keevin bybee 0:00
Welcome to the one school podcast. This is keevin Bybee. I’m a family physician who is looking at ways that we can get further into the preventative pipeline, hopefully, by making something like a school, a 24-7-365 community center. Most of my recordings are interviews with people who would be specialists in all of the sub domains that could make a project like this possible. Today, however, I thought I would read and riff on several of my blog posts, hopefully to get to people who might not otherwise have time to read the blog posts, as well as use them as an opportunity to kind of string together what might seem to be disparate thoughts into a more cohesive narrative that’s hopefully motivating to other people to want to get involved or at least think about or consider a project like this patchwork behavior. We are by we, I mean, the collection of biological processes and mental experiences and social behaviors that are basically a patchwork of evolved sufficiently adaptive survival functions. The functions exist at the level of self repairing molecules, spinal reflexes, midbrain, regulation systems for the body, and our cognitive faculties the ability to make models of the world and plan on long timescales, social patterns of behavior, as well as our subjective phenomenon, conscious experience of the world. I called it patchwork, but recently, I’ve stumbled across Zach Stein, who described a similar phenomenon as an ecosystem of the mind. And so if we think of the ecosystems of all of these survival habits, or survival traits, that were, loosely quote, assembled in an ad hoc, or improvisational manner through evolutions, and certainly weren’t selected or designed through any teleological mechanism. For example, we’re wired to find sweetness very salient and attention grabbing. But we can also be cognitively aware that it may not serve us well over time to eat a lot of sweet things. Thus, we can have a mind body conflict, which I use as a catchy shorthand to represent the fact that any survival function may have opposing drives to another survival function at another level part of the body or system of behaviors. Understanding the biological basis of our behavior and how they are arranged is critical. For both the general population level as well as the individual and interpersonal level. We are social primates, we evolved on the African savanna to cursorily hunt, we lived in tribes of about 150 people, also known as the Dunbar’s number. We have the same biological hardware now, as we did 100,000 years ago. Even though society and technology have drastically changed, we are not evolutionarily adapted to cities, nor worldwide society, in groups larger than our Dunbar’s number. If we know how we are, quote, put together biologically, how these components can contribute to behavior on the organism and social levels, and how we are likely to react under various circumstances, then we can begin to engineer or curate or perhaps cultivate an environment that would promote behaviors and mental contents we desire. Of course, we’re going to need to have a dynamic system of checks and updates to this model, and updating the goals to which we aim as we know more about ourselves. One might consider such a project something like a moral landscape. I stole this from Sam Harris. So it’s worth looking into that. Which to describe briefly is imagine every conscious creature suffering, as much as it’s capable of suffering for as long as it’s capable of suffering. And not just one but every conscious creature that is or could be in existence. If the word bad means anything, it probably means that. But basically, then, if we know what the worst possible outcome is, then we can use science to navigate ourselves further and further away from this place, and possibly to similar but does equal peaks along the landscape. For example, fetal and maternal death during childbirth are things that we would really like to minimize. So for things that we care about and can measure. If we can decrease the frequency of these events, then the cumulative well being of conscious beings will improve. So just an expanding that to all of the things that we care about even those that are hard to numerically, quantify. Such as reports of subjective well being, not to dive too deep, but just to give some examples of how such a project might be possible. I would also propose that we can integrate our subjective experiences our emotional lives when navigating this landscape. Through science is aware of the fact that we are emotional creatures that sometimes think we’re not thinking creatures that have feelings. And so we can take as report or as observation, the likely subjective experience of each other into a model when we’re considering how to minimize useless suffering, we can then develop more finely detailed values. And by value I mean a model a representation of what we want, or integrate that with some of our innate survival instincts up through multigenerational time horizons. What if we use science to cultivate an environment that promotes childhood development, both within a physical school and the larger community in which that school serves? I’m an argument I hear in direct opposition to this is that we can’t use science to define or to fit human values, nor tell us what we quote should do. Why not? In a very basic example, let’s split society in half, have one of them punish criminals in a traditional sense, and have the other half of humanity restoratively rehabilitate those who trespass. We can then measure crime rates and rates of reintegration of those people into society. If we wanted to minimize crime rates, and maximize rates of people becoming taxpaying citizens again, then perhaps we would know which method to choose. We might have a path forward depending on what we care about. Do we care about making sure people get what they deserve? Or do we care about lowering crime rates and making people have more taxpaying jobs? A survival heuristic is one in which we care about our immediate state of physical sensations and emotions. But at the same time, the human mind generates a sense of meaning, a story about how we relate to our own survival, our more long term sense of integration with the world that may require short term sacrifices, our organisms, survival mechanisms, and then the abstracted motivations that exist inside of us happen simultaneously. And if we do not actively cultivate meaning, we will, by default, only care about and seek activities that maximize immediate gratification. But how do we even know what we should care about at all. And one sense to be alive is to care. Another way of saying it might be not caring is merely the speed at which we approach an early demise. Subconsciously, we have neurologic cares baked into us about food, water, air and social contact. We can use the scientific method to explore our bodies and our minds, to better understand our physiological, social and spiritual needs. The basis is, if you will, for which we construct meaning. science based morality acknowledges that as a function of merely being alive, we have to care, otherwise, we will cease to exist. We have some degree to choose what we care about, and how we cultivate that meaning. We can use evidence and science to help us achieve goals as they align with the meaning we construct, we can use a transparent scientific method to help us clarify our values. So we won’t have to rely on archaic modal structures that ignore what we really are and where we’ve come from. So now we have two interpenetrating projects, reverse engineering the human physiologically, and using that to construct environments which are more likely to generate the kind of humans we want. I’d like to start with thinking about social and environmental cultivation. JOHN Rawls has the concept of the veil of ignorance, a thought of experiment where one might consider what kind of society they would like to be born into, if they didn’t know whether they were born into the upper echelons or the lowest depths. The purpose of this thought experiment is to illustrate how much luck has to do with one’s experience of the world and the outcomes which they attain. In the last few years, for example, I’ve started a meditation practice. One of my things Koans that I’ve been taught is, try thinking your next thought before you think it. For me, this hammered home, the fact that we whatever that means whatever we are, whatever we think we are, are not the authors of our thoughts. We are merely the recipients or observers of our thoughts. In full disclosure, I used to be quite the philosophical libertarian, both economical and cognitive. So, realizing that I’m not able to think my next thought before, I thought it was a challenging concept to weave into my pre existing worldview.I used to think that I had earned what I have or deserved my station in life based on what I had done. But even with some basic contemplation, it quickly became obvious that what I am, was largely a product of environmental variables far beyond my control. Right now, I practice family medicine. I see patients who were born into or have fallen into extreme circumstances, and it can be quite heartbreaking. I’m sure there’s, we all know people who through force of will or through grit, or determination or hard work, they have been able to rise above their circumstances. But at the same time, we also need to take a step back and ask did that person who rose above their station choose to have that grit or the capacity to do so this forces me to recognize that everything I have in my life, material and social is quite fragile. And then I’m motivated to make the world a place where what everybody has is less fragile. To quote, my favorite, so bad, it’s good movie kaitou. Imagine two climbers are fighting over whether or not to pay the porters of all their climbing equipment. One climber says in frustration, while he’s burning their money as an attempt to get them to continue on doing what they agreed I’m didn’t make the world the way it is. I’m just trying to get through as fast and clean as possible. And as partner responds, we all make the world the way it is. With that in mind, I have chosen to update my world model to be one where I can be thankful for what I have. But without claiming primary ownership or just desserts. If I make the world the way it is, at least in some small part, and I want to make it more anti fragile, then it behooves me to pay forward my luck, the experiences and insight that I’ve gained in my current practice as a family doctor convinces me that directing resources towards making the safest possible place for children is the best way to do that. I use the phrase, the soup in which we live a lot as a metaphor for the system’s environments, ecologies and societies in which we develop and live. I think it’s apt, as everything in a soup is in touch with everything else, either directly or through osmosis and diffusion. Many childhood experiences are the consequences of children’s swimming in a suit. That won’t be significantly altered by going to therapy once a week. In order to keep children safe. And to close the education and wealth gaps, we’re going to need to take care of the families where these children’s stew several interventions have been shown to help children by helping the families What about the soup in which the families live? Things like paid time off? good jobs, addressing police misconduct are all things that can improve the meta soup for our children. So what are some of the other ingredients in this soup we live in things like universal health care, universal basic income, I’m personally of the opinion that with the appropriate allocation and environmental sustainability, we can provide something like a Western first world material lifestyle to everybody on Earth, we have enough petrochemicals and solar energy and semiconductors to food, shelter, clothing, and educate all seven and a half billion of us even more if we consider asteroid mining. Consider that perhaps humans aren’t intrinsically or essentially, or inherently good or evil, selfish. or selfless. These are all characteristics for which we’re capable of, depending on our personal neurology and in the environment in which we develop, no amount of school reform is going to advance test scores if we don’t consider the soup in which we all swim and stew. I like to think of the economy as the sum total of all human endeavors, not just a narrow index, like the GDP, and we need to be flexible about the labels we use, and or models we use to allocate resources. As far as I’m aware, there’s no economic policy written into the corks, nor into our collective nervous systems. terms like socialism and capitalism capture different things. And they’re not mutually exclusive. For example, it’s pretty darn useful to have a market for consumer goods and many commodities, it’s a good way to get relatively quick feedback about goods and services that people want that are very difficult to anticipate. However, it’s all about aligning incentives. And we can generate needs to fill that aren’t really aligned with our true well being unrealistic advertising or short investment cycles. Kind of lead us to rob future Peter to pay today’s Paul, this is why we need to consider things like the human brain, which wasn’t evolutionarily well set up to consider long term investments. We can do things like nudge people into their retirement plans, opt out, as opposed to opt in to our 401k, for example, but consider socialistic organizing things for roads, schools, and public health, which have been repeatedly shown to have lower costs. So it’s not about socialism versus capitalism, but more about which one to use where, when strategically and intelligently. In addition, we can’t really talk about the economy without talking about where money comes from. And what even is money. A phrase that I’ve stumbled across that resonates a lot with me, is the fundamental unit of caring. And we can talk about how right now, what most people think of as money really isn’t what we care about, but it’s the next best proxy. And how we generate money, how money comes into existence is certainly going to influence how it’s used. And what kind of macro economic incentives are generated both deliberately and emergent. From what I understand, all money currently comes into existence, once the US Treasury decides it needs to borrow money from the federal reserve. So a treasury bill is drafted, which is given to the Federal Reserve who generates a billion dollars out of the electronic ink well to loan to the government at some arbitrary interest, then, that treasury bill is taken to the mint and a million or billion dollars is printed out. So where do we get the money to pay back the interest on that money that was loaned out of thin air? Well, we’ve got to borrow it. And this sets up an infinite recursion of an unpayable debt. If every dollar of debt in existence were to be paid off, that would be zero circulating currency, but still the interest left to pay. What if instead, money was created out of thin air as it is now, but instead distributed the citizens directly in the form of a universal basic income or forms of universal basic income? Again, I mentioned fundamental unit of caring. What if money came into existence as schoolbooks or exercise books, or therapy books, or go to the doctor books. That’s not to say we also don’t need direct cash that can be used in any liquid way that would meet somebody’s immediate needs. Additionally, if you think about the next 20 to 50 years, the robots are coming. Many of the ways that people spend their days to avoid starving are no longer going to be around. Automation is going to take over most manufacturing, agricultural, retail, and even a lot of clerical white collar jobs. It’s rather insulting then to just suggest that somebody learned to code to adapt to this new economy. So if all of the wealth and material resources are being generated automatically, who gets to own them? How do we tax the robots with universal basic income, we would then have a little bit more slack to do the things that humans do well, which is take care of each other, more of the currently unpaid caregiving that goes on in the world for our elderly, for our children, for our differentially abled things that we don’t want or can’t have robots do for us. With the buffer to take care of each other and have multi generational homes and well supported school, then this project of intergenerational transfer of information will be much more robust. If culture or society at large is anything at all. It is the intergenerational transfer of information. Some sense all of society’s problems are those of education challenges in bringing children out of childhood and into responsible, mature adulthood. My mind was blown the other day, when I read a quote by Zack Stein, if education is not the answer, you’re asking the wrong question. And this dovetails quite naturally with the adage that it takes a village to raise a child. In his book, education and in time between worlds. Zach Stein emphasizes the interdependence between educational organizations teacherly practice and the rest of society and culture. The idea of multiple systems that are coupled in various ways with extraordinarily complex dynamics. He uses the term internet generational transmission, to signal that there’s actually a much deeper way to understand this function of education, and how schools are a relatively new historical invention. And that we can have any khaleeji of educational experiences and practices that interpenetrate and are interwoven into the community at large, quote, the educational Hub Network. The basic idea is that school systems themselves need to be repurposed and redesigned. Each school building transformed into an unprecedented institution that is some combination of public library Museum, co working center, computer lab, and daycare. I’ll leave it there for now. Hopefully, people found this engaging, and I can certainly go on forever as anyone who knows me well could attest. The whole point of this is to get feedback. I would love to hear what anyone has to say and how I can get better as an interviewer or thinker. Please do reach out and thanks again for listening.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai