Don’t you look at the state of education today, and mull over how much decadent we’ve come so far ? No, I am not talking about the economics or public policy of education. I am talking about the human prosperity of what it means to be educated. In a way, and throughout this industrializing force of the 19th century, a process of dehumanization and machination of classical education has been set in motion— the rest is an interesting history of intellectual decay.
The modern education system is totally a different beast, a totally separate entity from the scholastic model of education as genuine learning about the world as in natural philosophy, or God as in medieval theology, or renaissance polymathy— intellectual quest for its own sake. What happened ? How come that the institutions responsible for intellectual curiosity have enshittificated at all? In retrospect, that sounds normal and business-as-usual, but it is literally quite impossible to even imagine ex-ante. Just try imagining how Isaac Newton, Galileo Galilei or the like would look at us today, at the way intellectual quest is conducted today, instead of us looking back at their time with a sense of fancy and deceptive exceptionalism that does more harm than anything. Try to see the present moment from the lenses of the past—at least as a measure of change, be it progress or regress—, and instead of self-aggrandizingly laughing at bunch of dead people, who’ve built what would be considered the roots of science and literature, to feel good about yourself, try to imagine how these dead people would mock your current state of intellectual cuckoldry had they have been alive today— are you still laughing ? I can see your smile gradually frowning, but don’t worry, we’re all in this mess together, and to a fair extent, we can equally end it together just as we started it.
The diagnosis of this disease can assure us of one thing though, that thing is: the education system started wrong by design— the seeds were already venomous— and whatever was experienced as peak human intellectual flourishment was a merely ephemeral utopia that would later be inevitably hammered by the true teleology of the education system— the politicization of human intellect into a packaged bureaucracy that stifles true and genuine intellectual growth for its own incumbency. What? But the education system was meant to advance scientific discovery, human prosperity and innova…Not really.
Here is your elixir syrup, but take it with a careful dose: any initially power neutral organisation is meant to converge to an oligarchy, primarily because the power gradient is inevitable. These institutions are cutthroat bureaucracies that supply world-class bureaucrats, with mediocre incentives for genuine intellectual production. The question is: can we do better ? Is there a way out of this mess ? No, seriously— this is a serious attempt at answering that question, and though it remains modest, but it is a leg-up to what may come. It is time to set the Pollyanna glad game aside, and to call a spade a spade. Also make sure to take your elixir syrup before you put a foot in these organizations, but don’t worry in case you forgot, you will be injected with syrup once you’re in.
Credentials and the Barbarization Process
The kernel of this discussion lies in trying to understand why bureaucratization— the politicization of human intellect— even emerged as a mechanical end at all. Whether we like it or not, bureaucracy is a concomitant inevitability of scaling effects i.e. a sufficiently large and complex organization can’t help but become oligarchical in nature mainly due to the fact that a direct democracy can’t handle the technical necessities of such organizations at such scales which are, in the case of the education system, are the increasingly demanding cognitive resources that are gradually becoming harder and harder to manage singlehandedly. As Robert Michels noted:
It is organization which gives dominion of the elected over the electors. [...] Who says organization, says oligarchy.
This oligarchy prospers even more owing to the side effect that increasing cognitive resources induce i.e. hyperspecialization of learning into siloed echo chambers with no sense whatsoever for any form of human connection— the miniaturization of the intellectual quest is a huge advantage for the incumbent bureaucracy to justify its intervention, power, growth and overall, existence. This is a direct consequence of the fact that hyperspecialization demands handling huge amount of uncharted complexity yet to be reckoned with, and this is efficiently done by a bureaucracy. However, this is a contingent condition of a pre-existing bureaucracy, not a sufficient one. It takes one a dose of Asperger syndrome to divert one's energy against the eternal enemy of academic oligarchy-- the main purpose of metrics is to justify the use of power, and thus justify the existence of the oligarchy that pervades every corner of intellectual production.
