Product, technology, implementation, police department, policing method, workflow. These aren't discreet. Incidents involve all of them.
Responsibility is on people.Technologies cannot be "found guilty." But... this isnt' a trial. There are consequences to doing policing any particular way, and that's the subject.
Doing it this way... using baby skynet for command and control has advantages, like response time. It has disadvantages, like false positives. "Law enforcement error" is technically correct, but not informative about the matter at hand. The error
That is, the www was "being killed" already in a lot of ways. "Democratization" and suchlike open ideals had already been receding for a long time.
In part, this is because of "democratization" of access. The old web was a self selected, subpopulation. After smartphones, it is the whole population.
Facebook's walled garden and other apps using the web as "merely infrastructure." Algorithic recommendations replace hyperlinks, until it no longer "a web."
Google, imo, represents a sort of intermediate stage. "Pagerank" the original tech behind their search relied on the hyperlink web structure... and also degraded it.
That was SEO paradigm. Now there is the LLM equivalent of SEO.
So... LLMs eat the web, while also making it redundant. The previous paradigm and all it's contents whill exist as a ghost within the new one.
I always hated the term "democratization" because last I checked there was never any consensus on what should be done, always MBA pricks shoving whatever they wanted down our throats.
If the timeline of things as you present them is taken as accurate, then I would say the www being killed was good, with FB opening up to everyone being the inflection point toward bad.
Webrings are nostalgic, but the old web sucked, and there was a dearth of information and fun to be had. I remember getting online and being able to confirm "nope, no new anime content worth looking at today" by quickly checking Usenet and Yahoo's index (which was updated manually) and a few webrings.
now, I'm able to watch a show that aired in Brazil the day after, with English subtitles.
People who long for the web of the 90s, I always feel like they must not be very interesting. Imagine complaining that we can't go back to libraries of the 1970s when the ones today have 3D printers, DVDs to rent, etc. because "there are too many teenagers"
If you judge the internet and the world by "no new anime content today" things have actually improved. But some would think that's not a healthy way to see things.
> People who long for the web of the 90s, I always feel like they must not be very interesting.
That's confusing content access with monopolised algorithmic promotion/curation of belief systems, using selected news and opinion pieces to modify beliefs and behaviour.
It's nice you can view (pirate) whatever content you want, but not so nice that algorithmic platforms pretend to be neutral social spaces when in fact they're being used to promote certain political and cultural beliefs while suppressing others.
I don't know about anyone else, but anybody who goes into a "1970s library" (I don't know what that is, but I guess it means a good old-fashioned library with like, books) and complains about the lack of 3D printers or that their obscure animated series catalog isn't wide enough would embody the definition of an uninteresting person to me.
I am one of the people that long for the old internet. I don’t long for it because there are too many normal people on it now.
The old internet was interesting, open, simple, un-gated, and relatively egalitarian with few corporate interests in commanding positions. The new internet is basically a predatory environment disguised as a library.
> People who long for the web of the 90s, I always feel like they must not be very interesting. Imagine complaining that we can't go back to libraries of the 1970s when the ones today have 3D printers, DVDs to rent, etc. because "there are too many teenagers"
The Internet used to be a space for high-IQ people, and now it's filled with low attention span, low impulse control people. Tik Tok and Instagram are the worst offenders in this regard, because it enabled borderline illiterate people to communicate on the Internet.
A quick read of any old usenet arguments should instantly disabuse you of this absurd notion. Or the old archives of stupid IRC conversations.
The old internet was a space for people who were incentivized to spend significant effort dealing with technical things to connect to strangers, which has nothing to do with IQ or "intelligence" or anything like that.
There has always been plenty of people who are extremely stupid, but have no problem following technical minutia as required for things like the early internet.
Remember that early access was extremely expensive. Usually it was billed hourly, at significant rates. This means that the primary filter for internet users back then was connection to resources, through an academic connection, a corporate connection, a government connection, or a lot of personal wealth.
The quality of internet users early on, if it even existed (which I dispute), was more driven by organizations like the government, academia, and defense contractors.
