Ruv Draba on Useful Information

Emma, sorry for reply-bombing your posts over the last couple of days, but I'm enjoying your thinking, which leads to me reading more of your stuff, thinking more and replying more. I hope that these replies may help you develop your own thinking, and the conversations you're building. In any case, thank you for a passionate, eloquent and thoughtful article. This reply is to the following para: > The story we’ve told for the last hundred years about what education means and its role in our lives, is unraveling. It’s unraveling as the cost of education inflates. It’s unraveling as the degrees we offer don’t translate into stable well-remunerated jobs. It’s unraveling as work and learning become less and less tied to in-person, location-based institutions. Its unraveling as the very future of human utility is called into question by artificial intelligence. There's so much to cover here. I write as a tertiary researcher and educator who eventually left to work in industry and from that perspective I'll try to frame things and offer some clarity. Education has both individual and societal value. Individually, its highest value is generational economic mobility and all else that brings (e.g. health, longevity, financial security, and more effective civic engagement.) While it can help build communities, good communities can also do that, while online learning generally doesn't. Societally the biggest benefits of education are economic agility, economic resilience and a more educated population typically produces a more peaceful, fairer and more resilient democracy. (References on this if you want.) But that's only if we target the education to produce these things, and if we also structure employment pathways to grow capability. But if we don't do that then we risk educational institutions farming the aspirations of the young and their parents, while serving up to industry vulnerable employees incapable of managing their careers and ripe for exploitation. That's a consequence of 'user pays' with no institutional responsibility for developing strategic user capability -- educational corporatism without adequate professional ethics, if you will. Your para speaks to the latter case, and I broadly agree with it (except the AI bit, which is a separate chat.) We could step back though and also note that we've never actually built a successful knowledge economy before. I think we're still working out how to do it. At the moment we're at a fork between building a knowledge economy and an influence economy -- and the influence economy is winning simply because not enough people know how to measure, assess and value knowledge while we already have a mature communications sector. Our need for tertiary educational reform and regulation is acute. Meanwhile we have a demographic swell of Millennials and Zoomers who can see that the current arrangements are a sham or even an outright scam, yet are floundering to make intellectual and economic sense of the challenges they've inherited. If ours will only be an influence economy then the best pathway is to be a big influencer, yet they already know that's both vacuous and a dead end to nearly everyone. Yet if it's to become a knowledge economy, then how do they build, differentiate and commercialise their own knowledge when the institutions they rely on can't even do that? If the easy pathways are all cul-de-sacs then the good pathways require thinking about the hard stuff. Like: what people actually need vs what they habitually do; how to distinguish what's true and relevant from what's popular; how to structure commercial models that are both fair and competitive; where to set boundaries and limits on what you'll accept and how to adapt when you need to do something different. This is therefore a marathon and not a sprint, Emma. You and the generations that follow need this to become a knowledge economy and not merely an influence economy. But regardless, the need for usable knowledge and insight are also acute, so continuous investment in yourself will pay and pay throughout your life. Since you can't trust institutions to deliver that, like prepping for the Dolomites with more than just brochures and gear, you need to get good at providing it for yourself. Traditional generalists don't know anything except how to argue for influence while traditional specialists have a toolkit to produce answers, but no great appreciation of the value of the questions. Our universities are still producing these simply because that's what they've always done. Yet in a knowledge economy an effective generalist is a multispecialist drawn to the difficult questions, able to build the capability to explore and advance them, and with the commercial nous to convert that back to cash and opportunity. They have enormous value to both industry and society, but we have to build this capability ourselves. That can involve serial failure, but is far from serial folly. That's what I think you need to build. That'll serve your economic and financial security, and may eventually help you advise the young and their parents how to build it better. I hope that helps, Emma. Specific examples are available on request.