities, none of that matters. Even worse, the grotesque twisting of the tension of artificial mythology will continue to shape into culture wars and other destructive phenomena.

The Absurdity of Overspecialization

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex… It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction." -Ernst. F. Schumacher

I suspect that we are at the tail end of an era that demanded specialization in the sense of monopolizing one's time primarily in one field, which is itself defined by unwritten rules of terf. A handful of heroes escaped that route and still achieved notoriety, but economics both strongly encouraged demanding competition and paths toward application of skill that might never be well known to the general population. And remember the obvious connection between wealth and health. 

Who is to say that there isn't some Einstein-level intellect sitting at a desk at the NSA or DoD coming up with new ways to spy on all the dirty anti-vaxxers?

That's not what an Einstein would do?

Is that due to intellect, or mythology?

How did Zeus treat the sheep, again?

Do we even know what the actual Einstein would do in every environment? I don't.

Do we even know if Einstein is a genius in every environment? I'm sure he's quite bright in a wide array of universes (circumstances), but I truly have no idea.

Why the Einstein fetish, anyhow?

Are we asking the most important questions? Or is the stable advancement of the tribe the primary goal we've been hypnotized to ignore? Maybe we're not fully understanding how the underlying issue is economic, and that we're ignoring the obvious questions on that front. In order to begin brainstorming on what economic questions we even need to ask, I've created a diagram to represent the economic order of vocational and bureaucratic specialization.

Sorry if I missed some of you. I know that Gauss proved that there are 17 professional pie slices that can be constructed with a ruler and compass, but I get bored easily.

Kidding aside, what we're looking at is something like the body Moloch, a topic that I wish I'd had more time to write about. Our economy, which is a marvel of nature, and representative of the collective will of humanity, has become a Molochian maze so large and overly complex that entering the labyrinth to go to work as a specialist means losing all sense of self—and any view of the Big Picture.

Where am I? Who am I?

What would I even be if I left?

The nature of the maze is that everyone sees the twists and turns (corruption) in their own zone, but the vision of each specialist is limited by the bureaucratic form of Gell-Mann amnesia.

If you can't leave the labyrinth, you're not a mythological genius—you're the minotard. If you spend your genius to build the labyrinth wider to accommodate your own terf, then later try to escape, you risk your children's survival on their own maturity. A sacrifice to Moloch.

No matter how smart you might be. You begin to defend your position in the hierarchy not by producing better (because you no longer know what makes the machine function better—you just have signals from other lost souls in the maze whose corruption levels you cannot surmise by definition of your different specializations).

Where are all the Einsteins?

Most of those with such creative potential are trapped in a Catch-22 of their own tailor made design.

I don't mean to make it sound like I have all the answers here. Much of the point is that the complete set of answers is something like a reorganization of the maze in which the whole tribe participates. We need to allow for the powerful forces of emergent organization, and that involves the whole tribe, from the ground up. The Acolytes of Einstein need to get out of the damn way—not just in public health as is apparent daily—but in totality. The quest for the next mythological god to save the materialist moment feeds the Kunlangeta whose top-down organization of the maze results only in the codification of their own flawed images.

Source: "Watchmen": The One Thing Nobody Says about Adrian Veidt aka Ozymandias?

The giant squid is actually a symbol of how insane and out of touch with humanity Adrian Veidt is. He had been aloof and emotionally detached from people all his life, observing and calculating them from above. It takes insanity and detachment to turn three million victims into a statistic to shock the US and Soviet governments into declaring world peace. When Zack Snyder got rid of the alien squid in the movie because he thought it was cheesy, he missed the point. The giant squid was supposed to be cheesy and absurd because it was a symbol of how nuts Veidt is. He took on the weight of saving the world in the most horrendous way possible because he thought it was necessary. Because he's a flaming lunatic.

He is proof of the thesis that a crazy clever person is incredibly dangerous. Because he thinks he's doing the right thing.

You want for the smartest man in the world to be a genocidal lunatic? Just keep chasing Ozymandius Einstein.

Fun fact 3: I named my Dallas school Daedalus Education.

Fun Fact 4: The artist of my school's logo, above, graduated from medical school disgusted by the system. He became an artist and wrote what stands out as one of the most prescient books about American medicine prior to the plandemonium.

The Tiger-Powered Feedback Loop

"I'm a misunderstood genius."

"What's misunderstood?"

"Nobody thinks I'm a genius."

-Bill Watterson

Right now, the greatest geniuses in the world are anyone managing to raise healthy kids in this environment.

Credit: Sensei spreading knowledge to young by Chris Baradaran

The American bastardization of Dr. Maria Montessori's educational system is one of the most emblematic signs of the times. For an additional $10k to $20k or beyond in some cities, wealthy families can send their kids to "Montessori schools" where their children will enjoy a clean upscale learning environment free of poor people. The greater personal attention to each child, Socratic conversation, and manipulatives are all surely upgrades from the standard education model. The problem is that it all completely misses the primary point of Dr. Montessori's mission.

When Dr. Montessori looked out her window in her little corner of Italy, she recognized that the visible problems on the streets—society's ills including crime and generally unhealthy people—were unnecessary. She began teaching…not the wealthy kids, but the mentally unhealthy and the poor kids whom she recognized as likely to often grow up to become the chronic poor or even criminals. She taught laboratory science to children condemned to an asylum, and was extended an honored invitation to "raise" Rome's destitute children. And at times she taught all kinds of children together, but one way or another, no child was left behind in her system. In essential ways, her methods overlapped with Benjamin Bloom's experiments, with proof of efficacy across wide demographics. And yet what we get out of all that are a few little schoolrooms dotting the landscape of America's upper middle class neighborhoods where future Mandarins are raised.

Our community leaders aren't enacting "No Child Left Behind". They are enabling the fracturing of societal fabric.

For several generations, specialists have often passed their knowledge and talents down through family lines, resulting in deeper and deeper specialization. Many of them routinely voted in ways that sabotaged the education of anyone else who might compete. Specialized tasks require learning enough twists and turns that it's hardly possible to leap from an ordinary childhood to specialization without all the extra help. Many specialists of generations past spent countless hours in their 20s, 30s, and 40s reaching those plateaus. Now, with Khan Academy, a few additional AP courses, and the sacrifice of all playdates, every child (who isn't left behind by the lack of at least one specialist parent and at least one tiger parent) can achieve that goal by the age of 26.7 without ever getting to know any of the other children in the neighborhood where they grew up. Since being Einstein isn't in the cards, this really is the primary path toward being named one of the 30 Under 30, which must surely be something like the next best thing. You don't need to be the first person to understand the photoelectric effect in order to benefit from that photoshoot.

https://www.forbes.com/30-under-30/2022/

Not pictured: Satoshi Nakamoto

Given that the highest quality of college education now costs 14,712 years of a median pre-bachelors-degree American income (and you can thank Putin for that), entrepreneurial all-stars and academics are no longer allowed to think unapproved thoughts (which certainly limits new discoveries), and the new patent clerking is "all bullshit jobs" that require kissing some geezer's ring. But I know what every Tiger parent is thinking, "How can my child be almost Einstein if they aren't surrounded by all the almost-Einsteins?"