And as much as people cried about "Eternal September", the internet mostly survived as a distributed place with real communities until the late 2000s, where it started to be really profitable to build walled gardens for Advertising economies.
The walls didn't really come up until the 2010s: Facebook being a dominant platform, Google owning Youtube and leveraging that to try and force their own social network, Apple controlling most phones, old forums dying, and the rise of AWS to centralize internet software design.
Being able to deal with “technical minutiae” is highly linked to intelligence. What you’re referring to is lacking social graces, which is different than lacking intelligence. Having a hobby that involved reasoning about abstract things like IRQ assignments is a pretty good proxy for IQ.
Similarly, back when computers were expensive, people on the internet generally were higher income, which is also quite significantly correlated with intelligence.
I think we still have many high-IQ people on the web. Its just they are not making tiktoks. However, they are harder to find since the pool got bigger.
The ease of use introduced the average individuals to the web and online gaming. When I was younger and online gaming was gaining traction my "clan" hosted servers. This is how I started dipping my toes into programming and server configuration. Literally, everyone that was in the clan was quite intelligent. We had debates and discussions on IRC, forums and teamspeak.
Now, gaming and the web is just trash full of brain rotted individuals. Communities have been destroyed by lack of self hosted or self owned servers. Forums have been destroyed by discord. Games are being destroyed by microtransactions.
The idea of designing incentives far less useful social scientists and policy wonks we're hoping circa 2010.
I agree with and enjoy the overall sentiment of this piece. Incentive are fit losers. BYO incentives is the way to go.
That said, IRL, the structural advantage of external incentives... especially artificially designed ones... Can be near impossible to overcome.
Let's say you are a researcher working in one of the fields tested by 21st century mushiness. Replication failures. P-hacking. An unstructured stream of published research adding up to noise.
This outcome is not just because of publish-or-perish, or other incentive structure. It's also because the field is just hard. Harder than it seems it should be, intuitively.
It seems like science should have uncovered a decent, workable "theory of nutrition" or a promising pathway to one. It hasn't. That means thousands of researchers are working in their little corners... And when they look up from their desk there is no big picture forming. No big project that they are contributing to.
Maybe we just need a new theory, when you research methods.. or something. But... we don't know what that is.
Intrinsic motivation vs academic grind... Facing a near impossible challenge. A good chance of modest success within the pigeon-incetives paradigm... Vs near-guaranteed failure of an alternative, intrinsic motivation path.
Even if you take the intrinsic motivation path... There will probably come a point where you have invested years, achieve nothing... and proudly refusing to publish banal papers like everyone else will seem like folley. This person probably just leaves the field.
Startups are different than the corporations they become. 19th century science is different to modern academia. Trying to replicate qualities is always sysephean.
When "ai slop" became a concept, it mostly came into spaces where "human slop" had already been firmly established.
Obvious ones like content scroll fodder. But also, there's slop everywhere. Even things like longform journalism or trade publications... these are often "slop." A string of platitudes and generalizations that superficially seem serious.
That is true in work culture too. A lot of people jump in on emails, superficially seem to be working... but contribute little of value. Now they do this, but with ai.
Is this cognitive dissonance, or is this just people being normal?
You pursue business strategies as a profit maximizing business person concerned with outcomes for your company and investors. You comment on the regulatory/political matters as a pro-social citizen concerned with societal benefits.
Cognitive dissonance tends to occur when attempting to avoid hypocrisy... and doing mental gymnastics to make it so there are no clashes between your different perspectives.
≥jet engines have a market structure that's uniquely terrible for traditional free market societies.
A lot of the theoretical concepts behind this... They need updating to account for the last generation of experience. For the most part, the concepts were developed in the context of the industrial revolution(s) and manufacturing.
We are talking about manufacturing here, but the US economy in the last generation is a story about software, services, non-manufacturing firms and manufacturing firms the side step (as best they can) the core paradigm of manufacturing economics.
Competitive pricing, substitutes and alternatives, a strategic paradigm governed by market prices, marginal costs, and manufacturing quality... This is relatively marginal paradigm in the US economy, certainly in terms of market cap. In china, it is their bread and butter.
