"For an assignment testing students' ability to make evidence-based arguments, they participate in a simulated school board meeting about banning books. It involves debating chatbots designed by Zeleny with names like the Confrontational Parent."

This a VERY thinly veiled parallel to a hotly divided political issue that teachers/unions [and chatbot trained bias] tend be on one side of and the majority of the public, parents, and truth on the opposite of. Given that adults of the highest levels of performance in our society, be it professional achievement, economic achievement, political achievement, IQ, and education disagree on the matter it sounds like what the teacher is likely testing is alignment with her own ideology and not evidence-based arguments.

I saw the same thing in many of my own courses, examples and material used in classes [especially logic classes like critical thinking] that taught and test concepts through distilled 'analogs' to popular political issues with an attempt to appear neutral and present both sides while actually presenting a weakened strawman of one side the argument and consistently that strawman was on the same side. Cleverly these were not the topics for essays where students spent effort on time and research and independent thought but the class examples that most would never look at additional material on... simply walk away believing they formed a valid independent judgement at the pinnacle of their own education.

It has nothing to do with being cowards, they are robots. It's a case of saving a little money at the expense of being excluded from a lot of money.

Piracy laws are very effective... for curbing intentional piracy in businesses because they have too much to lose to break laws like these and they are basically robots with instructions to follow the law.

But they won't outlaw these, what they'd do is prohibit companies that use them from government work/contracts and the government gives away WAY too much of our money to give that up.

Cool. That does sound like something which could be put into overdrive. Time to fire up the plankton farms. Solar powered carbon sequestration!

Here is a conundrum. If you make web7 that is betterer but if I make web 2000 it's obviously dated.

I don't think self-teaching is innately rare. It is the default mind and skillset among the poor/rural communities even if they are for a number of reasons focused on more immediate needs for those skills.

Still there are definitely things which require experience and those tend to be more efficiently transferred with the guide. Usually the roadblocks are small pieces here and there. Perhaps that is the best blend, a self-learner combined with a mentor they can reach out to.

It comes at a price though. Video is really only a good medium for a superficial level of focus and complexity. The rise of youtube instruction has been great but the decline of textual resources that has coincided with it is depressing sometimes.

"And if there is a societal change, there is no need for Web 5."

I disagree with this. No matter how society changes human nature isn't going to change with it. There will never come a time when all people are trustworthy, it will forever remain that most people are usually honest in most ways. Social change can shift the ways around but that is it.

The most sound strategies are and always will be strategies that assume no trust.

I'm not specifically supporting THIS proposal and web 5 (or opposing) but something like this will be needed. I do disagree with the notion that blockchain is the key to every decentralized lock.

By that logic we should never do anything.

Can we put the process in overdrive.

Not necessarily. It sounds like they have been all over but things like the engine design freezes they are talking about could have shut it down and required a redesign.

Additionally, being casual aka relaxed has been objectively proven to increase work output and quality.

See, this guy is a perfect example. Control.

Work being casual isn't a bad thing. Staff aren't being hired to be subject to control or signing up to be controlled. They are being hired because there is a task or set of tasks which needs to be performed in order to make a profit. End of story.

Or getting modded down for pointing out the popularity contest that is a blight on science. Nobody should be shunned for research which disagrees with popular consensus there could be nothing more antithesis to the principles of science than that.

They want to treat staff as if they were children who need constant supervision. At our company they've resorted to first requiring pictures on skype and now are pushing for everyone to have functional cameras just so they can stop people from working in their PJs. Anything to assert control.