Quantum Loop Gravity Be For Whitey

[Tim May]

On Jan 1, 2004, at 8:51 AM, Tyler Durden wrote:
> I'll tell you a story.
>
> Back in the late 1980s I taught at a notorious HS in Bedford 
> Stuyvesant. 90% of my students were black. I regarded few of them as 
> stupid, but almost none of them saw the point of studying math...they 
> just didn't see how it could benefit them, and they said this to me on 
> a regular basis.
>
>


First, please stop including the full text of the message you are 
replying to. Learn to use an editor, whether you ultimately top-post or 
bottom-post to edited fragments.

Second, we are fast-moving toward a society and economy where only 
those who _wanted_ to study math and science by the time they were in 
high school will have anything more than a menial, makework job. Now 
whether they go the full course and get a college degree or advanced 
degree is not so much the point as it is that they were intrinsically 
interested.

So if a kid in high school can't see the "benefit" of studying math, he 
shouldn't be. It's as simple as that.

The parallel I like is one we developed (in Ted Kaehler's 
nanotechnology study group in the early 90s) for looking at what a 
society and economy might look like where the costs of material 
production are as close to zero as one might imagine. That is, a 
society with full-blown general assemblers, i.e., von Neumann 
replicators at the molecular, mechano-synthesis, Drexler-type scale. 
How would goods be produced and sold? How would markets exist/

The analogy I drew, in an essay, and that Howard Landman, Ted Kaehler, 
Mike Korns, and others added to was this:

* We already have an example of an entire town and an entire industry 
where essentially the costs of material production are nearly zero.

* Namely, Hollywood. Film stock is essentially free...bits even more 
so. Cameras remain expensive, but are vastly less so than they were a 
decade ago. Basically, everything material in Hollywood is nearly free. 
What is expensive is the creative talent, the know-how, the ensembles 
of actors and directors and writers and all.

(And writing is itself a perfect example of material abundance. All of 
the money is in the writing and distribution, virtually none of it in 
the materials, or in the low skill segment.)

Which is why some writers and some Hollywood types make tens of 
millions a year and most don't.

* The society we are heading towards is one of an increasingly sharp 
division between the "skilled and in demand" end of the spectrum and 
the bulk of droids who have few skills in demand.

(I argued this, circa 1991-2, to a bunch of people who basically bought 
the line that technology would bring wealth to the masses, blah blah. I 
argued that yes, the masses would have great material goods, just as 
the masses today have color tvs in their cribs. But the big money would 
elude them. Libertarian rhetoric about everybody being wealthy is only 
meaningful in the sense that even the poorest today are wealthy by 
Roman or Middle Ages or even Renaissance standards. But the split 
between those with talents in demand--the Peter Jacksons, the Stephen 
Kings, the Tim Berners-Lees, etc. and the "reading be for whitey" and 
"I don't see any benefit to studying math" vast bulk will widen.)

Much more could be said on this. I recall I wrote some long articles 
along these lines in the early years of the list.

In conclusion, your Bedford-Stuy student who doesn't see the point to 
studying math will never be a math researcher, or a physicist, or a 
chemist, or anything else of that sort. So no point in trying to 
convince him to study his math.

It's like convincing a kid to start writing so he'll stand a chance of 
being the next Stephen King: if he needs convincing, he won't be.

The burnoff of useless eaters will be glorious.


--Tim May