Zero / wiki

ak: vision, goals, mission https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9ZGFaIHegE | Janelia.org

ak: context –> epigenetic epistemology (neopiagetian) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ud8WRAdihPg

Papert April 11th 1970 Teaching children thinking :

http://stager.org/articles/teachingchildrenteaching.pdf

Alan Kay HackerNews 2017 thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15261691

Excerpt:

The large idea of ARPA/PARC was that desirable futures for humanity will require many difficult things to be learned beyond reading and writing and a few sums.

If “equal rights” is to mean something over the entire planet, this will be very difficult. If we are to be able to deal with the whole planet as a complex system of which we complex systems are parts, then we'll have to learn a lot of things that our genetics are not particularly well set up for.

We can't say “well, most people aren't interested in stuff like this” because we want them to be voting citizens as part of their rights, and this means that a large part of their education needs to be learning how to argue in ways that make progress rather than just trying to win. This will require considerable knowledge and context.

The people who do say “well, most people aren't interested in stuff like this” are missing the world that we are in, and putting convenience and money making ahead of progress and even survival. That was crazy 50 years ago, and should be even more apparently crazy now.

We are set up genetically to learn the environment/culture around us. If we have media that seems to our nervous systems as an environment, we will try to learn those ways of thinking and doing, and even our conception of reality.

We can't let the commercial lure of “legal drugs” in the form of media and other forms put us into a narcotic sleep when we need to be tending and building our gardens.

The good news about “media as environment” was what attracted a lot of us 50 years ago – that is, that making great environments/cultures will also be readily learned by our nervous systems. That was one of Montessori's great ideas, and one of McLuhan's great ideas, and it's a great idea we need to understand.

There aren't any parents around to take care of childish adults. We are it. So we need to grow up and take responsibility for our world, and the first actions should be to try to understand our actual situations.