Not all relationships are transactional: any relationship you have with family and friends is free and clear. We should take care of all of our people to an extent. Feed the hungry, house the homeless who want housed, provide basic income to everyone, etc.
BUT
Society is transactional. If you want to get something you need to give something. Why? Go find a libertarian. Ask them what services they use they don’t want to pay for and they will give you a list. Then ask them what services they DO use they are paying extra for and wait for the stunned silence.
Why can’t you get anything for free? Because everybody saying “oh no don’t be transactional!” is on the take. Please prove me wrong and tell me about all the social services and general good doing you do with no strings attached. If you push a religious viewpoint, those are strings attached.
Everybody wants something, barely anyone just wants to give something. Ergo you give a promise to work, a promise to teach, a promise to give back, because otherwise MOST people only take. Call me a pessimist, but I’m waiting for the first libertarian who wants to pick and choose what they pay for so they can contribute to what matters, and not get something for nothing.
EDIT:
To put a finer point on it, why should you WANT to take without giving something back? That is a gross violation of the reciprocity principle which is basically a bedrock of society in general.
Society is transactional. If you want to get something you need to give something. Why? Go find a libertarian. Ask them what services they use they don’t want to pay for and they will give you a list. Then ask them what services they DO use they are paying extra for and wait for the stunned silence.
Society isn’t strictly transactional either. That is a big part of the reason why libertarianism is such a fundamentally flawed, swiss cheese ideology.
To give you a gigantic counterexample: when social security started nobody had paid a dime into it. The first seniors to receive social security received it directly from the people that were working and paying into it. The same kind of thing happens today. Despite ignorant insistence that social security should be a “bank account” of some sort, it is not. Today’s seniors receive their checks from today’s tax payers.
Please prove me wrong and tell me about all the social services and general good doing you do with no strings attached.
The idea that altruism isn’t simply rare but completely non-existent is simply…incorrect. There are multitudes of examples of it throughout history and if you look closely enough those continue into the present.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that humans are mostly good – like Penn Gillette-style libertarians often do when their arguments are pressed upon. But I wouldn’t say they’re all inherently selfish goblins either. In large parts, we are on top of the food chain because of our ability to cooperate with each other. Evidence of the cooperative spirit of humanity is all around you if you look closely enough.
(As I type my reply into an open-source browser on a decentralized platform on an open-source OS.)
The idea that altruism isn’t simply rare but completely non-existent is simply…incorrect.
Here we have hit on the issue. People can be, and are to a surprising degree altruistic. It is not a normal form of operation though because it isn’t guaranteed, and out certainly isn’t the norm for how we all interact with each other. There are homeless shelters, food banks, soup kitchens, and this sort of thing help the most disadvantaged, but those provide services until they run out of space or materials and that’s it. The ones that run on donations and that are funded by angel donors are indeed altruistic.
By and large though, services provided by society to its members are not handled that way. Social security has its flaws, but it’s not altruistic because the first seniors got it for free: they were lucky. It’s entirely transactional because everyone is obliged to pay a portion of their income into the pool. For countries with free education it’s the same thing: everybody pays in so students can go at little or no cost.
And here is the rub and the original point: educators don’t and SHOULDNT be expected to work for free. Leaving aside the facilities and support staff that also needs paid at a university, it would be unconscionable to expect to go for free and just let those people figure out how to eat. Scholarships are another form of altruism which is loosely relevant, but generally speaking I think what you are considering non transactional situations to actually be those that have been collectively paid by our taxes. Socialized, if you will :).
Make no mistake though, we are all expected to put money in if possible, and then we all benefit at the end.
By and large though, services provided by society to its members are not handled that way. Social security has its flaws, but it’s not altruistic because the first seniors got it for free: they were lucky.
I don’t consider any system as being altruistic even if the people involved in the system are supposed to be. So, I will not argue that social security is or was altruistic.
An implied point I’m making is that “society” is just a bunch of people. It contains systems that we made, use, and maintain. Many (or perhaps most) of those systems have been – intentionally or unintentionally – designed to be somewhere along the spectrum between simply transactional and outright hostile to altruism. For example, we still have laws on the books against people going out to the parking meters and feeding them for others whose parking is about to expire.
But these are choices. The rules of society and its systems – policies and their implementations – are built and arranged by people. These are not the only possible choices, and these are not the only possible systems.
