Quantum Loop Gravity Be For Whitey
Tim May
timcmay at got.net
Thu Jan 1 11:11:38 PST 2004
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
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