We’ve seen many, many examples of people picking up new concepts from their filter bubble, stuff like pizza-gate, that they wouldn’t have thought up on their own.
The same click-reward feedback algorithm can be applied when teaching more virtuous knowledge. The algorithms that create filter bubbles are disturbingly good at teaching, as in really disturbing and really proficient.
(And besides, let’s not pretend western and Confucian education aren’t indoctrination processes to some extent in their own right. Western education is predicated on building ‘virtuous’ citizens according to what I remember from the Socratic/Platonic dialogs. Also I feel like a dickhead for saying “according to the classics”.)
Are they really though? I have found that when I start probing people’s weird conspiracy theories picked up from blogs/facebook (or even more mainstream partisan disinformation picked up from newspaper op-eds or think tank whitepapers), they are quite shallow and unsophisticated, typically papering over gaping holes in basic knowledge.
“Teaching” a bunch of made up bullshit has much lower standards and requires a lot less effort (for both teacher and pupil) than teaching about complex real-world structures even to a level of basic competence, let alone serious expertise.
The analogy with conspiracies is flawed, pretty sure Google and Facebook don't first link to the basics of conspiracies, and then move on from there.
I’m not even American but I’ve noticed the bar’s pretty low after living here for years.
On one hand, we probably shouldn’t be making pedagogical policy based on the most gullible in our society, but on the other, everyone is gullible when they’re young and many continue to be so afterwards.
For example some language learning apps already do this, they will show you phrases you have learnt before and if you get them wrong it will show them more often, if you get it right, it will show it less as it knows you know.
I have grave misgivings about that sort of thing. This approach is what leads to the Google and Facebook "filter bubbles" [1]. What I need is something that exposes me to different viewpoints, opposing viewpoints, presented in convincing ways to challenge me and help me to grow as a person. What I want is to learn about new ideas that would never have occurred to me before.
Traditional schools, much maligned, try to expose kids to books and other media they never would've bothered with otherwise. Yeah, kids for the most part reject this stuff and slog through until graduation, but some don't! Some kids find a new passion for Mozart or Shakespeare or calculus for that matter. Maybe we can predict interest in those subjects before exposing people to them, but I'm not confident about it. There are outliers everywhere and it's not fair to leave them out in the cold.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble