A rambling, partial response. You post stirs up my thinking, and in some ways this is a response, but at the same time, it is a chunk of a synthesis I've been trying to put together for a long time.
When I think about the toxic tendency in the worst interpretations of Enlightenment thinking that leads to such excesses as economic fundamentalism and the hyperindividualism of lesswrong.com, I can sum it up as "If in doubt, optimize something".
Nowadays, it's "monetize everything". Bob Doto, on of several ADHD-oriented mentors in BASD14, on twitter said:
Bob Doto
@thehighpony
The real issue with "learning in public" is .... It's a capitalist mindset, convincing people that even as beginners they should consider themselves "experts" bc this is how you get exposure aka how u scale.
Jesse J. Anderson who styles himself "ADHD Creative", did a podcast "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsT3KPYJFl4" (Avoiding Toxic Productivity Advice for ADHD: Find What Actually Works). There are ways to become more effective with ADHD, but being told "You need more will power" is among the most hopeless strategies.
Lately, I seem headed towards one pithy conclusion, that the huge breakthrough for humanity was the knowledge commons, which came about when sharing knowledge and ideas became an end in itself. This requires some turning away from the idea of language (which embraces knowledge, ideas, and communication) as, LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE EVOLUTION PRODUCED (supposedly) about making things happen for ones own benefit and to our propagation.
Knowledge as an end in itself produces communications like: "I think we could do it this way", or "to get to that watering hole which is attracting so many animals, go X steps towards the big forked ___ tree, follow right fork of the path and go over the hill, etc. or "Look out, it's about to get you". There is also gossip, by which you may learn who is more or less trustworthy, and many other things, or a recounting of the events in a hunt, or passing on the virtues of a particular root, fruit, or leaf.
The end result was a community in which each individual had something approaching the knowledge that they whole several hundred who shared a language and a culture, paid visits from village (or "band") to village, and were often mystified and alarmed by by the different habits, body decoration, and language of those outside of the group. Opposible thumbs may have created an increase in potential ability that could support ape-sized brains, but this - the commons of knowledge, ideas, and shared intentions to carry out a plan among dozens in a band, or hundreds in a language/culture group could support a long unfolding of coevolution between group culture and individual intelligence.
We've long known that something happened; some capability/tendency emerged, to explain humans swarming all over the planet - arriving in Australia, evolutionarily isolated for 10s of millions of years, and diversifying into some who could live in the Arctic, wearing skins and perhaps building igloes, and only by that accident, finding the bridge between the Eastern and Western hemispheres, then diversifying again to live in forests, plains, and jungles, all in around 20,000 years. And all of this occurred when their technology consisted of:
fire, crude axes, bows, blow-guns, spears, string bags, shelter-building in some manner based on local resource (bamboo, vine rope and giant leaves, compacted snow blocks), a furnished cave, hunting, fishing, and plant scavenging and cooking techniques. A more exhaustive list could be made, and on the other hand, any one culture knew only a few of these, with much forgotten that their ancestors knew when they lived in different climes.
A rambling, partial response. You post stirs up my thinking, and in some ways this is a response, but at the same time, it is a chunk of a synthesis I've been trying to put together for a long time.
When I think about the toxic tendency in the worst interpretations of Enlightenment thinking that leads to such excesses as economic fundamentalism and the hyperindividualism of lesswrong.com, I can sum it up as "If in doubt, optimize something".
Nowadays, it's "monetize everything". Bob Doto, on of several ADHD-oriented mentors in BASD14, on twitter said:
Bob Doto
@thehighpony
The real issue with "learning in public" is .... It's a capitalist mindset, convincing people that even as beginners they should consider themselves "experts" bc this is how you get exposure aka how u scale.
This was part of a thread by Doto: https://twitter.com/thehighpony/status/1560257637710811136 and it also led me to a thoughtful blog post by Maggie Delano "Why I Hate What's Become Of 'Learning In Public' https://www.maggiedelano.com/2022/07/30/learning-in-public.html
More directly to the point:
Jesse J. Anderson who styles himself "ADHD Creative", did a podcast "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsT3KPYJFl4" (Avoiding Toxic Productivity Advice for ADHD: Find What Actually Works). There are ways to become more effective with ADHD, but being told "You need more will power" is among the most hopeless strategies.
Lately, I seem headed towards one pithy conclusion, that the huge breakthrough for humanity was the knowledge commons, which came about when sharing knowledge and ideas became an end in itself. This requires some turning away from the idea of language (which embraces knowledge, ideas, and communication) as, LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE EVOLUTION PRODUCED (supposedly) about making things happen for ones own benefit and to our propagation.
Knowledge as an end in itself produces communications like: "I think we could do it this way", or "to get to that watering hole which is attracting so many animals, go X steps towards the big forked ___ tree, follow right fork of the path and go over the hill, etc. or "Look out, it's about to get you". There is also gossip, by which you may learn who is more or less trustworthy, and many other things, or a recounting of the events in a hunt, or passing on the virtues of a particular root, fruit, or leaf.
The end result was a community in which each individual had something approaching the knowledge that they whole several hundred who shared a language and a culture, paid visits from village (or "band") to village, and were often mystified and alarmed by by the different habits, body decoration, and language of those outside of the group. Opposible thumbs may have created an increase in potential ability that could support ape-sized brains, but this - the commons of knowledge, ideas, and shared intentions to carry out a plan among dozens in a band, or hundreds in a language/culture group could support a long unfolding of coevolution between group culture and individual intelligence.
We've long known that something happened; some capability/tendency emerged, to explain humans swarming all over the planet - arriving in Australia, evolutionarily isolated for 10s of millions of years, and diversifying into some who could live in the Arctic, wearing skins and perhaps building igloes, and only by that accident, finding the bridge between the Eastern and Western hemispheres, then diversifying again to live in forests, plains, and jungles, all in around 20,000 years. And all of this occurred when their technology consisted of:
fire, crude axes, bows, blow-guns, spears, string bags, shelter-building in some manner based on local resource (bamboo, vine rope and giant leaves, compacted snow blocks), a furnished cave, hunting, fishing, and plant scavenging and cooking techniques. A more exhaustive list could be made, and on the other hand, any one culture knew only a few of these, with much forgotten that their ancestors knew when they lived in different climes.
No metalurgy, writing, agriculture.