I guess I didn’t know what outcome(s) you would like or expect?
I think “we should provide education free of charge (paid by taxes)” is great and would be beneficial at all levels.
Contrarily, I think “I should get free education and not have to pay for it or provide any effort at reciprocity” sounds and feels super entitled and shitty. It sounds exceptional, and like the libertarian examples before to me.
I guess I didn’t know what outcome(s) you would like or expect?
The actual outcome I would like is for people to take a break from looking at what the current system is and trying to provide an abstract, philosophical foundation from which to justify it.
Contrarily, I think “I should get free education and not have to pay for it or provide any effort at reciprocity” sounds and feels super entitled and shitty.
Perhaps contrarily, I think it sounds liberating…and better than our current system of “I should go into non-dischargeable debt to obtain credentials to get a job at evil corp and then have to pay 20x the amount of the loan to get out from under the debt”.
But my point isn’t that you have to go to a complete opposite system either, my point is that the way that it works today – speaking abstractly as this whole diversion began – isn’t the only way it could work despite everyone’s insistence that it has to be that way because of “society” or whatever.
Not everything is transactional. Not everything is a zero-sum game. When you teach people things, you often learn something yourself.
The people replying to me in this thread have a tendency to snap into a absolutist perspective. But if you cannot even dream of something different than debt slavery and other shitty institutions and even your thought experiments are all exercises to justify crappy systems in the abstract, then the greedy goblins have already won a total victory because they have already captured your imagination in addition to everything else.
In order to be able to improve anything, you have to first be able to imagine that improvement is possible.
That’s the thing, I don’t mean between two humans. I mean between a human, and all the rest of society, which is why I phrased it that way.
Society gives a person an education, and expects that person to do something meaningful in return. It might not be the same two people in that transaction, which is similar to how we pay taxes for benefits we might not personally see.
Society invests in the education of its people, and the return is a general benefit to society from its people being more educated. It is not necessary for every single individual to give something tangible and obvious back in order for society to benefit from an educated populace. If you apply the criterion that every individual must give something back, it always turns into a requirement that they give back something tangible, usually money or labour, and the next step is to abolish education in philosophy, the arts, and possibly the more theoretical or exploratory parts of science. The result of this is an impoverished society, not an enriched one.
For it to be a good deal for society to pay for education there only needs to be on balance a benefit to society. That leaves room for the arts and all kinds of human curiosity and creativity that doesn’t yield an immediate tangible benefit. We contribute together, not individually, and some contributions are very indirect. Still, societies benefit from the arts, philosophy, and people with curiosity. And this system can tolerate some people not contributing anything much at all. The investment is in quality of life for the society as a whole.
I don’t know that it’s even conditional. I think we owe society something just anyway. If my neighbor’s house is on fire, I should help how I can: contribute to putting out the fire (actually fighting the fire, calling someone who can), and I should help my neighbor deal with the aftermath (clothes and food and shelter and maybe assistance with paperwork, rebuilding, etc.).
So it’s not transactional, but an underlying permanent obligation to other humans to at least do a baseline amount of good.
I like your point earlier. However, I think what you’re missing is that not everything HAS to be transactional, and that humans can have value outside of what they offer society. Existential value is tragically overlooked.
If you and I are looking at a tree, you might see cubic board feet (I am picking on you here, because you selected the transactional view point earlier), while I would argue that the fact that the tree exists is enough and that if we reap benefits (beauty, oxygen, habitat value for other critters) from its continued existence, that’s great! Let’s plant more trees.
People educate each other. In a capitalist society, that may be based upon relationships between strangers that are primarily motivated by money. But even within a very capitalist society, people have other motivations, and we learn a lot of things by observing other people do a thing. They don’t necessarily have to be instructing us for us to get an education from them.
Yes, our current societal structure is largely transactional relationships between strangers for money. However, even within that society there are free educational programs and people willing to teach each other various skills just because they enjoy doing it.
Well I can’t speak for you, but if I have the choice between the two, I’ll take the brain surgeon that went to medical school over the one who learned brain surgery from the internet and people who like to perform surgery on brains for the sheer enjoyment of it.
Credentials are just a shortcut to trust in a stranger’s abilities. Broadly speaking someone who jumped through all of the societal hoops may be more trustworthy, but like all heuristics and facsimiles it fails sometimes as well. There have been well-credentialed, seemingly qualified surgeons from prestigious institutions that wound up being some combination of evil and incompetent, and landed people in the hospital or the morgue because credentialism is not foolproof.
Relatedly, credentials are really what the institutions consistently provide – not education – and they are a large part of the reason people attend them in the first place.
You’re mainly paying for a degree, not abilities and not an education.
Having both a Degree (almost 2 Degrees, since I went to Uni to get one and then changed to a different one half-way, so I’m an EE with part of a Physics Degree) and at the same time being massivelly self-taught because of being a Generalist (to the point that in my career I went down the route of working in that which I learned by myself and did for fun as a kid - computer programming - which was not the focus of either of those degrees), it has been my experience that certain things - mainly the fundamentals - are close to impossible to learn by yourself in a hands on way.
Further, discovering by yourself the best way do something complex enough to require an actual Process is really just going through the same pains of trying stuff out or limping along doing it in a seriously sub-optimal way as countless people in the Past who battled the damned thing until somebody discovered the best ways of doing it, and worst, you’re unlikely to by yourself figure out the best way of doing it even after years of doing it, especially as discovering new ways of doing things is a different process from actually doing the work - you have to actually take time out from doing the work to try new stuff out with the expectation that you might do a lot of wrong things as you try new approaches all the while not producing any useable results.
(No matter what, to learn new ways of doing things, you’re going to have to take time out of doing work to do the learning - because it’s pretty hard to figure out or just try out new ways of doing something without making mistakes and mistakes aren’t a valid product of your work - and if you have to dedicate time for learning the most efficient way is to learn from somebody else, which means either a mentor or a teacher)
It’s not by chance that even before Formal Education was a thing there was already the whole Master + Apprentices way of people learning complex domains (such as Blacksmithing).
Even with the Internet it’s still immensely hard to learn by yourself complex subjects because:
Plenty of things you don’t know, you don’t even know that you don’t know them - in other words you’re not even aware they exist - so you won’t go looking for them.
Most of what’s out there is shit for learning. Formats such as Youtube optimize for Entertainment, not Learning, so you’ll be fed by the algorthm countless loud dog and pony shows pretending to explain you things, all with about as much dept as a puddle, whilst the handful of properly deep explanations of things are algorithmed-away because they’re too long and boring.
Worst, the most experienced domain specialists seldom have the time or the inclination to make posts explaining certain things, worse so for videos (and from experience I can tell you making a good Youtube video is a lot more complex than it seems until you try it). Further what you tend to see is countless posts and videos of people who learned just enough about a subject to think that they know tons about it (and thus can explain it to others) without actually knowing tons about it - in other words, people at the peak of the Dunning-Krugger curve. In other words, most such “teachers” are just slightly less newbie than you.
Last but not least, you’re not going to figure out the Fundamentals by yourself. No matter how genial you are IQ-wise you’re not going to, for example, rediscover by yourself the various Advanced Mathematics domains, because that stuff took centuries to figure out by the most intelligent people around, often whose only job was to discover things.
So yeah, some things can only be learned from somebody else, the bulk of what you have to learn is much faster to learn from somebody else than by yourself, and since Formal Education with professional teachers is way more efficient a process than apprenticing under a Master (plus it is way broader in what you end up learning, though less deep than learning from a master/mentor) that’s pretty much all that’s available.
Personally I think a mix of formal Education, Mentorship and Self-Learning is the best way to learn complex domains, but it’s pretty hard to find yourself in a position were you get a Mentor and as one who often is one in my area, I can tell you I wouldn’t waste my time mentoring somebody who doesn’t even know the basics (for example, because they shunned formal education) when I could be mentoring somebody ready to directly learn the advanced stuff I know which is what’s worth me spending some time teaching.
Personally I think a mix of formal Education, Mentorship and Self-Learning is the best way to learn complex domains
I agree. I’m not against formal education at all, but was instead giving a counterexample. It is possible to become educated almost solely through formal education despite that perhaps not being the primary goal of the institutions you attend.
Harvard, for instance, is a fantastic place to learn things despite the fact that it is also practically a hedge fund, a gatekeeping organization, and several other things that are unrelated to educating people.
I consider myself an autodidact but I have a degree and without getting one likely would not have rounded out my background knowledge in computer science.
You made an argument that because someone went to medical school that they’re more trustworthy…and again broad strokes, sure. You are relying on their credentials though. You cannot possibly conduct a thorough enough background check to know if they are skilled enough to conduct your surgery.
While this is generally more reliable than say…taking their word for it, it also is possible for credentialed people to slip through the cracks:
I have nothing against universities, but the largely for-profit educational system in America is not the only way formal education can ever possibly work. There are universities in other countries that don’t rely on cronyism, nepotism, discrimination, and wealth to qualify who gets into the programs.
I disagree that all relationships between humans must be transactional, which is what you’re implying here.
Not all relationships are transactional: any relationship you have with family and friends is free and clear. We should take care of all of our people to an extent. Feed the hungry, house the homeless who want housed, provide basic income to everyone, etc.
BUT
Society is transactional. If you want to get something you need to give something. Why? Go find a libertarian. Ask them what services they use they don’t want to pay for and they will give you a list. Then ask them what services they DO use they are paying extra for and wait for the stunned silence.
Why can’t you get anything for free? Because everybody saying “oh no don’t be transactional!” is on the take. Please prove me wrong and tell me about all the social services and general good doing you do with no strings attached. If you push a religious viewpoint, those are strings attached.
Everybody wants something, barely anyone just wants to give something. Ergo you give a promise to work, a promise to teach, a promise to give back, because otherwise MOST people only take. Call me a pessimist, but I’m waiting for the first libertarian who wants to pick and choose what they pay for so they can contribute to what matters, and not get something for nothing.
EDIT:
To put a finer point on it, why should you WANT to take without giving something back? That is a gross violation of the reciprocity principle which is basically a bedrock of society in general.
Society isn’t strictly transactional either. That is a big part of the reason why libertarianism is such a fundamentally flawed, swiss cheese ideology.
To give you a gigantic counterexample: when social security started nobody had paid a dime into it. The first seniors to receive social security received it directly from the people that were working and paying into it. The same kind of thing happens today. Despite ignorant insistence that social security should be a “bank account” of some sort, it is not. Today’s seniors receive their checks from today’s tax payers.
The idea that altruism isn’t simply rare but completely non-existent is simply…incorrect. There are multitudes of examples of it throughout history and if you look closely enough those continue into the present.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that humans are mostly good – like Penn Gillette-style libertarians often do when their arguments are pressed upon. But I wouldn’t say they’re all inherently selfish goblins either. In large parts, we are on top of the food chain because of our ability to cooperate with each other. Evidence of the cooperative spirit of humanity is all around you if you look closely enough.
(As I type my reply into an open-source browser on a decentralized platform on an open-source OS.)
Here we have hit on the issue. People can be, and are to a surprising degree altruistic. It is not a normal form of operation though because it isn’t guaranteed, and out certainly isn’t the norm for how we all interact with each other. There are homeless shelters, food banks, soup kitchens, and this sort of thing help the most disadvantaged, but those provide services until they run out of space or materials and that’s it. The ones that run on donations and that are funded by angel donors are indeed altruistic.
By and large though, services provided by society to its members are not handled that way. Social security has its flaws, but it’s not altruistic because the first seniors got it for free: they were lucky. It’s entirely transactional because everyone is obliged to pay a portion of their income into the pool. For countries with free education it’s the same thing: everybody pays in so students can go at little or no cost.
And here is the rub and the original point: educators don’t and SHOULDNT be expected to work for free. Leaving aside the facilities and support staff that also needs paid at a university, it would be unconscionable to expect to go for free and just let those people figure out how to eat. Scholarships are another form of altruism which is loosely relevant, but generally speaking I think what you are considering non transactional situations to actually be those that have been collectively paid by our taxes. Socialized, if you will :).
Make no mistake though, we are all expected to put money in if possible, and then we all benefit at the end.
I don’t consider any system as being altruistic even if the people involved in the system are supposed to be. So, I will not argue that social security is or was altruistic.
An implied point I’m making is that “society” is just a bunch of people. It contains systems that we made, use, and maintain. Many (or perhaps most) of those systems have been – intentionally or unintentionally – designed to be somewhere along the spectrum between simply transactional and outright hostile to altruism. For example, we still have laws on the books against people going out to the parking meters and feeding them for others whose parking is about to expire.
