Hernan, Wayne has expressed his opinion a couple times about this. I suspect he was in school districts that were unusually grades oriented, as well as him being unusually reactive to authority.

I went to many school districts (family traveled a lot), and my memory is that most teachers were more learning oriented and less grades oriented, exactly opposite of what Wayne experienced. And of course what you said, that students goals play a big part of the experience.

@HernanLG

grades could be the purpose, or learning. I think the goal is determined by the student, no?

No. I ran the experiment. When I was in college, and I wasn't learning anything (whether it was because of "learning" gobeltygook or just doing huge amounts of busywork from which neither I nor anyone else was learning anything) and complained, I was labeled "disobedient" and "troublemaker" and treated with unbearable hostility. The notion that I had the ability to unilaterally override the system's goal of "grades" and substitute my own, "learning" (even though "learning" is ostensibly the whole purpose of the entire institution) is laughably, completely wrong. No, students do not have the ability to override the goal set by the institution, and that's grades.

If the student has a goal to get into the best possible university, then grades are the goal. If the student wants to learn new things, then learning is the goal.

If one wants to learn new things, then one should not be in a university! There are bookstores and libraries full of books. There are online open-source textbooks. There's Wikipedia and other online encyclopedias. There's Wolfram MathWorld. There's a magic search engine called "Google" (and others) one can use to find educational materials on just about any topic imaginable. There are online education systems like Khan Academy. There are apps like Brilliant.org and Duolingo, which teaches languages. If you don't know what to search for on a system like Google, you can ask a chatbot like ChatGPT what to search for. (Sounds weird, I know, but try it.) One can ask chatbots like ChatGPT to act as one's tutor (though beware of inaccuracies).

Maybe 100 years ago, if you wanted knowledge, universities were the only place you could go and everyone there (or almost everyone) was a genuine knowledge-seeker. In the world of today, if you seek to learn, why would you ever go to a university? With such vastness of knowledge available so much more cheaply? The only justification is to obtain the credential. Everyone (for all intents and purposes) who goes to university today is a credential-seeker.

If the student wants to make as much money as possible, then dropping out of school might be the goal…

Probably not. Statistics on large populations show people with college degrees make substantially more average. Sure, if you're Mark Zuckerberg, you make more money by dropping out, but there's only a handful of Mark Zuckerbergs and millions and millions of regular people. For regular people, a college degree, actually not so much a money maximizer, but essential destitution insurance.

@Will

Wayne has expressed his opinion a couple times about this. I suspect he was in school districts that were unusually grades oriented

Nope. I went to Denver Public Schools for K12 and the University of Colorado at Boulder (aka CU Boulder) for university. Totally normal schools. If these school districts were "unusually grades oriented," other students would have been affected, but it was only me.

as well as him being unusually reactive to authority.

It was only me. "Unusually reactive to authority" I suppose is one way to put it. From my point of view, the question was, why are all normal people so automatically obedient to authority?

I think I told you before how about 2 years after I was forced out of the school system (for disobedience) I met this young woman who was a college student (at UC Davis), majoring in biology. And for some reason I asked her these general, open-ended questions about what her college experience was like. I expected her to describe her daily struggle to be obedient, forcing herself to do her homework, forcing herself to obey the commands that are called "assignments" or whatever but are really commands that must be obeyed. But her experience was nothing like that. There was no struggle to be obedient, and in fact she didn't even think of school in "obedience" terms. She actually liked the system. She liked how someone else had broken down a body of knowledge and figured out a system for learning it, and on Monday we do this, on Wednesday we do that, on Friday we do this other thing, and all she had to do was "jump through the hoops" and everything would work out great for her. She actually liked the "hoop jumping" system. I had never considered before the possibility that such a thing was possible before. I thought other people who did well in school were just "tougher", "grittier", better at forcing themselves to be obedient than I was. I never imagined people existed for whom the obedience struggle was entirely non-existent.

That was what led me (over the last 30 years) to develop my theory of extrinsic motivation. For people who are extrinsically motivated (or sufficiently extrinsically motivated -- their extrinsic motivation level exceeds some threshold -- and in my mind, extrinsic and intrinsic motivation are independent personality dimensions, but I'm going to skip that explanation for now), they don't experience any loss of agency in school. They want to make money doing some profession, they work backwards from there -- they need a college degree in X major (ideally from a prestigious school), to get the college degree they need good grades (ideally "A"s and a high GPA) in various classes, to get their "A"s in those classes they need to do what the teacher says -- and oh how helpful it is that the teacher simply tells you what you need to do to get the "A"s, and all you have to do is whatever you're told. So people don't feeling like they're "being obedient" or like they've lost agency -- they're following their step-by-step plan to acquire extrinsic rewards ("A"s, high GPA, degree, high-paying job). People don't feel "hoop jumping" causes loss of agency because they want to jump through the hoops because they want the rewards for doing so. "Playing the game" is another expression I've heard a few people use (like my aunt who has a PhD). When I was in school, I didn't treat it like a "game". I treated it like my purpose for being there was to learn how to become a competent engineer and I took it very, very seriously. I spent my weekends in the math library while other students were getting drunk at frat parties. They have degrees and I don't. They understood they were there for the grades and the degree -- the credentials themselves are what matters (extrinsic motivation), not becoming a "competent engineer" (intrinsic motivation).

