ethics as linearization
My revelation came a short-time ago, during a philanthropic adventure in the education world.
I saw a lot of money and resources being scatter-wasted. Just like the broken education system itself, education foundations were trying to salvage as many kids as possible, resulting in undistinguished projects with low benefit densities.
Human potential is not evenly distributed. Every human being is important of course, but the people who can and will carry us forward constitute a very small minority. Artificially inserting a veil of ignorance in our decision-making mechanisms in the name of justice breeds nothing but mediocracy.
Where freedom is real, equality is the passion of the masses. Where equality is real, freedom is the passion of a small minority.
Eric Hoffer - The True Believer (Page 33)
Our world is filled with power law distributions and will continue to get more non-linear as it becomes faster and more complicated.
Our ethics is also non-linear, but in exactly the opposite way. We feel contempt for the advantaged. We hate handing out resources to the innately more capable. We are inclined to help the weak, cure the damaged, assist the incapable.
Our ethics is a never-ending struggle to linearise the world. It is as if we are trying to nullify our own chances of being left behind wounded.
Of course, this type of individualistic thinking makes absolutely no sense at the species level, because no trait of any social value is evenly distributed. Very few kids are born to be leaders, entrepreneurs, academicians, researchers etc. We need to find these kids as immediately as possible and concentrate all our resources on them. Scattering our resources is wasteful. We can not treat everyone as a potential Einstein.
Why are we so delusional? Because we lost trust in our systems all together. Filtering mechanisms got abused by the incumbent power holders, hopelessness slowly settled in and eventually bursted in a moral upheaval, resulting in an extremely suboptimal equilibrium.
Every god-damn complex-enough system eventually turns elitist. There are elite bacterias, companies, soccer players, singers, viruses, race horses, artists, ants, economies, minerals... If non-linearity is built into the very fabric of the systems around us, we need to learn to behave in a non-linear manner as well.
Justness and nonlinearity can co-exist. There is a whole spectrum between being a Machiavellian monster and naively rejecting the simple tautological statement that exceptionality is exceptional. We need to learn to trust ourselves again so that we can probe the grey zones where the better equilibriums lie.
That kid in the back of the classroom is asking irritating questions to the teacher because he is sick of the non-rigourous nature of the material being hammered into his brain. We set up superficial frameworks to protect the mediocre minds from bottomless depths. While doing so, we lost those who are actually capable of navigating such depths.
That kid near the window is staring outside and thinking about the massively multiplayer strategy game he played last night because he is sick of the exceptionally boring teacher. He is learning by doing at a much faster pace inside realistic simulations and his gaze is meant to defend himself against an intrusive mind-fuck.
Education foundations need to save these academic failures who are actually our best hopes.