To all the parents: Take a deep breath and come to grips with an understanding that sifting for Einsteins as a first principle looks a lot less interesting, and maybe even bat-CoV crazy when you zoom out.

Source: 5 hidden facts about Where's Waldo

I'm not here to shit all over whoever is in those 30 Under 30 photos. I don't know them. Some of them may be doing things that are valuable in most any imaginable future context. Good for them. Some of them might be there precisely because they've dodged the repeated application of the many social poisons. Dear God, I pray that is the truth. But I've seen too much of the sausage factory, and I know that the paths dictated by the selection criteria are fraught with so many sick incentives that I worry for each of them, and I worry more for each of the rest of us. And for the all of us.

I also know that we shouldn't count on them to save the world. Reformulating the great mass of humanity will be up to all of humanity. It will be up to people whose interests are simply feeding their family more than it will be up to somebody who checks the post-Ivy League fame checkboxes. It will be up to the unsexy maintainers of the sewers as much as the heli-drone builders. It will be up to new networks not codified by the bureaucratic maze enthusiasts, whose children have not been wed to Moloch.

The future belongs to the people who can stand apart from it all, and do the work to untangle the labyrinth map. Now the generalists must be heroes.

We will still need some specialists. We always need a few of them, defined by some more natural dedication to a defined discipline. And because they are well rewarded, the incentive systems are hard to balance without tempting the worshipers of false idols (meaning no disrespect to Einstein). We have far too many specialists, so most of those so trained become the entitled Mandarins. We are all under strain from their gravity. And because we live under a regime of such vast corruption, it's harder to relax and refuse to play their games. The system needs to change, and our educational motifs are a critical part of the feedback loop. Plan to lead children with love, learn what can be done, and the rest…well, that's still a lot of work, too. But at least we'll have company.

When It All Breaks Down, Who's Going to Rebuild It?

Okay friends, I'm wrapping this one up now. I told you it was too soon. I told you it was imperfect. But I think I'm right that waiting for perfection would be waiting too long. I reserve the right to rewrite all of this as inspiration hits. This is all too important to leave in place. This is far too important not to discuss. This is for the children who may build the next Age of Enlightenment.

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Some of you are probably irritated that the title is not, "Learning With Dyslexia," because that better fits a more natural learning-centric focus. I permuted the words not because that's the way my dyslexia typically works, but because that does happen to me sometimes—particularly as I get tired. At those moments, I find myself reading the same sentence several times before the words untangle themselves. Yet, I think that's all just about being tired because I have observed the same thing happen among completely ordinary people who aren't dyslexic.

I'm actually not even certain if dyslexia is the correct way to describe the problems I experience, but it's the easiest terminology to grasp onto because I read at a fraction of the rate of most educated people—around 25% to 50% of the rate of an average adult, depending on the material. But there is a connection between my reading problems to sound and other senses. Loud noises that I'm not used to well enough to filter out render me closer to blind, which is to say that my dyslexia is really just an aspect of an audio-visual disorder (I think).

Again, I recognize that noises distract other people from reading, so perhaps my issues are simply a several standard deviation underperformance? I don't think so, but that's possible.

For years I've wanted to make time to draw out what I see for other people. While working on the DMED story, a team member created for me this chart that gave me an idea. It's not perfect, but pretty close to what I experience.

What I can both see-and-decode on a page that I'm reading is constrained by a smaller "box". It's not a visually defined box, but that's fine. The box gets smaller quickly in the presence of unfiltered noise, or when I get tired, and at a late hour like this (nearly 3 AM), I'm essentially "code blind" in that I cannot read (decode text) as I type. Sometimes I just close my eyes and type, but that's not as relaxing as it sounds, so I sort of sit with a picture in front of me that might as well be written in Icelandic.

I've run enough small experiments to have a sense that my box is different from most people's. And I do sometimes compensate almost completely by following text with my finger (works best with something like a dense history book).

Weirdly, I seem to have better peripheral vision than most people. So there is something like a resource tradeoff in the brain (and not likely the result of brain damage, which is reassuring).

Do not ask me about other people's dyslexia, what other forms there are, or how it happens. Keeping up with my own problems is itself a specialization, as I assume it is for anyone. I'm curious, but it's not going to rise near the top of my priority list.

Compensation and Resource Management

We all know that people with disabilities shift their energies to find different ways to perform tasks. My favorite such story is that of the blind man who developed his own form of echolocation (like bats) he calls "flash sonar":

How cool is that?!

With dyslexia, sometimes there is no need to compensate. You know how long it takes somebody to read a math or science book, or a dense article? It takes as long as it takes for them to think through the concepts and problems. Reading speed is rarely the rate limiting step in the process.

There is also no need to compensate when I tie my shoes, cook, or take out the trash.

But I do an enormous amount of compensation. My strategies have grown as I've grown older and performed more different kinds of tasks. One thing that I do is rapidly take and sort thousands of pages of notes. I estimate 17,000 pages in the past 32 months. Here is one of my several dashboards that links to scores of documents, each of which is on average several hundred pages in length:

Understand, I was a disorganized child. But somewhere along the way I began to become organized in my disorganization. Dig into my document tree, and the content is dense:

We all have personal achievements of figuring out how to function in life. This hierarchical organization of notes, links to articles and studies, graphs I've made or found important, etc., is on my very short list. But on a simpler note, while writing the opening paragraphs of this essay, I looked up at my browser tabs and felt a very mild feeling of panic over not recognizing my protonmail tab. Oh no!!

Turns out that it's second from the left. That's a brand new tab icon, and I found that out quickly because I always position my email tabs far to the left (I have 300+ tabs open across 10 browser windows; three large monitors with email always on a browser in the middle) so that I can locate them without effort. And that reminded me to slide calendar and email-system management tabs flush to the left against those email tabs. I can operate smoothly because I organize…mmmm…reasonably well.

While I have my organizational habits, I have some unusual sometimes sloppy coping habits, like beginning to read from the middle of lengthy and dense blocks of text in email. Once or twice a year, that gets me in trouble, but 99% of the time, it allows me to get to the point in 2 minutes rather than 20. I do tell those I work with that spacing email text well is a nice favor to me.

In case you're wondering, I failed the pictorial test at the top of this article. But I sometimes weirdly succeed where others fail, depending on the illusion/test. Also, I've never once lost a game of Big Boggle. Lifetime. It's like somebody designed a game exactly the size of my reading box, but I still get to apply all my weird little compensating habits, most of which I haven't explained.

Visual Cues and Queues

"The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision." -Helen Keller

Oddly, I think that dyslexia had a positive impact on my ability to create curriculum for students. It forces me to think through the interplay between words and images in an economical sort of way. Creating and allowing for enough space to distinguish between words/numbers/diagrams eases the process.

As mathematics gets a little deeper and more challenging for even good math students, I take the time to organize and visually arrange the steps for what I hope is a complete and thorough lesson the very first time.

Having spent additional pains myself working through mediocre books and articles, I spend 20% longer arranging computations.

And still, I basically cannot see much of what I'm typing as I type it. So, I even come up with my own way to lay it all out. If you ask essentially any mathematician or physicist who uses LaTeX to typeset, they will tell you that my TeXing on the left has "far more whitespace than usual." I pattern my typing to organize spacing to make bug-hunting simple, and to minimize my typos, which are perhaps doubly or triply numerous compared to average.

But here is what happens in the end: the time spent in creating new forms of organization turns into a fluid process. At the end of week one, I'm still "the slow guy" at this. At the end of the year, I churn out pages and pages and pages…that often still need the eye of an editor, but are professional textbook quality work. But the excessive gains do depend on the world standing still for me, sometimes (no, I won't ask for it to).

The Weirdness of the Productive Dyslexic

Years ago I was building a company with a business partner, and he had a hard time understanding that I was not able to read my computer screen as he talked rapidly at me. I stopped him multiple times and told him that I was dyslexic, and that I also needed a break from the screen after some time. This enraged him, and he acted like I was trying to punish him for some reason. He paced around the room declaring that there is no such thing as dyslexia—that it's a made up excuse for people who wanted more time on tests. He found catty little ways to punish me for weeks and try to make me feel dumb.

I was stunned the first day, but it was jarring to see somebody go to such lengths day after day to burn me as a witch. I still don't know where that idea came from that dyslexia is a grand conspiracy designed to…what exactly?...to rob superior students of their speed advantage on tests, slightly narrowing the grade gap?

But the episode did cause me to think back to school. In the first grade, I began the year in the lowest reading group. After a couple of months, I got moved up. A bit later, I was moved to the highest reading group. Comprehension was never a problem—just speed, which then sounds worse in group reading.

From that point, I made up for speed in enough ways that I mostly did not think about it, and nobody ever identified me as dyslexic. I was typically the first person to finish most every test in most classes. Being able to perform calculations in my head made math and science far easier. But there was exactly one time when I failed to finish a test, and it was one of the only times that would actually bother me. I took the SAT just once, in 1994, and it was the first time there was essay writing on the Verbal portion. I had no idea there was a new essay portion, and didn't read the several pages prior for understanding because I would generally read the questions asked and go back. I was asked to write an essay that basically required for me to read the story in full. I went back and read every word. Then I started writing, and six or so sentences into what was likely going to be a 25ish sentence essay, time was called. My verbal score was 710 and my total was 1510, so I figured that's where I lost all the points.

Along with the pandemic has come an interesting and sometimes frustrating social challenge. It comes in the form of, 

"Wow, you get so much accomplished. Can you give my 15-page data thing [where you may or may not have to look up biomedical terminology] a quick lookover?"

Every time I read that, my heart races. I even feel a bit sad. I have said "yes" and then changed to "no" more times in the past 28 months than in all my life. I hate saying "no" and during ordinary times, I'd sacrifice the time. But…what time?

Also…and this is really important to me…THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A QUICK LOOKOVER OF A 15-PAGE DOCUMENT IN MY WORLD AND NOW I NEED TO FIND A PUPPY TO HUG!

It was the worst with Steve Kirsch. Steve is a prototype hyperproductive Type A CEO. He does his thing very well. But during the first three months I knew him, he kept sending me links with literally 100-page and 200-page documents, and he would be like, "Can you give this a proofread?" I would write back and say, "I am dyslexic, and this would take me 8 or 16 hours, and I'd feel drained and sick before I was nearly done." I got on the phone to explain dyslexia to him multiple times. I think that for some people, the problem is invisible and weird enough that it's hard to see. But all my productivity hacks that allow for me to still be productive as a dyslexic do not translate as well to other people's work.

Last week I explained dyslexia to Steve for about the tenth time in a year, and then went a little further into the explanation of the audio-visual processing disorder. He finally got it. He stopped, and asked me, "Are you vaccine injured?" I told him [honestly] that I have no idea. I don't remember not being dyslexic, and I escaped from a cult without bothering with anything like jotting down my vaccination schedule. I had whatever college required in 1995, and got conned into one flu shot six or seven years ago.

All this is basically why I'm finally writing this article—because I need to be able to point here so that the people I work with will better understand. I will work and do my part if I'm allowed to choose my own adventure. Sorry that I'm a shit proofreader. Sorry that I'm bizarrely slow at one thing and weirdly fast at another. It irritates me more than it could irritate you, but I do get that people plan for certain aspects of normalcy in some tasks that I just do not provide well. I can't wait for the world to get back to normal and I can go back to focusing on learning to do just one thing well at a time instead of ten, and learn how to hack it to fit me and for nobody to be the wiser.

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Education Wars articles can be found here at the Campfire.wiki.

This is not an article where I'm going to tell you that the university system is completely useless. Honestly, there are a small handful of professions where I think (or I think that I think, but should update my research) that it's best for young people to gather for some period of time for intensive training. Of course, that could happen on a corporate campus, or anywhere else. But I do think maybe those studying…something intensely technical might maybe sort of still benefit from the university system.

Then again, a combination of other technologies has made a tremendous amount of learning easier from essentially any locality. You can learn to code from your bedroom. Unless your work involves rare materials, it's hard to imagine the purpose of a university beyond the claimed "stamp of conscientiousness" which is strangely never delinked from the "stamp of credulity of a sociopathic system", but whatever.

Yale's Newest Graduate

"Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in." -Leonardo da Vinci

A little while ago I saw one of my former students post on Facebook about graduating from Yale. The post amused me. He included an amusing picture of himself, but I'm leaving him unidentified. But most of my Dallas client families will guess. I'll call him Nav in this article, but do not confuse him with the B-list rapper of the same name.

I chatted with Nav a bit after I saw his post and he explained that he graduated in 5 semesters, but only spent 2.5 on campus. I think he shaved off a year with AP exams, and an additional semester with cobbled together credits of various kinds or heavier per semester work loads. He moved to Austin to work on cryptocurrency for a semester and, as he put it, 

…nobody noticed I was gone (I was exempt from mandatory COVID testing because I had contracted it, and I took classes which didn't take attendance and only had final exams which I flew back and took at the end of the semester [that was this Spring]).

So, did Nav even need Yale?

I asked Nav to give me the rundown on the positives, and here is what he had to say:

The most important thing I did was join a research group - that's where I learned scientific programming, how to learn many different things at once, and it's also the only thing which pushed me to gain intuition  vs. rote memorization or even olympiad-style proof-mapping. I didn't learn much in any class except statistical mechanics, which I learned very well because I had a fantastic professor who was kind. My entire sophomore year was spent online due to the pandemic and I taught myself everything I know about cryptography and economics in that period.

But, by far the most important thing that happened to me in college was feeling true friendship. It is the greatest thing that has ever happened to me.

Kudos to the statistical mechanics professor.

Nav made a few other comments around which I'll leap to my own set of thoughts, which I understand better for young men than young women: it is easier to explore the world of adults a bit at a time with a pack of friends at around the ages of 18-2x, for some value of x. Eventually, that need dissipates as the lions form their prides, perhaps.

Good luck, Nav!

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https://abundancebuildingconcepts.com/our-homes/

Update (June 7, 2022): Several commenters worry about the non-squareness of the home, but this new video shows that the interior is more completely usable space than one might imagine.

Call it a tiny home if you like, and it could certainly serve the same function, but it could also serve as a "simple home" for those who don't need the luxury of something larger. At 400 square feet and a projected cost of $10,000 (if I understood correctly from talking to the designers), it fits a lot of possibilities. Bury one of these domes in the side of a hill under a bit of sod (the concrete dome is tough) and maybe you have a root or wine cellar. Or a hobbit hole. Two or three together could form a larger structure where needed.

Here are my new friends Grant and Gustavo explaining the simplicity of the Catalan Vault:

You can find a number of similar and related architectural styles here, but I suspect this is the first, "unfold and just add water" version!

Perhaps the world suffers from a bit of ancient amnesia. Let's have a little fun exploring the discrete side of technological wonders, which likely gives historical insight into how some ancient architectural masterpieces were accomplished.

The Catalan Numbers

The following problems may not seem relevant to architecture, but as we will see, they…might be? Further, I suspect that great architects of centuries past knew more about practical physical mathematics than was recorded in history—knowledge possibly passed down through a small network of superior students to each master.

The first problem we are going to tackle is a path walking problem. If you ever took a course on or involving combinatorics, you probably remember these problems. If we count the number of paths that follow the gridlines from the lower-left to the upper-right, moving only up or right (north or east), then there are "20 choose 10" possible paths.

But we are going to tackle a more interesting and challenging problem. We want to count the paths that stay on or above the main diagonal. Perhaps examples are in order. In the following diagram, the silver and the blue paths satisfy the condition of never crossing below the main diagonal (always at least as many N moves as E moves from start to finish), while the red path fails (so it would not be part of our count).

Note, our problem of counting paths that stay on or above the main diagonal is equivalent to the following problems (and also many others):

• Counting the number of syntactically correct sequences of 10 + 10 = 20 parentheses (for example, ((())(()(()))()()()) always has more open than closed parentheses from left to right).

• Counting the number of ways to triangulate a convex dodecagon, which is to say chop it into only triangles whose vertices are vertices of the original polygon.

• The Mountains of Catalan version.

It may be enjoyable for some readers to think through why these problems are equivalent if you never have before. These equivalent problems involve some nifty additional lessons of their own (perspective alters the ease of different approaches), but for the moment, we will focus on our path walking problem. Let us leap into the clever approach, and specifically my version of that approach.

The goal of staying on or above the main diagonal (green) is equivalent to the goal of never touching the diagonal of doom (red). Make sure you see why or…DOOM!

Many excellent solutions to counting problems involve focusing on what we don't want to count rather than what we do want to count (when that's easier). We call this complementary counting, and we apply it here. We will count the "doomed" paths that do touch the dreaded diagonal of doom, like this one (in blue):

Note that every point on the diagonal of doom has coordinates (m+1, m), where m is some integer appropriate to our range. The blue path above was doomed when it hit the point with coordinates (2+1, 2), or (3, 2).

Now we take advantage of symmetry. At the moment (point) of doom, let us imagine the body and soul of a person traversing the blue path to "split", with the ghostly soul thereafter walking a path that is the mirror image of the blue path reflected over the diagonal of doom (red line).

The ghost always winds up at (11,9) because,

• The first leg of the path (first 5 steps in this case) to (11,9) is just the blue path to (3,2).

• After that, the blue path must go North once more than East to reach (10,10) from (3,2), so the silver ghostly path does the opposite, going East once more than North.

So, the ghostly soul winds up two steps further East than North in total after the 20 total steps—once during each of the two path walking parts (up to the doom point, and thereafter).

What this means is that for each (blue) path that hits the diagonal of doom, there is one and only one path where the ghostly soul can "take over" and complete the walk, which necessarily finishes at (11,9). So, the number of such paths is 20C11. The remaining paths must therefore remain on or above the main diagonal (green), so there are

such paths. Or, more generally, for an n x n grid.

The first solution to this problem came from Spanish mathematician Eugene Charles Catalan (1814-1894). Hence, the numbers Cn are known as Catalan numbers. And if you're wondering if there is some exceptionally beautiful proof that just says that 1 out of n+1 of the random walks remain on or above the main diagonal…yeah, well me too! And if there are any exceptional mathematicians reading who know, this is one of those moments when I'd rather you not spoil it because I'd rather it remain a wonderful mystery to take a walk and think about once a year or so. But if this remains an unsolved problem, I'd be happy to have that sourced.

Back to Architecture

The Catalan numbers are the answer to a two-dimensional counting problem. How does that relate to a three-dimensional architectural structure?

I wasn't sure that I could answer that question when I started working on this article. I learned about Catalan numbers as a teenager, but was never as strong a geometer as I was with discrete math. I'd heard of Catalan solids, but wasn't sure if there was a relationship to the Catalan numbers. I am certainly no master architect, and I'm piecing together my latent understanding of the solid geometry on the fly, so forgive me if I make a mistake or two. I'm happy to learn from a greater geometer who may stumble along this post. But…crap, I was unable to unravel the complete connection in my hotel room in Austin, and I haven't really had free time to work on it since.

Oh well, let's see if we can establish some vague connections among Catalan's mathematical passions (assuming they're related, which they might not be at all).

The protrusions of these 13 solids are all regular pyramids, which are protrusions from the 13 Archimedean solids, with chirality intact for the snub cube and snub dodecahedron (which may excite some math/physics geeks). Regular pyramids are extremely strong structures. If we take the polygonal nets or quasi-nets (same tiling repeated as needed), and stretch them out without completing the folds into closed solids, we can achieve dome-like structures: geodesic domes.

This time lapse of the construction of a Catalan dome shows a key feature of the architecture: the triangular frame. Catalan domes can technically be built without the triangle, but the triangle is the "strongest" polygon. If somebody hits you in the face with the corner of a cardboard polygon, you'd rather have that polygon be of many sides so that it would "give" and fold in. That doesn't happen with a triangle.