Low margin, highly competitive components manufacturing... Is that really a forte a free market societies in 2026? We outsource the "commodity value add" parts of the process. We certainly do not put them at the center of corporate strategy.
I agree about "corporate rot." I don't think anyone has a good answer to this either. China included. In practice, the best solution appears to be young vibrant companies. VW or Ford vs Tesla & BYD. VW and Ford exist because of history. Tesla & BYD exist because they perform well.
Schumpeter's free market solution was creative destruction... But, we've never really had a system for promoting this.
Part of the problem is that in a global market, allowing a company to fail creates room in the market for renewal, but there's no guarantee that your country will fill it. If Germany had come down hard on VW after the turbo diesel scandal... They probably would have just ceded market share to Korea or China or the US or something.
I feel that our understanding of trust and antitrust, along with the legal and regulatory premises... Just isn't very useful in the 21st century.
I understand the motivation, and justification for employing antitrust. Google's business model, and much of modern tech economy is really all about Monopoly-like market power.
In fact, one of the main concerns for AI investors is price competition, insufficient lock-in, weak network effects and consumer choice. They call this commodification... a telling choice of word. It's a worry that $trn valuations are impossible without something resembling monopoly to ensure longevity and high margins.
Peter Thiel gave a talk in favour of monopoly. It's worth reading. Even if you completely disagree, there are some subtle points that are relevant either way. A company facing market dynamism, price competition... Is unlikely to be investing billions in speculative r&d, for example.
Our core ideas about Monopoly, and antitrust... Tend to be highly derived of the industrial revolution, which is in turn all about manufacturing. Capital, labor, technology, marginal costs, marginal utility, price theory, etc. you can count the number which it's coming off the assembling line to understand the productivity of the firm. The product is concrete, and therefore productivity can be reasoned about.
There's no real way of applying this to Google. Google's users generally don't pay anything. Google doesn't have marginal costs.There is no price. The AdWords auction, is very clearly designed assuming monopolistic dynamics.. the seller is price maker and the buyer is a price taker. Prices are set as close as possible to buyer marginal value. Competition has no effect on pricing.
Otoh, where is the EU or any other antitrust regulator going with any of this. In the 90s, the Microsoft Monopoly was the biggest antitrust case. They used their os Monopoly to crush Netscape.
Now that it's history, we can look back and learn that the antitrust case just didn't matter one way or another. Nothing was really gained by victory, and nothing would have been lost by defeat.
The theory appears to be (a) regulated capitalism is good (b) tech monopolies clearly have market power and abuse it. There is no theory of desired outcome or the benefits of such an outcome. Are they regulating monopolies, preventing monopolies, pursuing an abstract notion of Justice?
Even in a digital world, monopolies bring clear downsides. The case of Google being able to simply create realities by way of Chrome the rest of the market is forced to follow is a good example here.
I agree that the common understanding of antitrust regulations has become a leaky abstraction, but the general idea is still completely sound to me: A corporation should never be in a position where it can actively suppress competition, or act in a way that is harming consumers without an alternative available.
> Are they regulating monopolies, preventing monopolies, pursuing an abstract notion of Justice?
I suppose all of it; opportunities to prevent some monopolies were missed, to the detriment of all, so regulating them is the only option left. In other cases, we can still act to actively work against emerging monopolies. And above all is clearly a notion of justice, without which democracy itself would be a pretty futile exercise in bureaucracy.
Put differently, what do you suppose the EU should do? Just let global mega-corporations have their way? Even if Google users by and large don't pay for the services, we're all aware they monetise off of users still. To me, this is an implementation detail that doesn't really make a difference to the observation that yes, Google is (and other big tech corps are) clearly in a market dominating position it (they) should not be in.
> A company facing market dynamism, price competition... Is unlikely to be investing billions in speculative r&d, for example.
The comparison to manufacturing isn't necessary because this seems to be contradicting by much of tech history itself. Plenty of companies have spent plenty of billions on R&D to outpace their real competitors.
If we're to update our view of monopoly (and I agree we should) it should be to clamp down on them even more.
>Now that it's history, we can look back and learn that the antitrust case just didn't matter one way or another. Nothing was really gained by victory, and nothing would have been lost by defeat.
