Tag: education

Ransom Trilogy – Part 1

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This semester I’m teaching a course that I’ve called “Philosophy Seminar — Beyond Narnia: the Varieties of C.S. Lewis.” We’re reading Lewis’s less-known works, with an eye to their philosophical ideas. We have read parts of Allegory of Love, Experiment in Criticism, The Discarded Image, and all of Miracles. Later we’ll read Abolition of Man, some of the ethics essays (e.g., “The Inner Ring”; “Learning in Wartime”), and whatever else we have time for. The middle section is Lewis’s adult fiction: the Ransom trilogy and Till We Have Faces. (We will skip Narnia, Mere Christianity, and Screwtape Letters, since these are all much more widely known.)

These are some various thoughts on the first of the Ransom Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet.

OSP is the simplest of the Ransom books by far. The narrative is straightforward. There are few attempts to explain things, to engage in philosophical theology, etc. Perelandra, in contrast, is far more complex (more on that in a future post), and That Hideous Strength is vastly more complex, with far more characters and many more ideas floating around — and also longer than the other two books combined. Many people have noted that the three books are the Male book, the Female book, and the Marriage book. Perhaps it is appropriate that the male book is the least complicated.

One of the questions I posed to my students is to define Lewis/Ransom’s word hnau. This is clearly an important word in the book; indeed, I suspect that the entire book is really about what this word means.

A few scholars, including several of the writers in the impressive volume Life on the Silent Planet, suggest that hnau means something like “rational creature”. But this won’t work, because Oyarsa, the angelic ruler of the planet is agreed to not be hnau. The reason is that he does not die and he does not have children. There is some dispute among the hrossa whether the eldila are hnau, and Oyarsa is thought to be some kind of eldil. (“Eldila” are clearly something like “angels”, and Oyarsa is apparently some higher order of being, or at least a more important kind of angel.)

Regardless, hnau has to be more than “rational creature”. We might further refine the definition to be “rational mortal creature”. This is, of course, is a philosophically important definition, for it is the one that Boethius gives in response to Lady Philosophy, expressing the standard classical definition of “human being”. Adding mortality (i.e., having a type of existence that naturally includes death) distinguishes hnau from eldila, for the latter do not die.

Yet even this revision doesn’t quite capture what Ransom seems to come to understand about hnau. The key passage occurs just at the end of the hnakra hunt, when Ransom and his fellows have killed the dragon. They are standing side-by-side in triumph, and “they were all hnau…[Ransom] had grown up.” Here we have a further clue about what the word means.

I suggest that Lewis is trying to explore the meaning of a different word, one formerly in use here on Thulcandra. That word is vir, the Latin word for “human”, but distinctively for man. Vir distinguishes not only between male and female, but also between boy and adult. A boy is not vir on account of his youth. Women are not vir on account of their sex. And some adult males are not vir on account of their vices, or at least their incontinence. A weak and fearful man is not virtuous — he is not “manly”. The term is the root of our word “virtue” — having qualities appropriate to adult masculinity in particular.

Thus, it is entirely correct that OSP is the “male” book, and not merely because there are basically no significant female characters. The action is all about the males, but more to the point, the central narrative question is about the nature of masculinity, here condensed to a quasi-generic, masculine term for human being.

Throughout the book Lewis describes an extensive catalog of different kinds of fears. The story is told from Ransom’s point of view, and we find that he has many ways to be afraid, ranging from such heighted experiences that he can’t distinguish fear from general excitement, to gothic creature horror, to the much more basic nervousness of sitting for an exam in school. When Ransom meets Oyarsa, the first line from the latter is “What are you so afraid of, Ransom of Thulcandra?” And this is the appropriate question, for until very recently fear has been the dominant feature of Ransom’s experiences.

