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== Overview ==
Due to the nature of the Info-Ops series, many of the concepts translate directly over into other fields where the result is information, knowledge, or new skill acquisition. Public education is one of these. The following ideas are developed at length in the series and shown here


blup
== Habits Over Goals ==


== Books ==
Perhaps the most counter-intuitive concept out of many in the Info-Ops books is that habits can get goals accomplished in a context environment but the reverse is not true. Goal-focused management and knowledge work tends to hand-wave over the details of how that goal is to be accomplished, and for good reasons. Each type of knowledge goal has vastly-different ways of being accomplished, and it varies by student, project, culture, and so forth.


=== [[Info-Ops 1: Build The Right Thing]] ===
Instead, a system of habits should be created and honed that will allow widely-different intellectual goals to be accomplished. These habits should be the focus, not the goals themselves. Focusing on the wrong thing has been called "Trying to play tennis by watching the scoreboard"


=== Info-Ops 2: Build Things Right ===
== Education Is Always Bullshit ==


=== Info-Ops 3: Learn By Building ===
Another thing that Info-Ops teaches us is that knowledge work is infinitely-divisible. (That's the main reason we have something called "analysis paralysis". This means that when you're working intellectually, you're always going to be wrong. The real goal is understanding when you're right enough not to need to continue working. An old saying here is "All models are wrong, but some models are useful"


Pick any topic in education, from simple counting up through something extremely complex and nuanced like literary deconstruction. For every topic that we teach, a simple-yet-wrong topic is introduced as a a way of getting the student started and perhaps providing all they need for a successful life. So there are no correct or incorrect things to teach, only things that can be useful right away for the student and things that provide a foundation for further learning. A good education should provide these kinds of "fake" narratives as a jumping-off place for students later. Narratives that do not provide immediate applicative value and/or make future learning more difficult should be avoided at all costs.


blup
== Negatives Stack ==


Another very powerful concept not acknowledged in most education theory is that negatives stack, positives don't. In other words, it's much easier to eliminate broad areas of inquiry than it is to focus down on one specific one. To over-simplify, as Frankenstein's Monster learned, "Fire Bad!" and it's a true statement that any child who's gotten burned learns. But it's really more complicated than the simple "Fire Bad!" concept; it's just that we want a child to eliminate *anything at all to do with fire* for a long period of time. We have tossed-out a huge area of childhood inquisitiveness. It is categorical.


== Philosophy ==
These types of negatives are very difficult to overcome in life, which is the reason why parents use them. We are wired to exclude things. "Elephants kill!" is a much more useful evolutionary concept than "Some elephants are useful". The first provides a negative space that we may never have to challenge. The same is true in more technical analysis, as shown in the [https://danielbmarkham.com/negatives-stack-positives-dont-a-numberline-model-of-communication/ "Negatives Stack" essay]
The Info-Ops works are based on a loose synthesis of four major school of philosophic thought.


Unless otherwise noted, these definitions are lifted verbatim from internet sources.
It follows that we need to be very careful about the kinds of negative attitudes students receive in school. Ideally, we would teach positive, fake narratives about how problems can be overcome in certain fields. As students, progress, their knowledge may become such that they can be one of the people helping to move progress along. When we teach, accidentally or otherwise, general negative concepts like "history is for losers", we effectively eliminate entire areas of academic research from future generations. Why spend any time on a topic that is for losers? Students should not, and they don't.


=== Pragmatism ===
The fallout here is that we need to create false positive over-simplified stories about our place in society and how we might help solve problems in various areas should we be more interested in learning about them. This means that education is much more about which negatives to exclude and how to over-simplify than it is anything else (aside from good habits, perhaps). There are multiple ways of achieving these goals. It's no wonder that various local school systems vary so widely. This should be expected and encouraged.
[[File:2023-01-icon-pragmatism-large.png|200px|thumb|left]]  <blockquote>Pragmatism is a philosophical movement that includes those who claim that an ideology or proposition is true if it works satisfactorily, that the meaning of a proposition is to be found in the practical consequences of accepting it, and that unpractical ideas are to be rejected. Pragmatism originated in the United States during the latter quarter of the nineteenth century. Although it has significantly influenced non-philosophers—notably in the fields of law, education, politics, sociology, psychology, and literary criticism—this article deals with it only as a movement within philosophy.


The term “pragmatism” was first used in print to designate a philosophical outlook about a century ago when William James (1842-1910) pressed the word into service during an 1898 address entitled “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,” delivered at the University of California (Berkeley). James scrupulously swore, however, that the term had been coined almost three decades earlier by his compatriot and friend C. S. Peirce (1839-1914). (Peirce, eager to distinguish his doctrines from the views promulgated by James, later relabeled his own position “pragmaticism”—a name, he said, “ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers.”) The third major figure in the classical pragmatist pantheon is  John Dewey (1859-1952), whose wide-ranging writings had considerable impact on American intellectual life for a half-century. After Dewey, however, pragmatism lost much of its momentum.</blockquote> [https://iep.utm.edu/pragmati/ Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]
== Broken Management Metaphor ==


===  Tripartite Semiotics ===
== Abundance of Theory, Paucity of Practice ==
[[File:2023-01-icon-tripartite-semiotics-large.png|200px|thumb|left]]
<blockquote> In the nineteenth century, Charles Sanders Peirce defined what he termed "semiotic" (which he would sometimes spell as "semeiotic") as the "quasi-necessary, or formal doctrine of signs," which abstracts "what must be the characters of all signs used by…an intelligence capable of learning by experience,"[16] and which is philosophical logic pursued in terms of signs and sign processes.[17][18]


Peirce's perspective is considered as philosophical logic studied in terms of signs that are not always linguistic or artificial, and sign processes, modes of inference, and the inquiry process in general. The Peircean semiotic addresses not only the external communication mechanism, as per Saussure, but the internal representation machine, investigating sign processes, and modes of inference, as well as the whole inquiry process in general.


Peircean semiotic is triadic, including sign, object, interpretant, as opposed to the dyadic Saussurian tradition (signifier, signified). Peircean semiotics further subdivides each of the three triadic elements into three sub-types, positing the existence of signs that are symbols; semblances ("icons"); and "indices," i.e., signs that are such through a factual connection to their objects.[19]
== Feedback loops have to be simple, visible, and fraud/vagueness free ==


Peircean scholar and editor Max H. Fisch (1978)[d] would claim that "semeiotic" was Peirce's own preferred rendering of Locke's σημιωτική.[20] Charles W. Morris followed Peirce in using the term "semiotic" and in extending the discipline beyond human communication to animal learning and use of signals.
== Metaphor should be gardening instead of industrial processing ==
</blockquote> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics#Charles_Sanders_Peirce From Wikipedia]
 
=== Philosophy of Language ===
[[File:2023-01-icon-philosophy-of-language-large.png|200px|thumb|left]]
<blockquote>
Wittgenstein left Cambridge in the early 1920s and pursued projects outside academia for several years. He returned in 1929 and began doing very different sorts of work. It is a matter of great debate, even among Wittgenstein acolytes, how much affinity there is between these stages. Many philosophers of language will speak of “the later Wittgenstein” as though the earlier views were wholly different and incompatible, while others insist that there is strong continuity of themes and methods. Though his early work was widely misunderstood at the time, there can be little doubt that some important changes took place, and these are worth noting here.
 
In the posthumously published Philosophical Investigations (1953), Wittgenstein broke with some of the theoretical aspirations of analytical philosophy in the first half of the century. Where analytical philosophers of language had strived for elegant, parsimonious logical systems, the Investigations suggested that language was a diverse, mercurial collection of “language games”—goal-directed social activities for which words were just so many tools to get things done, rather than fixed and eternal components in a logical structure. Representation, denotation and picturing were some of the goals that we might have in playing a language game, but they were hardly the only ones. This turn in Wittgenstein’s philosophy ushered in a new concern for the “pragmatic” dimensions of language usage. To speak of the pragmatic significance of an expression in this sense is to consider how grasping it might be manifested in actions, or the guiding of actions, and thus to turn our attention to usage rather than abstract notions of logical form common to earlier forms of analytical philosophy. (Speech act theorists will also distinguish between pragmatics and semantics in a slightly more restrictive sense, as we shall see in §4.2.) The view that “meaning is use” (1953, p.43) was often attributed to him, though interpretations of this view have varied widely. Wright (1980 and 2001) read this as a call to social conventionalism about meaning, McDowell (1984) explicitly rejected such a conclusion and Brandom (1994) took it as an entry point into an account of meaning that is both normative and pragmatic (that is, articulated in terms of obligations and entitlements to do things in certain ways according to shared practices). But it can be safely said that Wittgenstein rejected a picture of language as a detached, logical sort of picturing of the facts and inserted a concern for its pragmatic dimensions. One cannot look at the representational dimension of language alone and expect to understand what meaning is.
 
A second major development in the later Wittgenstein’s work was his treatment of rules and rule-following. Meaning claims had a certain hold over our actions, but not the sort that something like a law of nature would. Claims about meaning reflect norms of usage and Wittgenstein argued that this made the very idea of a “private language” absurd. By this, he means it would not be possible to have a language whose meanings were accessible to only one person, the speaker of that language. Much of modern philosophy was built on Cartesian models that grounded public language on a foundation of private episodes, which implied that much (perhaps all) of our initial grasp of language would also be private. The problem here, said Wittgenstein, is that to follow a rule for the use of an expression, appeal to something private will not suffice. Thus, a language intelligible to only one person would be impossible because it would be impossible for that speaker to establish the meanings of its putative signs.
</blockquote> [https://iep.utm.edu/lang-phi/#SH3b Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]
 
=== Analytic Philosophy ===
[[File:2023-01-icon-anaytic-philosophy-large.png|200px|thumb|left]]
<blockquote>
The school of analytic philosophy has dominated academic philosophy in various regions, most notably Great Britain and the United States, since the early twentieth century. It originated around the turn of the twentieth century as G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell broke away from what was then the dominant school in the British universities, Absolute Idealism. Many would also include Gottlob Frege as a founder of analytic philosophy in the late 19th century, and this controversial issue is discussed in section 2c. When Moore and Russell articulated their alternative to Idealism, they used a linguistic idiom, frequently basing their arguments on the “meanings” of terms and propositions. Additionally, Russell believed that the grammar of natural language often is philosophically misleading, and that the way to dispel the illusion is to re-express propositions in the ideal formal language of symbolic logic, thereby revealing their true logical form. Because of this emphasis on language, analytic philosophy was widely, though perhaps mistakenly, taken to involve a turn toward language as the subject matter of philosophy, and it was taken to involve an accompanying methodological turn toward linguistic analysis. Thus, on the traditional view, analytic philosophy was born in this linguistic turn. The linguistic conception of philosophy was rightly seen as novel in the history of philosophy. For this reason analytic philosophy is reputed to have originated in a philosophical revolution on the grand scale—not merely in a revolt against British Idealism, but against traditional philosophy on the whole.
</blockquote> [https://iep.utm.edu/analytic-philosophy/ Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy ]
 
== Synthesis ==
 
blup
 
== Derivative Work ==
 
[[Info-Ops Implications For Public Education]]
 
== Common Fallacies ==
 
blup
 
The result of all of this helps address [[common rhetorical fallacies]] found on the internet
 
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Revision as of 09:45, 5 February 2023

Due to the nature of the Info-Ops series, many of the concepts translate directly over into other fields where the result is information, knowledge, or new skill acquisition. Public education is one of these. The following ideas are developed at length in the series and shown here

Habits Over Goals

Perhaps the most counter-intuitive concept out of many in the Info-Ops books is that habits can get goals accomplished in a context environment but the reverse is not true. Goal-focused management and knowledge work tends to hand-wave over the details of how that goal is to be accomplished, and for good reasons. Each type of knowledge goal has vastly-different ways of being accomplished, and it varies by student, project, culture, and so forth.

Instead, a system of habits should be created and honed that will allow widely-different intellectual goals to be accomplished. These habits should be the focus, not the goals themselves. Focusing on the wrong thing has been called "Trying to play tennis by watching the scoreboard"

Education Is Always Bullshit

Another thing that Info-Ops teaches us is that knowledge work is infinitely-divisible. (That's the main reason we have something called "analysis paralysis". This means that when you're working intellectually, you're always going to be wrong. The real goal is understanding when you're right enough not to need to continue working. An old saying here is "All models are wrong, but some models are useful"

Pick any topic in education, from simple counting up through something extremely complex and nuanced like literary deconstruction. For every topic that we teach, a simple-yet-wrong topic is introduced as a a way of getting the student started and perhaps providing all they need for a successful life. So there are no correct or incorrect things to teach, only things that can be useful right away for the student and things that provide a foundation for further learning. A good education should provide these kinds of "fake" narratives as a jumping-off place for students later. Narratives that do not provide immediate applicative value and/or make future learning more difficult should be avoided at all costs.

Negatives Stack

Another very powerful concept not acknowledged in most education theory is that negatives stack, positives don't. In other words, it's much easier to eliminate broad areas of inquiry than it is to focus down on one specific one. To over-simplify, as Frankenstein's Monster learned, "Fire Bad!" and it's a true statement that any child who's gotten burned learns. But it's really more complicated than the simple "Fire Bad!" concept; it's just that we want a child to eliminate *anything at all to do with fire* for a long period of time. We have tossed-out a huge area of childhood inquisitiveness. It is categorical.

These types of negatives are very difficult to overcome in life, which is the reason why parents use them. We are wired to exclude things. "Elephants kill!" is a much more useful evolutionary concept than "Some elephants are useful". The first provides a negative space that we may never have to challenge. The same is true in more technical analysis, as shown in the "Negatives Stack" essay

It follows that we need to be very careful about the kinds of negative attitudes students receive in school. Ideally, we would teach positive, fake narratives about how problems can be overcome in certain fields. As students, progress, their knowledge may become such that they can be one of the people helping to move progress along. When we teach, accidentally or otherwise, general negative concepts like "history is for losers", we effectively eliminate entire areas of academic research from future generations. Why spend any time on a topic that is for losers? Students should not, and they don't.

The fallout here is that we need to create false positive over-simplified stories about our place in society and how we might help solve problems in various areas should we be more interested in learning about them. This means that education is much more about which negatives to exclude and how to over-simplify than it is anything else (aside from good habits, perhaps). There are multiple ways of achieving these goals. It's no wonder that various local school systems vary so widely. This should be expected and encouraged.

Broken Management Metaphor

Abundance of Theory, Paucity of Practice

Feedback loops have to be simple, visible, and fraud/vagueness free

Metaphor should be gardening instead of industrial processing