Imagining a Future with 'Social Learning'

I am shocked, shocked that far-right insurrectionists are attacking IC-adjacent Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) -- last seen in Poland -- for proposing to weaponize law enforcement against young conservatives. Democrats have never done

such things, and it is a conspiracy theory to suggest that it started with FDR going after Andrew Mellon. Do not believe Google AI!

President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) launched an aggressive political and legal attack on former Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon during the 1930s, using the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to pursue tax evasion and fraud charges against the wealthy industrialist and financier.

Months after Mellon died in 1937, the Board of Tax Appeals "handed down a ruling exonerating Mellon of all tax fraud charges."

I guess Slotkin is giving us a "tell" that the Deep State is panicking. When rulers are losing: that's when they ramp up the lawfare.

But you and I are above all that. Let us think instead of larger, deeper things, so that when the administrative state collapses, and the rubble bounces, we will know what to do and how to build the world that is to come.

For instance, education.

For some time, I have been thinking about how humans learned things -- not before the dawn of government schools but before the dawn of writing. Was it all about epics, myths, and fairy tales, sung and spoken before the hearth fire? Or priestly incantations after a human sacrifice at the local temple?

In another proof of God's existence, I stumbled across an article that explained the whole procedure. For instance, how did Pacific islanders figure out how to navigate across the Pacific without sextants and star maps?

The answer is explained in The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich, a rebel who decided to quit his job as an engineer at Martin Marietta and become an evolutionary biologist.

The big difference between humans and other animals, including chimpanzees, is that we humans learn by social learning. At a basic level, we learn by hanging around other people and copying what they do. At a sophisticated level, we acquire "information from others, often by making inferences about their preferences, goals, and beliefs, or strategies and/or by copying their actions or motor patterns." In the modern era, we call this stealing their patents.

Henrich uses the failed Franklin Arctic expedition of 1845 as an illustration of social learning, or lack thereof. Franklin & Co. starved to death, frozen in the ice in the Arctic winter, because they didn't know how to hunt seals on the ice like the Inuits nearby.

How did the Inuits know? By social learning. By listening to their seal-hunters, copying their methods, and then getting good at it.

Seems obvious, but scientists have found that chimpanzees are no good at social learning, even compared to human toddlers!

One fine day humans invented writing, so that knowledge could be preserved, no longer just handed down from the old ones to the young ones. And then the alphabet, to make it much easier to read. Then the printing press, so that lots more people could acquire knowledge. Then mass media, so rulers could instruct the peasants. Then internet, so people could get knowledge by sidestepping the rulers. And now AI, so moms can set up a custom home-school curriculum for their children in minutes.

Know what's next? Elon connects your brain to AI using Neuralink and his Starmind satellite data centers.

I know. OMG.

You can see that guilds and labor unions use the social learning process with apprenticeships. You can also see why guilds and unions try to limit access to apprenticeships to the relatives of their members. Because apprenticeships work.

And you can also see why governments have laws against child labor. Wouldn't want the kiddies to go to work and acquire skills and compete with adults in the labor market. Much better to have them incarcerated in government child custodial facilities until their mid-teens where they can be properly supervised and indoctrinated by regime-adjacent union teachers.

Now you see why the kiddies in France are peacefully protesting against overcrowded and understaffed schools. Perhaps France needs a few Soros prosecutors, Alex, to decarcerate the French education system.

What? You are insulted by the double standard of incarcerating children in government child custodial facilities while sanctuary cities and devoted activists protest incarceration of undocumented migrants by ICE?

I am more insulted by the idea of sitting children down in classrooms doing nothing except listening to a droning union teacher. Why couldn't the kids do something useful and practical with their math, like computing the teacher's union pension for various retirement dates?

Or even better, the kids could design a government program with the help of AI to transition their future retirement from the present failed Social Security program into IRA accounts brimming with ETFs.

Experts agree that such a program of social learning in our schools would mean the end of credentialed expertise as we know it.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill blogs at The Commoner Manifesto and runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.