what are we supposed to learn to prep for the future?

Moontower Munchies #94

Jan 15, 2025

Friends,

Our local social club recently held its annual all-hands where we address housekeeping matters, re-affirm goals, and discuss event programming.

This is boilerplate info from the weekly letter I send to the club.

This is where I hosted the Financial Literacy sessions for kids last year. Feel free to copy and host your own:

Last night, we did our first salon of the year where members who were fluid with what’s happening in AI gave a presentation to the rest of us eager learners.

The topic of AI can leave people feeling anxious about the future. “What am I supposed to learn?” or maybe even more important to the members “what are my kids supposed to learn?”

This made me think of a recent interview I listened to with sci-fi author Devon Eriksen.

I’ll cut straight to the excerpts that relate (emphasis mine).

Interviewer Dan Koe: I want to start with that very first post of yours that I came across, and it was you responding to Yuval Noah Harari, like a clip of him saying that nobody knows what to learn because nobody knows what will be relevant 20 years from now. And then you started it with, "That's because this dude doesn't know what education is."

That caught my attention immediately. And you went on to say this:

“In my opinion, the seven liberal arts of the modern world are:

Logic: How to derive truth from known facts.
Statistics: How to understand the implications of data.
Rhetoric: How to persuade and spar persuasion tactics.
Research: How to gather information on an unknown subject (practical psychology).
Practical Psychology: How to discern and understand the true motives of others.
Investment: How to manage and grow existing assets.
Agency: How to make decisions about what course to pursue and proactively take action to pursue it.”

This will set us up for the entire podcast. So I want to start with this question: What do you find wrong with the current education system, and why are we not teaching what you call these liberating arts?

Devon: Well, the root cause of what is wrong with the education system is that a third party is paying for it. You know, we could go on all day sort of nitpicking the symptoms. But that is the disease. And when something is being paid for, the person who pays for it is the customer, and it is the customer who gets served.

So when you don't pay for your education, when the government pays for your education through money that it has taken from other people, then the government decides on some level what you are going to learn. And you do not have so much as a veto power. Because if you pack your bags and go somewhere else to some other college, you're getting the same thing because the government is paying for that, either through these kinds of education grants or through the Stafford Loan program. You're not writing the checks, so you don't decide the curriculum. And when somebody else decides the curriculum that you are going to be educated from, then they are going to give you the education that is going to make you useful to them—not specifically the education that is going to make you useful to you.

This is something that Cicero talked about when he talked about education. And I would highly recommend giving those bits of his writings a read. Because we don't really have an organized version of what Cicero would have considered education.

What we call education today is mostly actually training, and that is the kind of education that in Rome would have been given to slaves. A slave is essentially a human machine. Where he's property. He's going to spend his whole life doing one task. So you give him job training. Job training is not education. It is preparation to do a specific task.

In that era of history, if someone was a free man, a Roman citizen with the full rights thereof, who could carry weapons and do all the things that Roman citizens could do, it was expected that he would probably need to be able to do many different things in his life because he would be acting in his own interest. He was not a slave. He did not exist to serve someone else. He existed to benefit his society, but also to serve himself. Hopefully, the two would align.

That meant that you couldn't teach him everything he might need to know because you had no idea what he might need to know. He had no idea what he might need to know. So you taught him how to train himself. You taught him how to learn. Education is not about how to do a task. It's about how to learn a task.

We do not have systematic education in this society, in the modern West, about how to learn and educate yourself, because the people who are determining what goes into education are really more focused on, "Okay, what's going to make this person a useful worker for the moneyed interests that I actually serve?"

[Kris: Maybe that was a lot of words to say “specialization is for insects”. Then again, my money is on the roaches to outlast us all. Even better, cyborg roaches.]

Dan Koe: With that, it seems like agency is a massive part of that equation. The last art, so to say, could be the glue between it all. So in your eyes, what is agency, and what is the importance of it?

Devon: Well, agency is really the one most rare factor that determines highly successful people in life. You know, if we look at someone like Elon Musk, we can say, "Oh, he's very smart." And clearly, he is. IQ probably 150 plus. But there are lots of people banging around with 150-plus IQ—thousands upon thousands of them in the United States alone. And a lot of them are cloistered in academia. They come up with these sort of post-modern-esque papers. Or maybe they're doing something slightly more useful, like physics. But they don't get this magical effect where everything they touch turns to gold.

That's because the bottleneck is not intelligence. Intelligence is only one of the things that is needed for success. It's necessary, but it's not sufficient. And intelligence is a very narrow thing. So what agency is, is the tendency to initiate action to achieve your goals.

And we don't solve the world with intelligence. We don't look at the world and think very smart thoughts and say, "Oh, I understand everything now." That's not how it works. Because when we look at the world and we think very hard, we get a few things right and we generally get most of it wrong. Then what we do is we try something, we have our guess, we test it. Some of it fails; maybe it succeeds, but usually, it fails. We refine that guess and try again.

So what applying raw intelligence to the universe is missing is that feedback loop. And what agency does—what this tendency to initiate action, this belief that you will eventually be successful, which is what agency is—what it does is it makes us willing to take risks. And it makes us resilient to failure. Because if you're trying something that really is an achievement worth having, that somebody hasn't done before, the first time you try it, you're going to fail. No matter how smart you are. You're going to get a lot of things wrong. So you have to keep trying again until you eliminate all of the errors from your model or from your plan.

You can't do that with pure intelligence because intelligence is just the ability to analyze. It doesn't give you data. It doesn't tell you what the universe is like. So you have to go over and over again.

Ok, so I want to just emphasize the “feedback loop”. At our weekly family dinner with my in-laws we discussed New Year’s Resolutions.

I admit I was being quite tedious, but I kept pointing out how the way the resolutions were written, there was no feedback loop.

“Make the middle school basketball team”
“Shoot in the low 80s in golf”
“Write a 100 page story”

Here’s how you fix all of them:

“Alternating days: 20 minutes of dribbling drills/400 shots from various stations. Record percentages.”
“Driving range X days/week and putting drills Y days a week. Play 18 holes every week.”
“Write for 15 minutes every day”

None of these were my resolutions so I have no idea what the specific prescriptions should be, but I’m certain that the second set of prescriptions will have a higher likelihood of getting you to the goal. Because they embed a feedback loop.

If this reminds you of timeboxing, then you’ve been paying attention. It’s the manuka honey of productivity hacks. Score yourself not on the output of an hour but on whether you actually worked on what you said you would.

It’s so stupid simple and yet if you scored yourself this way do you think you’d actually be batting 1.000? If not, then you probably have a lot to gain from this shift in what you label a successful hour vs an unproductive one.

Ok, I’ll close the sandwich with another education bit. This is from my takeaways from Seth Godin:

What we have done in the last 50 years is leveraged everything. So, whereas in the old days of business might be able to go four or five days with no revenue because they didn’t own the bank, anything because they didn’t know the mortgage, anything. Now, if you want to compete, you need to have raised the money, to have run the ads, to have lower the price, et cetera, et cetera. So one business after another, big and small are leverage to their eyeballs. And we’ve done the same thing with education. That if other people are leaning into it, levering up, competing for scarce slots, it’s really easy for a parent to believe that balance will be punished. There’s no way to win that game against someone who’s unwilling to compromise. So what you have to do instead is play a different game. And you had to figure out what other agendas are available for my kids and my family…

If you talk to freshmen at Harvard, not one of them says they came to Harvard so they could get a job in finance. And if you talk to graduating seniors, they’ve somehow persuaded themselves that that’s exactly what they’re going to do. So what happened? Well, they’re not vocational schools in the sense that they teach you how to be an investment banker. But they are definitely labeling and finishing schools in the sense that they make it easy for investment bankers to know where to go, to get more investment bankers. The thing is that colleges that chose not to play this game got less famous. The ones that said you’re here to read great books, you’re here to explore what it means to be on the planet, you’re here to think deeply about meaning and philosophy and connection didn’t attract the same people to their placement office.

Which meant a signal went out to parents. And the signal was if you’re about to invest $200,000 or go into debt for something choose wisely and your peers will judge you for it. And so we created this capitalist driven ratchet that says money and success are the same thing. And that success means you’re a good parent. And success means you have a good kid and we’re defining that success in terms of money, but there are plenty of ways to make a living where you can be happy and make a contribution where the goal isn’t to make the most money.

Stay Groovy

☮️

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