If the goal is to learn, in some classes, there won't be a problem. But in others there will be, because no learning is happening. There's some sort of imitation learning going on -- "learning" gobbeltygook or doing a lot of robotic busywork. In this situation, what you must do is STFU, do what you're told, get your "A", and go on with your life. You can't complain. You can't fight the system. You're one person, and the system is thousands of schools in hundreds of countries with millions of students and teachers and administrators, thoroughly embedded within all the other major institutions of society such as the employment system. The system is vastly bigger than you. You can't complain and change anything. You have to STFU and obey.

When you say

I went to many school districts (family traveled a lot), and my memory is that most teachers were more learning oriented and less grades oriented

to me this just sounds like, you're a normal person with extrinsic motivation levels above the critical threshold, so you didn't experience any problem.

Hmm, I was motivated with both a deep curiosity about the world (intrinsic) and intentions to get credentials (extrinsic) in the process of learning. All my teachers did their job about as i expected, and i learned a lot, much more than if i just read books. Much like that lady you mentioned.

What you might be missing is an appreciation of constraints. Sometimes constraints enable a process. You seem to view constraints only as limits and impedance since you framed your argument in terms of "obedience".

Alicia Juarrero, a philosopher, wrote a whole book about this idea. Here she is discussing the idea in a video interview:

Constraints, Context, Complexity, Culture and the OODA Loop | Alicia Juarrero

Or this video, i don't recall which interview is better:

Alicia Juarrero on Context, Constraints, and Coherence

Just stumbled onto another article on the enabling value of constraints. Haven't read yet.

Biological organisation as closure of constraints
sciencedirect.com/science/arti…

Apologies for the late reply on this, but I watched the two videos and read the article, and I am completely failing to see the relevance to my educational experience.

I don't see how unconditional obedience to arbitrary authority "enables" education. I am missing "an appreciation of constraints"... If I had "an appreciation of constraints" then I would understand how unconditional obedience to arbitrary authority is necessary for education and I would have embraced obedince throughout my school experience. I would have understood how the "process" of education was "enabled" by unconditional obedience to arbitrary authority and magically had no problem with it. How???? I don't get this at all. Apparently if I understood how unconditional obedience to arbitrary authority functions as a "constrains" that "enables" the "process" of education, then I would never have even "framed" the argument in terms of "obedience".

Doesn't my alternate hypothesis of extrinsic motivation do that already? Extrinsically motivated people don't feel like they are being "obedient" in school. If you want extrinsic rewards (money, jobs, degrees, grades, etc), then having the reward issuer telling you exactly what you need to do to obtain the reward is exactly what you want. They tell you what to do to get the reward, you do what they say, you get the reward, and you don't feel like you're engaging in obedience to an authority. There's no subjective experience of "loss of agency". I spent decades trying to understand this and the extrinsic motivation theory is the best I've been able to come up with. There are people who exist who go to school and excel and experience no subjective loss of agency, even though that seems impossible.

When I was in school, it seemed like I was placed in a room with an arbitrary authority in the front, and if I didn't obey, my life would be destroyed. Bad grades mean a bad college or no college, a bad job or no job, and your life will basically be terrible. Adults successfully instilled this in me in elementary school. Obviously adults felt it was necessary to instill this in me or I would get bad grades, and they were probably right. That's what got me through high school -- the expectation that obedience was childhood, and once you became and adult and went to college, college would be different, college would be about real genuine learning. When I got to college and discovered it was more of the same, (besides it being heartbreaking discovering the hope I had held on to that got me through K12 was completely false), I complained and got the associated punishment. I complained when learning was not happening and that's not allowed. Disobedience is not allowed. I got labeled "the disobedient student." That's literally what I was called by the professors.

But according to you, what went wrong was I had inadequate "appreciation of constraints"???

"I would have understood how the “process” of education was “enabled” by unconditional obedience to arbitrary authority and magically had no problem with it. How??? I don’t get this at all."

Well, no one that i know has described their educational experience as "unconditional obedience to arbitrary authority". That sounds paranoid.