Yet by this point Ransom has grown up. Though he is still afraid in a way, he is not afraid in the same way that he had been. An interesting feature of Lewis’s narrative is that after the hnakra hunt, Ransom’s fears are given little to no phenomenological description, whereas virtually every fear before this point has at least sentences, if not entire paragraphs describing how the fear feels. Even when Ransom first meets a sorn, he does not fear it, albeit perhaps because he is too tired to care. Nevertheless, after Ransom “grows up” his fears no longer control him. He is, in his words, like the man on a horse, rather than the man on a sailing ship. He is along for the ride with his emotions, but he is also an agent toward them, rather than merely a patient.

Next: Perelandra

Safety and education

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Consider a parent who is happy to let their kid go to amusement parks, summer camps, workshops, etc., in which there are seemingly dangerous (or sometimes genuinely dangerous) activities. Why would they let them do that?

Presumably it’s because they trust that there are safeguards against the worst dangers, and expert guides to help their kids do what it takes to be safe. Of course, the dangers can still be there, and there can be accidents. But in general, the protections greatly reduce the actual risk.

So then why do the kids want to go to these kinds of places? Often it’s precisely because they seem dangerous. The kid likes the thrill at least. And more than that, when the activity is in fact risky, they like the satisfaction of being able to do the activity. The recognition of one’s own skill in some challenging activity is immensely gratifying.

A parent who will not allow their kid to even begin to engage in these activities, even under close supervision and instruction, and after a guided program of training in doing them safely, must hold one or more of the following beliefs: 1. the kid is essentially incapable of skillful, virtuous performance; 2. the activity is not actually worth while; 3. the guides and safeguards aren’t trustworthy.

Options 1 and 3 require the parent to believe something about another person. Though the belief may in fact be true, it would nevertheless be a pretty damning claim about either one. Sometime parents may in fact know that their kid isn’t mature enough (in whatever sense) for the activity. However, if the kid never seems to mature enough to satisfy the parent, something else is going on. A skeptical belief about the guide would need to come with quite a bit of justification. After all, in many of these cases, several other people have certified the guide as basically competent and trustworthy. They might be wrong, but the onus is on the critic to show how.

Option 2 is tricky, because sometimes these kinds of activities are not intrinsically valuable, but they still have some kind of value. A fun activity might be merely fun. Yet “being fun” is a type of value, and one that we often care a lot about. A parent who won’t let their kid just “have fun” is stereotypically bad, however well-intentioned.

Here’s the upshot. The “risky” activities described above are all risky to one’s body. What about activities that are risky to one’s mind? Many kids aren’t interested in thrill rides, extreme sports, weapons, power tools, etc. But they do love to think about things, to try out ideas, to experiment with cultural expression, and the like. These activities can also be risky. Many parents, especially in Christian circles, are quite tolerant, even enthusiastic, about teaching their kids to use their bodies correctly in dangerous activities. But they don’t want to grant their kids opportunities to use their minds in a similarly risky way.

A Christian education offers a “safe” environment in which skilled guides may direct students into risky uses of their minds. There is still risk, just as there is risk in the climbing gym or on the dirt bike track. But the risk is mitigated by the safety features and by the skilled, progressively-scaffolded instruction.

Parents who object to their kids being exposed to dangerous ideas must believe something analogous to one of the three options above. Either 1) the kid is essentially incapable of skillful, virtuous engagement with ideas; 2) the activities of thinking and creating with one’s mind are not worth while; or 3) the guides and safeguards aren’t trustworthy.

Unfortunately, it is basically impossible to escape exposure to dangerous ideas, so a kid who is incapable of responding appropriately to them will be in bad shape. Some of the especially risky physical behaviors can be avoided more or less indefinitely. (Not all of them, including some of the riskiest ones. Driving a car, for example, is hard to avoid in many contexts.) Risky mental activities are a lot harder to completely avoid. Someone who doesn’t have any skill in dealing with them will be extremely fragile.

Perhaps this kind of mental creativity is not really worth while. But many kids find it fun, and if fun is a good enough reason to do something physical, we would need some further reason to refuse it to those who enjoy the life of the mind. Sometimes parents just don’t really believe that thinking and creating can be fun. Sometimes kids can actually enjoy these kinds of things in ways that their parents never really have, or have forgotten about. For example, a successful businessman has the mental power to be an intellectual, but the habits of mind that would make it possible have never been cultivated. His son, though, might have enjoyed the fruits of his father’s success, and also gotten a taste of the contemplative life. The father is largely responsible for his son’s ability, but he doesn’t understand how his son would rather think about world than change it. Or a mom is a social expert, navigating various relationships and responsibilities like a master politician. Her daughter has the same skills, but is interested in thinking about them abstractly through psychology and political science rather than actually cultivating the social network. These parents’ successes enable their kids to enjoy their minds, but the kids’ way of engaging with the world remains unintelligible, and so the parents can’t see why thinking about “dangerous” ideas would be enjoyable in its own right. Just as the riskiness of a thrill ride can be fun, so too the riskiness of considering a dangerous idea can be fun.

(There is, as well, a complaint about the usefulness of merely thinking about ideas. I’m not considering that claim here.)

The complaint could be against the trustworthiness of the guides and instructors. But again, absent some special complaint against these individuals, it seems slanderous to deny their ability to successfully guide a student. The critic would have to claim that it is impossible for someone to be a reliable guide through risky and dangerous ideas. And it’s just not obvious what justification they could have for such a claim.

The conclusion, then, is that a good Christian education ought to include “risky” ideas. It’s the way Christian young people can acquire skill in navigating the life of the mind under competent supervision. Engaging with potentially dangerous ideas is also fun, and when done in the proper way, not nearly as risky as encountering them in the wild. This is, I think, an argument not just for Christian education, but for Christian liberal arts education.

Immature students; immature AIs

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As a new school year approaches the tide of think pieces on AI is rising again. Here’s my contribution. Put simply, the challenge is that AIs are immature. But so are students.

There is plenty of doomerism about AI in education right now. I think it is probably true that many professors (and high school teachers, for that matter) will find their course assessments far too easy to game with AI. This fact is regarded, in some places, as the “end of the world” for various classic assessments. Perhaps it is.

The standard response: if the assessments are that easy to game with AI, then they’re not very good. Again, something is right about this critique, but I want to press back on two fronts.

First, the students are immature. A lot of education, including college education, really is about telling students things that “everyone knows”. Of course, not everyone knows these things. Those who haven’t been taught don’t know them yet. It’s true, in principle, that an ambitious autodidact could learn these things on their own, but actually doing so is hard. Teachers are supposed to curate materials from the blooming, buzzing confusion of the world’s ideas and texts, structure their curricula into logical sequences, evaluate whether students have actually understood well enough to avoid subtle errors, etc.

Critical thinking adds value to learning these things in a classroom, rather than on the job. Nevertheless, first, one cannot be a critical thinker with nothing to think about. Facts and systems of organizing them have to come first. Criticism is a higher order thinking skill, and without the subject matter, readily available to the mind, there isn’t much to criticize. Second, the advocates of “on the job training” often fail to appreciate the many ways in which a broad education is valuable. It’s not just that understanding the task for a particular job requires a sense of a broader cultural and social context. Moreover, thinking of knowledge in purely mercenary terms is bad. Sometimes it’s good to know things just because they’re true, and part of a flourishing human life involves knowing things that aren’t immediately useful. (It is true that colleges and universities have not made this case well in recent decades.)

The problem with AI is that most of these tools are also pretty good at regurgitating what “everyone knows”. Because they (approximately) reproduce the consensus on a subject, they say what everyone already says (even when that’s wrong). In this respect, they are about as good as a typical student, and they’re doing what students need to do.

Thus, the “solution” for education can’t be as simple as teaching (and assessing) in ways that LLMs can’t. We can’t shortcut the very thing that LLMs are good at. Instead, we have to explain why doing the hard work without the AI is worthwhile.

Alan Jacobs supplies an insightful analogy to this end. A culinary school that teaches its students to hack HelloFresh isn’t really a culinary school. Part of the aim is to teach the students how to do for themselves what they can buy in the market. And this requires “pointless” work along the way, in the sense that learners must do tasks whose products they could more easily acquire from someone else. But not everyone needs to go to culinary school. For most of us, HelloFresh is fine, and possibly an improvement over our own cooking. The challenge for higher ed, then, is to provide an education that seems valuable in its own right, including in those parts whose products can be purchased.

(Jacobs also points out another feature of the AI world: it’s not really free, and by losing the ability to do the thing for yourself, you’re caught in a market with producers who can fleece you. OpenAI, for example, has put its high-quality GPT-4 behind a paywall, but it’s still a lot cheaper than college. Competition may further reduce costs, and once a model is trained it’s not particularly expensive to run. The shelf life of this critique might be pretty short.)

I think I can say for myself why I find my education valuable, but part of that is because I’ve actually done it (a lot of it). My subjective sense of its value isn’t the kind of thing I can communicate to someone else. They have to experience it for themselves. But for many students, it seems perfectly reasonable for them to be doubtful about the intrinsic value of (any particular bit of) knowledge. They can say, “I’ll take your word for it” and then go use the AI tools when they need them.

Second, the AIs are immature. A common response to the explosion of AI tools is that they’re actually not very good at more complicated activities. For example, they often have trouble with basic arithmetic. If you give them extended tasks (beyond their context windows) they can veer off topic. And so on.

But this is also a problem with students. Every teacher can give examples of students who make bone-headed errors in assignments. LLMs hallucinate facts; but so do students. LLMs lose focus; but so do students.

Indeed, Timothy Lee’s really helpful LLM explainer uses the term “attention” to describe what these tools are doing in the depths of the algorithm, as far as we can tell. Sometimes LLMs fail because they don’t pay attention properly. Ahem.

So if the immature students illustrate that there could be value in education even in a world of super AI tools, the immaturity of AIs suggests that the current (accurate) criticisms of their abilities aren’t quite sufficient. AIs aren’t perfect right now, and perhaps will never be. But might they become much better than humans? I don’t see why not.

A lot of the critiques of AI’s competence seem to me to apply to children just as well. We don’t demean children for their ignorance and foolishness because we expect them to learn as they grow up. We also don’t put them in charge of things until they’ve established their abilities. We accept their limitations for the time being and then expect them to improve with age and experience. But why wouldn’t we expect AI tools to grow up as well?

The problem, then, is that teachers who rework their courses to resist AI will end up having to do it all again in a few years when the AI has gotten better. If a student can’t improve by retaking a course, then something is wrong with the course. But AIs will have lots of opportunities to “retake” courses, and eventually the AI tools might perform the way an average student would perform after taking the course a dozen times. I’m not persuaded by the critique that AI isn’t and never will be very good at this stuff. Many of its current limitations seem like the same kind of limitations that immature humans have. Absent a good account of the technical limits on AI, or a good theory of what “intelligence” consists in, I don’t see how to avoid the possibility that AI tools might become unequivocally superior to the vast majority of human intelligences.

This is a complicated problem for education, but I think it’s really the same problem we’ve had ever sense we expect basically everyone to go to school. For a reasonably large subset of the society, school doesn’t have much value. AI is making that subset grow. An adequate response will probably require rethinking the purpose of education, which in turn might require rethinking the goods of human life. And where better to do that than in school?

Universal Basic Income and the Liberal Arts

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Recent social fractures, combined with our society’s enormous wealth, has caused a fringe discussion in the public policy world to get more attention. The idea is that the society (the government) should supply everyone (every citizen?) with some kind of basic material support. This goes beyond what we usually think of as “welfare,” for it applies equally to everyone, without conditions on working, having disabilities, etc.  Slate Star Codex has a useful post supplying the arguments in favor of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) instead of a basic jobs guarantee.

I find the arguments for a UBI over a BJG pretty convincing. The basic idea still seems to have a number of unknowns, and it isn’t obvious that a UBI would work as a policy. (See point iii on the SSC post for some worries about the economics.)

I’m interested here in one particular complaint: “iv) Without work, people will gradually lose meaning from their lives and become miserable.”

It seems to me that this objection makes a basic error that is nonetheless very common: it equates “work” with “what I’m paid for.”

At one level the assertion may be true. A life with literally nothing to do isn’t a lot of fun. It’s boring. (“Meaning of life” questions are fraught, so let’s focus on whether we would want such a life.) Even here there are caveats all around. It might not be easy to determine whether a life’s activity is “pointless” or whether someone ought to find it boring. Let’s just work with the intuition that mere aimlessness is not good.

The complaint against a UBI is that without work, life would have this kind of pointlessness. And there does seem to be some evidence for this. Consider the last few decades in the Rust Belt and Coal Belt. Many of the social issues there seem to track the loss of stable, decent-paying jobs. Or consider the people who “retire” several times from different jobs, only to find themselves stir-crazy with nothing to do.

SSC rightly observes that a lot of jobs are pretty boring themselves, so it isn’t clear that offering basic jobs is going to solve the problem. A UBI is better because it gives people freedom to do what interests them.

But that’s the other problem, because a lot of people don’t really know what interests them. And this is a failure of education.

The Liberal Arts(TM) were not the subjects that would make one free, but rather those that befitted free men–those domains of knowledge that were appropriate for citizens, freed from the demands of labor, whether slave or wage. One studied the liberal arts to know things that would make life interesting when there was no need to work.

This is the problem with linking “work” with “job”, and then saying that lack of “work” causes a lack of meaning. Some kinds of work are not easy to compensate, but are still valuable and interesting. There are many people I know who, as far as I can tell, would love to be freed from their day-to-day labors so that they could do what they really like. Some of them even work less than might be considered prudent so that they can do their side-gig. Their real work is not paid, but no less valuable for it.

Our society is probably rich enough that it could probably support at some basic level everyone who doesn’t want to work in a job. Those who do want a job can produce enough marginal value to support those who want to do other things. (Lest you think these other things are themselves pointless, remember that caring for family, volunteering for charity, etc. are all things that might fall into this category. Imagine being able to decide whether to be a stay-at-home parent without having to seriously worry about making ends meet.)

This economic freedom is impressive, probably unprecedented in the history of the world. It really does seem as if, at least in the West, we are quickly approaching a time when large portions of the society don’t need a job. If having nothing to do is so bad for one’s soul, then how should we prepare for this coming freedom?

The liberal arts have two answers. First, we can prepare to do more of these liberal arts. We shouldn’t think of the liberal arts as the so-called “humanities.” It’s not that everyone should write more poetry (though perhaps some should). It might be that some should do more science or math, or more arts and crafts, or more politics, or more cooking, or more gardening. (Chad Wellmon has been critiquing this distinction recently.)

Second, studying the liberal arts gives us something to be interested in. SSC’s examples on this point seem slightly off. Folks who already feel their interests squeezed out by their responsibilities would be fine. Most people benefiting from a UBI wouldn’t know what to do with their time. The UBI would give them time to pursue their interests, but for the most part their interests aren’t worth pursuing. And often they know it, at least a little. They’d be bored because their current time-wasting distractions aren’t interesting enough to sustain an entire life of leisure. But the liberal arts are interesting enough.

The problem is that our recent educational trends have favored purely technical education–job preparation–when it seems likely that there will be no job to prepare for. One might say that this technical preparation has enabled our society’s wealth, and perhaps that is partly true. But the cost in the long run might be very high.

The liberal arts have tried to justify their existence in purely utilitarian terms–writing gets you a better job; reading comprehension helps you understand your work; etc. I wonder if the better way defend them is that the liberal arts give you something to do when when you don’t need to do anything. This was David Foster Wallace’s point in his famous commencement address at Kenyon College.

Ironically, then, the biggest problem with a UBI might be that the a society with the material means for it will not have the moral means. But that is what the liberal arts are supposed to fix, and the best part of the UBI would be to supply the modest material means to participate in the life formerly restricted to a tiny fraction of society. SSC thinks that a UBI would be close to utopia. I’m less sure, because I’m not confident that most of us are ready to live there yet.