Really, arches can be thought of as fractalized triangles. They do not buckle under pressure until the building material itself is somehow broken. The discrete approaches the continuous model, asymptotically according to the sizes of the tiles or bricks.

So, here's where I am now:

• Catalan numbers are also counts of Catalan mountain ranges, which is like a fractal representation of a simple set of (strong) triangular structures.

• Catalan numbers also count triangulations of polygons.

These are part of my lesson on Catalan numbers, and certainly have potential for direct relationship to Catalan domes and vaults. But is there any relationship?!

I Give Up

I finally broke down and searched the internet, finding this article on Catalan vaults at Wikipedia. It turns out that the architecture is more due to a different Spanish genius, Rafael Guastavino, but was later named after Catalan—very possibly due to the reasonably entertaining notion that the Mountains of Catalan and Catalan Solids must surely relate to the architecture. Maybe there is some wonderful discretization of these arches and domes that relates back to Catalan, but that is beyond my two hour skill level, and possibly far beyond.

And there I will retire. I hope you are as entertained as I am.

Historic American Engineering Record; Library of Congress HAER NY,31-NEYO,86-49

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In this article, we discuss a method of education that elevates an average classroom student to among the top 2% among peers in standard classroom models. Or, more broadly: all students show two standard deviations of improvement in academic skill development. That's not all. The process takes up less time for each student, so sitting still in a chair for hours on end, day after day, no longer stresses children out into oblivion.

Does that pique your interest?

If you have doubts, I hope to erase them by the end of this article. But you may also be a little angry about what you discover.

I understand that I'm making a rather extreme pronouncement about identifying the variable of most extreme impact on education. I'll go ahead and make the proper hedge: the greatest possible variable is existing at all. Life. If you're alive, you experience inputs and guide outputs, by definition. If you're sentient, you direct improvement of your information feedback loops.

I like that hedge. It already makes me feel a little more appreciative of this amazing dance of energy we call the universe. Now, on with the show…

As a side note for those familiar with the literature of educational theory and who are wondering: yes, this is the same Bloom responsible for Bloom's taxonomy.

Benjamin Bloom's Two Sigma Problem

If you haven't heard of "the Benjamin Bloom problem" or the "two-sigma problem [of education]", you're far from alone. It's kind of like not knowing in April 2020 that SARS-CoV-2 is weak sauce with lots of early treatment options. The topic should be among the world's highest priorities until it is understood and agreed upon by essentially everyone. It's that basic and foundational, and the only reason most people aren't aware is that it gets in the way of the obedience model of education, which powerful forces align to keep in place.

Rounding the Earth Newsletter

Meditation and the Art of War

“I never let schooling interfere with my education.” Mark Twain If you've never read Sun Tzu's The Art of War, you've surely seen it quoted. Maybe you've seen it on a shelf at the bookstore. Why have generals like Douglas MacArthur and Colin Powell, not to mention intelligence officials and business moguls, consistently praise the 2,500 Chinese relic in …

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5 years ago · 50 likes · 16 comments · Mathew Crawford

That the media has helped suppress this study in yet one more clear example of a conspiracy of silence is how you can recognize that the totalitarianism that we're seeing today didn't begin yesterday. The veil is full of holes through which we see through the porous curtain an emperor wearing no clothes (and masturbating like a stimulated macaque just pardoned from biomedical research duty). We're entering a period of dramatically shifting economic fault lines that shakes the facade until it breaks, but that's a story for another day.

On June 1, 1984, University of Chicago Professor of Education Benjamin Bloom published a study testing three models of learning:

1. Conventional. Students learn from a teacher in classrooms with 30 or so other students, periodically taking assessment tests.

2. Mastery Learning. The conventional model plus a feedback loop to bring more students up to foundational mastery.

3. Tutoring. Students learn the subject matter with a good tutor for one to three students at a time, with testing and a feedback loop for mastery.

Let's jump right to a summary of the results:

1. Conventional. The conventional classroom model sucks. Students lost 35% of their time (does this ingrain attention deficits?), and only 20% of the students achieved foundational skill mastery.

2. Mastery Learning. The mastery learning model shifts the distribution of student performance by a full standard deviation over the conventional classroom model. The average student under mastery learning outperformed around 5 out of 6 students in the conventional classroom, and 70% of the students achieved foundational skill mastery.

3. Tutoring. The tutoring model shifts the distribution of student performance by a bit over two standard deviations. The average student now performs at the 98% percentile relative to the conventional classroom model, and 90% of the students achieve foundational skill mastery.

Behold: learning through ordinary interaction with an adult who has a plan turns the average student into a high performer with a strong foundation, and who is ready for creative thinking and work.

We can see a summary of results with a more specific breakdown of some observed variables.

We could stop right here. You now know one of the great secrets to educational success.  If there are only three, this would be one of them. If you choose to use it, your children will be vastly better prepared for the future.

Mechanism: It's Just a Feedback Loop

Ultimately, the Bloom result is simple and intuitive. No, wait, let me rephrase that: the Bloom result is stupid simple and flatly obvious unless you've accepted some form of dissonance that gets in the way of understanding it.

Personal communication entails a feedback loop whereby individuals (each of whom have their own strengths, weaknesses, perceptions, and relative language mastery) have the opportunity to negotiate the communication channel and specifics of the lesson they're learning, as part of a natural feedback loop, in order for each lesson to be communicated and absorbed as needed for the development of new skill mastery.

The Implications

Having helped build and run three schools, I have my own stories about making use of Bloom's observations (which I hadn't read until after I was into the third school, but understood intuitively having taught classes since I was 13). But I'll save those for another time.

Ultimately, nearly every child can master the fundamentals. The traditional (Prussian) model gets 20% there, and at the cost of mental and emotional agency.

"Is that intentional?"

Yes, that's intentional.

"But why?"

That's the interesting question. It looks like engineering of a Pareto social class. Take a deep breath…this is going to get a little speculative, but if my proposed theory bothers you, propose your own in the comments.

Why?

Once upon a time there were among the educated of Europe, which dominated the world economically at a particular moment in history, men like Charles Darwin and Francis Galton (Darwin's smarter cousin…isn't there always a Mycroft in these stories?) from landed or otherwise wealthy families who decided that their parents' success must pass through them by divine right, which was rebranded as evolution and genetics.

Don't get me wrong, this is not an essay disputing evolution or genetics, for which there are models and applications that are more or less correct, incorrect, and still under discussion. I'm talking here about their misapplication, made for self-justification of familial supremacy. This is another story about the Kunlangeta.

The social Darwinist view was bolstered by Galton, who studied the wealthy of Britain and determined that since their children were more likely to succeed that it must have been the bloodline (genetic stock). On the backs of Darwin and Galton, the eugenics movement sprang forth, and has been working as a poison beneath the surfaces of secret societies such as the Fabians ever since.