Take the example of the Brachistochrone problem (posed by Johann Bernoulli in 1696 and solved by Isaac Newton in 1697)-- the way that these 17th century physicists and mathematicians gathered naturally to solve it in an eusocial fashion like a swarm of bees, with complete disregard to a prevailing organisation, is the sort of spirit that Gregory Perelman had. They didn't have to be resist by a corrupting bureaucracy. They didn't have to weight their intellect against alienating metrics-- they well knew that, and naturally so, that performance is actual. They were reigning free-- they, in other words, were monopolists of their intellectual production. We've come a long way of decline from that point hitherto. Unless we reboot this machine, there is no way out of this mess-- not reform, not correction, no nothing. Just build a new property relations structure, and certainly be careful of intermediate, transitory powers that be. To wish to do away with power by leaking it is to do away with order.
But to come back to bureaucracy as a disease, it is important to keep these two factors, size and complexity (or technical necessity), in mind because of their aetiological nature with regards to the emergence of bureaucracy. Regardless, a bureaucracy after emergence is a bureaucracy that is necessarily incumbent in terms of decision-making, but how come such bureaucracy maintains such power in these supposedly “enlightening” institutions where the intellect is supposed to burgeon and erupts out of them. The answer to that question is credentials.
To give it some slack, the idea of credentials is a powerful tool for gaming the human telos, precisely because it is capable of pathologizing human behaviors with measures that don’t truly reflect anything at all— the hyperreal pwned the real. Credentials are hyperstitional in nature. However, that’s not the most intriguing part, what’s interesting is how they induce a barbarian behavioral system in place. Ever heard of the sheepskin effect ? the observation that people possessing a completed academic degree earn a greater income than people who have an equivalent amount of studying without possessing an academic degree. The economics of education therefore already reveals how politically powerful the idea of credentialism is— it’s a tool for inducing gradual human disorder into a form of unreality. On a par with credentials, lower-level opiums also exist, one epitome of that is exams. Isn’t it obvious that the point of taking an exam is just getting high grades even if this means that no genuine and true understanding takes place at all? That’s the Chinese Room trap: the prior telos of genuine intellectual quest is subverted by a degenerative and pathological deutero-teleology that seeks its own indefinite expansion precisely because it’s tool for justfying the user of power by bureaucracy— the intellect has been surrogated. As long as the system in place is gameable, then intellectual quest is vulnerable to subversion mainly because of the fact that prior telos is not a conserved quantity— it can be created but equally destroyed. It is equally important to pay attention to the scaling effects of the measures or metrics used to monitor intellectual progress— the farther away, as in complexity and required duration, these measures are, the more likely they are to subvert the very construct of interest (or prior telos of intellectual quest) that they measure. The point is to perform attribute compensation i.e. divide-and-conquer these inaccessible metrics to short-term, simple and accessible metrics to avoid the surrogation effect— after all, any good measure subject to regulation becomes a bad measure.
Let’s look at this from the point of view of time-preference to see why credential-based education system is no less alienating than the human zoo.
Human prosperity is measured by the amount of genuine efforts exerted to attain what would ex-ante be not-yet-attained goal. This is very important to understand because it indicates that there is a temporal dimension to (genuine) human action or the lack thereof. For instance, if this human teleonomic system is gamed (and it can be), that directly contributes to a degeneracy of human prosperity. By that measure, it is fair to say that the essence of human prosperity lies in the uncertainty of the consequences of human action ex-ante. By design, such uncertainty is intrinsically expressed in time by the measure of the possible risks, perturbations and errors that may hinder the future attainment of some end goal. This means that uncertainty incentivizes future investment, saving and capital accumulation given that the present end goals are fulfilled (present subsistence), which implies that uncertainty is a core element cause of future-orientation i.e. low time-preference. Therefore, reducing such uncertainty by whatever means possible induces a juncture in time— a temporal dissociation from reality, and much more importantly, a decivilizing force that makes human activities more brutish, shortsighted, poor and decadent— a transition from adulthood to childhood, from civilization to barbarianism is set in motion.