You are missing the fact that the US administration did change and Microsoft was not broken... similar to the fact google/alphabet escaped that too
> A company facing market dynamism, price competition... Is unlikely to be investing billions in speculative r&d, for example.
Simple solution: tax companies more heavily and use the money for public investment in research.
The problem with people like Thiel is they’re incapable of thinking past their own self-interest, which makes many perfectly good solutions seem unthinkable to them. No one should listen to them when it comes to anything resembling public policy.
Unless your goal is creating a society that is centred around being the perfect habitat for Peter Thiel and Peter Thiel only, you should not listen to anything that guy says.
and you might think this is a small or pointless win, but the whole point of this is that because users have this choice, microsoft is forced to make internet explorer actually good so that people willingly choose it instead of abusing it to make life harder and worse for everyone else while making things easier for themselves.
Hence internet explorer was killed and we got edge
You don't think that Microsoft being forced to present a screen where the user selects a browser among several options contributed to that outcome in any way?
Peter Thiel himself is a good reason to avoid monopolies. He is dangerous fascist with political goals that would make life of most of us hell. He defends monopilies, because he is seeking to create one and then use its power to harm the rest of us.
So the best we can do for the future is to prevent Thiels of the world from monopoly creation.
PT's theory is full of strawmen, subtle leaps of logic, unproven postulates, and plain self-serving lies.
It seems he basically posits to have single-handedly reinvented monopoly theory. But such extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, which I'm not quite seeing. Some cherry-picked examples (like that old MS antitrust case) just don't cut it. And the mere existence of these monopolies in our time is not at all sufficient proof of a positive outcome (for whom, anyway?) in the end (what end, has anybody seen it yet?). In fact, I'd argue that it takes some quite rose-tinted glasses or a billionaire's mile-high distance to the ground to not see the huge problems they're posing to society right now.
The fact that this is coming from his position of great power, and that he himself is benefitting immensely from the theory he advocates, should be enough to make you pause and think really hard about what philosophy he's trying to sell you there, and why.
The puppet master wants you to cheer for our tech overlords and accept them as benevolent dictators because trust me bro. But do you really think what's driving this man's reasoning is the good of mankind - of you and me? If so, I have a bridge to sell you.
There have been many wonderful ideas and concepts for education systems over the centuries. They have/had different, sometimes contradictory philosophies. Most fall short of their values and ambitions, regardless of what these are.
IMO, the pressures leading to degradation are all somehow linked to universalization:
(a) Resource constraints. Student/teacher ratios. The availability of good teachers, at scale. A great teacher is the ultimate lever. But great teachers in every class, with enough time and energy to invest in every student... very hard to achieve at national scale.
(b) Voluntary, self-motivated students who want to learn vs checked-out teenagers that just want to pass the exam with minimum effort... it's a massive difference. It's the difference between a world class gymnastics club and the PE class from an 80s teen movie. Even if half the class is highly motivated, it can't be like the gymnastics club when half the class is there involuntarily.
The visionary, optimistic concepts are usually focused on what students can achieve when motivated and willing. Universal, mandatory education rarely achieves this attitude.
(c) The bureaucracy required for scale. Decisions about teaching methods, standardized testing and whatnot... these can be performing terribly for years and decades before getting dropped. A department starts judging schools or teachers by standardized tests... and then a whole generation falls into a stale "teaching to the test" paradigm that disillusions both teacher and student.
> Universal, mandatory education rarely achieves this attitude.
As a former teacher I think that's very common, but a fatal error to assume that it's something that it's up to education to achieve this at all. It's up to student to decide what they want to achieve, what their motivation is, whether they are motivated at all etc. The point of education have always been to provide students tools.
Btw, what makes a great teacher? One of my most influential teachers was universally hated by the rest of the class.
As a taxpayer and citizen, there are good reasons I want every kid to achieve great education results. The fact that it is probably impossible, is irrelevant. I want that. This is why we have universal education in most countries.
Despite the fact that the results aren't what they could be in an ideal world where every student is motivated, the results are much better than any place where education is not universal.
