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Jun. 26th, 2025 12:42 amWhen you're familiar with a few elements contributing to the problem, the way Techbros talk about AI starts to make sense. But you have to know what's contributing.
So this is one that a lot of people are familiar with, because most people went to public school and witnessed first-hand the horror of it. But I'm not just talking about public school; I'm talking about pedagogy, which is the word for what method you use to teach students. With one exception, all pedagogy is based in religion or other non-scientific worldviews. I like to call this the "world of should". The world SHOULD work like x, people SHOULD work like y. Well they don't. The "teacher lectures, you take notes" model has remained unchanged for thousands of years--despite huge developments in the fields of psychology, child psychology, paediatric and adolescent health, and other fields that you'd THINK would be relevant to pedagogy as they are about how people, including children, learn.
What's the exception? Montessori. Dr Montessori used evidence-based science to design her curriculum, and developed and improved it using more and more of that throughout her life; after her death, the schools for teachers and the associations that use her methods improved on them more using the same evidence-based science. There were still other schools that didn't use her entire method, only taking bits and pieces--those schools, like Waldorf for example, often try to associate themselves with Montessori, but they are not accredited and do not have the same rigorous training given to Montessori teachers, nor do they base their pedagogy on evidence-based science. They just use different, newer religious beliefs to fuel their pedagogy--usually New Age type stuff.
If you've never BEEN to a Montessori school, you don't understand the difference here. If you were raised inside a religion, you do not understand the difference here. Montessori centres the child, and puts into praxis the concept of children having human rights and being full persons from birth, and Dr Montessori advocated for children's rights for her entire life, making it a part of her address to the first meeting of UNESCO. Though a Declaration on the Rights of the Child had been approved by the League of Nations in 1924, and was even displayed in every school in France, it didn't change the way children were educated. Dr Montessori started her career being given the class of disabled children that the school she worked for had given up on--this was not a woman who started her career with children that everybody found easy to teach or even love, but with those of us who are even now often given up on, abandoned, and forgotten in institutions. She started with us, disabled kids. Special needs kids. Montessori is ENTIRELY based on what works for EVERYONE.
And what is that? Well, play. Showing children how stuff works with models they can touch and manipulate and interact with. Cooperation. Mixed age groups. Peers being allowed and encouraged to teach peers or youngers (or olders!). Teachers not being authoritarian figures but helpers who encourage children to have their own opinions and ideas. Children taking care of their own classroom together by sharing chores they are taught how to do.
You are taught how to do EVERYTHING, in Montessori--and if you're struggling, you can ask for help and get it! There is no homework, you do things in the classroom where there's a teacher available or a friend to help you if you need it. There is a great value placed on teaching children how to be persons over teaching x amount of math and testing. So, you learn not just what you're learning, but also how to teach and explain it to other people, and that you have a right to get help and that your fellow people in this world are friends to work with, not enemies to compete with. You are given enough support that you can struggle but also get help, and know the reward of finally grasping a new thing.
You learn, in a word, how to be human.
Contrast this with the way we encourage competition from birth in other schooling, we punish children for deviating from the lesson plan, we punish them for falling behind, we punish them for speaking, we punish them for having the wrong answer, for asking for help, for not knowing, for knowing too much, for questioning, for exploring. We punish, punish, punish! It seems the thing a shocking number of adults hate more than anything in the whole world is children. Is it any wonder that Matilda is such a favourite book?
We also teach them that other people are enemies. We do this by separating age groups strictly, having grades, large classroom sizes, and most work being done at home; and punishing children for trying to help one another in the classroom. We also treat abuse as a separate totally fine thing when kids do it to other kids. We have a word for it and everything: bullying.
Children do not learn how to learn. They don't learn how to teach, or explain what they know. They don't learn that other people know things they don't, or have experiences they don't, that their experience and perception isn't universal. They don't learn the reward of learning or getting better at something after struggle.
Take a look at a photograph of Paris or Florence or Mexico City. Right away you'll notice there's a fuckload of art everywhere, from street performers to statues and architecture. Now look at the average US city. Nothing. The buildings don't even have ornaments, most places. It's just boxes and signs and advertisements--which don't contain art anymore. Sure, some cities have one big piece that's famous--the Bean for example, or the Arch, or the Bridge or something like that. But these are huge structures in a desert of boxes and ads. But it goes farther than that, that's only a symptom of the problem.
We don't value art, in this country. We don't think art is important. For all the entertainment we make, it's just that--entertainment. It's made by people only interested in making money, rather than being made to say something, or to decorate something, the way that Art is. You can see Art happen despite these mercenary goals, but that art has a huge price tag--I recently went to see a touring broadway show, and it cost me $400 and driving about 2 hours. That art is not available to everyone, and as progressive as Broadway is in comparison to Hollywood, it's not nearly as accessible as movies. And while community theatres exist in MOST communities, they are poorly funded and not well-patroned. People just don't go see a play on a saturday night the way they see a movie. We don't give the arts funding, we have been drumming STEM STEM STEM into kids heads for a couple decades now, all while media has gotten easier and easier to not pay for, making it seem like it costs nothing to make.
If you aren't taught what art IS and the history of humans making art, and the reason humans make art, you're not going to know any of that. If you aren't given opportunity and instruction on how to make your own art, you will never know how much effort and skill it takes to make art either, and will have no sense of context, no ability to analyse, no ability to engage with art in a way that values it. With how art is simply not taught at all, kids are limited to whatever they pick up from the world around them. Sometimes they get lucky, and live in one of the few places in the country that has a lot of art, or they have parents that value art and know to show them art and talk with them about it; but leaving it up the chance means a lot of kids are stuck growing up in ugly places devoid of not just art but natural beauty.
Do you know what therapy actually does? No really, do you know what a therapist is supposed to do for you? None of us really get told what it is we're supposed to expect from therapy, and that means we have very little idea of how to tell a good therapist from a bad one.
Therapy is a class to teach you about how brains work and teach you skills for how to manage your thoughts and emotions. That's it. It's a class. A therapist is a teacher. And most of those skills and ideas are those that we can only access if we go to therapy, even though they're skills that we need to navigate life.
One of these ideas that most people do not have is called Theory of Mind. Theory of Mind is the idea that your experience of reality is not universal, that YOU are different from OTHER PEOPLE. That YOU know things OTHER PEOPLE do not, and OTHER PEOPLE know things YOU do not. Other people may be feelings things YOU are not. YOU may be feeling things other people do not. Etc etc. It's the first thing the therapist has to teach most people.
This is just one of many, many things that people should be taught from birth, other examples being: how to de-escalate, how to understand emotions, dealing with trauma, advocating for one's rights, understanding boundaries, communicating clearly with words and body language, and on and on. Things that we are ONLY taught if we go to a therapist, which is often behind layers of barriers such as money, time, and shame.
Do you have a hobby? Most people my age and younger will say they don't have the time, or will say they like "watching movies" or "listening to music" or "hanging out with friends". These are not hobbies. A hobby, to quote Bob Ross, is an applied interest. A hobby is something that requires some amount of skill-building, such as knitting, making model planes, or playing the guitar. Most hobbies are some form of creative skill, or employ creative skills in combination with social activity (such as the SCA, Camping, or playing soccer).
Having a hobby requires time and money, which most people no longer have; even kids from rich families do not have time in a lot of cases, because kids have been pressured more and more academically and have been burdened with more and more homework as years have gone on. I hear now that it's getting to where kids are given so much, in some places, that it is not humanly possible for them to get it all done and still get even one hour of sleep. And most adults are working 2 and 3 jobs just to barely scrape the rent and car payments together, if that. "Nobody has time for hobbies" is seen as sad, but not catastrophic--after all, hobbies don't teach you anything useful.
Well, they do. They teach you to practise a skill and show you the reward of getting better at something that is hard to get good at. They teach you the value of struggling through being bad at things, and how in order to get good at something, you have to enjoy the process of doing it, not being good at it but just doing it at all, whether you're bad OR good. They're very good for stress and I would argue they're a form of play, they often create art, and play and art are the whole point of being in a society.
Men are denied friendship. Friendship requires vulnerability, and men are not allowed to be vulnerable, that's sissy stuff. So men don't have friends, and they don't know how to make them, and they don't tell the friends they have that they consider that person a friend, and they don't know how to maintain relationships, and on and on and on. Men are not given affection past a certain age, because 'you're a man now'. Men are not allowed to cry past a certain age, because 'you're a man now' and so on. This results in men who are socially malnourished and starving for any form of affection, because they're told the ONLY person they can ask for affection from is a sexual partner and that the ONLY form of affection they are allowed to have is sexual gratification. And then we throw them a further restriction that they're ONLY allowed to have ONE partner.
And then they just create feedback loops that reinforce all of this. But if you isolate someone like that, and malnourish them, they're gonna get really fucking hostile and unstable. Like REALLY unstable. And they're gonna have some pretty weird ways of interacting with other people, that are very aggressive, hostile, and miserable. This also means that any social mileu dominated by men is going to reinforce this toxic masculinity. Places like, say, tech, which is dominated by not just men, but men who have been told they are failures of masculinity.
Ok, let's review.
The way we teach children and what we DON'T teach them, the devaluing and non-presence of art, and the lack of interpersonal and behavioural skills results in an inability to understand:
1. That your experiences--all of them--are not universal.
2. That in order to learn something, most people need it taught to them--this includes explaining the concept multiple ways, using metaphors or similes, models, diagrams, and patience to walk someone through something you already know all these different ways.
3. That there is value in enjoying the process of doing something, even if you aren't very good at it, and there is value in persisting to practise that thing so that you can improve your skills.
I have observed that, over and over, people enmeshed in coding end up in a kind of weird combination of a negative feedback loop and an echo chamber. It isn't JUST one of these things above contributing to that; it's all of them interacting with each other.
And that's why you get guys very earnestly trying to describe how cool it is to be able to create songs at the push of a button, with zero effort, and just as earnestly not understanding why anyone would actually ENJOY practising something and making the music their own self. That's why you get people who can't tell when a video or image is AI. That's why you get people who do not understand how AI is not at all the same thing as art.
AI is really highlighting the catastrophic failures that have led us to this point. But those failures started a long, long time ago.
1. The sorry state of schooling
So this is one that a lot of people are familiar with, because most people went to public school and witnessed first-hand the horror of it. But I'm not just talking about public school; I'm talking about pedagogy, which is the word for what method you use to teach students. With one exception, all pedagogy is based in religion or other non-scientific worldviews. I like to call this the "world of should". The world SHOULD work like x, people SHOULD work like y. Well they don't. The "teacher lectures, you take notes" model has remained unchanged for thousands of years--despite huge developments in the fields of psychology, child psychology, paediatric and adolescent health, and other fields that you'd THINK would be relevant to pedagogy as they are about how people, including children, learn.
What's the exception? Montessori. Dr Montessori used evidence-based science to design her curriculum, and developed and improved it using more and more of that throughout her life; after her death, the schools for teachers and the associations that use her methods improved on them more using the same evidence-based science. There were still other schools that didn't use her entire method, only taking bits and pieces--those schools, like Waldorf for example, often try to associate themselves with Montessori, but they are not accredited and do not have the same rigorous training given to Montessori teachers, nor do they base their pedagogy on evidence-based science. They just use different, newer religious beliefs to fuel their pedagogy--usually New Age type stuff.
If you've never BEEN to a Montessori school, you don't understand the difference here. If you were raised inside a religion, you do not understand the difference here. Montessori centres the child, and puts into praxis the concept of children having human rights and being full persons from birth, and Dr Montessori advocated for children's rights for her entire life, making it a part of her address to the first meeting of UNESCO. Though a Declaration on the Rights of the Child had been approved by the League of Nations in 1924, and was even displayed in every school in France, it didn't change the way children were educated. Dr Montessori started her career being given the class of disabled children that the school she worked for had given up on--this was not a woman who started her career with children that everybody found easy to teach or even love, but with those of us who are even now often given up on, abandoned, and forgotten in institutions. She started with us, disabled kids. Special needs kids. Montessori is ENTIRELY based on what works for EVERYONE.