Um, what?

If you're thinking that Darwin, Galton, and their ilk should have tested other variables before making their pronouncement, you're on a reasonable path. As best I've looked through their works, they did not find the appropriate control for confounders. And I have to work at it not to hate them bitterly for having me read through hundreds and hundreds of pages of their mumbling ego-shit-tastical eugenics-laden drivel looking for it.

But let's lay it out: what other variables might explain the heritability of metrics of success (remember that starkly non-genetic attributes like zip codes are highly heritable)?

• The wealth of parents to hire tutors for their children. We could stop right there, given what we've already discussed. A good education is enough to explain how those who rise to leadership becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy with a false appearance of correlated genetics.

• Culture. Some cultures (and I'll include religious culture here as a subset) focus on sacrificing for a generation in order to provide the resources (including tutoring that may come from the parent) to elevate the children.

• Access. Put simply, we cannot expect for the children still growing up in rainforest tribes to understand the contents of a standard library.

• Health. Of course, this correlates with other variables above to some degree.

Maybe I'm missing a major potential variable? Let me know. The point is that these variables fully explain the so-called excess success of bloodlines observed by Veblen and others. If there is research that suggests otherwise, I would be interested in seeing it.

Pushing Authoritarianism

Darwin believed that merely a few pockets of humans are capable of self-governance—and so the rest need to be governed (read: enslaved, or be-serfed, or something). Such a view requires vast amounts of justification. To justify it requires taking over societies and engineering top-down control—something that the European megacorporations were doing in Asia and the West Indies. Then, from positions on high, it is necessary to engineer the sabotage of anyone who deigns to behave as a sovereign individual. We might even ask if there is really any true belief in eugenics or social Darwinism beneath the surface, or if those at the tops of hierarchies are fully aware that these views simply provide cognitive justification for those climbing their hierarchies in their service.

The best way to take control over societies is to take children from their parents and run a "best slave pageant" in which the "winners" become society's Mandarins (intermediate organizers who obscure the Kunlangeta oligarchs). These Mandarins fall into line with the belief in their superiority, and even aspire to move into the ranks of the elites (slim chances, but not impossible). They are paid to dehumanize and confuse the "losers" and keep them too emotionally weak to demand fair wages, properly educate their children, or organize revolution (whether peaceful or violent).

With specific respect to education, the only way to make the superiority of the tutoring/mentoring model not the presumptive default model of education is to spend decades or centuries crafting a society in which parents have essentially no time remaining for the healthy raising of their children, and are themselves too zombified—miseducated and tired—to understand what is happening or resist. Success of the plan requires that those who do understand to never speak out. In the media, the arts, and education, there is a layer of Mandarins who further gaslight the victims. Good Mandarin Nazis who are patted on the head, and told that they are leaders for succeeding in a set of circumstances that imply obedience in taking instruction more than anything.

Sound like anything else we've been experiencing lately?

"Really?"

Kunlangeta like Frederick the Great were more straight-forward about how they felt it their right to mold humans to be mindless drone servants of the royals and oligarchs. Today we get layers of bullshit ideology providing a smokescreen, but at the root, it's the same story.

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Opting Out

It's not easy, but the first step on the path to fighting the insane war against all by the Kunlangeta is to spend enough time with your children to teach them the basics, or to hire somebody who can do that for you. They will learn faster, avoid unnecessary shots to their confidence due to "failure", and have a lot more time to then spend running around outside and participating in that other great educational process that we call "playing". And however this plandemonium turns out, they'll be in the best position to build great lives for themselves, and for the world.

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Resist Who?

Resist the Pandemicists, that's who.

Who are they?

They are whoever follows the Kunlangeta in their task of erecting a fully authoritarian reich from behind the facade of medical authority. The sometimes appear as academics, bankers, physicians, and also mobs of Woke Karens.

Operation Uplift is a group of volunteers who came together to resist the pandemonium. Members participate in a variety of investigations, research, and educational outreach, including the Campfire Wiki, which will soon expand quickly by tens of thousands of words covering scientific research and documentation of important events during the pandemic (one of our technologists is working on a way to upload hundreds of pages of organized notes). Among us, there are professional scientists, artists, statisticians, doctors, programmers, graduate students, real estate agents, and a host of other generally concerned people from several continents. We are engaging in an educational battle.

Clubhouse

This Friday, December 17, Operation Uplift will host its first Clubhouse chat. You are invited to join us.

What are we going to talk about?

Everything that needs to be done to keep America free, and free the rest of the world as well.

At least, we're going to start the conversation. We're going to try to educate each other on how to educate the rest.

This isn't going to be easy. But it's time for action. That action may mean building a fully parallel society and economy. Not Caesar's economy of the Fourth Reich. Just the economy of our community.

Do not think that liberty will be easy to protect. But believe that it will be a joy to engage. It really is. Dive into it, restore your soul, share some humor.

That's scary.

It sure as hell is. What's scarier is not resisting. You're here because you see those people. They're keeping their minds separate from their souls because somebody else told them that they should in order to succeed. It doesn't look pretty. Hopefully we can wake some of them out of the Matrix before it's too late.

You see those people. WTF are they even drinking?

Don't think that The Science™ is going to save us. Or the government. What you might have thought was a democracy was long ago replaced by unelected bureaucrats. I'm not saying that reprogramming the government is impossible, but we have to at least win the public relations war before that's possible. Don't wait on the physicians to listen to Peter McCullough, or Silicon Valley to declare Steve Kirsch their leader on a path back to sanity. Robert Kennedy wasn't winning this fight alone, which is why you're needed. They need your talents, and you need theirs. That's community.

Community is the Most Underrated Technology

And that's why we're going to win.

So, come join us. Just to talk.

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I got 6 out of 6 correct, but only after months of studying for the test. Probably not worth the A+ alone, but it's about the friends we made along the way, right?

The Bigger Picture

Much of the reason that a pandemic could be stretched to "max pain" is that the firehose of information achieves the effect of miseducating the public. Even worse, those in charge of the firehose point the finger at people like me and tell the public that we're the disinformation warriors. I've been banned from Facebook for roughly 100 of the past 300 days for crimes that range from sharing information from a meeting I joined in with an Indian Council of Medical Research physician, to showing a packet of ivermectin (out of India), and to stating that it's okay for parents to defend their children with force. 

After the wickedly sophisticated disinformation campaigns run through Big Tech, Big Media, and government offices, those caught in the headlights aren't going to bother to find out that I was averaging on the order of 500% trading returns for several years prior to dropping everything to research and write about pandemic nonsense (I probably lost half my friends and left 7-digits on the table these past 18 months). I should have negotiated better with the Kremlin, I guess.

So, what, if anything, could short-circuit such diabolical propaganda machinery? How can the public get a glimpse of all the absurdity? How do you educate people who cannot fathom that they've been miseducated? Fighting them over social media all day ain't gonna do squat [except in true edge cases]. We need solutions to challenging social problems that take into account the realities of brainwashing, groupthink, proxy-trust, social pressure, and maybe also gamification principles.

One way to do it is with a completely unforgiving quiz site. What better way to show a mirror to a narcissist than to quantitatively test their expertise? I'm dead serious and I think I'm going to build it (or more likely pay somebody to build it).

The idea is to take submissions of questions from those who are experts in the material, so long as they are willing to write up an informative response with full citation. Then build a database that includes a lot of questions that would be revealing of some of the many absurdities:

• The 99.5% of deaths from COVID-19 patients were unvaccinated statistic came from,

  • A government database,

  • A hospital network,

  • A CDC official made it up with no source or citation, later saying it was just a guess.

• In the WHO trials testing hydroxychloroquine, the 9.6g and 10.4g cumulative doses were chosen because,

  • These were the dosages published by most hospital systems.

  • These were the dosages used by Dr. Didier Raoult and Dr. Zev Zelenko.

  • These were the dosages suggested by the pharmacokinetic studies published on the trial website.

  • It is entirely unclear why these dosages were selected since those designing the trials called the initially proposed 4.4g doses "undoubtedly high".

• The reproduction number, R, for a virus is

  • The same in all environments.

  • Depends on the mutation rate of the virus.

  • Dependent on so many variables that it can range widely in different environments.

Perhaps the quiz items could be tagged with metadata to make it possible to create randomized topic-specific quizzes. That way, instead of debating that know-it-all volunteer propagandist or misguided dentist-turned-epidemiologist in your friend network, you can kindly drop a quiz challenge on them. You don't even need to let them know that their name and score will be permanently recorded upon completion of the quiz (that'll be acknowledge just below the name-entry box at the outset of the quiz, possibly tied to their social media account to ensure no hiding their performance).

1. Thoughts and improvements on the idea are absolutely welcome and encouraged. No idea should be put into production without taking or resisting a sound beating.

2. If you have the coding skills to frame the coding project and put it into production, email me at mathew.crawford@protonmail.com. Please include a bid for the contract. Understand that my budget cannot be lavish (this substack thing is kind of working, but I'm trying to run it currently to break even while paying researchers and developers for all their help, and making donations to those brave enough to blow the whistle on medical corruption), which is to say that I expect somebody taking the job to be invested in the outcome. I'm happy for the site to be an advertisement of their capability if they want to tag it as such.

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If you've never read Sun Tzu's The Art of War, you've surely seen it quoted. Maybe you've seen it on a shelf at the bookstore. Why have generals like Douglas MacArthur and Colin Powell, not to mention intelligence officials and business moguls, consistently praise the 2,500 Chinese relic in modern times?

Was that novel-sized book really written 2,500 years ago?

Those who have read the "book" already know the joke: The Art of War spans 13 short "chapters". And they're not really chapters: these were scrolls set up in a tent where a Chinese military general went to meditate on cultivated and curated. The books you see in stores are largely filled with one or another historian's perspective on the ancient texts.

Without ever reading the scrolls, you can fully understand how the English slaughtered a superior French army at Agincourt by picking the terrain that best leveraged the English longbows. It is unclear whether or not Prussian military minds who invented the goose step (Stechschritt) ever read a word Sun Tzu (or perhaps a collection of authors) wrote. There is nothing at all in The Art of War about stealth bombers or uranium-laden ordinance.

So, why do leaders who see themselves as part of---or potentially part of---battles still read The Art of War and express their appreciation for it like a religious text?

Because it's a religious text.

More accurately, The Art of War is mental software. The messages of the scrolls were succinct lessons collected from often tumultuous ancient Chinese military history. The goal of the general entering the tent was self-programming---lessons and reminders for overcoming personal failures to focus completely on the task of defeating their enemies. The Art of War goes beyond mere schooling. It helps the general to best know himself through meditation.

Deprogramming and Reprogramming People

Maybe the Prussian leaders read Sun Tzu after all. In 1763, by decree of Frederick the Great, all Prussian boys and girls aged 5 to 13 or 14 (presumably aside from the nobles whose children were mentored privately through classical training) were forced into tax-funded compulsory educational systems. The Prussian educational model is often described as being aimed at the economy-building needs inherent in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. But this is more a matter of the victors writing history than a complete description. Sure, the Humboldtian model of holistic study and research sounds like a platform for creative excellence, and surely it was to some who managed to maintain their agency, but the platform from which those students ascended was refined to ensure obedience and compliance to the state.

The history of warfare is one of military leaders solving a basic prisoner's dilemma. Each soldier facing a battle has a choice: to follow orders and fight---or to desert their post. The choice of one soldier would rarely affect any of history's battles, so defecting does little damage to one's comrades. Cooperation with one's own army in battle risks injury or death. So, military deserters have been historically harshly punished---even executed---to effectively regulate compliance. Commanders in ancient times threatened their own soldiers with swords to their backs during combat. During WW2, Russian barrier troops aimed machine gun fire behind the feet of charging soldiers. Cortez burned his ships so that his men had no choice but to defeat the Aztecs.

Frederick's solution was new to history. He wanted clockwork soldiers, following every order to perfection. The result proved to be deadly efficient military regimens as the hands of military puppeteers. The Prussian educational model ensured through a brutal disciplinary gauntlet that Prussian soldiers were incapable of conceiving of their own agency. Complete deprogramming resulted in the perfect soldier: ready for any program their commanders fed them. In tech-speak, Frederick's army was perhaps the first military computer network, and the first master-slave botnet.

Frederick the Great was a brilliant man in addition to being a monarch. That brilliance was necessary to elevate Prussia among the European nations that had grown rich through advances in trade via sailing technology. A musical composer, Frederick gained a reputation as an enlightened monarch. Perhaps this means something like, "Enlightenment for me, but not for thee."

Though lacking in the wealth of resources of the greater European nations of the time, Frederick's armies found a mixture of successes and failures over the course of dozens of battles. After a defeat at the hands of Napoleon, Frederick doubled-down on his educational system as a means of producing the best soldier drones. Prussian military successes grew and grew, and eventually Prussian forces succeeded in defeating Napoleon at Waterloo. Behind such military success, Prussia (eventually Germany) grew in stature among the world's most powerful nations.

The Enemies of Meditation

Every good American high school graduate and media consumer knows that meditation is that thing people in Asia do that makes them superior. Learning transcendental meditation from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi is probably what made the Beatles so cool. Is 'meditation' from sanskrit?

Hold on there, young'un. This is exactly where your education went wrong. To begin with, the word "meditate" comes from the Latin meditari, passed through Old French and pretty much every other proto-European language. The definitions of verb and noun forms include thinking, contemplation, thought, idea, planning, devising, preparation, intention, exercise/practice, study, rehearsal, custom, and habit. And before Latin, there were other words that existed in every language of every civilization, and likely most every tribe that survived more than a generation or two.

Sounds sort of like...education, don't it?

Better: self-guided education. Self-design. To meditate is to be human, as in free to pursue learning about one's own interests. There are many forms of meditation, and some noteworthy forms specify abandoning one's [selfish] interests, but perhaps that is a game theoretic lesson for another day. I may not fully understand divine enlightenment, but I'm positive that I can't fit it into one article. What I do know is that the only way for humans to share this glorious space together is for there to be more than one self-guided human left.

Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrring. Get up and move to another room. 

Train of thought disturbed? That means it's working.

Through the Prussian factory schooling model, most students largely stop thinking for themselves. Self-guidance is punished by those who tell you they love you as they beat you. It's the worst form of gas lighting. The students stop thinking that thinking is for them as a matter of self-preservation---to avoid traumatic dissociation. They learn to work at the behest of, and depend on, authorities. They are molded either in the image of the corporate army, or as consumers. The technocrats in Big Tech craft ever-more-precise levers to direct the human botnets handed to them by the system of public education. And that's why social media, like public schools, remain free of charge. Everyone inside is part of the product.

Nazi Right Educational Result

Disguised in the democratic language of "enlightenment" and "progressivism", the Prussian model made its way around the world. Through Horace Mann and a cadre of America's biggest oligarchs, the Prussian model gradually became the American model over a few decades, and in time also made its way to Japan. Is it any wonder that where factory-model obedience training went, the nations that dominated the Great War evolved?

Following WW1, a broken German nation of productive if directionless drones, in need of a programmer, fell into the hands of the dynamic Adolf Hitler. Though we're taught that Hitler was a painter, the young film buff sought a career in acting where perhaps he learned to hack into audiences in need of a program. He cultivated friendships with directors and other actors whose crafts laid the groundwork for the inventively evil propaganda machine with which the Nazi Party disguised its murderous conquest.

Perhaps the only possible result of deprogramming and reprogramming children is that they grow up to fall in behind whatever authority figure best controls the primary means of mass communication.

That Could Never Happen to Us

Can you imagine doctors telling people to stay home during a pandemic using no medicine at all until they get sicker despite hundreds of scientific studies pointing to an array of options of varying positive efficacy?

Can you imagine public perception of medicine turning violently partisan prior to any trials reaching conclusions?

Can you imagine trusting a World Health Organization (WHO) not run by a doctor, but by a Marxist revolutionary?

Can you imagine any scientist or doctor looking at the design of the WHO experimental treatment protocols and concluding that those trials concluded anything about the optimal use of medicine?

Can you imagine that the Surgisphere paper managed to fool all the world's public health experts?

Can you imagine the founder of one of the world's top medical research institutes not recognizing the conclusion of a paper stating the exact opposite result of the data?

Can you imagine a nonsense paper becoming one of the most influential during the entire pandemic without one single statistician or mathematician pointing out that it's nonsense?

Can you imagine a paper with so many wrong and seemingly made-up numbers jumping off the page getting published? And still not retracted?

Can you imagine all of this nonsense and all of that nonsense happening without the sophisticated mass programming of a large population?

Can you imagine thinking that during a busy pandemic that doctors have time to figure out how to use an antiquated and notorious clunky database to the point that data is not substantially underreported?

Can you imagine thinking that statistics that mute each other are more important than sheer magnitude of numbers when it comes to pharmacovigilance?

Can you imagine American medical authorities using the Nuremberg Code as toilet paper?

The problem is that either you missed it (falsely projecting your agency and sanity onto others) or else were too outnumbered to even talk about it. Directed insanity is precisely the result of our education system. It's a feature, not a bug. And the worst part about it is that the only people allowed in on the game are the willing tools of the Kunlangeta.

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When It All Breaks Down, Who's Going to Fix It?

Make no mistake, totalitarian control or not, the system breaks eventually. The focus on asymmetric technologies of domination comes at the expense of economic growth. Chile found out quickly. The Soviets found out slowly. The Sino-American-corporate triad, however one might describe it, will leave a crater where it lands. But fall it will. The days of the dollar will come to an end. When it does, there will be a lot of feral drones let loose on the world. Perhaps that will be humanity's doom?

Not likely. So long as some people remain who can teach their children to meditate---to learn---a wealthier, more productive, and more free civilization will rise in the ashes of the old empire. How you participate in that is your choice.

But this isn't just another red pill moment. It's a collective action moment. A network will achieve more survivors than preppers in glorified backyard tin cans dotting the landscape. To be continued...

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Note the depth of conversation that springs forth from just one excellent passage from one of Gatto's books. Gatto was a pioneer, and if humanity has an excellent opportunity to pass through the great portal ahead of us and emerge from the other side of the Wars of Wars greater, the Gatto attitude may emerge as a general phenomenon. This is the psychic healing we need for the world's children---particularly here in the West and wealthy nations where the Prussian education model has dominated for so long: turning children into cogs to help the machinery function. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Things Are Breaking. Education is Breaking.

It doesn't take a genius to recognize that the world has entered a state of flux. I believe people are still entirely confused because they have mostly been working with the wrong model for so long. By that I mean that the world (or "society" at least) is not what most anyone thought it was. Parents are screaming at school boards not understanding that these are stacked with people long since committed to selling out their communities (or moved there to sell them out), and loyal to centralized authoritarians. Noblesse oblige was never an operating principle.

Whether or not my own model is exactly right (it evolves), what is clear is that it's breaking now. The kinds of betrayal of trust we are living through are not the kind a society comes back from. The long list of absurdities (here and here, not that this is more than a tiny fraction) are too hard to ignore, and those in the know are laughing about them.

Whatever happens next, the wise will take it upon themselves to be responsible for the education of their children.

Read that sentence again. And then again. If it doesn't come naturally, say it every day until it's natural. That means you've escaped, and your children can be free again.

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My Vocation in Education

From an early time in childhood, I felt that much was deeply wrong with our educational system. The feeling was so strong that by the age of 12, I vowed to devote my life to doing something about it. One of the plans I formed was to rewrite mathematics curriculum, which I did help with. After deciding that online resources were well in place for those students who needed them, I decided that "Culture is the primary technology" needed a push, so I spent nine years running brick-and-mortar educational centers in Alabama and Texas, though too few adults understood what needed to be done enough to support and help the process. True complete success requires a community effort, and there wasn't a clear path toward educating the adults.

I plan to talk much more about my educational philosophy in future articles, but for the moment, I want to introduce myself as an educator by dropping this talk I gave with the 1517 Fund during the early weeks of the pandemic. I hope that some of you enjoy it. I called it Math Education: Why the Star Trek Future Isn’t What You Think.

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