On the educational-financial feedback structure of Intelliland.
The recent discovery of a long separated human civilization on Intelliland, and their advanced technologies has shocked the whole world, we assumed every square mile was accounted for since the surface of the globe is essentially a sphere, entirely mapped by satellites, but to avoid repeating what everyone already knows first from their own announcement (shared in all spoken languages), and then repeated at nauseam in the news.
We will ignore their motives for staying invisible for so long and instead focus on just one aspect of their civilization: education. In the dataset about their society (their full history, politics, science, law, ...) we have chosen to focus on their education system, precisely because we are all dazzled by their superior technologies. How did they pull this off with such a low population count? Why did we fail achieving similar scientific and technological growth rates in what is now commonly referred to as the "outer dumbosphere" ?
Given the huge size of their documentation of their educational system, we decided to focus on just a single aspect: curriculum determination.
How did the inhabitants of Intelliland decide what information to teach to the next generation, as well as each other?
It turns out that they didn't. You read this right, we also couldn't believe it, but it's true, they didn't. There was no committee, no dictator to decide what the next generation should be indoctrinated with, but also no democratic system to decide what to teach the next generation (and indeed each other, which will become clear to the reader).
Their educational system uses targets so simple, and a mechanism for valuing such targets displayed such minimalism it boggles the mind.
So how did they decide on what factoids to include in their curricula? To answer that question, we first have to stress they didn't use curricula in the sense that we understand it. But they did use the concept of statements, or factoids as we might call them in the outer dumbosphere.
Each factoid was assigned an income value: as long as you could prove you could reproduce the factoid on their proctoring systems (basically computers in rooms where one isn't allowed to bring in cheat sheets etc.) then that income value would be received by the citizen, on top of whatever they earn otherwise.
An example might be "commutativity of addition: a + b = b + a" any citizen capable of reproducing it might receive say 10 cents that month (I made up this example and value for demonstrative purpouses).
All knowledge (true or false, factual or fictional) could be entered and assigned some income value. There were no curricula (a note on the combining coefficients later) per se.
The reader, like us, will certainly not be impressed by this explanation: it sounds like a philosophical definition trick, what does one call a "curriculum", and who sets the values?
Again, it turns out no committee sets the income values, nor the values for the combining coefficients.
Every citizen is encouraged to report which statements they know (they can select of indicate those claims at home and schedule the checking for the next time they make time to go to a proctoring facility). Of course they will select the higher value statements in their knowledge, so commutativity of addition is seldom demonstrated in the proctoring facilities (unless one is still just learning as a child).
There is thus an incentive to report your knowledge.
The citizens have historically organized sometimes as a mixture of private entrepreneurs, government employees or private sector employees, in different proportions, but we stayed focused on the "curriculum selection feedback mechanism" so we refer the curious reader to the Intelliland documentation archives if they wish to learn more.
Some citizens earn more than other citizens, and nearly all turn out to work in the knowledge economy, given that their society is highly automated. Working under the assumption that statistically a smarter person will earn money faster, a strong direct feedback is that whatever high-income earners provably understand has a higher likelihood of helping achieve higher income. To translate it more vulgarly: a safety engineer will earn a lot more than a quack shaman, and thus the beliefs of the safety engineer enjoy higher associated rewards than the beliefs of the quack shaman. This encourages the next generation, but also the quack shaman to learn and demonstrate similar knowledge as the safety engineer in order to enjoy more income. This is the direct feedback term. It is important to stress that for calculating the value of a factoid, one doesn't correlate with a citizens total income: part on applying skills and part on proving knowledge; to calculate the value of skills one correlates with the income earned by work, not by study, to prevent open loop amplification of factoid values.
There is also an indirect feedback term: since their society tracks the proclaimed most valuable beliefs, and since their society tracks each financial transaction it can backpropagate this value signal instantly (somehow both the belief testing as well as the financial transactions are kept private but still accountable through the use of cryptography, but that was above the feeble mind of the authors of this text...)
As another artificial example for us in the outer dumbosphere: suppose you book a flight with a certain company, then their society knows how much fuel the company buys, what people worked in that fuel industry and what their knowledge was, so every time anyone books a flight the income value for a lot of chemistry factoids is automatically increased. But also metallurgy factoids since the company bought that plane. And Navier-Stokes equations since the plane manufacturer hires physicists and engineers, and so on. The government doesn't need to know the price of the fuel per liter, or the price of airplanes per piece, it just sees money flowed from the company to people with certain provable knowledge of factoids, and the value of such factoids is thus increased according to usage measured in expense rates.
When the system was first to be attempted in Intelliland there was a lot of fear of economists and other elite positions negatively affecting the previously manually selected curricula. Some pointed out that it didn't matter since that would self-correct: to the extent elites were effectively freeloading on the lower classes, the freeloading tricks, and financial parlance and euphemisms surrounding it would become decentralized public knowledge and then their democracy would start closing all the loopholes in their system essentially overnight, and that is precisely what happened: the population saw how simple and manipulative the games of the elites were and just closed those loopholes. And from then on genuine factoids started rising in value so quick even the ex-elites weren't bitter: although they had to get accustomed to life-long study, this actually gave them more self-confidence and their perceived need to freeload on top of others diminished as their new gained knowledge gave them confidence in life.
Just like one can measure the correlation between citizens knowledge of a factoid with their income, one can correlate combinations of knowledge with their income: reproducing the Navier Stokes equation without understanding the continuity equation makes no sense, so it is important to also automagically determine the values for combination coefficients, and they are actually computed in exactly the same way, even though the formulas look a bit more complicated.
A crucial consequence for explaining their absurd scientific and technological growth rates is that the financial feedback is not just highly reflective of value to society, it is also nearly instantaneous: here in the outer dumbosphere, if an engineer or physicist (or a group of them) had a crucial insight, then as soon as this factoid was capitalized, its income value would rise, and students could immediately learn from the state of the art. No waiting for generations until the knowledge has entered textbooks, and then waiting until professors hopefully acknowledge the importance and value, and so on. In the outer dumbosphere it could take decades, sometimes centuries for breakthroughs to end up in widespread study materials.
So it turns out there is no need for committee's deciding curricula, like guardians of the sacred truth, there is no need for experts to assess the value of each factoid. All You Need Is Correlation.
To a large degree I agree with him. He gets one radically wrong, though--unions. He's attributing to unions the post-war boom that was actually due to the US having the only industrialized economy that had not been smashed by the war. Effectively a monopoly--of course we did good. But the unions take credit for it.
And it's the very problem he's talking about that has caused the "decline" of the American worker--it's no longer a group selected from those in the best position, now it's a group of all.
Unfortunately, he's right about our economy lacking enough jobs for those without sufficient academic prowess, even though he's wrong about what became of those jobs. (Reality: I've seen it--over 20+ years I watched my former employer increase productivity per labor hour about 5x. We were growing, this didn't cause any layoffs. It was the machinery that mattered--jobs were moving from doing a somewhat skilled operation by hand to feeding a machine that could do better on standardized stuff. The skilled operations were mostly for customers that wanted oddball stuff, plus some of us whose job was making the hardware and software.)
Unions were a big part of what kept the proceeds of that economic boom from accruing benefits almost exclusively to those already at the top. And helped sustain said boom by ensuring a much larger swath of the population had disposable income to grow a consumption economy.
On the educational-financial feedback structure of Intelliland.
The recent discovery of a long separated human civilization on Intelliland, and their advanced technologies has shocked the whole world, we assumed every square mile was accounted for since the surface of the globe is essentially a sphere, entirely mapped by satellites, but to avoid repeating what everyone already knows first from their own announcement (shared in all spoken languages), and then repeated at nauseam in the news.
We will ignore their motives for staying invisible for so long and instead focus on just one aspect of their civilization: education. In the dataset about their society (their full history, politics, science, law, ...) we have chosen to focus on their education system, precisely because we are all dazzled by their superior technologies. How did they pull this off with such a low population count? Why did we fail achieving similar scientific and technological growth rates in what is now commonly referred to as the "outer dumbosphere" ?
Given the huge size of their documentation of their educational system, we decided to focus on just a single aspect: curriculum determination.
How did the inhabitants of Intelliland decide what information to teach to the next generation, as well as each other?
It turns out that they didn't. You read this right, we also couldn't believe it, but it's true, they didn't. There was no committee, no dictator to decide what the next generation should be indoctrinated with, but also no democratic system to decide what to teach the next generation (and indeed each other, which will become clear to the reader).
Their educational system uses targets so simple, and a mechanism for valuing such targets displayed such minimalism it boggles the mind.
So how did they decide on what factoids to include in their curricula? To answer that question, we first have to stress they didn't use curricula in the sense that we understand it. But they did use the concept of statements, or factoids as we might call them in the outer dumbosphere.
Each factoid was assigned an income value: as long as you could prove you could reproduce the factoid on their proctoring systems (basically computers in rooms where one isn't allowed to bring in cheat sheets etc.) then that income value would be received by the citizen, on top of whatever they earn otherwise.
An example might be "commutativity of addition: a + b = b + a" any citizen capable of reproducing it might receive say 10 cents that month (I made up this example and value for demonstrative purpouses).
All knowledge (true or false, factual or fictional) could be entered and assigned some income value. There were no curricula (a note on the combining coefficients later) per se.
The reader, like us, will certainly not be impressed by this explanation: it sounds like a philosophical definition trick, what does one call a "curriculum", and who sets the values?
Again, it turns out no committee sets the income values, nor the values for the combining coefficients.
Every citizen is encouraged to report which statements they know (they can select of indicate those claims at home and schedule the checking for the next time they make time to go to a proctoring facility). Of course they will select the higher value statements in their knowledge, so commutativity of addition is seldom demonstrated in the proctoring facilities (unless one is still just learning as a child).
There is thus an incentive to report your knowledge.
The citizens have historically organized sometimes as a mixture of private entrepreneurs, government employees or private sector employees, in different proportions, but we stayed focused on the "curriculum selection feedback mechanism" so we refer the curious reader to the Intelliland documentation archives if they wish to learn more.
Some citizens earn more than other citizens, and nearly all turn out to work in the knowledge economy, given that their society is highly automated. Working under the assumption that statistically a smarter person will earn money faster, a strong direct feedback is that whatever high-income earners provably understand has a higher likelihood of helping achieve higher income. To translate it more vulgarly: a safety engineer will earn a lot more than a quack shaman, and thus the beliefs of the safety engineer enjoy higher associated rewards than the beliefs of the quack shaman. This encourages the next generation, but also the quack shaman to learn and demonstrate similar knowledge as the safety engineer in order to enjoy more income. This is the direct feedback term. It is important to stress that for calculating the value of a factoid, one doesn't correlate with a citizens total income: part on applying skills and part on proving knowledge; to calculate the value of skills one correlates with the income earned by work, not by study, to prevent open loop amplification of factoid values.
There is also an indirect feedback term: since their society tracks the proclaimed most valuable beliefs, and since their society tracks each financial transaction it can backpropagate this value signal instantly (somehow both the belief testing as well as the financial transactions are kept private but still accountable through the use of cryptography, but that was above the feeble mind of the authors of this text...)
As another artificial example for us in the outer dumbosphere: suppose you book a flight with a certain company, then their society knows how much fuel the company buys, what people worked in that fuel industry and what their knowledge was, so every time anyone books a flight the income value for a lot of chemistry factoids is automatically increased. But also metallurgy factoids since the company bought that plane. And Navier-Stokes equations since the plane manufacturer hires physicists and engineers, and so on. The government doesn't need to know the price of the fuel per liter, or the price of airplanes per piece, it just sees money flowed from the company to people with certain provable knowledge of factoids, and the value of such factoids is thus increased according to usage measured in expense rates.
When the system was first to be attempted in Intelliland there was a lot of fear of economists and other elite positions negatively affecting the previously manually selected curricula. Some pointed out that it didn't matter since that would self-correct: to the extent elites were effectively freeloading on the lower classes, the freeloading tricks, and financial parlance and euphemisms surrounding it would become decentralized public knowledge and then their democracy would start closing all the loopholes in their system essentially overnight, and that is precisely what happened: the population saw how simple and manipulative the games of the elites were and just closed those loopholes. And from then on genuine factoids started rising in value so quick even the ex-elites weren't bitter: although they had to get accustomed to life-long study, this actually gave them more self-confidence and their perceived need to freeload on top of others diminished as their new gained knowledge gave them confidence in life.
Just like one can measure the correlation between citizens knowledge of a factoid with their income, one can correlate combinations of knowledge with their income: reproducing the Navier Stokes equation without understanding the continuity equation makes no sense, so it is important to also automagically determine the values for combination coefficients, and they are actually computed in exactly the same way, even though the formulas look a bit more complicated.
A crucial consequence for explaining their absurd scientific and technological growth rates is that the financial feedback is not just highly reflective of value to society, it is also nearly instantaneous: here in the outer dumbosphere, if an engineer or physicist (or a group of them) had a crucial insight, then as soon as this factoid was capitalized, its income value would rise, and students could immediately learn from the state of the art. No waiting for generations until the knowledge has entered textbooks, and then waiting until professors hopefully acknowledge the importance and value, and so on. In the outer dumbosphere it could take decades, sometimes centuries for breakthroughs to end up in widespread study materials.
So it turns out there is no need for committee's deciding curricula, like guardians of the sacred truth, there is no need for experts to assess the value of each factoid. All You Need Is Correlation.
Yes, we should study countries like Finland that have a success of sorts.
To a large degree I agree with him. He gets one radically wrong, though--unions. He's attributing to unions the post-war boom that was actually due to the US having the only industrialized economy that had not been smashed by the war. Effectively a monopoly--of course we did good. But the unions take credit for it.
And it's the very problem he's talking about that has caused the "decline" of the American worker--it's no longer a group selected from those in the best position, now it's a group of all.
Unfortunately, he's right about our economy lacking enough jobs for those without sufficient academic prowess, even though he's wrong about what became of those jobs. (Reality: I've seen it--over 20+ years I watched my former employer increase productivity per labor hour about 5x. We were growing, this didn't cause any layoffs. It was the machinery that mattered--jobs were moving from doing a somewhat skilled operation by hand to feeding a machine that could do better on standardized stuff. The skilled operations were mostly for customers that wanted oddball stuff, plus some of us whose job was making the hardware and software.)
Unions were a big part of what kept the proceeds of that economic boom from accruing benefits almost exclusively to those already at the top. And helped sustain said boom by ensuring a much larger swath of the population had disposable income to grow a consumption economy.