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Politics : View from the Center and Left
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To: koan who wrote (403148)3/17/2019 11:48:15 PM
From: cosmicforce  Read Replies (1) of 542519
 
Maybe we watched different talks. He concluded - I paraphrase but this is close:

"We are not getting better at everything. We are getting worse at 'politics' and remembered history."


In the video I watched, Flynn pointed out that the vast majority of people didn't know that there have been five wars into Afghanistan in recent recorded history and none of them have left a permanent impact or significant improvement behind. People in the early days learned history. Today, I'm surprised by how many people don't know how to navigate without a GPS using maps or remember basic facts about the government or history. He also said that we no longer are engaged in the concrete and that our facts are locked in the contemporary and not historical. You don't get something for nothing. More people know the name of the Kardashians than Lord Kelvin. Pretty much everyone in the 19th century could tie dozens of knots necessary for their crafts, of which there were many. Nobody knows knots anymore other than current and some former boy/girl scouts which is probably under 5% of the first world population and Naval boatswains mates.

That doesn't sound like education is necessarily making us all smarter in the sense of picking our leaders or knowing how to survive. It sounds like we are getting better at some kinds of logic, and abstraction but that a broader set of basic skills is being lost. In his other example of the 4th grade educated peasant, if you live in a world where crows and fish provided you challenges - of course they are going to seem unrelated in your world. Their only utilitarian functions represent either a threat to your crop by the crows and something you or your dog could eat in the case of the fish. Eating crow is an expression because crows probably aren't all that tasty associated with dead (possibly human) carcasses.
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