And what is that? Well, play. Showing children how stuff works with models they can touch and manipulate and interact with. Cooperation. Mixed age groups. Peers being allowed and encouraged to teach peers or youngers (or olders!). Teachers not being authoritarian figures but helpers who encourage children to have their own opinions and ideas. Children taking care of their own classroom together by sharing chores they are taught how to do.
You are taught how to do EVERYTHING, in Montessori--and if you're struggling, you can ask for help and get it! There is no homework, you do things in the classroom where there's a teacher available or a friend to help you if you need it. There is a great value placed on teaching children how to be persons over teaching x amount of math and testing. So, you learn not just what you're learning, but also how to teach and explain it to other people, and that you have a right to get help and that your fellow people in this world are friends to work with, not enemies to compete with. You are given enough support that you can struggle but also get help, and know the reward of finally grasping a new thing.
You learn, in a word, how to be human.
Contrast this with the way we encourage competition from birth in other schooling, we punish children for deviating from the lesson plan, we punish them for falling behind, we punish them for speaking, we punish them for having the wrong answer, for asking for help, for not knowing, for knowing too much, for questioning, for exploring. We punish, punish, punish! It seems the thing a shocking number of adults hate more than anything in the whole world is children. Is it any wonder that Matilda is such a favourite book?
We also teach them that other people are enemies. We do this by separating age groups strictly, having grades, large classroom sizes, and most work being done at home; and punishing children for trying to help one another in the classroom. We also treat abuse as a separate totally fine thing when kids do it to other kids. We have a word for it and everything: bullying.
Children do not learn how to learn. They don't learn how to teach, or explain what they know. They don't learn that other people know things they don't, or have experiences they don't, that their experience and perception isn't universal. They don't learn the reward of learning or getting better at something after struggle.
2. Devaluation of the Arts and Absence of Public Art in most of the US.
Take a look at a photograph of Paris or Florence or Mexico City. Right away you'll notice there's a fuckload of art everywhere, from street performers to statues and architecture. Now look at the average US city. Nothing. The buildings don't even have ornaments, most places. It's just boxes and signs and advertisements--which don't contain art anymore. Sure, some cities have one big piece that's famous--the Bean for example, or the Arch, or the Bridge or something like that. But these are huge structures in a desert of boxes and ads. But it goes farther than that, that's only a symptom of the problem.
We don't value art, in this country. We don't think art is important. For all the entertainment we make, it's just that--entertainment. It's made by people only interested in making money, rather than being made to say something, or to decorate something, the way that Art is. You can see Art happen despite these mercenary goals, but that art has a huge price tag--I recently went to see a touring broadway show, and it cost me $400 and driving about 2 hours. That art is not available to everyone, and as progressive as Broadway is in comparison to Hollywood, it's not nearly as accessible as movies. And while community theatres exist in MOST communities, they are poorly funded and not well-patroned. People just don't go see a play on a saturday night the way they see a movie. We don't give the arts funding, we have been drumming STEM STEM STEM into kids heads for a couple decades now, all while media has gotten easier and easier to not pay for, making it seem like it costs nothing to make.
If you aren't taught what art IS and the history of humans making art, and the reason humans make art, you're not going to know any of that. If you aren't given opportunity and instruction on how to make your own art, you will never know how much effort and skill it takes to make art either, and will have no sense of context, no ability to analyse, no ability to engage with art in a way that values it. With how art is simply not taught at all, kids are limited to whatever they pick up from the world around them. Sometimes they get lucky, and live in one of the few places in the country that has a lot of art, or they have parents that value art and know to show them art and talk with them about it; but leaving it up the chance means a lot of kids are stuck growing up in ugly places devoid of not just art but natural beauty.
3. Zero psychological education for the masses.
Do you know what therapy actually does? No really, do you know what a therapist is supposed to do for you? None of us really get told what it is we're supposed to expect from therapy, and that means we have very little idea of how to tell a good therapist from a bad one.
Therapy is a class to teach you about how brains work and teach you skills for how to manage your thoughts and emotions. That's it. It's a class. A therapist is a teacher. And most of those skills and ideas are those that we can only access if we go to therapy, even though they're skills that we need to navigate life.
One of these ideas that most people do not have is called Theory of Mind. Theory of Mind is the idea that your experience of reality is not universal, that YOU are different from OTHER PEOPLE. That YOU know things OTHER PEOPLE do not, and OTHER PEOPLE know things YOU do not. Other people may be feelings things YOU are not. YOU may be feeling things other people do not. Etc etc. It's the first thing the therapist has to teach most people.
This is just one of many, many things that people should be taught from birth, other examples being: how to de-escalate, how to understand emotions, dealing with trauma, advocating for one's rights, understanding boundaries, communicating clearly with words and body language, and on and on. Things that we are ONLY taught if we go to a therapist, which is often behind layers of barriers such as money, time, and shame.
4. We do not value play, fun, or hobbies.
Do you have a hobby? Most people my age and younger will say they don't have the time, or will say they like "watching movies" or "listening to music" or "hanging out with friends". These are not hobbies. A hobby, to quote Bob Ross, is an applied interest. A hobby is something that requires some amount of skill-building, such as knitting, making model planes, or playing the guitar. Most hobbies are some form of creative skill, or employ creative skills in combination with social activity (such as the SCA, Camping, or playing soccer).
Having a hobby requires time and money, which most people no longer have; even kids from rich families do not have time in a lot of cases, because kids have been pressured more and more academically and have been burdened with more and more homework as years have gone on. I hear now that it's getting to where kids are given so much, in some places, that it is not humanly possible for them to get it all done and still get even one hour of sleep. And most adults are working 2 and 3 jobs just to barely scrape the rent and car payments together, if that. "Nobody has time for hobbies" is seen as sad, but not catastrophic--after all, hobbies don't teach you anything useful.
Well, they do. They teach you to practise a skill and show you the reward of getting better at something that is hard to get good at. They teach you the value of struggling through being bad at things, and how in order to get good at something, you have to enjoy the process of doing it, not being good at it but just doing it at all, whether you're bad OR good. They're very good for stress and I would argue they're a form of play, they often create art, and play and art are the whole point of being in a society.
5. Toxic Masculinity
Men are denied friendship. Friendship requires vulnerability, and men are not allowed to be vulnerable, that's sissy stuff. So men don't have friends, and they don't know how to make them, and they don't tell the friends they have that they consider that person a friend, and they don't know how to maintain relationships, and on and on and on. Men are not given affection past a certain age, because 'you're a man now'. Men are not allowed to cry past a certain age, because 'you're a man now' and so on. This results in men who are socially malnourished and starving for any form of affection, because they're told the ONLY person they can ask for affection from is a sexual partner and that the ONLY form of affection they are allowed to have is sexual gratification. And then we throw them a further restriction that they're ONLY allowed to have ONE partner.
And then they just create feedback loops that reinforce all of this. But if you isolate someone like that, and malnourish them, they're gonna get really fucking hostile and unstable. Like REALLY unstable. And they're gonna have some pretty weird ways of interacting with other people, that are very aggressive, hostile, and miserable. This also means that any social mileu dominated by men is going to reinforce this toxic masculinity. Places like, say, tech, which is dominated by not just men, but men who have been told they are failures of masculinity.
Ok, let's review.
The way we teach children and what we DON'T teach them, the devaluing and non-presence of art, and the lack of interpersonal and behavioural skills results in an inability to understand:
1. That your experiences--all of them--are not universal.
2. That in order to learn something, most people need it taught to them--this includes explaining the concept multiple ways, using metaphors or similes, models, diagrams, and patience to walk someone through something you already know all these different ways.
3. That there is value in enjoying the process of doing something, even if you aren't very good at it, and there is value in persisting to practise that thing so that you can improve your skills.
I have observed that, over and over, people enmeshed in coding end up in a kind of weird combination of a negative feedback loop and an echo chamber. It isn't JUST one of these things above contributing to that; it's all of them interacting with each other.
And that's why you get guys very earnestly trying to describe how cool it is to be able to create songs at the push of a button, with zero effort, and just as earnestly not understanding why anyone would actually ENJOY practising something and making the music their own self. That's why you get people who can't tell when a video or image is AI. That's why you get people who do not understand how AI is not at all the same thing as art.
AI is really highlighting the catastrophic failures that have led us to this point. But those failures started a long, long time ago.