Yes. And that's why universal education has been success and why a modern idea of education – "let's find out everyone individual needs are, adjust to these, show how cool it is to think critically etc" – is such a disaster.
Eventually, though, we do need to say that we need to specialize. To become a great musician, you need to spend hours and hours practicing every day. There isn't time to also be a great physicist if you're going to be a great mathematician. Well, maybe you could be both, but it means you have zero free time at all to spend on things like having a social life is one point of life.
Still, until you're in your mid-teens, your needs are not much different from anyone else. You need to get the basics of education which are the same for everyone. As you get to your late teens, you need to start figuring out what your specialty is going to be and start moving in that direction.
I feel it's important to make this distinction because otherwise it's too easy to be arguing past each other when people don't realize that there are different stages of life that do have different needs.
Good point. As a former highschool teacher, I tend to think on this (K12 in US terms?) level, but of course universal higher education wouldn't work. Some comments though. In my experience this point in life when people will figure out their direction varies wildly. I had classmates who figured it out in their early teens and others who found their way in late twenties. And even more important point against specializing too early - some of them had already three careers (I'm in my sixties). Times change, jobs disappear and strong universal foundation helps enormously if you have to start a new career.
I'm not sure that is the modern idea of education. As you can see in the linked example, it's there 200 years ago at the sunrise of universal and education. I'm sure it was there when Aristotle taught Alexander.
I think we can just call that "good" education vs.. the best we can do.
If you are thinking about the individual, you are going to be thinking about individualization... Like the coach of a gymnastics team, chess club or whatnot.
I agree that from a societal, governmental or taxpayer pov... It's different. That is the "true" perspective if you are doing national policy, which is why that "woke stuff" is so often a disaster when applied to national education systems.
But... as a student or parent... not thinking about it individualistically is pretty pathological.
You are, I think, blinded by the fact that you were a HS teacher. Primary grade teachers teach principle societal objects by rote and practice, not by encouraging students to "go discover the alphabet on their own". Middle-school takes it up a notch, and maybe by (USA) junior high school students' brains are ready for learning how to learn, but for me it wasn't until I reached HS that a teacher ever challenged me to interpret the "facts" I was presented with in a novel, personal way - to use my skillset to understand the facts, discern facts from propaganda or beliefs, and so on.
Mandatory education is still probably better than the alternative but it does seem to create a constant tension: the system has to serve students who want very different things from it
The solution would seem to be a flexible system which identifies and works with the needs of each student.
A school system I attended when I was young divided classes between academic and social --- social classes were attended at one's age level, academic classes were attended at a student's ability levels, I believe that there were also trade school tracks, prompted by students taking Sloyd Woodworking claseses:
While there is a point that on balance I have to disagree, there are a lot of things I want students to achieve that are just hard and they won't be motivated to. I want every student to have a good education in math, even though it is hard to do that. For that matter, most of it was forgotten by now, but it was hard to learn how to read. Most students wouldn't learn how to read if they were not forced to at some point.
Which is to say, the vast majority of students are not different. There are some much below average kids who need a lot of help but never will reach anything, but the vast majority are very close to average and we don't need particularly anything better for them than anyone else. What we need is to give the programs we give to the most gifted students to the less gifted students because they would benefit from the same attention
The neat thing about stratifying by ability is that it doesn't require any additional resources or special programs. If you have 20 teachers in a school, you divide the student population into roughly 5%-wide ability bands instead of roughly 5%-wide age cohorts with random ability, and that's it.
Mastery learning is also more effective than moving on with knowledge gaps, so this should be expected to raise everyone's outcomes.
Exactly. The school was laid out in grids, and identical layouts between floors (higher grades higher up) with identical class sequencing for each grade, so at class change time, it was easy for even young kids to get to their next class.
> I want every student to have a good education in math, even though it is hard to do that.
That's a laudable goal but I think it backfires in practice: a lot of students struggle with math and consider it to be torture, and will rarely require the skills and insights that learning algebra, trigonometry, geometry, and calculus will offer. Having done that work I find that I use very little of it in my day to day life (personally and professionally (as a programmer)).
I'm not suggesting that path be eliminated, only that it be an expected track for those interested in a STEM career.
For those who are not, just teaching them math literacy that can be used in contemporary daily life (some statistics, math reasoning (investments and debts), etc.
I love math -- it's the language of the universe! But it shouldn't be used to torture kids who will only learn to say "I hate math".
When kids reach late teens I'll buy that. However, let's be very cautious about separating kids too early. Kids do mature at different rates and some will realize that they need to study sooner while others smart kids decide to slack off and do terrible.
I'm not suggesting closing the doors on those deemed unworthy -- they should remain wide open in perpetuity. It's more about asking what we want our students to take with them into life.
Do your own survey of peoples takes on math and the value it added to their life. Some of course will have been well-served, but many will share how they hate math and it makes them feel stupid and they don't get the point of it.
And that last bit is fair: what did they get out of it.
How much math does a lawyer, therapist, graphic designer, HR rep, dental hygienist, plumber, etc need?
The current mode of teaching it is building foundational layers so one can do advanced math that requires those layers, but if that isn't a destination, is that particular avenue the best way to do it? Teach them to hate math?
I don't have the easy answer except that if we were to teach kids "real-world" math that illustrates how things work, and more importantly, how math can be used to understand things without going to calculus and beyond they might absorb more and have a positive relationship with it.
Again, I'm not dismissing that there's any value, but that the teaching is more on abstractions as foundations for the next level vs what that lesson could be applied to today.
In your case, could you describe what it was and how it helped?
It is naive to think that gradeschool is all about education when it serves so many other social functions. Firstly, it is free daily child care, a concept that allows parents to be more productive workers. A school is the point where various government agencies have contact with children. Vacinations, nutrition and the general welfare of kids is daily inspected. If a kid is in trouble, a teacher is the most likely government employee to notice. But perhaps most importantly, school is a testing ground. Our society doesnt have the resources to turn everyone into doctors and astronauts. School is where we start sorting out who will be granted access to future education and who will not. It isnt about actually learning anything.
If this is remotely true, then schools have either always had these functions, or there was a great tipping point where the schools were dramatically repurposed worldwide.
Taking children out of the farm workforce was actually a huge negative; so much so that laws were passed to require their attendance - everywhere, essentially.
Vaccines and suppplemental nutrition are only a very modern idea. Children brought their own lunches, and suffered from now mostly-extinct diseases.
Schools, even general education, existed before the poor had a real path to higher education. Doctors and lawyers were admitted based on criteria like if their fathers had attended - thus excluding the poor a priori.
You're 0/3.
So when are you claiming this great sea-change in schooling occurred? Coincident with the fluoride-based 5G mind control?
3. Surveillance towards prosecuting negligent parents
4. Evaluation of conscripts
I think I agree 100%. It is exactly those things, even if I can't be so cheerful as you about it. That's why my children have never stepped foot inside a school.
There was no cheer in the comment you’re replying to, just facts. The fact that you misinterpreted that is strange.
The fact that you have strong feelings about having your children reviewed by other adults for signs of abuse and neglect is stranger.
You do understand how children are vulnerable and parents aren’t always reliable, yes?
Homeschooling your children can be done well, in theory. However the majority of the time it’s done by imbeciles for religious, political or pseudo-medical reasons and results in children far less educated than the system you criticize and who are also imbeciles.
This is a form of abuse that will destroy a child’s potential far more readily than the four core elements above that you seem to be protesting.
>IMO, the pressures leading to degradation are all somehow linked to universalization
Liberalism is fundamentally a universalist idea. I mean "liberal" in the original sense: the cultivation of free and indepdendent human beings capable of governing themselves. A democratic society can't survive for long without universal liberal education.
We need to distinguish between education and the education system. You make good points that the system as it is today doesn't scale as much as we might like. But that doesn't mean we should abandon the goal of universal education. Unfortunately, I think the solution requires something much broader and deeper than more schools and more teachers. It requires a culture that values learning and independent thinking, parents who bring up children who are curious and willing to learn, and institutions that uphold these values in society.
We made a lot of progress over the past few centuries, but now there's an increasing number of people who want to question and undermine the core values of liberalism and replace them with something either more elitist, more authoritarian, or both.
