Sep 4

A conventional notion is that of the world being “a cruel place”.

And this remains implicit in common advice (which I find very unworthy to pay heed to) such as “Don’t talk to strangers. (Especially people online!)”

And so most people learn that the world—physical and virtual—is a dangerous place and act accordingly “for their own good”, without ever questioning bad advice.

. . .

A few bad experiences with a clouded judgment can easily account to “proofs” for entirely false extrapolations such as “the world is a cruel place”. With such established ideas flow moral principles: “You shouldn’t talk to strangers.”

This is characteristic of bad advice.

Bad advice is not based upon an actual explanation. It may be a form of extrapolation from a few exceptionally bad events which overshadow all the good ones. It aims to be universal and appeal to everyone but it fails to. It cannot appeal to everyone and to all situations. There is no universal advice.

If there’s any piece of advice I’d give, it would be to lookout for bad advice, question authority and be critical (especially to those ideas which seem to come with a moral obligation not to be critical of).

Sharing ideas and meeting people virtually has changed my life for the better. People are amazing. But I’ll reflect on that another time.

. . .

My guess is that this common idea of the world being a cruel place is so popular because at the root of it, tradition is afraid of exchanging ideas and letting people grasp and circulate counter-culture opinions. It knows how beautiful and amazing human exchanges are but it also knows the consequences that has for tradition itself. Proliferation of better ideas might extinguish the culture—something that doesn’t want to go extinct. And so the cultural meme stays alive that talking to strangers is a bad idea.

But this is just my guess. I may be fantasizing.

The Amazing Things & Ideas List

Rallying against the classroom-to-cubicle pipeline with The New 95:
- There can be no safety without dangerous ideas.
- The risk of being wrong is the price of being right.
- It is no coincidence that the architects of prisons are also the architects of high schools.
- High School noun (1824): a place where students repeat “me gusta” for four years in Spanish class and still can’t speak the language.
- Where one went to college should not be the most interesting thing about a 22-year-old.
Read 90 other theses arguing against the classroom-to-cubicle pipeline here.
All criticism aims at destruction for the purpose of construction:

“All criticism aims at destruction for the purpose of construction. (Or at least this is the ideal case.)
Criticism aims to destroy a less good idea to replace it with a newly constructed better, truer idea.
Of course, what people mean typically by constructive vs. destructive criticism is more about tone.
Constructive criticism is about being nice to someone that you’re talking to an destructive is about being mean.
And so there’s the concern related to this that criticism might be applied to people.
And here I completely understand the concern. One should always be careful to focus on the ideas not the person. We are criticising ideas not people… People have ideas but they are not identical to ideas. This is important.”
— Brett Hall (Excerpt from Ep: 88 Critically Creative of ToKCast)

A parent first, friend second? What does that mean?:

“The conventional idea is that we must be parents first, friends second (if at all). But this has never sat well with me. I didn’t understand what this PARENT thing is I was supposed to be. Some sort of authoritarian figure holding power over weaker beings “for their own good”.
— Vivek Patel, Educate Through Experience Rather Than Rules

Books I’m reading:

Upon suggestion by someone on Twitter, I started with the classic 1984 by George Orwell. Loving the infuriating depiction of a dystopian state so far.

Then I just finished with Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power. This was a fascinating read with gripping stories depicting the laws of withholding power from all over history. There were places I wasn’t seemingly aligned with what the book had to say but in others I found great advice. I particularly liked the 48th Law (Assume Formlessness):

“In the face of the world's harshness and danger, organisms of any kind develop protection — a coat of armor, a rigid system, a comforting ritual. For the short term, it may work, but for the long term it spells disaster. People weighed down by a system and inflexible ways of doing things cannot move fast, cannot sense or adapt to change. They lumber around more and more slowly until they go the way of the brontosaurus. Learn to move fast and adapt or you will be eaten.

The best way to avoid this fate is to assume formlessness. No predator alive can attack what it cannot see.”
— Robert Greene, The 48 Laws of Power, The 48th Law

I tweeted out something similar to this recently:

Arjun Khemani @arjunkhemani

either adapt yourself to the environment (or the environment to yourself) or go extinct.

And one of my now favorite pieces of (psychological) thriller fiction which I read in less than a mere day is The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides. As John Marrs praised it, “The definition of a page-turner”. Definitely recommend giving it a read.

An article written by me published this week

I wrote a book review of Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society for the wonderful Taking Children Seriously website that was relaunched recently. Read it here.

“Why is learning primarily thought of in the context of the school – a particular kind of institution, with a very specific form and organisational structure? How can there be essentially one educational path for all children? What are schools really for? Is there another way to learn? Do schools promote learning at all?”
— An excerpt from my review

That’s it for this week! Thank you for reading.

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Onward,
Arjun

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