But these are choices. The rules of society and its systems – policies and their implementations – are built and arranged by people. These are not the only possible choices, and these are not the only possible systems.
I guess I didn’t know what outcome(s) you would like or expect?
I think “we should provide education free of charge (paid by taxes)” is great and would be beneficial at all levels.
Contrarily, I think “I should get free education and not have to pay for it or provide any effort at reciprocity” sounds and feels super entitled and shitty. It sounds exceptional, and like the libertarian examples before to me.
The actual outcome I would like is for people to take a break from looking at what the current system is and trying to provide an abstract, philosophical foundation from which to justify it.
Perhaps contrarily, I think it sounds liberating…and better than our current system of “I should go into non-dischargeable debt to obtain credentials to get a job at evil corp and then have to pay 20x the amount of the loan to get out from under the debt”.
But my point isn’t that you have to go to a complete opposite system either, my point is that the way that it works today – speaking abstractly as this whole diversion began – isn’t the only way it could work despite everyone’s insistence that it has to be that way because of “society” or whatever.
Not everything is transactional. Not everything is a zero-sum game. When you teach people things, you often learn something yourself.
The people replying to me in this thread have a tendency to snap into a absolutist perspective. But if you cannot even dream of something different than debt slavery and other shitty institutions and even your thought experiments are all exercises to justify crappy systems in the abstract, then the greedy goblins have already won a total victory because they have already captured your imagination in addition to everything else.
In order to be able to improve anything, you have to first be able to imagine that improvement is possible.
Now, which one of you punks is going to pay me to investigate this crime?
That’s the thing, I don’t mean between two humans. I mean between a human, and all the rest of society, which is why I phrased it that way.
Society gives a person an education, and expects that person to do something meaningful in return. It might not be the same two people in that transaction, which is similar to how we pay taxes for benefits we might not personally see.
Society invests in the education of its people, and the return is a general benefit to society from its people being more educated. It is not necessary for every single individual to give something tangible and obvious back in order for society to benefit from an educated populace. If you apply the criterion that every individual must give something back, it always turns into a requirement that they give back something tangible, usually money or labour, and the next step is to abolish education in philosophy, the arts, and possibly the more theoretical or exploratory parts of science. The result of this is an impoverished society, not an enriched one.
For it to be a good deal for society to pay for education there only needs to be on balance a benefit to society. That leaves room for the arts and all kinds of human curiosity and creativity that doesn’t yield an immediate tangible benefit. We contribute together, not individually, and some contributions are very indirect. Still, societies benefit from the arts, philosophy, and people with curiosity. And this system can tolerate some people not contributing anything much at all. The investment is in quality of life for the society as a whole.
I don’t know that it’s even conditional. I think we owe society something just anyway. If my neighbor’s house is on fire, I should help how I can: contribute to putting out the fire (actually fighting the fire, calling someone who can), and I should help my neighbor deal with the aftermath (clothes and food and shelter and maybe assistance with paperwork, rebuilding, etc.).
So it’s not transactional, but an underlying permanent obligation to other humans to at least do a baseline amount of good.
I like your point earlier. However, I think what you’re missing is that not everything HAS to be transactional, and that humans can have value outside of what they offer society. Existential value is tragically overlooked.
If you and I are looking at a tree, you might see cubic board feet (I am picking on you here, because you selected the transactional view point earlier), while I would argue that the fact that the tree exists is enough and that if we reap benefits (beauty, oxygen, habitat value for other critters) from its continued existence, that’s great! Let’s plant more trees.
Again, abstract, but worth considering :)
So you don’t have to be skilled as long as you’re good looking.
I think there’s something to that.
We have models after all.
Does it?
People educate each other. In a capitalist society, that may be based upon relationships between strangers that are primarily motivated by money. But even within a very capitalist society, people have other motivations, and we learn a lot of things by observing other people do a thing. They don’t necessarily have to be instructing us for us to get an education from them.
Yes, our current societal structure is largely transactional relationships between strangers for money. However, even within that society there are free educational programs and people willing to teach each other various skills just because they enjoy doing it.
Well I can’t speak for you, but if I have the choice between the two, I’ll take the brain surgeon that went to medical school over the one who learned brain surgery from the internet and people who like to perform surgery on brains for the sheer enjoyment of it.
Credentials are just a shortcut to trust in a stranger’s abilities. Broadly speaking someone who jumped through all of the societal hoops may be more trustworthy, but like all heuristics and facsimiles it fails sometimes as well. There have been well-credentialed, seemingly qualified surgeons from prestigious institutions that wound up being some combination of evil and incompetent, and landed people in the hospital or the morgue because credentialism is not foolproof.
Relatedly, credentials are really what the institutions consistently provide – not education – and they are a large part of the reason people attend them in the first place.
You’re mainly paying for a degree, not abilities and not an education.
Having both a Degree (almost 2 Degrees, since I went to Uni to get one and then changed to a different one half-way, so I’m an EE with part of a Physics Degree) and at the same time being massivelly self-taught because of being a Generalist (to the point that in my career I went down the route of working in that which I learned by myself and did for fun as a kid - computer programming - which was not the focus of either of those degrees), it has been my experience that certain things - mainly the fundamentals - are close to impossible to learn by yourself in a hands on way.
Further, discovering by yourself the best way do something complex enough to require an actual Process is really just going through the same pains of trying stuff out or limping along doing it in a seriously sub-optimal way as countless people in the Past who battled the damned thing until somebody discovered the best ways of doing it, and worst, you’re unlikely to by yourself figure out the best way of doing it even after years of doing it, especially as discovering new ways of doing things is a different process from actually doing the work - you have to actually take time out from doing the work to try new stuff out with the expectation that you might do a lot of wrong things as you try new approaches all the while not producing any useable results.
(No matter what, to learn new ways of doing things, you’re going to have to take time out of doing work to do the learning - because it’s pretty hard to figure out or just try out new ways of doing something without making mistakes and mistakes aren’t a valid product of your work - and if you have to dedicate time for learning the most efficient way is to learn from somebody else, which means either a mentor or a teacher)
It’s not by chance that even before Formal Education was a thing there was already the whole Master + Apprentices way of people learning complex domains (such as Blacksmithing).
Even with the Internet it’s still immensely hard to learn by yourself complex subjects because:
Last but not least, you’re not going to figure out the Fundamentals by yourself. No matter how genial you are IQ-wise you’re not going to, for example, rediscover by yourself the various Advanced Mathematics domains, because that stuff took centuries to figure out by the most intelligent people around, often whose only job was to discover things.
So yeah, some things can only be learned from somebody else, the bulk of what you have to learn is much faster to learn from somebody else than by yourself, and since Formal Education with professional teachers is way more efficient a process than apprenticing under a Master (plus it is way broader in what you end up learning, though less deep than learning from a master/mentor) that’s pretty much all that’s available.
Personally I think a mix of formal Education, Mentorship and Self-Learning is the best way to learn complex domains, but it’s pretty hard to find yourself in a position were you get a Mentor and as one who often is one in my area, I can tell you I wouldn’t waste my time mentoring somebody who doesn’t even know the basics (for example, because they shunned formal education) when I could be mentoring somebody ready to directly learn the advanced stuff I know which is what’s worth me spending some time teaching.
I agree. I’m not against formal education at all, but was instead giving a counterexample. It is possible to become educated almost solely through formal education despite that perhaps not being the primary goal of the institutions you attend.
Harvard, for instance, is a fantastic place to learn things despite the fact that it is also practically a hedge fund, a gatekeeping organization, and several other things that are unrelated to educating people.
I consider myself an autodidact but I have a degree and without getting one likely would not have rounded out my background knowledge in computer science.
I didn’t say anything about credentials. This is about a proper education for the job.
Would you really go to a brain surgeon that didn’t go to medical school?
You made an argument that because someone went to medical school that they’re more trustworthy…and again broad strokes, sure. You are relying on their credentials though. You cannot possibly conduct a thorough enough background check to know if they are skilled enough to conduct your surgery.
While this is generally more reliable than say…taking their word for it, it also is possible for credentialed people to slip through the cracks:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Duntsch
I have nothing against universities, but the largely for-profit educational system in America is not the only way formal education can ever possibly work. There are universities in other countries that don’t rely on cronyism, nepotism, discrimination, and wealth to qualify who gets into the programs.