From the aforementioned analysis, credentialism is in a way a form of guaranteeing the future i.e., reducing uncertainty below a certain utility threshold that it no longer remains functional, but paralyzing of human action. This uncertainty is not reduced to zero obviously, but still credentials are a measurement system with the inexorable side effects of hijacking the telos of human action from the get-go vis-a-vis its temporal dimension— a teleonomic disruption of human intellectual purposiveness. In other words, credentialism induces intellectual neoteny— intellectual shortsightedness, brutishness, cynicism, childishness and dishonesty. It is not a surprising reality at all that modern learners (students sound too Prussian), are extremely present-oriented. This doesn’t mean that they don’t think about their long-term futures as they obviously do, but this means that they are quite often driven by intellectual consumption rather than (genuine) intellectual production, capital consumption rather than capital accumulation, intellectual shortsightedness over intellectual investment— the range of intellectual actions that may enter the value scale of the learner remains limited by their urgent, present-oriented and immediate utility— inducing a truncation of intellectual production. If this should remind you of something, it should remind you of the perverse incentives of redistributive policies: in a way because credentials are a strong form of taxation on intellectual production, and in an another, because they create the very problem they try to solve: more intellectual consumers than producers, more unmotivated learners than motivated, more dysgenics overall. Credentials are economically equivalent to the welfare state, or even worse with the advent of “EdTech”, intellectual UBI (after all, there is a reason why education was “democratized” and “digitalized”— those are called revolutions for a reason i.e. because they are in a way, just that the direction of the “re” in revolution is backwards: more like devolution or retrogression).
Now add LLM technology to that, and you get far more worse results with regards to intellectual honesty— by ensuring that intellectual agency is destroyed, there is nothing left to call a learner to begin with. This may not sound bad to you. Seriously? this doesn’t sound bad to you? If that’s case, then I feel sorry for you…you are, just maybe, already devoured by the Shoggoth worm (or Ethan Mollick wildnil as they are called these days). Need a cure? Click here to buy.
The thing about AI in EdTech is that it exposes the corruption of the education system from its inception, especially because there are no stopgap measures to limit its (mis)use. There is a reason why students are attracted to LLMs like moths to a flame, and it is because something about the sort of actions they are commanded to execute in the school system is bothering them i.e. they don’t get to define those goals on their own, therefore they lack the motivation to exert serious efforts towards those goals— inducing intellectual decadence thereby—, they are generally unsatisfied or at least disinterested by the attainment of such goals. To understand this further, let’s reverse-engineer the teleonomy behind cheating, but before we do that, let’s first look at how the education system handles this phenomenon: for something as “systematic” as an education system is, it should at least be able to pre-compute the possible behaviors of its units, especially when such behaviors are considered defective to its own telos. It is interesting to see why the education system fails at solving the problem of cheating from the ground up, restricting itself to mere temporary stopgap measures which are optimized by surveillance technologies. It is clear how much artificial this is as a solution— inorganic, coercive enforcement of compliance always fails even if you add technology to it: 10 times 0 is still 0. The reason the education system fails so miserably at preventing cheating is that it doesn’t address the problem from first causes or principles, to look at it from the inside out, not outside in. This is the case because the very efficiency logic of the education system—as an intellectual production system without private property of the means of intellectual production— is an intrinsic cause of the phenomenon of cheating itself, and to thereby prevent cheating, the whole system needs to be rebooted, or better, replaced apriori. Starting from the effects and back to the causes— as in solving the inverse problem— ensures a premature optimization to a local optima. To start from the causes however is as follow: learners cheat primarily due to teleonomic extrinsicality i.e. they don’t see any genuine value whatsoever in the process of intellectual production as an end in itself, and this is fundamentally owing to the fact that credentials have hijacked the classical telos of education as a way to enrich one’s intellectual and spiritual endeavors— the human intellect has been hijacked by the reduction of uncertainty concerning intellectual end goals.
Intellectual Market in Crisis
In his book Deschooling Society, Ivan Illich tried to lay down explanations for why modern institutions, and the school system in particular, have declined the way they did. His explanation for this process of decline is industrialism i.e., industrial growth becoming an end in itself, or what he calls “growth mania”. For Ivan Illich, genuine learning was replaced by a process of advancement through institutional hierarchies accompanied by the accumulation of largely meaningless credentials. In place of compulsory mass schooling, Illich suggested, it would be preferable to adopt a model of learning in which knowledge and skills were transmitted through networks of informal and voluntary relationships. The problem with Ivan Illich solution is that it underestimates the inevitability of the power gradient, his solution is just as inefficient as the initial random state that led to the very inception of the modern education system as it is today, namely because it doesn’t address the seeds that leads to the bureaucratization of the intellectual production process— the lack of a privately-owned governance system of intellectual production.
For that cause, it is important to see what the true goal of credentials is— the sort of the deutero-teleology that successfully inverted the original teleology of classical education as an end in itself: the main goal is to conserve power, and arbitrarily taxes intellectual production as an ultimate subgoal, efficiency-wise, to facilitate the conservation of power. You took your elixir syrup at this point, right? No? Really? Why? Here is one more cup: Proxy measures are only relevant insofar that they converge on processes and behavioral patterns that justify the use of power. What started as purely economic means of intellectual production slowly and gradually became more and more political in nature— more and more power being conserved in alienating processes that hollow out genuine intellectual production— eventually, supply-and-demand shifted to capture-and-command, and the examples are abundant in this regard, usually framed as heroic revolutions: democratization, publicization, federalization, standardization, digitalization, etc. As natural as it should now sound, there are many ways to name a process of decline, because decline is by nature iterative and self-sustainable. The thing about power is that it’s inevitable, the question to ask is what sort of distribution of power is optimal to ensure maximum (genuine) intellectual production efficiency: how to minimize intellectual idleness ? What can we do about intellectual resource curse ?
Intellectual Resource Curse
A resource curse is the “paradoxical” phenomenon of prevailing poverty regardless of the available natural or human resources at hand, due to not capitalizing upon or misusing such resources as a result of a corrupt allocation strategy, or stifling human labor. In that vein, intellectual resource curse is, well as you’ve might guessed, the state of intellectual decline despite having the intellectual power for burgeoning innovation. Naturally, this comes from a corrupt allocation strategy of intellectual resources. The source of this poverty paradox is intellectual rentierism, that is to say that by parasitically feeding on intellectual production, the deprived learner subsequently surrender to the serfdom of his lord, the sage-on-the-stage. How come we now find ourselves in this wreckage, counting the rubble, and tasting the venom that slipped through the cracks. What happened?
It should be fairly obvious what the goal of this septic oligarchy is: indefinite accumulation of political rent, power and jurisdiction monopoly. The nature of power is its capacity to subvert human teleonomy, and make of itself an intrinsic end goal towards which all relevant instrumental goals can be pursued. This “anything goes” dynamics is the kernel of intellectual decline, inevitable collapse of truth pursuing processes. At this point, this already might’ve made some folks unhappy, and plausibly frustrated at the realization that Reason is not as supreme as we’ve been (ironically) domesticated to believe it is. Don’t worry, take a breath, relax, the is is not the ought. Not very postmodern from me to say that reason is slave of power, right? Just that reason serves an instrumental leg-up to power indefinite accumulation. You can take it from the very man you hate, or you can tell us how come Covid happened? Bunch of virologists creating a prospective jurisdiciton monopoly for themselves using the very supreme faculty of reason? Do we evolve on the end goal of pursuing objective truth as in correspondence with objective reality? Are you okay? Too much Ayn Rand, my friend…Too much Ayn Rand, that reason is conserved, that someone has to use reason apriori in order for the world to work, for resources, as in production and consumption, to be properly allocated, for the market to reach its equilibrium because reason comes first and cannot be manipulated, someone has to bear that burden…Wait, this sounds like something we’ve all seen before…but in what now is a different flavor. This idea that we’re somehow guided by this epistemic darwinist machine towards more Greater Truth within an organization, and that this organization instrumentalizes all its resources for that noble, incorruptible and supreme goal is very messianic of an idea.
But before we go on, we need to make sure you are not vulnerable to bad ideas. You see, one such big bad idea is thinking that power can be dissipated away and out of the organization system. This is a very, very bad idea, with very, very detrimental consequences at the core of intellectual paternalism that is haunting intellectual production. In contrast, the idea of pursuing power, say as an end in itself, has stood the test of time, has transcended all human generations, civilizations and the species itself from time immemorial. Power is and will remain always pursued, make no mistake. The idea itself has a longevity, and is unlikely to go away any soon. Without pursuing power, an organization is unable to survive, and power thus becomes inertial, baked into the institutional memory of any organization in existence.
So…Are we doomed? is intellectual resource curse inevitable? No, not if power accumulation becomes privately monopolistic: Only power can fix power, only more power can fix power, only a positive feedback loop can balance a positive feedback loop: to build a new intellectual governance system with private ownership of intellectual production as its core tenet. We need to make sure to grasp the nettle firmly, lest it gets thornier, but the way ahead is already filled with thorns, left and right.
