Schooling and education are different, you need to educate yourself to survive but you need schooling because it is compulsory by the government.

To educate someone is to brainwash them, as education is a desire for knowledge that comes from one's self.

In this essay, I will go through what is schooling and what it has done for us and for the adults of the future. I hope to encourage you to see a different perspective and take your own path in researching schooling and its effect on children.

I am not focusing on academy schools, grammar schools, foundation schools, private schools or any types of special schools, most are different flavours of public schooling and I will be focusing on that. I am also not focusing on homeschooling as they are not schools and they can function any which way the parents would like.

Schools…

Formal schooling is an institution that tries to provide teaching environments for students under the direction of teachers. In almost all countries (USA, UK, AUS, CAN and more) schooling is compulsory for children between ages 5 to 7 and above depending on the region. Most countries have 10 to 12 years of compulsory schooling that is required of all people and is imposed by the government.

If schooling was there to teach students to ride a bike, it worked in a way to keep the training wheels on the bikes for all children till the prescribed time, despite differences in their learning ability. Students who learn fast have to keep their training wheels on while wasting their time waiting for others. Meanwhile, the students who have struggled to learn cycling by the pre-prescribed time will be left on their own to catch up and they might be labelled as having a learning disability or being developmentally challenged.

Imagine if training wheels were compulsory till a prescribed age.

In a typical school class, there is a qualified teacher that tries to teach the pupils the prescribed lesson. Neither the teacher nor the students have a say in what should be taught in the class.

“When you take the free will out of education, that turns it into schooling.” - John Taylor Gatto.

Schools often have multiple classes for each topic but the level of understanding between students could be more than what can be bridged by teachers without moulding the students to the average.

Schools select teachers based on their competence to condition students to sit quietly and feed students the prescribed compulsory information. School teachers have to teach the compulsory curriculum to the students and students are told they need it for their future.

In compulsory schooling, neither teachers, parents, students nor anyone who is in touch with the classroom has any control over the direction of the compulsory curriculum. The standards of the compulsory curriculum come from somewhere far from students and the classroom, and often it does not match the short-term or long-term real-life needs or wants of the students.

The non-compulsory curriculums are limited to a pre-approved list. Students' interests have no relevance in the eye of the school and the school wants students to follow the path that was set for them. Public schools have to follow a mandatory national curriculum and the schools that don't have to follow the national curriculum often follow a standardised curriculum.

At the end of the school year, all students are put through an exam about the things that they have learned that year.

The results of the exams will be the only measurement of students' understanding and students are told future employers judge the worth of the students with that.

At the beginning of every year, schools keep students separated by age and expect students of the same age to progress at the same speed, those who have got the best grade might be in the same class as the ones with the worst grade. Schools disregard their own measurement of students' understanding but yet every year students are measured by more exams.

Schools' bureaucratic focus on measuring students will leave no time for students to learn. Students first have to prepare themself for exams and if they have time and energy left, after their homework they can spend time learning what they are interested in.

Schooling limits students' learning choices and makes grades of standardised tests the sole target of the students. The standardised testing industry pushes to give a uniform target to the students and it's judged by an external examiner who is detached from the day-to-day performance of the students. This uniformity and external locus of judgement is what the dystopian novel 1984 by George Orwell was centred on.

Winston Smith wrote:

“To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone— to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink — greetings!” - George Orwell, 1984.

Of course, We might not have a name for the examiner who judges us all and we might not deify the judge but the standardised testing industry has created that structure, just needs a trigger.

Classrooms…

Every school day consists of 3 to 5 lessons and each lesson lasts for 1 to 2 hours depending on the school.

The number of lessons per day and the hours per lesson are fixed per school. All lessons are hosted in a classroom by a teacher. In the classroom, students are meant to sit behind a desk facing the teacher or the blackboard/whiteboard.

Each class is time-limited and breaks off with a bell ring. Students are told to focus on the task that is assigned to that period/hour and break their focus and attention to move to the next task that was pre-planned for them. Students have to understand what they are meant to do and finish their task before the bell rings, which tells them to take a break or go to their next class. If students want their focus to not get interrupted by the bell ring, they have to perform exactly the same and follow orders step by step, like a factory line.

In a classroom, students are discouraged from getting up from their seats and talking with other students. Teachers expect students to listen to the teacher and focus on the work when given work and anything other than that is considered misbehaving.

Schools' classroom structure is more like a lab to condition children to sit still and do what they are being told. Schools turn children's drive to explore and desire for an adventure into the condition of intolerable boredom. Students are told to not show expressions of boredom and try to engage with the topic. Students will have to give up their free will and tolerate boredom or conform to the schools' will to educate. This suppression of control in students will change boredom to the default condition of living.

If a student is interested in the topic of that lesson and builds the concentration to work on that, they will be interrupted by a bell ring and have to move to another class and another topic and start to build concentration and interest all over. Lather, rinse, repeat... It is almost like schools are built to disrespect children's efforts to build focus.

John Taylor Gatto summarises:

"Slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behaviour." - John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling.

Boredom…

Boredom is a drive to do more, it is a feeling that tells us what we are doing is not enough and that something needs to be changed. In schools, boredom is treated as a problem and a condition of being there. The burden of responsibility to entertain boredom is left to students but students are only allowed to do what the teachers tell them to do.

Schools push students to build habits that do not fulfil their boredom. Teachers often try to reduce boredom in their classes but they can't avoid dealing with it. When children have higher boredom intolerance and they can't contain their energy to adventure, schools label them as badly behaved or learning disabled.

Learning disability…

When students can't conform to the methods of schooling they are often considered learning disabled (or having difficulty learning). Outside of schooling these children often have no problem navigating their life and because of those differences, they have a different way of approaching life.

What schools call learning disabilities are not the fault of the students but the rigid way of teaching. This is what Eric Weinstein called "Teaching Disability". On The Tim Ferriss Show, Eric Weinstein said:

"I think, kids who have been labelled as learning disabled, but they’re actually super learners. They’re like learners on steroids who have some deficits to pay for their superpower. And teachers can’t deal with this. We label those kids as learning disabled to cover up for the fact that the economics of teaching requires that one central actor, the teacher, be able to lead a room of 20 or more people in lockstep."

Schools have a rigid way of motivating, teaching and examining students on what they are compelled to learn. Schools try to teach the moderate average in the class and educate all kids equally despite their differences in ability and interest. This will push teachers to adopt a rigid teaching format which will lead to students fitting the school mould. The ones who fit the school mould get rewarded and the ones who are outcasts get pushed to the side to be treated as defective and called learning disabled.

Just with a quick search, you can find out the most successful people in history have what schools consider learning disabilities like dyslexia, ADHD, dyscalculia and dysgraphia. Steven Spielberg, Richard Branson, Michael Phelps, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Tom Cruise, John Lennon, John F Kennedy and more... the list is endless.

A good teacher…

Schools select teachers based on their competence to condition students to sit quietly and feed students the pre-prescribed compulsory information with kindness and passion. Teachers have to keep the students engaged in the curriculum despite students' interests. Teachers often give the students baseless hope about the future if better grades are achieved. As grades are not directly linked with experience or career.

This is not the fault of the teacher but of the schooling role that pays people to teach. If students ask for more than what is in the curriculum teachers often have to tell them "that is not in your exam, you don't need to learn that.", "you can learn that in your spare time" or teachers themselves can't answer questions about what they teach. No matter how considerate the teacher is, the teacher has to teach children the compulsory curriculum and disregard the child's interests.

The child has to learn the compulsory curriculums at the best time of their day and put aside their interest and growth for another time.

Teaching roles are restricted in many ways, including how they can help, what they can teach, how much time they can spend on a student, and how many students they can have in their class.

Teachers have to make the curriculums interesting and engaging for the children. Some teachers try to have a one-to-one session with the low-performing students, but often students are not interested in that curriculum to start with.

A good student…

Schooling teaches students that as time passes they will go to the next year and working harder or smarter than their peers will result in them moving at the same speed as their peers.

Students are encouraged to sit still in the classroom, listen to their teacher and study at home so they can get good exam results. A good student will try to get the best results for their exam by memorising the curriculum that was given to them. All students are examined and graded on what they have learned but the best and the worst students might have to sit in the same classroom (depending on school size). In schools, students' ability has no relevance as all students are categorised by age and all students move as they age (with some rare exceptions).

Categorising children by age will stop them from teaching one another based on their ability and educational growth will be slower. Age categorisation makes a comparison between children's age with education and progress in life. When people pass a certain age, education and age have no correlation for most people. But yet we categorise our children by age and we keep them down till they can prove that they have memorised the compulsory school topics.

Each person develops differently, some fast, others slow, and some focus on one idea, others on many.

“So you must not think a man has lived long because he has white hair and wrinkles: he has not lived long, just existed long. For suppose you should think that a man had had a long voyage who had been caught in a raging storm as he left harbour, and carried hither and thither and driven round and round in a circle by the rage opposing winds. He did not have a long voyage, just a long tossing about.” ― Seneca, On the Shortness of Life.

Even though we reward children who exceed in examining and getting far in schooling we fail to acknowledge the children's understanding. For those students who passed through schooling with flying colours, the only skills they have proved for certain is to be a good student in a school.

Students are not free to take their own path and take their own time in learning ideas, students don't have a choice on what to learn in the best hours of their day. They are actively pushed to read the dumbed-down version of the topics of compulsory schooling. The best students are the ones who do average and comply with every command.

Standardised tests…

Compulsory schooling is made with standardised tests at the core, every year students prepare for the final test and in the middle of that, they get tested over and over again to prove to someone that they are good enough.

Standardised tests by definition are standard checkboxes to be ticked by the student and checked by the teacher.

Standardised tests reduce the complexity of the students' knowledge to a single grade that could well be far from students' ability. A desire to learn is not needed in schools as every student has to remember the same curriculum as everyone else with minimal choice on the learning path just to be measured by a factory-based checkbox test.

In some cases to teach students, the curriculum strips down the topic to a dumbed-down version and students are expected to give the dumbed-down version in their exams. Almost all examinations are is relying on the known path of getting to the answer, creativity and exploration are actively discouraged.

Examining students measure schools, teachers and students' performance for the judgment of a third party. Schools are built to serve future employers and standardised tests are there to measure obediency in students.

As to pass school with flying colours the student has to listen to the teacher spelling out the school curriculum and regurgitate it at each exam.

Students are limited on what they can take to the exam room but in the real world, the tools they can use are only limited by their imagination.

The real world does not have rules on what tools to use and if you can get your hands on them you can use them. Whether the tools used are calculators or internet forums, the real world doesn't care and rewards people who get the job done as fastest, efficiently and with the highest quality as possible.

School exams are treated as tools to measure ability and knowledge, but they will create unnatural environments that will not represent the real world. In the real world, the problems are not 2-dimensional lines written on paper.

And most times there is no single solution to solve real problems and creativity is rewarded. As to create new ideas and explore knowledge to find the truth we sometimes have to explore the unknown and challenge what's out there, and that is what examining prevents.

"If you are going to do anything big you are by definition unqualified" - James Dewey Watson.

If schools were centred around education, teachers' experience would have been determining grades for students, just like work/personal reference. In the real world, people are measured by the experience and performance they had rather than a measurement system that only works for the average with high memory retention. You can find that out for yourself, when was the last time you asked "what grade did you get?" from your doctor, lawyer, mechanic or anyone with some skills you are willing to pay for?

John Taylor Gatto was a teacher in New York City's public schools for over 30 years and has received the Teacher of the Year award in New York State. He has written multiple books on the topic of schooling and published The Bartleby Project to destroy the standardized testing industry. You can find The Bartleby Project here:

http://openconspiracy.org/

Thought exercise…

Teachers often stand in front of the school entry as students enter the school through gates. When the bell rings students have to get themselves to the class as fast as possible. During class time, students have to be in their class.

To leave the class students have to ask for permission from the teachers. During break time, students are left to do what they want in the playground but the teachers are spread throughout the school to make sure miss behaving won't happen and break up fights as soon as it starts.

Depending on the school, bullying is more common in school than outside. Students are not allowed to leave the school before the scheduled time. If they want to leave early they have to get permission from teachers before they can leave.

Now change the words with the rules down below and read the above writing one more time.

School => Prison

Student => Prisoner

Teacher => Prison guard

Class => Cell

playground => Open-air

Free adults are not divided by age and locked in a gated building, why should our children be?

Of course, there are differences I haven't mentioned, but do we want this much similarity between where our children go to spend the most impressionable times of their life and where criminals go as punishment?

The problem with schooling does not end as soon as we finish school. It has and will affect our future. Can future adults act free when they are mandated by the government to spend more than 10 years of the most important years of their life in a gated building with people watching over their shoulders and telling them what to do?

“School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know.”― John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling.

Effects of schools and a better path…

Children like to grow just like trees, branching every which way their abilities and interest takes them.

This natural growth just needs the child to have the freedom to choose and change their path as they learn. This freedom is not allowed in schools, students are pressed into a mould and restricted from doing anything that is not asked of them. The schooling does not pressure children into the mould in one day but in more than 10 years of schooling, as children grow older they develop a dependency on authority watching them and telling them what to do.

