Re: Extropian Party Platform

Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
16 Oct 1999 17:20:11 +0200

Replicant00@aol.com writes:

> In a message dated 10/15/1999 1:39:06 PM Pacific Daylight Time,
> asa@nada.kth.se writes:
>
> << "Ok, your grades from the government board are good, but they
> tend to be too lax on the critical thinking section. We would like you
> to have grades from one of these boards, which emphasizes more
> relevant abilities."). Of course, the Kansas Board of Creationist
> Science might exist, but that is no real problem since it will not be
> a very credible board - what really makes this system interesting is
> if the boards can be reviewed and rated well. >>
>
> This would be a good opportunity for a new field: education experts.

And this is a field where I think we transhumanists can get in early. Take Sashas ideas about collaborative filtering and rating, combine them with the ideas of net based review boards being discussed in science journal circles, and we can get some interesting possibilities. Both to earn money, do something useful and maybe apply transhumanism.

> An outside source of rating our school standards would be very nice ... but
> is it plausible? Would schools stick to it? They barely stick to the
> low-standard government ones (I know you're in Europe I mean here in USA).

Don't worry, we have low-standard government schools here too :-)

Why would a school stick to an external ratins organisation? Because it can give it credibility and make it attractive for students; if the Miami Vegetable University has a lot of seals of approval or can show that 70% of the students get a high rating by some well renowned boards, then it will be much more attractive. The problem here might rather be that the school system doesn't allow people to select schools, if you always have to go to the nearest school it will not have any real incentive to get better. However, getting these ideas into the system might be achievable by starting at the "top", with adult education, and then let the ideas percolate down into basic education.

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Anders Sandberg                                      Towards Ascension!
asa@nada.kth.se                            http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y