Stephen Downes

Even though I had a mainstream Anglophone education, from my perspective, everyone has a different point of view from me. So I expect people to disagree, and unless I want to be a practicing solopsist, I need to be able to interact with them on a relatively civil basis. It is, however, as Dean Shareski laments, becoming a lost art. "I remain desperate to find examples of thoughtful, intelligent people engaging across ideological divides—people who wrestle with difficult issues, challenge each other's thinking, and explore the real-world consequences of policy decisions," he writes. It's hard, because we grapple with each other not only with reason and logic, but with sentiment, emotion, passion, culture and history. Still, like Shareski, I remain "committed to diversity, critical thinking, media literacy, and civil discourse," even though these very foundations of civil society have recently come under attack.

What's interesting about this article is the chart that accompanies it depicting the alphabet and numbers as written in cursive. Take a look at it. Now ask, why did we develop cursive writing when we had printed text as a perfectly good system of hand-printed text already in existence? It has to do with the quill pen and ink, and specifically, the fact that cursive allows you to write text without lifting your pen off the page, thus preventing drips and smudges. It was a shortcut. Anyhow, if we look at that chart, we can see that this original purpose has been lost, as many of the lowercase letters to not properly join with the letters preceding or following them. And all of that tells me that the whole idea that 'cursive writing builds x skills' is a rationalization created by people who do not understand why cursive exists (and why it is no longer necessary).

What attracted me to this item was not the tales of abuse in illegal schools but rather the philosophical question emerging from the headline: what counts as 'wasted lives'. Some cases are obvious, such as students who may perish in a fire when the doors are locked. Arguably, so are cases where the 'education' is nothing more than work in a sweatshop or when the teachers and staff are abusive. "Misogynistic behaviour doesn't just happen at religious schools." But where does the limit lie between a 'wasted life' level of abuse and merely 'undesirable conditions and outcomes' type of school? It's hard for me to imagine any life that isn't prematurely ended as 'wasted'. But that might just be my own bias. (p.s. please do not construe this as support for illegal or even private schooling; it is not).

Today's new word is 'organoid', the outcome of "growing (neural) cells into more complex 3D structures... that mimic some of the structure and function of regions of the nervous system." The technique is useful because "neurons in these three- or four-part assembloids extend axons and connect with some specificity to other neurons (which) gives rise to emergent properties, such as the contraction of human muscle." They can be maintained long enough to emulate post-natal maturity and can be studied to find underlying causes of various conditions such as Timothy syndrome. An assembloid, meanwhile, is what researchers get when they "combined different types of brain organoids into structures... in which cells from different origins can intermingle."

This list is a pretty good measure of "influence in mainstream Anglophone philosophy" and also a pretty good indication of a large part of my own philosophical background (which is supplemented by a lot of reading in religious studies and scientific works). I won't say I've read them all (*) but the first hundred or so are quite familiar to me and I can cite a good selection of the rest of them. (* I once said "I've read them all" to someone who was looking at the books on my office shelves. It was obviously untrue and I was obviously caught out and I've regretted it ever since. I don't know why I said it and I guess it reflects a character flew wherein I pretend to be more knowledgeable than I am. Anyhow, not making the same mistake twice.)

Here's the tag from this item: "I was going to write a story about how Amazon is no longer even pretending to respect your privacy. But, really, why bother?" The gist here is that while we still think we have privacy, we really don't; it has long ago been lost in a world of data breaches, government programs and (I would add) Equifax. It's a useful perspective. The concept of privacy itself, I think, is relatively recent and limited to urban environments in the more developed world. Growing up less wealthy and rural, I was raised in an environment where everybody in town knew your business and you knew theirs. That was often useful - and for some people, vital - information. Privacy is, ultimately, the right to lie about yourself in public, generally to protect yourself from the consequences. I get that there are reasons to do this, but it's something that should be talked about, not assumed as an automatic - and existing - good.