Having grown up in Germany I have firsthand experience how Humboldt's ideals fall short. I don't think I fully agree your explanation.
a) Teachers themselves went through this system, so if it's so great, it should produce plenty of great teachers
b) Now we are blaming the kids for the failure of the system?
c) Yes, absolutely, but is the bureaucracy really inevitable, or is it even contradictory to the original idea?
Anyhow, Humboldt's humanism was ideology from the start. It was a way to change as little as possible from christian values. Instead of God making humans all great now it is the great human mind and civilization.
By now, most of German academia is a bubble for humanistic fundamentalists, that have long lost their connection to reality.
After WWI, the "Great War", everyone thought it was the final war, and would never be repeated. (So no profound changes in the educational system were applied).
After WWII, and observing how it could occur despite the recent occurrence of WWI, it was decided to put extra focus on the horrors of war in Western Europe.
Both on allied as well as axis side, sure, but especially on axis educational systems.
Having grown up in Belgium, I can confirm that the never-ending stream of unprompted details of the horrors of WWI and WWII were not exactly "fun" part of education, but hey at least we haven't been lobbing chemicals at each other for the last ~80 years, so at least it seems to work, here, locally in Western Europe, despite all the side-effects of such an education.
That said, I don't feel confident that any insights that may truly improve education in Western Europe (without losing the pacifying -as in peace generating- benefits somehow) would apply well to educational systems elsewhere, because a large fraction of negative side effects in Western European education stem precisely from the educational pivot after WWII.
What’s so terrible about the WW1 (industrial warfare) and WW2 (industrial extermination) curricula taught in Europe? I don’t think they’re designed to be fun. Quite the opposite.
At a bare minimum, there is the amount of time and money spent on going through things, there are many things to learn.
Imagine you have children, or imagine your children still go to school.
Imagine someone propose to expose all the kids to even more gore and abhorrent imagery, movies, ... for some genuine goal, and lets just assume the goal is universally agreed to be genuinely desirable, for the sake of this discussion:
1) would you blindly approve it?
2) would you approve doubling the amount of time or financial resources a few years later? or would you condition it on something?
3) wouldn't you prefer whatever the goal and whatever the method, that goal metrics and method performance be compared?
4) a lot of people are raised to not never come close or touch this or that fence post, or talk about touching it, or even merely think about why people can't touch it; we can't run social experiments on the kids! we are doing this precisely to prevent the horrible "social experiment" of WWII with all the horrors that came with it.
If these thoughts feel "dirty" or "bad" or "naughty" you have been raised to think in an authoritarian fashion (we all have been to a greater or lesser extent).
Let's start with the "social experiment", the truth is educational systems are constantly running unintentional experiments: perhaps some parents tell their kids to skip this or that class, so governments enforce mandatory education, and minimum targets... well, even with 100% pupil compliance, there exist many reasons a student didn't attend: perhaps they were truly sick, or their school bus broke down, etc. Ooops some of the students didn't see the full curriculum! Different schools show different movies. Different student generations saw different movie distribution on the subject. All of these are unintentional experiments. Mass surveillance was happening, is happening, and will happen for the foreseeable future. Sometimes young adults join some extreme right wing party, or perhaps express such a sentiment online. We could try to correlate the natural variations (which movies did they see, which explanations did they receive, ...) with any flagged statements?
How do we prevent pupils from merely associating the "bad behavior" merely with the red,white and black color palette, the german accents, the fonts and vehicle models that were in use; instead of associating it with authoritarianism proper? Think of how Laibach (the original Rammstein) challenges and ridicules authoritarianism by permitting the audience to enjoy the non-authoritarianist elements: there is no fault in liking such color schemes, or finding beauty in such a font, the problem was people following orders and blindly complying when ordered to drop disinfectant developed for ships and warehouses, (Zyklon B) canisters down some shafts in full knowledge some poor souls will die because of it. Laibach eclectically mixes symbolism from diverse dictatorships in a riveting way, but while criticizing authoritarianism and ridiculing it. They faced a lot of pushback because they necessarily stay in character to get the message across, how easy it is to be carried away by aesthetics and the smallest excuse to stop thinking.
Contrast system A and B:
System A: educational system just drills in (with best intentions) how bad Nazi's were, without measuring effectiveness, and thus without measure what the minimum nudge necessary was to achieve the same goal, risking loose associations such "as long as me, my friends, my compatriots aren't wearing the exact same armbands, don't speak specifically the aggressive german accent, don't use that font throughout society, etc. then me, my friends, my compatriots couldn't be lapsing into authoritarianism", which destroys insights like "the banality of evil", which would necessitate a much stronger form of critical thinking, but which state leadership tends to not appreciate in its population despite claiming they seek it in their population...
System B: kids constantly ask "why?", education is much more effective if information is provided when the students wonder about something, compared to being force-fed factoids if they are not the party asking "why?" about something. Let's consider a hypothetical scenario, in a truly critical-thinker-generating authoritarianism averting education system:
History teacher starts talking about and showing pictures of horrible scenes in WWII.
Students are reminded of the previous class a week ago and don't want to see the imagery, they ask "why? why must we sit inside and watch and discuss this war porn?"
The teacher is happy to oblige: "There are many reasons, its complicated, but I will be upfront: the reason I present them is because I need to reach certain targets, some education milestones, set in Brussels / Berlin / Wherever. If I don't I will get in trouble, but not only that, I agree with those milestones and think you should see it."
The kids ask: "Why did they set those milestones for you?"
The teacher responds: "Well, although states tend to abuse this excuse, in order to increase national identity, there is a genuine purpose to teaching history: so we don't repeat the mistakes made in previous generations, so we can learn from their mistakes"
The kids ask: "But surely we can't go through all mistakes that have occurred in all of human history, can't we keep it shorter, the sun is shining outside"
The teacher responds: "OK here is a deal I will dedicate this single session to answer all your meta-questions, but in return you will give full attention in all my future classes".
The kids agree and repeat there question: "Why do we have to go through this horrorfest?"
The teacher responds: "To put it bluntly, to prevent us from lobbing chemicals at each other again, among other things, its more than chemicals, its fundamentally about authoritarianism, that's why we have to sit you through this multi-year, multi-movie, multi-museum, multi-book, multi-essay horrorfest".
The kids ask "But why does it have to be so repetitive? why does it have to be so inefficient? We could be learning more math, learn about cryptography, learn how to bolster civil rights, human rights, children's rights with cryptography, instead of this thing that feels like brainwashing, which you basically already admitted it to be, benevolent brain-washing but brain-washing none-the-less, why?"
Teacher: "because among all possible ways of hopefully immunizing the next generation from making the same mistakes, no effort was spared, with many overlapping and potentially redundant approaches simultaneously applied, just to make sure the message didn't fly over anyone's head, I guess, and over time people were too afraid to touch it or decrease it in any way."
Student: "We see 3 costs: you rob us of our time we could have spent freely outside, you rob us of precious time we could have spent on other subjects and worst of all you rob us of our humanistic innocence, you show us this war porn and we mentally place ourselves in the shoes of both victim and perpetrator, we will never be the same. If you or the system is willing to make such a drastic intervention in every child's life, you better carry proof that its provably the least invasive intervention which provably suffices, is that the case?"
Teacher: "How would you propose such a proof is generated and assembled?"
Kids: "The surveillance state has no qualms tracking every fart we make as long as the data is only used for improving sales of whatever the system happened to overproduce last month, or for whatever dark scheme some billionaire needs the data for, but actually using it for good things like finding the most time-,cost-,soul-sparing education on the subject to correlate our behavior with the exact variation of authoritarianism-related courseware each individual experienced, no the system and the economy can't be bothered... we must sit through inordinate amounts of soul-scarring horrorfest, all because of ... vibes? no systematic correlation measurement?"
Do you think system A (where kids must learn to accept the status quo of education, like it or not) or system B (where kids learn and criticize the status quo) is more likely to produce authoritarianism vs critical thinkers?
Either way, this isn't really advice for 17 year olds. Pg is thinking out loud about the pathways for founders.