Karl: Miscellaneous Rejoinders

You recommend (Post-Academic Manifesto, 2002) that we should use straightforward english in short papers that get to the heart of an idea without unnecessary posturing and embellishment.

I agree with your manifesto - and if we are to change anything fundamental, education is the point of leverage most effective but most ellusive, hence its primacy. But I don't think your manifesto goes far enough, and could it be because, while declaring the currently "derailed" educational establishment can be "traced back 50 years" you speak as one nevertheless enamored of it, or of some neater era of it, when a paper like Turing's Entscheidungsproblem could signal an alteration in culture history tout court?

In mulling this over, it struck me that what has changed now, this 50-year moment in time, is the grading system, and this is the simple idea I want to convey to you from thin air. Indeed, the mammoth machinery established over centuries for providing generational feedback from one authoritative human to another subservient human petitioning for entry into that intellectually elite club has fundamentally broken down with the symptoms you list. But why? The central academic trajectory, first a student, then an equal, has been deflected. Formerly, the student cannot challenge the master until he is an equal. (Paradoxically, after becoming an equal, it is almost required that he challenge his former master - Husserl and Heidegger et al.) The enforcement mechanism is the grading system. The teacher is the repository of some cumulative cultural sounding board that is determinative of worthiness.

Now Turing has given us a mechanical teacher. That is why programmers do not need school, they already have it. A program is a paper submitted to the operating system. And the feedback is, at least overtly, impersonally authoritative. There is no need to be restless and dissatisfied with the older generation's bias and flukes, we know full well when code is A+ work - when it executes fast, without unwanted side-effects, and renders a game pleasing to the senses of the player. But most programmers cannot write poetically in their native language, they cannot spell it more often than not. No matter - they have learned how to please the machine. No mere human can get in their way.

I suggest this has become a universal situation. Published papers are more and more an explanation of what some software program has output. Older professors cannot read (or write) the source code - their graduate students can. The academic recipe is irremedially spoiled, it tastes different, but few have really noticed why. Wolfram (I am not a devotee) abandonned academia in favor of a software business, the Mathematica franchise, and has declared that publishing papers is a collosal waste of time: students should program their ideas.

Let this insight reconstruct education. Under the ancien regime, we (im)patiently learned everything we needed from our masters, then became masters ourselves and repeated the process (in Japan, to master a skill is to teach a skill). The major constraint was that as a student, one could not safely displease one's master, dispute his authoritative standing. Indeed, to matriculate was to get out from under it. Now, there is no escape at all. We cannot ever remove ourselves from the logically inescapable authority Turing institutionalized into every chip and fiber of the modern metaversal network, and compose a rejoinder to our own master.

This master, the ultimate operating system, is of course the Turing machine itself. We students can produce A+ work by learning how to address it properly, and if we choose, we needn't ever bother with the vast, crumbling traditional educational system that flutters around the machine, deluded that somehow it can be owned or guided anymore. But we can never graduate and get beyond it without somehow rejecting its assumptions. I am tempted to say that what we are called to do, in this weird crisis, this postmodern haze of reluctant, self-infatuated, lurching electronicizing, is to reformulate that machine, to bring it back from its rational excess and conform it to the rest of human experience. I have some ideas, perhaps faulty ones, as to how we might do that, but I have no idea al all what might happen in a post-Turing (no pun intended) world.

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Karl: Miscellaneous Rejoinders

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Rejoinder to Jason Rohrer's Post-Academic Manifesto

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