Why Reforming The System Is Futile
There are mechanical conditions that either incentivize or discourage an oligarchy from blocking innovation and restructuring. These conditions are the following: degree of competition, degree of entrenchment, external threat, level of human capital and political rent.
The basic economic fact of scarcity of resources entails the following:
1- A high degree of competition between agents of the same oligarchy encourages bottom-up innovation. In other words, it is good from the point of view of the student that his professors enter a market competition, which lessens their micromanagement incentives and thus increases the chance of entrepreneurial innovation. The more you regulate, the less you educate, therefore the more you regulate, the lesser you educate…etc. Eventually, we end up with a circensian dichotomy of image-makers who crave power and powerful incumbents who image-make.
2- A somewhat entrenched oligopoly that fears intellectual challenge or replacement, is most likely to block innovation, mainly because inferiority complex, personal insecurity or outright envy are de facto normative and institutionally influential.
3- A high degree of entrenchment is conditionally good for innovation on the off-chance that this highly-entrenched oligarchy needs to compete with external enemies, and thus encourages innovation that it itself doesn’t fear. Domestic antagonism is a surrogate stopgap for lacking external competition, the example of the US elites during the Cold War is eye-wateringly clear in this regard.
4- External threat can also encourage innovation but only if this innovation is prospectively safe vis-a-vis incumbency conservation. The oligarchy would rather die by its own venom than by bottom-up replacement.
5- Level of human capital (intelligence, energy, curiosity, passion for learning…etc) can be threatening to the oligarchy in case students were aggregated by a unified goal. This also goes in the other direction of the oligarchy allowing innovation by ensuring that intellectual resources will bring about intellectual rent that it can easily siphon off and increase its incumbent state in terms of political rent, basically free labor.
6- Gains in political rent (as in having more coercive monopoly of jurisdiction) that result from innovation can also incentivize allowing innovation, and unless there are checks-and-balances (watchdog institutional processes) at place to merely restrict the indefinite growth of political rent, then it will continue to accumulate. Political rent is the ultimate goal of the academic oligarchy, and “anything goes” insofar that goal is not disrupted.
Blocking innovation is a reflexive process that solves its own future problems ie; by blocking innovation, the incumbent needs not to worry about future innovation attempts mainly because the Pavlovian dog has been sufficiently trained to embrace learned helplessness as an anti-depressant. The current education system is infiltrated with ruthless bureaucrats, and bureaucracy is a sufficient condition for the emergence of an oligarchy: the more you get promoted in a bureaucracy, the more likely it is to have a wider distribution of bad motives to execute with impunity for being protected by the barrier of bureaucratic toolbox. Simultaneously, the more you get promoted, the more likely it is to be unfit for that job position mainly because the would-be-incumbent bets on the power gain and not the intellectual gain. When feedback loops are factored-in, the system can only get more absurd than it already is, more corrupt but somehow more attractive. It is somewhat of a fascinating perversion that corruption is always attractive. This is the current state of the education system, and there is unfortunately no organic way out of it: simply just build a new system.
