Language made civilisation possible, but its capacity to reproduce belief, identity and conflict offers no guarantee of survival. Planetary first aid begins with understanding what our communication does, not merely what it says.
Tag: education
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Burden of Knowing
Independent knowledge becomes a social burden when learning is treated as competition and established opinions become territories to defend. Genuine enquiry begins when understanding becomes a shared endeavour rather than a contest over who knows more.
A protest becomes something different when separate grievances begin moving at the same time. France offers a glimpse of how synchronisation amplifies communicative affect.
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What Does Education Do?
Education stabilises knowledge long enough to transmit it, even as the machinery through which knowledge is produced and interpreted accelerates the movement of the epistemic attractor itself.
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Vocabulary: How not What
I found myself in conversation with another commuter on public transport today. They mentioned not completing high school in regards to their education, and the conversation drifted toward my interest in language and communication. I explained that vocabulary is never a reliable proxy for intelligence. A small vocabulary used precisely often reveals more intellect than […]
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Expertise
Our universities are not producing experts or competency, but inasmuch as they are—and where they are—it exists only as an outlier within the great goo of median self-replication to which hierarchical bureaucracy is naturally attracted. The institutional frame does not optimise for insight but for the recursive preservation of itself, absorbing deviation back into the […]
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The Tyranny of Repetition
To know how systems work—minds, technologies, institutions—is to stand at a vantage where the contours of failure are obvious. You see the repeating loops, the patterned insistence on precedent masquerading as wisdom, the reflexive grasp for what was done before as though it could still suffice. Awareness here does not grant influence; it only exposes […]
Australian universities now draw more than 40% of their revenue from international students, with billions funneled into research, teaching, and infrastructure, much of it mediated by digital platforms. Government support has shrunk to under 30% of funding, while tech companies capture not only the delivery mechanisms but also the analytics, intellectual property pipelines, and student […]
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Zak Stein: AI, Education, Regulation
Zak Stein frames the personhood conferral problem as a distinct risk in education and society. Alignment asks how humans control machines, this asks how humans mistake machines for persons. As systems simulate dialogue, affect, and presence, children and adults may confer moral standing to tools. Placing AI in roles of educator, caregiver, or companion risks […]
There is no “future proof.” It’s like asserting the presence of impermeably secure communications systems. Nothing, if not a nice story… …longer-term visions don’t play the same game in better ways. They rewrite the assumptions and axioms, they reinvent it. It is the unquestioned assumptions that generally hide in plain sight and everyday language. For […]
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Education and AI
We have stepped across an event horizon in which accelerating rates of technical change and the proliferation of “cognitive” tools have outpaced our personal, professional and/or collective ability to stay on top of the diversity and utility of these rapidly speciating systems. Strategic planning for education (as much as for the broader world) will be […]
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Metacrisis
Metacrisis complexity reflects the deep interconnections among global systems, where socioeconomic, technological, geopolitical and environmental factors are intricately interdependent. Each regulatory response to these integrated crises, while intended to mitigate challenges, often becomes a functional microcosm in the runaway complexity it aims to address, amplifying the signal of entropy it seeks to navigate. This dynamic requires adaptive governance, focusing […]
