Websites you really should be aware of

[stoppingby4now]

Careful Monty, Rome also trained and 'educated' it's Third World allies and those were the very Barbarian Hordes who swept it aside!

I do love the cyclic nature of history :D

 

I'm all for a good cleaning of the house when the house gets dirty. :)

[frihyland]

More free education sites:

 

Connexions

 

Coursera

 

 

OpenCourseWare Websites

 

 

Open-Of-Course

 

 

Open Yale Courses

 

 

Saylor

 

 

webcast.berkeley

 

 

Someone really needs to invent an anti-aging serum I just don't have time for all the stuff I want to learn :P

[z929669]

At our last gasp, we stand to be very knowledgeable .....

[stoppingby4now]

Deleted the marked spam post in ACP as I have submitted the user information to stopforumspam.com.

[MadWizard25]

A little off topic, but regarding knowledge accumulation, a friend sent me an interesting opinion article if anyone's interested.

 

Take it with a grain of salt though, the writer is an anarchist and anti-capitalism (bit of a fallacy to bring this up, but it shows; plenty of bias), and its melodramatic, but the basic message is intriguing.

 

Basically he posits that we have shot ourselves in the foot due to bureaucracy in science and most knowledge industries due to the industrial age, more specifically since the 1960s. Knowledge accumulation could be much faster today, but institutions are so bureaucratic thats its slowed things. My assumption was we had just picked the low hanging fruit, we have discovered many simpler concepts, and now the more complex questions raised by the simpler concepts are being research. Allegedly, no matter how well you educate your workforce today, we wont be seeing the leaps and bounds of discovery that we had pre-1960s or even though we most certainly have people as smart.

 

https://www.thebaffler.com/past/of_flying_cars

 

I now suspect its a mix of both bureaucracy and low hanging fruit, but had never considered this argument before. Fits with what ive experienced in research though. He paints a pretty sad picture.

[frihyland]

I don't believe it for a second, new leaps forward in computer technology have already created and will continue to create an almost limitless garden of "low hanging fruit" for the basic sciences.

 

We just need people interested in picking it, which sadly we do NOT have, due to an education system based on rote learning rather than personal experience, scientific discovery, and artistic exploration.

 

As far as these new discoveries actually improving life, they really won't until we overhaul the patent system.

 

The real problem lies in the bureaucratic nightmare of our education and scientific discovery. While difficult, these problems are quite solvable.

[skwareballz]

Bureaucracy may be a problem, but we seem to think life is somehow harder now than it used to be. We have seen leaps and bounds in the last few generations, but people just seem to be so jaded by what they have. People in the pre-60s world still died of Polio, now people don't even die when their heart explodes from filling it with cheese and tacos. Cars have only been safe since the 80s, before that they were rolling death-traps.

 

I think this generation completely takes for granted that we have computers that connect us to the entire world in our pockets. The global information network that has been built over the last couple of generations is the greatest achievement in the history of the human race, and it wasted on the laziest, most ungrateful group of a**holes that has ever lived, ever.

 

I know I'm guilty of this, my first pc was a commodore64 that played 8-bit games with wires everywhere and I thought that was amazing. Now, I can sit on the toilet and play HD games on a wireless tablet without even the smallest acknowledgement of what has gone into making that possible.

[frihyland]

I think the general malaise is the result of the bureaucracy of education and its complete avoidance of true learning. For those few who are still awake and curious about the world, there is more information available now (and to more humans on the planet through billions of free of inexpensive access points) than any single human has ever had available in history.

 

With ever more information becoming available faster and cheaper then ever in history. The question is will education change to enable us to make use of this golden era or will it remain a barrier to be overcome in order to seek the new truths and beauty of our future.

[z929669]

2020.

 

I have been hypothesizing that around that year, the entire world will change in a fundamental way for humanity... and sorry, but realistically, much for the worse. Shortages in water and oil being the functional basis, but a more fundamental flaw in human nature is the core issue. Until we can ALL be happy having what we need rather than what we want, embrace change rather than stubbornly adhere to stability, socialize the system rather than incentivise ongoing disparity, ... (n).

 

Human-induced climate change is a looming threat that cannot be averted at this point, but that is at least 50 years ahead before the real impact (rising sea levels and dessertification) is realized.

 

Again, sorry to put a damper on any of you optimists, but these are mathematical certainties with variables defined only by time.

 

MW25, I do subscribe to many of the author's views in that modern, industrialized nations with the infrastructure necessary to produce the products of innovation are more interested in profit margins and exclusive, short-term gains than social evolution; whereas more 'hungry', up-and-coming nations with real innovative drive lack the infrastructure to fully implement it in a world of waning resources largely consumed by the few and less needy ....

 

... I just try not to think about it too much and live my life as a well-meaning, socially conscious hedonist :P

---

EDIT: and cheers to Fri's observations RE education. This may be the biggest fundamental breakdown of all, but also due to points made above IMO.

[MadWizard25]

... I just try not to think about it too much and live my life as a well-meaning, socially conscious hedonist :P

 

Ill drink to that!

 

@Fri and z92

Interesting points! Commentary in a bit.

[Bealdwine]

2020.I have been hypothesizing that around that year' date=' the entire world will change in a fundamental way for humanity... and sorry, but realistically, much for the worse. Shortages in water and oil being the functional basis, but a more fundamental flaw in human nature is the core issue. Until we can ALL be happy having what we [i']need[/i] rather than what we want, embrace change rather than stubbornly adhere to stability, socialize the system rather than incentivise ongoing disparity, ...

 

EDIT: and cheers to Fri's observations RE education. This may be the biggest fundamental breakdown of all, but also due to points made above IMO.

On the first point I'm afraid the very nature of capitalism requires the obsession with material wants (rather than needs) and the industry that feeds that compulsion to people (media/advertising). Although I readily admit that I have yet to discover any viable alternative... I simply don't put it 'all' down to natural human greed, it is a controlled process.

If anyone knows better PLEASE advise :) [and sorry but I've lived through communism and hippy/new age'isms and they fail under the pressure of human nature].

 

On education - most actual teachers would agree with you Fri, unfortunately it has become yet another victim of the industrial process that demands measurable results, accounts, accountability and Profit In reality it's a very complex question about what we want education to achieve... and believe me, limiting the goals is serving someone's purposes.

[MadWizard25]

Cant comment about education, since im neck deep in it. Too young to know how bad its gotten either. Actually, im too young to have experienced anything but a post 80's world in all its... glory? Too young to be wise :P So ill attach utmost importance to the scientific knowledge i have had access to.

 

What i do know is that greed is here to stay. Neurobiology and cognitive neuroscience are two of my pet disciplines so im relatively up to date with the literature. If you believe in materialism, then capitalism makes perfect sense as to why it attracts the human race. Without going into too much detail, the way we have evolved neurologically basically predisposes us to economics flavors of capitalism. There is actually a fascinating sub discipline in the field regarding economics and neurology, as well as neurobiology and politics.

 

Even made a presentation for an philosophy of international relations politics course i took on why gender differences do have a measurable and deterministic outcome of politics, purely based on studies in neurobiolgy (you would be surprised at how foreign an idea this is to political disciplines). The class was 80% women, so you can imagine how that went down...

 

So greed is a phenotype that everyone has, and capitalism is a social and economic extension of that. Altruism is also a phenotype, but in a competitive environment such as today's modern society, greed usually trumps.

 

End ramble.

 

Oh and 2020 is a little early for the crunch, I think 2040/50 is more likely, but its coming. Hopefully it wont be too much a stumbling block, and humanities collective knowledge will come through mostly intact. Losing that is what worries me most.

[skwareballz]

2020 might be right if you look at the shape of the oceans the amount of contamination from tankers going into the water. I've read that 90% of all the larger ocean animals, whales, sharks, tuna... , are already dead from fishing, and pollution. Ocean plant life is dying super fast too, like Usain Bolt fast, which spells disaster for the Earth's biosphere. When the oceans loose the ability to sustain life the land masses are far behind.

 

We've made some amazing advancements in the last few centuries, but it seems that we invented the things that will destroy us. As far as capitalism goes, the very nature of what capitalism is has changed so much or the last century. We have basically accepted that it has morphed into corporatism, which is not the same thing at all.

 

If you go out and talk to teachers off the record they will tell you that there is to much bureaucracy, but especially in elementary schooling, parents are as much to blame as anyone. Parents have become absent and let the square boxes purvey the world to children. We are letting the youths grow up thinking that somehow MTV's programming is showing them a healthy lifestyle and that Facebook updates are a good source of information. Maybe I just feel that way because my parents were always home and never overworked, but still absent from my life growing up even if they were in the next room.

 

I think a lot of kids aren't getting the home education they need as much as school education, and so we can change our schools, but the culture at home has to change as well.

 

"My father taught me how to work, not how to love it." Abraham Lincoln

[z929669]

good points all, particularly skwareballz.....

 

The distinction between capitalism and corporatism is an important one; however, it is likely that the latter is an inevitable evolution of the former, since capitalism cannot really be held in check and social disparity is an inevitable result.

 

More important are indeed the oceans --the densest proportion of our atmosphere and making up over 70% of the Earth's surface. It also houses the most biodiversity and is the ultimate source --and resource-- of life on Earth. The key there is ultimately the food chain beginning with various forms of plankton, which we are effectively destroying, at least in terms of biodiversity ... plenty of algae to go around though *ahem*.

 

The human race is not going anywhere, but we are on the brink of a massive natural culling to be sure, governed by limited natural resources that should never have been tapped (i.e., oil). Think of it as a self-stabilizing process that is ultimately good for all life on Earth, including humanity

 

In the meantime, I think that we are in the twilight of humanity's "golden age" and it is a good time to be alive, so we should really enjoy it while it lasts

[MadWizard25]

Enjoying the afterparty!

 

I guess corporatism is not capitalism, just labor organization right? So not mutually inclusive at all. But at its roots, last centuries capitalism is still today's capitalism, dont think its morphed, it just has a few different flavors.

 

I also think some radical social engineering might help mitigate social crunches caused by resource crunches, but ethically and technologically thats a bit of a non-starter...