A Proto Solution Out Of This Mess
So, how we do we go about building a new system? First, it is important to remind the reader that what I am proposing is not a solution perse, but somewhat of a proto solution, even say pre-formal. This means that it should be constantly iterated upon, tested, experimented with and reformed. However, there are few principles that I think no amount of reformation should violate, and these principles are tied to the incentive structure— reforms can be restricted to the technical aspect of systems analysis, which is flexible and malleable. To do this, we should start with some fundamental key dimensions that shouldn’t be violated:
1- Organizational Effectiveness
A small size hierarchical governance system resembling a small startup with enough people to handle cognitive resources, but not too many people to avoid bureaucracy— the size of the organization induces more and more technical necessity. This startup should aim for intellectual quests that maximize power density i.e. most difficult but very small in size. In other words, the requisite variety of the hierarchical governance system should exceed the size or complexity of the cognitive resources in question, but this is not a necessary condition as we shall see later. Moreover, the fundamental role of this hierarchical governance system is to oversee and interlock the intellectual end goal with respect to its attainment, but not the instrumental subgoals to attain it, that is to say: the governance system should dictate the end goals (the what), but not the methods (the how) to attain such goals— an efficient Auftragstaktik structure: the strategic planning is delegated from the chief commander executive or supervisor to the lower echelons of the hierarchy whose mission is to execute flexibly, efficiently and independently on the tactical and operational level. In other words, its function is to resist the natural tendency towards expansion of intellectual demand to the supply of resources available given to it— the natural tendency towards teleonomic entropy i.e. deutero-teleological subversion characteristic of open, decentralized and democratic governance systems. However, this hierarchical governance system shouldn’t engage in stubborn micromanagement of intellectual labor, as its mere goal is to oversee the end product of such intellectual labor and interlock it towards intellectual order. That is to say, the hierarchical governance system should implement a goal-oriented, functional subsystem to intellectual quest devoid of instructions, in order to preserve agency and self-sufficiency without comprising its intrinsic efficiency: total flexibility on instrumental steps to maximize instrumental agency in a low validity environment with regards to scarcity of resources i.e. to have an intellectual end goal, to exert serious effort towards that goal, and to attain the goal in an instrumentally autonomous way, and as such, the role of the hierarchical governance system is to oversee the stability of this power process with respect to its original goal i.e. empowering the incentive for more intellectual agency. Teddy Roosevelt has a succinct description of what would an intellectual philosopher king look like:
The best executive is one who has sense enough to pick good people to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it.
If power conservation is inevitable in organizations, then why not make it explicit from the get-go ? This idea of heterarchical natural order is bullshit we have to do away with— power gradient is a constant. The point is replicate the governance structure of the education system without the oligarchy part. To do that, a private ownership system is radically essential for this to be possible. Historically, it took exceptional circumstances like revolutions or historical abruptions to make intellectual production a public property in the sense where the process of intellectual production is handled by some bureaucracy for that bureaucracy sake. This publicization of intellectual production has mainly contributed to the decline of intellectual honesty and curiosity, rendered learners more present-oriented, less concerned with the legitimacy of their intellectual activity because they don’t own their intellectual activities vis-a-vis its input or output— the learner is commanded to produce and get taxed on that production.
A new governance system should ensure that learners privately own the fruits of their intellectual production as well as the input factors of production that go into it. This means that intellectual production is handled by private owners themselves, and as such, these owners are intrinsically concerned with the asset value or capital value, as in the legitimacy of their intellectual production, of their intellectual activities— they care about the quality and genuinity of their intellectual production because they privately own the whole process. This makes them more civilized, less barbarian, more future-oriented, less present-oriented, more farsighted, less shortsighted, eventually leading to an accumulative expansion of far more distant intellectual goals appended to their value scale i.e. further intellectual capital accumulation that restores the human prosperity to education and make it, to borrow from Ivan Illich, convivial again.
However, as with respect to the golden rule of power conservation, initially power neutral organizations or governance systems can only retrogress back to the current state of the education system. Therefore, a hierarchical governance system needs to be established from the get-go. This governance system should resemble the structure of a small scale startup— elected head of the organization conserving all power, aligned incentives and functional goal-oriented learning, as to ensure that human action doesn’t expand towards disorder.
2- Intellectual realism
Intellectual action can be easily subverted when inaccessible measures or metrics (long duration, complexity, etc) are used to track the progress of this intellectual action, thereby becoming corrupt measures by surrogating their construct of interest. However, measures are fundamental to intellectual quest, as epistemic uncertainty always prevails. The role of the hierarchical governance system is to compensate these complex attributes by divide-and-conquering measures into accessible, simple, short-term measures that are unlikely to surrogate the prior telos of intellectual quest for its own sake i.e. measures that are too accessible, simple and short-term to be apt to corruption and regulation.
3- Knowledge Problem
The knowledge problem is at the core of the emergence of bureaucratic rules, mainly because the intellectual explorer is unable to handle the complexity of the increasing cognitive demands on their own. Therefore, this should either be handle by the hierarchical governance system holistically, or to possess an information system to handle the intellectual variety of the quest as in meeting the demands imposed by the cognitive resources (and their shrinking half-life), and ideally, this information system should allow for network effects (or pheromones) much like an ant colony system, only with a dose of hierarchy. This is to further ensure that the oligarchical tendencies of connectivism is decimated to dust.