The enabling constraint is much more mundane than you describe. The constraint is the orderliness of ordinary institutions which have evolved systems to operate over a long period of time. Schools, banks, grocery stores, town halls, whatever institution. They have to plan ahead, hire employees, establish methods and standards. Many people are involved in this process and you're implying they are all a bunch of meanies.

Your apparent view of all this is that normal social and civil constraints are intrusions on your free will. Or, perhaps you personally did attend deviant schools and are not aware that most schools are quite benign about assignments, grades and whatnot.

Assigned reading, pop quizzes, presence in classrooms, all those constraints enable the educational system to endure. Maybe there is a better way. But, that requires activists to re-shape people's normal expectations.

If a person wants to avoid these mature institutions they are free to do so. And it is up to the free spirit individual to figure another way to become a civilized member of society.

So, your expression, "unconditional obedience to arbitrary authority", is not a reasonable description of ordinary civil institutions.

The constraints that enable orderly institutions to endure is a collective norm. You personally don't buy into the educational institutions norms. That puts the burden on you to figure out a better way to get along in life.

Now, given all that, could most school districts become much better? Yes, of course. But fixing "unconditional obedience to arbitrary authority" is not realistic in my experience.

I was dam glad a teacher would teach us. I was damn glad they made an effort to do their job well according to community standards. Almost all of my teachers were good to excellent.

I did go to catholic school my first 2 1/2 years. They were pretty strict and authoritarian, and the phrase "unconditional obedience to arbitrary authority" sorta fits, but not quite. But that was their style, I still got educated quite well even tho they were all bossy about it.

I say all this even tho I personally am rather reactive to authoritarian institutions. But schools? nah, they are pretty much the same world wide. You must have got some wing ding schools or you got off on the wrong foot to be so totally alienated from normal educational institution standards.

I feel like we're going in circles, over the same material over and over and over.

You know what this reminds me of? One time I saw a video of this woman who spent over a decade on antidepressants, and one day she decided, maybe these drugs aren't helpful, maybe I should get off of them entirely. And she discovered to her shock that "You're not allowed to say 'no'" -- that the system she thought existed to help her actually didn't care and she was oblivious to this as long as she said "yes" to everything, but as soon as she said "no", it turned against her. More specifically, as soon as she said she wanted to get off antidepressants and explained her thinking as to why, every last person she interacted with in the medical profession took the position that she absolutely must keep taking antidepressants. And suddenly she realized, all these people who she thought cared about her well-being were actually just in it for money -- everyone from the pharmaceutical companies, to the insurance companies, to the hospital administrators, to her individual therapists. Everyone was making money off of her -- but only as long as she stayed on the drugs. Luckily for her she was ultimately able to say "no" and get off the drugs, though it was hard because she was taking multiple drugs at once and you can't just quit psychoactive drugs "cold turkey" -- you have to taper them off. After getting off the drugs, she still had to deal with the reality that her life was full of problems and spend another decade getting her life together. I searched my files where I have piles of links saved, and I probably saved the link to this interview, but I couldn't find it, I guess because I couldn't think of the exact words in the title.

Anyway, I thought it was interesting as I've never taken any psychoactive medications voluntarily but was forced to twice -- once by an employer and once by the government (State of California). But here I'm just bringing it up because it reminds me of this discussion about school. When it comes to school, you're the person who always said "yes", yet you claim to know what happens when you say "no"?

To me, saying school == obedience is the most obvious thing in the world. Imagine you go to school and you tell every teacher, "I'm going to learn everything on the syllabus for your class and I'll be able to prove it at the drop of a hat -- on any exam you care to give me or however else you want to test that I've mastered the knowledge. But I won't obey you. I won't participate in class, and I won't do any homework assignments or any assignments of any kind."

I can tell you exactly what happens when you run this experiment because I've run the experiment (which I'll describe in a second -- but I think you've heard it before). What happens is the teacher gives you an "F". And in school, once you've accumulated enough "F"s, you get expelled from the system. At least once you're out of the compulsory phase of the system where they have to take you. And no, I absolutely did not attend some "deviant" or "wing ding" school system -- we've been through this before -- I attended Denver Public Schools, a standard US K12 school system, and the University of Colorado at Boulder, a standard US university.

Here's the time I ran the experiment. I had a digital circuits lab. The idea was to take digital devices and plug them together in accordance with a diagram in the lab manual, copy down various numbers output on the devices, put them in the boxes in the lab manual, and carry out simple arithmetic calculations, which were all laid out in the lab manual. Then you tear out the page and turn it in. I realized I was learning absolutely nothing by doing this -- I was just robotically following instructions in the lab manual but learning absolutely nothing about digital circuits. In talking with the other students, I realized everyone was in exactly the same situation. Nobody was learning anything. I complained about this to the professor, but the other students didn't -- they just continued to robotically follow the lab manual. To prove I'd learned everything on the syllabus, I did a big, complicated final project that demonstrated I had mastered Fourrier transforms and a whole bunch of stuff, all the concepts we were supposed to learn in that lab.

The end result was: I got an "F" while all the other students got "A"s.

If the purpose of school was learning, then the student who learned everything on the syllabus would get an "A" while the students who learned nothing (pretty close to nothing) would get "F"s. That's the opposite of what happened. The mystery goes away when you switch "learning" for "obedience". If the purpose of school is obedience, then it makes perfect sense that the obedient students all got "A"s and the one disobedient student got an "F".

The thing is, it wasn't just this one class -- this class is just the starkest example. In most classes, the intersection of the set of "things you are supposed to learn listed on the syllabus" and the set of "things you learn by being obedient to the instructor" is not the empty set. In this class it was.

So yes, school == obedience. For me, this is the most obvious thing in the world, but when I tell people "school == obedience", everyone argues with me and tells me I'm wrong. It's like saying the sky is blue, and having everyone you meet tell you that you're wrong. How is it that everyone everywhere says something so extremely obvious is wrong? If you don't obey, you get "F"s and once you accumulate enough "F"s, you get expelled. You must obey. This is super, super, super, super, extremely, extremely, extremely, extremely obvious. How can anyone deny it? (And yes, I'm totally aware if I don't obey, that "puts the burden on me" to "figure out a better way to get along in life" -- we've pretty much structured society so there isn't one. It's not as if, if you don't succeed in one school system, there's a dozen others to choose from, and you can switch to a different system that suits your personality temperament better. Children have no ability to do that. We have the one-size-fits-all obedience-based school system that all children must succeed in or not. If you fail, society will hold it against you for the rest of your life. That is the punishment I've experienced, and I totally get that from your point of view, it's totally deserved.)

One time I saw a video of an autism researcher -- this is another one where I don't have the link handy because I saw it years ago and don't have the magic keywords to search on in my pile of links -- I saw a video of an autism researcher who, after a talk, in the Q&A session, and I don't remember what question he asked that prompted this, but he said that some people learn best by direct interaction with the world, and not by listening to a lecture by an authority figure.

At that moment I realized that there are people in this world for whom learning by being lectured to and obeying an authority figure was the most natural thing in the world, so automatic and so built into their brains that they had to have someone tell them people exist whose brains don't work that way. And apparently that's the vast majority of all humans. In other words, the reason normal humans don't find school an excruciating exercise in "obey, obey, obey, obey" is because learning by obeying an authority figure is their natural, normal mode of learning.

I started programming computers when I was 9 and learning from direct experimentation. And I was fascinated by the ability of these machines to do math, and when I was 12, I met an older guy at a computer store who told me you could get computers to draw circles using sines and cosines. I figured out that there were 3 ways to draw circles: you could use the equation for a circle (based on Pythagoras's formula), you could imagine a particle moving around the circle and figure out the derivatives for its motion (this was my first glimpse of calculus), and you could do what the older guy I met said and use sine and cosine, so I started learning about trigonometry. At school, we were doing pages and pages of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division problems. (This was grade 6 math at the time. We were supposed to be introduced to exponents but hardly did any that year.) I told my math teacher I wanted to start learning trigonometry. She said no, "You should stay at your level."

Supposedly the purpose of school is "learning", yet I was being explicitly told by a "teacher" to not learn something. I did the pages and pages of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division problems because that's what you have to do -- you have to obey to get the grades.

Perhaps the distinction isn't "autistic" vs "non-autistic" but "autodidact" vs "non-autodidact". If learning by being lectured to and obeying an arbitrary authority figure is the most natural and normal way of learning for you, then maybe school is just fine. But if you're an autodidact, and are better at teaching yourself any subject rather than learning by obeying an authority figure, then school is an oppressive exercise in "unconditional obedience to arbitrary authority".

You repeat my "unconditional obedience to arbitrary authority" phrase as if you are shocked by it. Yes, it is absolutely unconditional -- when teachers give assignments, you must do them. You can't get out of them, you must do them. You can't go to the teacher and say, I'll learn all the material on my own, rather than obeying you and doing your assignments. You can't do that. You will get "F"s. Yes, the assignments are arbitrary. I had to do pages of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division at a time I was ready to start learning trigonometry. Yes, the authority figures are arbitrary. I'm a kid born into this world, and I'm placed before arbitrary authority figures that I must obey. How is my statement "unconditional obedience to arbitrary authority" incorrect in any way? It seems exactly correct to me.

I guess your point is that I should have appreciated society's need for "constraints" and "orderly institutions" -- society has millions of children, and needs to establish "education factories" for the millions of children. But you don't take the obvious next step and just say obedience was chosen as the method of doing this. After all, what power do children have to disobey?

It's been years since I did any research on the history of the school system but I believe if you do some digging you'll find this is where the school system came from. The system we use originated in Prussia (now parts of Germany and Poland), which had a problem: it was losing wars. They devised a system to turn children into create obedient soldiers. It involved many familiar elements of our school system, such as being constantly interrupted by bells that make you stop doing whatever you're doing and do something else. Later, the industrial revolution happened, and industrialists -- in our country as well as what is today Germany -- realized they could adapt the Prussian system to produce obedient factory workers. So the system was actually designed on purpose for obedience. It's not an accident that obedience is central to the operation of the system.

Then the information revolution happened, and the system seems to have undergone another adaptation -- this time as a way for extrinsically motivated people to attach themselves to recognizable brand names to market themselves on the job market. That seems to be the primary function of school today. If you apply for a job and you have a famous school on your résumé, you're far more likely to get an interview than if you have nothing -- even if your actual knowledge and skill are the same. My theory is that extrinsically people don't feel like they are being "obedient" because they are pursuing the credential itself and the brand name recognition, and not terribly concerned about whether they learn anything or not. My fellow students in the college-level digital circuits lab are a perfect example. All of them were are they were learning zero (or pretty close to zero) about digital circuits, but didn't care as long as they got an "A" on the class. The "A" on the transcript was what mattered, not knowledge or competent mastery of any subject matter.

As an aside, another thing that happened was those students ostracized me. They knew they were there to get "A"s and if they were seen associated with someone the teacher hated, that teaching might apply "guilt by association" and not give them their "A". My last year in college, after I was publicly labeled "disobedient" and a "troublemaker" by the professors, I had only 3 friends: my roommate and 2 international students. I think the international students weren't invested emotionally in American society, at least not as much, so they didn't care if I was disapproved of by the American educational system, and were willing to be friends with me. Again, it's all about the "A"s, not the actual "learning".

Finally, you say, "personally am rather reactive to authoritarian institutions". I'm going to push back on this. I think this is false. If it is true, there would be evidence of it. What is the evidence? You have never told a single story that I can recall about getting punished by authority for anything. Not even getting fired from a job, which can happen for reasons other than disobedience to authority (you could simply have a mismatch between the person and the job, for example). If you've ever gotten a significant punishment from anyone in a position of power and authority, you've never mentioned it.

Peter Thiel says he likes to ask interview candidates, "What important truth do very few people agree with you on?" He mentions this in his book Zero to One and has mentioned it in some interviews I've seen of him. He's said what he's looking for is a willingness to consider "heretical" ideas. It's an intentionally dangerous question because if you answer the question with a genuinely "heretical" idea, it's something you can get in serious trouble for. So if you genuinely believe something very few other people believe, you'll be inclined not to mention it, but if you don't mention it, you won't be answering the question truthfully. Peter Thiel says most people give boring, milquetoast answers to this question.

What important truth do very few people agree with you on? Is there anything you believe that could get you in trouble with authority? You haven't expressed any idea that could get you in trouble with authority that I can recall. In this conversation, you're completely supportive of the school system, which obviously won't get you in any trouble. I don't think you're "reactive" to authoritarian institutions. If there's evidence I'll accept being proven wrong.

Interesting. Ok, so a major point of contention here is your opening observation that we in the US have a " centuries old system that values grades over actually learning." You believe that is true, and I don't believe it.

You are an exceptionally bright person, so I respect your concern. I'm a person that likes to get to the bottom of things, so i'm motivated to figure out why we have such a different view of a matter that we both have decades of experience with.

You have given several examples where you showed the educational system to exhibit domineering treatment of students. And here you doubt my claim that I am reactive to authoritarian institutions, The implication being that I'm obedient and therefore perhaps not credible arguing against your viewpoint.

This is interesting enough that i want to give it a bit more thought to get to the bottom of things.

It's too early in the morning and I won't get into things just yet, but i'll mention a couple things where I've experienced domineering people.

I was in the military and there of course obedience is pretty much absolute (within certain parameters which rarely were unreasonable). I don't recall having any great reactance to that domineering. They got what they needed and so did I.

I signed up knowing the score, and i don't recall any incidents where it violated my sensibility. In exchange for me being a good boy in their eyes, I benefited greatly. I gained some needed confidence in general, and I got a paid college post graduate degree out of it. That is I parleyed the benefits they gave (monthly educational income for several years after serving my four years.) This whole experience was profoundly helpful to me. I came from a very dysfunctional social and family situation and my military experience helped fixed that.

My earliest experience of a heretical rebellion was when i was about 7 years old, attending catholic school for the first 2 1/2 years of school. The school tried to indoctrinate us into religion. At 7 years old i realized that their notions of god, and sins and you'll end up in purgatory, and all that other stuff was nonsense. I completely rejected it even at that young age. I looked up into the sky and said to myself I don't think there's some god up there watching us, it's all nonsense. Going to church was merely a social phenomenon and i thought it was mostly silly for people to act like that. But no one punished me for this heresy so I didn't learn to resentful. I did my thing, they did theirs. No harm, no foul, so to speak.

I did experience extreme reactance when I was called up for jury duty. I got very paranoid when i discovered how they handled that. During voir dire, for example, they think they can ask you on public record to tell about your personal and family life and your opinions of things. "Is anyone in your family an alcoholic?" I did write the judges criticizing them for some of their procedures violating personal privacy. And I figured out to avoid jury duty altogether, by merely stating that i was biased. I even told the judge during juror questioning that my professional experience with psychological research on memory led me to doubt the value of witness testimony and doubt that the legal system was up to date on the matter. He merely acknowledged my concern and sent me home.

Well, for now that's enough dredging through the cob webs of my mind. I'll come back to this matter because it is interesting to confront one's own brainwashing. I still think you had a dysfunctional reaction to having to follow social norms. But there's always a grain of contrary truth in there, and it's worth sorting that out.

My main disagreement with you is that I don't think schools, in general, value grades over learning. But I agree there can be the appearance of that.

Thiel - He’s said what he’s looking for is a willingness to consider “heretical” ideas.

Here's an example where i would get reactive. I'd tell Thiel that's a stupid question. That's looking for trouble just for trouble's sake. I look for insight and understanding. If that leads to questioning established beliefs, then that's fine. But to go looking to prove conventions are wrong just because it's fun to prove them wrong is just being a maverick. Galileo didn't try to be a maverick just to be different, he had an idea and was willing to be a maverick to pursue it. That's the difference.

I did a big, complicated final project that demonstrated I had mastered Fourrier transforms and a whole bunch of stuff, all the concepts we were supposed to learn in that lab. The end result was: I got an “F” while all the other students got "A"s.

Yes, that's pretty stupid of your teacher. And if you go looking for examples of that you'd probably find a fair number. But that's the exception that proves the rule. You have a maverick student and an inflexible teacher which results in stupidity. Most teachers would NOT have flunked you. They may ding you for not following their procedure, but most teachers would compromise and acknowledge your excellence, Most teachers would NOT stigmatize you with an F just for being disobedient when you shine from another perspective. Most teachers would make a point of congratulating you on going beyond their expectations.

My question to you would be why didn't you take the hour or two and do the lab work in addition to your major year end project? Maybe you also excelled at being righteous and resentful. That's a recipe for disaster.

You said, "I don’t see how unconditional obedience to arbitrary authority “enables” education."

That may be because you filter the experience through a resentment filter. The "obedience" most people engage in is not unconditional and it is not due to arbitrary requirements. Rather obedience is a process of cooperation, not coercion. And if you really do see it as coercion, then you are missing something about the nature of social cooperation. I'm trying to figure out what that is so that we can come to some common understanding.

Educational norms have been developed over centuries, by millions, even billions, of people. "unconditional obedience to arbitrary authority" is simply not a reasonable description of education institutions in general.

In grade school kids are not as smart as their teachers, and it's not uncommon for a student to need to be "coerced" into things they disagree with. They simply haven't learned about the broader context and requirements that they later will understand and accept and even go on to perpetuate.

In high school and college, it becomes less clear what is authoritarian and what is nurturing to individuals. But with millions of people willingly maintaining the norms, the burden of showing harm and lack of individual nurturance onto the individuals who disagree with the norms.

So, that's my first premise in this argument.

You have already acknowledged that you frequently are hostile to teachers and the institutions. Usually that pattern of social interaction with anyone will poison a relationship. And once a relationship is toxic, then the matter becomes a social relationship, not a matter of institutional patterns.

That's the second premiss.

Side note, off topic. Here's the research on witness memory reliability that i mentioned:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabet…

Loftus was a member of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation Scientific Advisory Board.[56] She along with Peter Freyd, Pamela Freyd and the False Memory Syndrome Foundation have argued that there is sufficient experimental evidence that people distort their memories, that human memory is not usually faithful to objective facts, and that false memories can be implanted in other people through suggestion and recovered-memory therapy.

American cognitive psychologist

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as soon as she said she wanted to get off antidepressants and explained her thinking as to why, every last person she interacted with in the medical profession took the position that she absolutely must keep taking antidepressants. And suddenly she realized, all these people who she thought cared about her well-being were actually just in it for money

Nah. Most doctors and nurses don't say people have keep doing their mood meds, unless they are in a psychiatric setting. They advise, encourage, and educate. So your description seems exaggerated, or if not, it is an isolated case. But, there are two grains of truth because, 1. yes doctors in particular are enticed by big pharma and do indeed over prescribe medicine rather than diet, exercise, and education and 2. medical people don't encourage patients to be actively involved in determining the treatment. (I've personally had to tell various med people, whoa, let's talk about this, and they step back and wonder why a patient would want to have a say in the matter. Most patients are "obedient". LOL.

I once caught my doctor prescribing an $80 pharma brand allergy med where a $20 generic brand was readily available. I asked him about that and he just mumbled. We both knew why.

Suddenly i'm wondering why you frame your examples in such an exaggerated, categorical way. I'm taking you somewhat literally. Maybe i should instead respond to a milder concern, "obedience to authority". In that case there probably is too much rigidity in many schools. On the other hand there is probably a lot of student focused modernization in education now that you aren't aware of. Maybe they have fixed some of what you went through a decade or two ago.

Jeez, this is getting to be a long read. I don't mind, but i doubt anyone wants to slog through it. And you did start off by saying we're going in circles.

So, what do you think?

Thiel is also driven by the charm of creative-capitalism, which is about filling a void. I'm actually using this as a motivation for a more general topic, not that you think I want to start an economic debate here. Capitalism as the free trade and ownership of material does more than foment creativity. Tech and finance sectors in particular use this property to justify a big void, which they fill exactly with its products. That void is empathetic reasoning, for which the logic and numbers of boards and shareholding, the reaffirmation of symbols like "free market" act as arguments against investing in whole branches of democratic and technologically independent thinking, simply because it would be "too complex" and we need to "get things done." Of course, one hardly fails to notice that centralization of power is antithetical to technological progress uplifting society, which requires adoption on our terms, not disruption by worldviews which only permit a functional take on life. We are not functions and to see us as such is not just heartless, but also counterproductive.

When it comes to dissonance with industrial education, it's fair to look at its sponsorship by the nearest power elites, be they kings or technocrats. I remember teachers of Einstein and Gauss also being depicted as somewhat clueless and even cruel. Why is it that so many teaching authorities remain in our minds as horrible people, while others excell?

Will, your amiable presentation avoids going deeper on the necessary blind spot when any common ground is striven--specifically pertaining to education. (To use a math metaphor,) no set of goals or approach will find a common denominator everytime which contains the primes of relevance which are going to factor into (1) the goals set (because kids have different needs and knowledge is going ) (2) the places knowledge wants to go under individuation (Wayne's frustration), or (3) the places knowledge wants to go as a collective impulse. And (3) is not attained, just by the fact of the common denominator approach: functionalizing misses opportunities to grow. It's a faulty assumption that we can generalize knowledge before generalizing our approach to knowledge: we have to become flexible by tempering and not by coincidence, or as psychologists would say (from normal to esoteric) "compensatory correspondence" to "synchronicity."

If an approach to approaches is not sought, or not known by the teaching authority, then its need to irk compulsion will (in hindsight) actually represent the gradual decline of society: precisely in the blind spots do we lose ourselves (Jung's shadow). The inverse elements to the set of knowledge under function of injective education will be precisely those foments of discontent and dissaray which we could have known about with more compassion. To a certain degree, we are missing a kind of flexible esotericism which would allow progress in (1) institutions (inverting some useless bureacracy related to schools to achieve more excellence), of (2) individuals, or of (3) collective relevance (contending with bureacracy/power establishments--Thiel's aversion to complexity as a thin justification of the benefits of centralizing power). It just takes a moment of compassion to recognize this, and trusting the process can even mean letting one child pass.

For example take my case: thanks to the compassion of being allowed to live, I am developing some great tools. It looks like Wayne is too. One day such compassion might become irrelevant, but I work like it won't, because that's the world in which our blind spots are being addressed. There is no cure for ignorance except that compassion is the equal partner to knowledge. There is naive knowledge, and there is the sense of systems. If more people were fostered in this aspect, we would have wide-ranging thoughts. Our bureacracy and power structures would also get more challenged, but that's why I exist: to prepare the means for these challenges themselves to be compassionate. Everyone got to get lucky. This is the challenge of self-interest, which is the common denominator of this world. I doubt it is the common denominator of every world, and it won't be the last stumbling block, but it's a big one unlimited by the void implanted in youth by the need to obey arbitrary inherited states of being.

If I may offer a common ground to your question: the adversarial approach is itself a response to the lack of prime factors in the social calculus. To make this have meaning as a common ground, you should consider that both positives like "the education system" and negatives like "the obedience orientation" are themselves positives. They are statements addressing the same thing (education) from the perspective of what it has versus what it takes away, and a negative can be all the more positive if it is actually addressing a blind spot.

A critique isn't necessarily saying "get rid of the thing", but is frustrated by some aspect which is lacking. The reason empathy is important for a society to develop is that it addresses our blind spots. Notably both ironic and tragic, many empathetic people end up on the streets or in mental hospitals, or just jaded people: precisely because the current education systems are all about factoring the world into uselessly functional primes: all the more useless because they sort out the world into mine and thine, missing, warping, or even deriding the whole shared space of inter-intellectual permutations. This least divides the set of options by 2, ignoring all the possible solutions which would come if we stopped for a moment to think differently, breath with the thoughts of our neighbor, and considered the world without our egos command.

@unmittelbar I read your comment but don't understand. It's pretty general and meandering. Do you care to make it more concise?

The term "empathetic reasoning" caught my eye but i have no idea what that means. And how does it relate to our topic?

For example you say the following:

Capitalism as the free trade and ownership of material does more than foment creativity. Tech and finance sectors in particular use this property to justify a big void, which they fill exactly with its products. That void is empathetic reasoning, for which the logic and numbers of boards and shareholding, the reaffirmation of symbols like “free market” act as arguments against investing in whole branches of democratic and technologically independent thinking, simply because it would be “too complex” and we need to “get things done.”

@Wayne Radinsky Our conversation is puzzling to me. I know you to be an exceptionally bright person. And you are empirically oriented, facts matter to you. I've read your many posts about technology, and I mostly agree with your assessments. Occasionally I find something to comment on, mostly to clarify or introduce another perspective. It is one of my more gratifying reads and interactions here on social media.

However, our conversation about obedience to authority, mostly about educational practices, seems to be unusual. You offer one explanation that makes some sense of your extreme opinions about authoritative teachers -- autodidacts learn better on their own. Ok, I can buy that.

But nothing in that logic leads to a valid condemnation of teaching based on traditional, carefully organized methods (curriculum) that most students seem to benefit from. And, I don't see the logic that leads to saying that educational practices are more oriented towards grades over learning. Nor, any logic that leads to saying most students are in the classroom mostly to get credentials rather than to learn.

You are not merely advocating improving educational practices, you are categorically condemning them. That is what I am responding to. Certainly it is a worthy goal to improve educational practices. I'm not personally motivated to take on that topic, but it is a valuable goal. So, our difference of opinion isn't about improving educational practices, Our difference of opinion is about categorically classifying many things as dictatorial and people in general being submissive to authority.

Yesterday, I was reminded of a setting where I could see where your position made some sense. Over the years I've learned that medical patients seem to be passive about their medical treatments, and they often let doctors and nurses tell them what to do. I'm not like that. I always insist with my doctor that i am an active participant in determining my diagnosis and treatment. And I've seen a few medical people surprised by that.

One example of that was when i had to undergo some serious treatment for a heart condition. I was transferred to the hospital in the wee hours and it wasn't until 8 or 9 am that the surgeon came in to tell me what he was going to do. He had a dozen interns following him into the room. I really laid into him. I told him to get these students out the room and to explain to me what's going on so I could assess what i would agree to be done to me.

He was an arrogant ass, and threatened to expel me from the hospital for challenging him. I said no, you're not expelling me, you are going to explain to me what my condition is and what my options are. He apparently had never been challenged like that. And he left the room. Shortly later some head administrator came in to see what the conflict was. I told her that he was an asshole leaving me alone without consultation all night and then came in and started telling me what he was going to do. Long story short, she left and another doctor came in, a nice quiet Japanese doctor, and we talked, he explained things, and i consented to an option after i knew some facts. It all turned out well. But I hope that arrogant ass learned his lesson.

So, yes, I can see your point about excessive authority and passiveness in institutional settings.

But in our conversations I've been pushing back on your characterizations of situations, they seem way over stated: For example, you say a couple things here:

I told my math teacher I wanted to start learning trigonometry. She said no, “You should stay at your level.”

I’ve never taken any psychoactive medications voluntarily but was forced to twice – once by an employer and once by the government

My theory is that extrinsically people don’t feel like they are being “obedient” because they are pursuing the credential itself and the brand name recognition, and not terribly concerned about whether they learn anything or not.

So yes, school == obedience. For me, this is the most obvious thing in the world, but when I tell people “school == obedience”, everyone argues with me and tells me I’m wrong.

I find those descriptions hard to believe on the face of it. Perhaps there were extenuating circumstances that would make them more credible.

You also wondered about my experience with the threat or treatment by authority, since i had said i have a strong reactance to it. I may add another comment to talk about that, but this comment is long enough.

And by the way, even tho this conversation is about serious things, I'm comfortable with it and hope you are too.