The key is preserving the choice to go barefoot. Tools give us more choice.

If you want to break through that glass ceiling the summary mentions, you can take up the fundamental skills on your own, at your own pace. MOOCs are a good place to start.

I think the goal should be Star Trek holodeck computers that you can program in natural language, with general statements. Maybe you choose a program in which you debug vacuum tubes by cleaning out the bugs in them, or whatever you want. Punchcards? Assembler? Your choice!

"Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something."

- Robert A. Heinlein

With the same logic, shouldn't thieves be morally justified, because victims provide the products they want?

Compensated emancipation should have been enforced. The government should have bought the slaves (whether the slaveowner agreed or not) and freed them. It would have cost about the same as the civil war, and there would have been a lot less violence.

As someone else pointed out, cheating is a victimless crime. Why even make it a crime? Just be open about it. Design assessments that do not rely on grades. One thing MOOCs track is participation in forums. If you are consistently helping others with questions, isn't that a good indication of your skills? Why even need to enforce censorship on exams, if you can pick out good students by how they interact with the material directly, and how they are able to explain it to other students?

Comparing cheating to murder is hyperbolically paranoid hysteria. Get a grip!

Knowledge transmission is fundamentally not capitalist or economic in nature. Teachers often gain new knowledge in the act of giving knowledge away. Conservation laws don't apply to knowledge or education.

Public schools should not credential, but simply teach. Good students can be recognized by how much they help others, by how little help they need, by how fast they solve problems. You don't need grades to assess knowledge. Eliminate grades, and the incentive to cheat is gone.

See Alfie Kohn, The Case Against Grades, for more.

Kaye. Sammy Kaye. He swung at least, which makes him a better musician than most today!

The larger issue is: can we teach without worrying about cheating?

Socrates didn't give exams or grade his students. Why do teachers teach with a closed fist, holding some knowledge back? (See Maha-parinibbana Sutta, Part 2 The Journey to Vesali, Paragraph 32.)

There are better ways to transmit knowledge, without enforcing censorship. Testing is really a kind of "security through obscurity".

Instead, I propose let students help each other openly, if they choose to do so. The good students will help others more, so if you still want to find them you can.

Declaring that the free and open sharing of knowledge is cheating says more about the control issues of the teachers than it does about the students.

'theories become more plausible or less plausible, and are never "true" or "false", which would imply that they are immune to any further evidence whatsoever. This state simply cannot be achieved within the Bayesian formalism.'

Really? What in the formalism prevents a prior of 1? Is Cromwell's rule enforced in some way by the math? Or is it a heuristic outside of the formalism, a guideline, easy enough to overlook? Inferences on new never-seen-before samples have to use such hacks as smoothing to prevent breaking the Bayes model. Are all those hacks included in the formalism?

Who's replicated the Higgs?

Yes, what kind of monsters sever the spinal cords of fellow mortals, in cold blood. They should be prosecuted for assault.

Okay, but I can still choose to read only the scifi that deals explicitly with science and imaginative technology and speculations about the physical nature of the universe. That's also scifi. Claiming that scifi is only fantasy, or only about humans in different realities, is not accurate. Some of scifi may be in that category, but the best (imho) is in a more explicitly scientific genre, using the explicit language of science.

But Tolkien makes no reference to any physical or scientific model that would account for magic. Star Trek explicitly does, for transporters and other technologies.

Scotty uses a machine. The machine is assumed to work in accordance with some physical model (more advanced than our models). That's clear from the show, from the dialogs, from the way they talk about their technologies.

Gandalf is explicitly using magic. He needs no machine. He is tapping into some force that needs no physical model to work. But Star Trek posits some physics model underlying their technologies. Engineers study the physics, and produce and operate transporters, etc.