Rats vs Unicorns and the educational system

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about many different things.  Mostly “why” type of questions.  Perhaps I should elaborate.  Or not.  I don’t know.  I think the real problem is two-fold.  See, I don’t think I learned what I should have learned in school.  Reading, writing, and arithmetic are general subjects, but those aren’t the primary purpose of sending people though school.  As a creator of success, school is an absolute failure.  It’s been highly touted, though I’m not sure highly researched, that if you take 100 people out of any school the results will be vastly different.  Out of those 100, perhaps 10 will be moderately wealthy.  1 will be supremely wealthy.  And 90 will have zero or negative net worth. 

If that’s the case, then what are schools teaching?  Because if 90 out of 100 have a negative net worth, then that’s a fairly large failure rate.  What metric is being used to measure success?

I went through those systems.  I spent a lot of time learning the wrong thing.  And I’ve also spent a lot of time trying to learn and relearn the correct things.   The only problem with that is I don’t know what I need to be learning.  This shouldn’t be something that I have to redesign by hand.  It’s 2015.  Why haven’t we figured out how to train and teach for success yet?  Is the answer so complex that humans are incapable of understanding or developing the solution?  Or is it that our mental concept is so self-centric that we can’t think of long term solutions for education? 

I’m beginning to think the answer relates to rats and unicorns.  There’s a mental separation between those two animals.  They are more different than they are the same.  Unicorns are special, unique creatures.  They are these magical beings that are impossible to catch.

Rats are simple creatures.  There are more of them than humans.  There are rats everywhere.  There is roughly nothing unique about them.  A good 80% (assumption thrown in based on Pareto principle) of what makes a rat a rat is no different than any other rat.  It’s only via minor parts is the average rat ever special. 

So what do rats and unicorns have to do with education and technology in general? 

There aren’t any unicorns. 

There are a lot of rats.

Remember those two facts.  The next time someone discusses the uniqueness of what their selling, try to determine what is truly unique.  Mostly what you will find is a rat in a hat.  80% the same as every other alternative.  Really. 

There are no unicorns.  Just a bunch of rats with different color fur, or a hat, or something else that makes the rat not look like a rat.  

Garbage In/Garbage Out

I’ve been thinking of the concept of garbage in / garbage out.  It’s a computer science concept.  It’s an interesting concept.  The idea is that a computer is capable of processing all sorts of data, not just good data.  So if you give a computer bad data, it will spit out bad results.  Makes perfect sense in the computer world.  But what about applying the concept to life? 

Seems perfectly applicable to me, but it’s hard to interpret what constitutes good or bad information.  The basic concept I’m trying is limit the type of music I intentionally listen to.  I find that it’s hard to maintain the correct mindset when being assaulted by lyrics that preach the wrong kind of information.

Building the concept of where I want to be in relation to where I am is only limited by what my mind thinks I’m capable of.  But when you feed your mind information telling it that something can’t be done, then you are defeating yourself.  Logically, your brain is sitting there telling you that the music you are listening to is not affecting you.  But it is, and the effect is incredibly subtle.  It’s something easy to test, though it requires a bit of discipline.  What I did was eliminate music with words from my day to day listening. 

I guess I spent too much time listening to people doing bad things to other people.  Or listening to music written by people who are convinced the world is out to get them.  Or those that think the world owes them something.  I’m generally more inclined to think the world is ambivalent to individual existence.  Life is not fair, or easy.  But that doesn’t mean there is plenty of great stuff to pull out of the world.  In the grand scheme of things, the individual human life spans a very short period and has very little impact.  So really, our lives don’t matter all that much.

But mentally, people don’t want to believe that.  They want to believe in the importance and reach of their life.  But it’s simply not the case for the most part.  So you get a collection of garbage thrown in your brain that tells you the wrong thing and leads you to the wrong conclusions.  And generally, these conclusions are very logical.  Andy Andrews describes it as “thinking logically to the wrong conclusion”. 

So my recent approach has been to take in less garbage with the hopes of getting better information out.  I recently took a 4 day weekend after 17 straight days at work.  I had to work 17 straight days because I had been focusing on solving the wrong problem.  See, there’s the right problem and the wrong problem.  If you solve the wrong problem, you have to keep solving the problem over and over again.  It just doesn’t work.  What I finally realized in those last three or four days was I could have easily avoided working 17 days straight if I had done the correct thing.  What I needed to do was document better.  If I had documented better, then I could have turned anyone calling me to look at the document in question and follow it to its conclusions.  If the document was incapable of producing an answer, then there must have been some other issue.

What good does it do to create wonderful systems that have no documentation or notes?