"I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress genius because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.” - John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through The Dark World of Compulsory Schooling.

If we are trying to help our children grow up and learn to live, we have to always try to help them to do what adults do and let them make choices for themselves. Children's choices should build their future, they should have opportunities to make mistakes and grow at their own pace.

Children's curiosity will naturally gravitate to taking responsibility as they grow old and adults need to help children to take as much responsibility as they can.

John Taylor Gatto has identified a natural learning method and called it Open-Source learning. In open-source learning, no one is exclusively a teacher and anything or anyone can be a source for learning.

At the core of Open-Source learning, education is an internal drive to learn and not something that schools or anyone can give. Just like how in the real adult world people don't have to learn if they don't want to, in open-source learning children learn what they want to when they want to and curiosity takes the lead and boredom becomes a drive to avoid stagnation.

This is the best form of learning, it is the path that everyone who has created, invented and discovered has taken whether or not they went to school.

Schools prevent an essential need for children's growth, the adult-free playtime. The adult-free playtime will help children to learn about the limits and boundaries of life.

Without any adults around to help, children will find a way to get themselves out of arguments, fights and trouble with other children and learn negotiation techniques. Lenore Skenazy the author of the book Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry, goes through the benefits of letting your kids become independent and limiting adult supervision. An antidote to helicopter parenting.

This adult's supervision and general control over what should or shouldn't be learned can create a sick society. We can see some traces of that in schools and universities.

Schools have started implementing safety warnings and protocols to the detriment of the children's growth. This process will delay children's development to become adults. As students who have had overprotective schools and parents grow older and get into university, they expect the same treatment from their university as adults and that trickles down to the workplace and further in society.

This social contagious is not distant from us. The upcoming generation of children, who are now becoming legal adults has adopted this demand for safety from their university administrations.

In "The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure" a book by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, has highlighted the social contagious called safetyism that has captured universities. The resulting culture of safetyism is built on three great untruths:

What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.

Always trust your feelings.

Life is a battle between good people and evil people.

One of the school's selling points is that schools are a place where children get to socialise with children their age, but schools are also the only place that segregates anyone by the year they were born. Socialising and working with people of different ages will help a person see different perspectives and experiences that can bring a healthier mindset. Among adults, it is the norm to be colleagues with people of a different generation, but in schools, the norm is to be the same age.

The schooling model is a fertile petri dish waiting for a social contagious to hijack it. Social contagious are common in schools, some can be dangerous like anorexia and self-harm, and some are harmless like fashion trends and games.

The commonality of social contagious in ages and groups is not a new Idea, Friedrich Nietzsche had the same idea more than 130 years ago when he said:

“Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.”

The book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. Abigail Shrier explores a mystery: Why, in the last decade, has the diagnosis "gender dysphoria," transformed from a vanishingly rare affliction, applying almost exclusively to boys and men, to an epidemic among teenage girls?

Final thoughts...

I have no solution to replace schools with and that is the whole point. Children are not problems in need of solutions, they are the solution finders of our future!

We should let children choose their own paths and let them educate themself and adults should try to help them as best as they can. Each child themself should find out how they want to spend their life from the earliest age possible, but just like we don’t let under-18s gamble and buy alcohol, we should not let children do things that affect their bodies permanently, but that should be the responsibility of parents’ and not a bureaucratic system like school.

As always, this was not an exhaustive exploration but to start the conversation. Hopefully, I have given you enough resources for you to continue researching.

Saman.K

New technologies have new benefits, but like always there are unintended consequences that we are not aware of when we use them. One of the big consequences is the sudden emergence of (what I call) synthetic relationships in everyone's life. Is that a healthy relationship? Can we live on those types of relationships?

I will first try to explain what a synthetic relationship is and what it feels like to be in one. I will explore the tools that help us find or trap us in a synthetic relationship. I will try to explore this topic but this will not be an exhaustive exploration but to start the conversation.

What is a synthetic relationship?

A relationship that is maintained with a communication proxy. A proxy that is built ground up to plug into our social needs. For example, social media or any relationship that uses a proxy medium for maintenance. I also include relationships with AI as a synthetic relationship as AI is trying to mimic humans over a logical proxy. I will use the word "relationship" in a broad term.

Exception.

People can have a similar relationship while being physically close to each other, In such a case one or both partners are projecting their own fantastical character onto the other's body without updating as they learn more about each other. This will create a relationship that is not between 2 people but what they think the other person is or could be. But this is more towards a dysfunctional relationship that is not related to a proxy part of the synthetic relationship. I will not talk about these kinds of relationships as it is not the focus of this essay.

What does it feel like? How can we detect it?

In a synthetic relationship, we are not getting the full benefits and constraints of a real relationship (edit: Organic relationship is the best description of the opposite of a synthetic relationship). A synthetic relationship will leave us having a relationship with ourselves and our imagination without the full feedback of the person we think we are in a relationship with. Our intuition is limited by the proxy medium, we are left to make magical fantasies, going to the negative or positive imaginations that could be distanced from reality. That can also mean the interaction that is between both parties is lacking half of what it could be and the part that is there could be intense but superficial. The intensity will come from us having to bridge the communication gap of a superficial relationship with our own imagination.

The intense part of the relationship has the same texture as a film, it is real as long as we are convinced of its reality, but no more. In an intense part of the relationship, everything can be left to be interpreted by each party. The desire for intimacy will never get fulfilled, but it only makes one feel they are in the process of getting their needs met.

The maintenance of the relationship is where the important events of the relationship happen, and if that is done over a proxy medium I consider that a synthetic relationship. If the dose of maintenance and bonding in reality (face to face) is low enough for the partners to grow distance and build a distorted image of each other it would be a synthetic relationship. In such a case it would be difficult to tell whether the dysfunction was because of the proxy part of the relationship.

In our age, it is difficult to avoid synthetic relationships as we are more connected than we know what to do with them. We feel like "we are connected with people", "we are in touch with them" but we still feel we are far apart and we are far alone. Anytime we’re in silence, we look at our phones, to find more excitement in our lives, to have a more intense connection. It feels like sugar, when the rush ends you want more... We often convince ourselves we are getting our needs met from the synthetic relationship because it is easier to see it that way than to face the reality.

Tools that enable synthetic relationships...

On social media...

Social media is one of the bigger categories for making synthetic relationships possible. We have been sold that social media keeps us socially connected. But as time passes we are finding out it interferes with social development and makes us feel anxious about being lonely. Young people's motives will shift from experiencing joy to grabbing attention. Because of the global nature of social media, people no longer can be themselves but what the global trends accept them to be. This will trigger in people's deep feelings of loneliness as most will be the followers of the few social trends and that's just for the natural desire to be accepted. Groups and trends will be celebrated and individuation will be rare. Individuation will only happen when one moves away from the collective. When the collective is at your fingertips, we will no longer be able to think for ourselves or build the courage to individuate. Synthetic relationships are one-way; you will struggle to have enough detail on the level of understanding of the other person; you are left to interpret what is happening in the other person’s head. Now If we make this communication between multiple people, we will be guessing what everyone thinks and what everyone feels. The nature of social media only allows basic and primal emotions which is fuel to the emergence of a synthetic relationship.

The social media problem captures mostly girls but more boys will be addicted to porn which I also categorise as social media... Here is a study that has looked into "Gender differences in the associations between age trends of social media interaction and well-being among 10-15 year olds in the UK" (https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-018-5220-4). The research finds that the use of social media impacted the later well-being of both sexes: "...higher social media interaction at age 10 was associated with declines in well-being thereafter for females, but not for males.". But synthetic relationships in this scale will affect both sexes and our ways to find partners.

By using social media we are voluntarily submitting our time and attention to become the products of the social media companies, and they will sell our attention to the advertisers as they please. These sorts of platforms profit from being a middleman in our relationships. Their business model is to sell our attention for advertisements, which makes an incentive for them to make us socially starved and addicted to the platforms. These platforms do their own internal study on the effects they have and they employ psychologists to help them become more profitable. Here is an article on a leaked Instagram internal research (https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/15/22675130/facebook-instagram-teens-mental-health-damage-internal-research). Here is a debate between Jonathan Haidt and Robby Soave on social media:

They will talk about the good and bad of social media.

On porn...

I call any platform that tries to bridge social gaps social media (I consider porn platforms social media companies). Porn can morph sex to the point that people who have watched porn for a long time treat sex like masturbation with someone else. This is also a form of synthetic relationship as porn is made to plug into our need for sex and simulate that. We are at the point that is difficult to find people who don't watch porn for us to study this topic. We don't know what is the consequences of this level of detachment from nature en masse. But we know that erectile dysfunction in young men was nonexistent before the introduction of high-speed internet porn. The trend that suggests young adults have less sex and start their sex life later in their life (commonly known as The Sex Recession) does not give confidence in the sexual health of the society (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/the-sex-recession/573949/). These patterns in the young generation are closely correlated to high-speed internet porn and Social media, but correlation does not equal causation. Here is a book on the effects of porn (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23121356-your-brain-on-porn).

Upcoming technologies with synthetic relationships at the core...

All my examples above have a human on the other side but what if we remove all humans from the equation? Could AI and care robots bring a new form of relationships?

I am trying to look into the future as we don't have widespread use of these technologies. I differentiate AI and care robots by the physical presence robots have. Care robots often have AI installed on them and they can take care of our social and physical needs.

On artificial intelligence...

We often think technology can make our life easier and safer, but can we overdose on that? Often when we talk about AI or care robots of the future, we think of a personal assistant or potentially cure for our loneliness. In the film Her (2013), we see an average man who was recently divorced from his wife and falls in love with his AI operating system. I believe this film shows us how new technology can have unintended consequences on our social life, just like social media. After finding out, Theodore's ex-wife tells him "...you always wanted a wife without the challenges of dealing with anything actually real...". This is a depiction of the problem we will face in the future, to find someone we can compromise with and build something beyond two individuals or, give up and have a relationship with ourselves with no challenges to overcome and no growth as a result of that. AI and robots are not fulfilling our need for relationships but they merely plug into the main drives to seek relationships, and as results slow the growth that we naturally seek.

On care robots…

This video shows care homes that are using robots to entertain and create an emotional bond with the elders. It looks like it is a great idea, and it is, but only short-term. When we have one lonely person who needs caring it is a great idea. But this great idea will fail as soon as we consider generations of people. As the first generation of care homes adopt this, there will be a low number of people using this service. But as time passes and this sort of technology becomes more established, we will see the push from those who are financially incentivised to sell as many care robots as possible to the health system. When care robots become commonly available, our attitude will change toward taking care of the people who took care of us. Our attitude will change in the same trend that has been changing from taking care of our elders in our own homes to delegating that to an outside party. Care robots merely enable us to take this to the next level.

Because of our short-sightedness in seeing only short-term benefits, we would like to give this technology to everyone who can use it, from elders to the chronically ill to the disabled but it will be mostly adults.

Does anything stop us from using care robots on our children?

After all, care robots are robots programmed to simulate human care. Of course, orphan children and children with abusive parents should be first in line to get a care robot. We can replace the parents who are bad at parenting with care robots, surely that's good for the kids. To judge good and bad parents, we give children the option to choose their parents and the parents to opt-out of parenting, In the same way, we let our children make irreversible medical choices. But as time passes, we will see magnified short-term benefits in these kinds of robots and we might buy one so we can bring up our children. The same trend that has been going on for the past 100 years or so will continue from taking care of our children to delegating that task to an outside party, schools.

It would not be much of a change to have a care robot at home for domestic tasks as we already have our children addicted to tablets, phones, online social games, and digital assistance; the portals to synthetic relationships. Everyone can do a reality check themselves: in public places, almost all the children have a phone or tablet at their disposal when they need comforting or they are bored.

Sex robots Have the same problem as both Care robots and porn. They will plug into our drives for sex and socialising which stunt our development and could guide us to a lonely society.

Final thoughts...

Over the past 2 years, most people experienced remote work and remote relationships, and they have tried to navigate the maze of potential misunderstandings. This has only highlighted the problems with synthetic relationships. But this is bigger than that, we are now seeing the new generation who are having difficulties with face-to-face relationships and find it easier to be in synthetic relationships.

Synthetic relationships are not new as we have had long-distance relationships with letter exchanges, but they rarely replaced our real-life relationships if any. With the emergence of the Internet, these forms of relationships are not only possible but easier to create and maintain.

This could well be the largest out-of-control experiment with the biggest impact on us. We will have a hard time finding out what part if any is related to tech, but the absence of evidence does not mean evidence of absence. Any path we take will have downsides, from continuing the path and making virtual friends to potentially isolating oneself and feeling left out from the mainstream.

I think this has created a large gap in our need to socialise and compromise with people. I don't know if the good outways the bad but certainly the bad can bring our civilization to its knees.

Any path we take will have downsides, from continuing the path and making virtual friends to potentially isolating oneself and feeling left out from the mainstream. It is up to each individual to take their own path. I think this conversation has to be continued to find the best path to this problem.

So what do you think? Is this anything we should be concerned about?

Join us to discuss this topic:

https://www.meetup.com/The_Examined_Life/events/284529452/

In the last few years, I have noticed that some words have changed use cases rapidly. and in this article, I will try to understand what is happening. This will not be an in-depth view but to start a conversation.

Language and its evolution…

Language is a living thing and its evolution is a slow process. Evolution by natural selection is one of the main ways language evolves between generations. When people use a word/phrase it will make it stronger and last longer in the common language. And when a word/phrase is stopped being used by people it dies. Meaning of words is something that comes from people and then it moves upwards towards the dictionaries. Also, the updates of the meaning of each word have a similar process, come from the people and then move upwards to the dictionaries. Dictionaries always lag behind on how people use language. Another way to say it is a slow and bottom-up process.

The health of language…

Healthy evolution of language sways with people and their thoughts rather than language guiding people’s movement towards a certain idea. A healthy language will have a natural implicit democracy. You can think of it as every time a word gets used, the use of the word gets promoted and it will get defined by the context it’s being used in. And this process is usually slow but we can see the shift in the meaning of words by reading old books or using tools like Google Ngrams (https://books.google.com/ngrams)

Orwell depicted the ill language in his book 1984. The purpose of Newspeak was to control people and their thoughts. “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.” (Orwell 52). The unhealthy language described by Orwell has a top-down process. The top-down process of making and changing existing language needs for an organization (like media channels and governments) to have control over how language is being used. In the book 1984, Winston was working in the Ministry of Truth where his job as an editor was to alter, rewrite and edit a lot of these records to Newspeak and change historical records to fit the needs of the party (now we have fact-checkers to do what ministry of truth did. https://fullfact.org/.). The editing was being done to guide people’s thoughts and behaviour to manufacture consent and show that the party is and was always right.

Coming back to reality…

Controlling language is not just a fictional concept. It usually happens just before wartime in order to distinguish between friendly and enemy. It is also used in gangs and mafia for the same purpose.

In the US homeland security website, they have released a “National Terrorism Advisory System”(https://www.dhs.gov/news/2022/02/07/dhs-issues-national-terrorism-advisory-system-ntas-bulletin). And they comment “The United States remains in a heightened threat environment fueled by several factors, including an online environment filled with false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information (MDM) introduced and/or amplified by foreign and domestic threat actors.” They don’t specify who will judge what is a “false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories”. They also have mentioned “The proliferation of false or misleading narratives, which sow discord or undermine public trust in U.S. government institutions; …” witch could include criticizing government information and actions. In this document, they have explicitly left the door open by loose definitions and vague words for them to do anything and call it the fight against “Terrorism”. But we can take a closer look at the words and the definition they used and try to find out what they mean.

Words like “Misinformation” became widely adopted by the media with a different meaning recently. Here is the definition that is being used by CISA a US federal agency “An official website of the United States government” (https://www.cisa.gov/mdm): “Misinformation is false, but not created or shared with the intention of causing harm.”. This definition of “Misinformation” was used to separate factual and false based information but with a strong emphasis on the intention of the person who shares it. This silent judgment of the intention of the person who shares it is where the problems emerge. Who will judge the information and who will judge the intention to cause harm? Can anyone defend themself when they have been labelled as misinformers when the judgment of intention is made by a third party?

There are more words like this that are novel and with an unnatural use and adoption in common language. Examples would be “Disinformation” and “Malinformation”. They are made in an unnatural way to complement “Misinformation”. Moving towards the word “Malinformation” and its definition: “is based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.”. Once again this definition puts the care/harm principle above truth but disguises it to separate falsities from the truth. To translate the definition: It is fact, but we don’t like you using it in the way you use it. These new words and their carefully constructed definitions give the certain party the upper hand to do whatever they like in theory. As Orwell has described these sorts of language manipulation are dangerous, to say the least. We always had phrases like false/wrong/incorrect/untrue information but they did not account for the intention of the person. US government has manufactured a new definition of these words to judge the perceived intention of people, and use them as tools to identify “National Terrorists”.

There are many examples of manipulated words. The trend I see is words that are built to separate good and evil in a backward or twisted manner. A few examples would be “antiracism”, “antifascism” and “anti-vaxxers” what do they mean?

Have they changed meaning without us noticing it?

At first glance, we see “Anti” next to “racism”, and we think “racism” bad “antiracism” is good! right? In this video (https://odysee.com/@newdiscourses:9/antiracism-a-translation-from-the-wokish:3) James Lindsay has described the meaning of “anti-racism” and what it means for the people who have created it. And here is James Lindsay on “antifascism” (https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-antifascism/).

Moving on to a word that became popular in the past 2 years, “anti-vaxxers”. As far as I have noticed the use cases of “anti-vaxxers” in the media. To become an “anti-vaxxers” you don’t have to be against vaccines, but question a little deep on the policy related to vaccines. The common use cases have a moral judgment attached to them like the good old word “Witch”. “Anti-vaxxers” has its definition changed to describe a person who is against what government says about vaccines. You will be called an “anti-vaxxer” even if you are a vaccine scientist and had all of your vaccines, but you disagree with how the vaccine is being implemented and the rules surrounding that conversation.

It seems like all of these words and updated meanings have hidden judgment backing them. Could they be new tools to demoralize and dehumanize that we are not aware of?

Closing thoughts…

Of course, some people will not agree with the way I have described some words and the judgment I have put on them. I might have not given enough resources for your taste, after all, this is just to start the conversation but, absence of evidence does not mean evidence of absence.

My method to find the real definitions of words is to find out the outcome of their use in extreme cases and work backward to describe where boundaries lay. I believe the extreme use cases of a word is important to discover where the boundaries of words are and what they can be used for.

A language is a tool, just like an axe. We have to take care of it so we can use it when we need it the most.

Join us to continue the discussion (https://www.meetup.com/The_Examined_Life/events/281956811/).

Some useful links…

A different perspective on fact-checkers by Heather Heying (https://naturalselections.substack.com/p/coming-soon?s=r)

A different perspective on “mis- dis- and mal-information” by hosts of the darkhorse podcast (https://odysee.com/@DarkHorsePodcastClips:b/anyone,-at-anytime,-can-spread-mal:1).

During the research of this article I have found James Lindsay’s works and his work “Translations from the Wokish” (https://newdiscourses.com/translations-from-the-wokish/), it might help you through your research.

On dehumanization (https://samank.substack.com/p/dehumanize?s=w)

What is dehumanizing?

As far as I can describe it. Dehumanization: is an act of removing default rights or values that are attributed by one's morals to treat a person. To treat that person as a subhuman or to associate that person with an evil superhuman.

I will use a not so well-known term "rehumanization". Rehumanization: is an act of adding back default rights or values that are attributed by one's morals to treat a person, contrary to the social norm (in the case of that subject). To treat that person as a human or to associate that person with an average human.

When would dehumanization happen?

Just before any war or conflict one or both parties might see each other as less than human or they describe the other party's actions as amoral/wrong. People tend to dehumanize each other so they justify breaking their own default mode of treating people (breaking rules or morals). Dehumanization tends to not be based on reality. Meaning, it has an overblown or imaginary element in it.

Examples could be:
A: "My neighbor is an evil witch. she has a black cat. And I have heard she killed and eaten her 2-year-old daughter"
B: "have you spoken to her about any of these? are you sure they are true?"

A: "No, I don't want her witch type to live let alone to be my neighbor."

I have intentionally used a simple and overblown example to describe it in an abstract way. But dehumanization can become complicated to the point of it being indistinguishable from the objective reality. In the example, person A has portrayed her neighbor as an evil witch that does inhumane acts with no evidence to support her claims. But she is enraged and wants to act inhumanely just like what she imagined her neighbor did to her own daughter.

The dehumanization is the thought process that she has towards her neighbor. If she manages to justify inhumane treatment by reducing her neighbor to less than human, then we say she is dehumanizing her neighbor.

This reaction could come from a moral justification for self-defense. In history people with dogmatic beliefs (linked with moral judgment) but detached from core values, are those who take the stand with a dehumanizing perspective. People use dehumanization to say they had a right to do that inhumane act.

example: "I will kill those evil communists."

in that example, "evil" was used to dehumanize the communist, as evil is an Idea that people should fight against. Therefore not only opens up an option to fight but it demands fighting as a necessary moral action.

How can we fight against dehumanization?

I think the best way is to rehumanize people. When people are in the dehumanized part of society, I believe they should try to show their human side to the collective and to rehumanize themselves. If one can see people who are being dehumanized I believe one should take it to be their duty to rehumanize them. Just like how it's people's good faith duty to make a steelman out of the other person's weak argument. But rehumanization should not happen at the sacrifice of one's own life. The person who acts on the dehumanization due to ill thinking or social conformity is solely responsible for the outcome of the action. 

I believe everyone should try to give the benefit of the doubt and try to rehumanize people they are in conflict with as a gesture of goodwill.

“The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche