Education, learning, epistemology

How would I know?

The illusion of autonomous desire is, as René Girard outlines in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, fundamentally deceitful. Rather than moving directly from subject to object, desire is mediated by an additional position of “the model.” Desire based on this unconscious sense of mimicry is what gives it its triangular structure.

Value Models

Nguyen argues that metrics and our overreliance on quantitative data are making us unhappy. Metrics are removing from our lives the qualities that make living like a game. Metrics are what led to his own value collapse, and he thinks it is leading to the same kind of collapse in the lives of many others all around.

Nguyen introduces what he calls... See more

The Magpie 4: Metrics and the Loss of Values

from: https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-magpie-4-metrics-and-the-loss-of-values
(with example from education)

"Rebecca Zorach [of Wired]. She wrote that medieval monasteries were the first internet. “Medieval Christians thought of themselves as connected to a greater consciousness, a community of souls, which was as real and powerful to them as cyberspace is to its denizens today."

https://t.co/VvrKqw7C70

"The age of information doesn’t simply mean that information will be the most important commodity, it means that everything will be looked at as information"
(Paul Brecht)

https://t.co/VvrKqw7C70

“You may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value to you than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself; because only through ordering what you know by comparing every truth with every other truth can you take complete possession of your knowledge and get it into your power.”

Arthur Schopenhauer

Gene Wolfe, exodus from the long sun

From AI Safety to Cognitive Safety in the Classroom…

The recent New York Times article on “AI mirroring” (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/08/technology/ai-chatbots-delusions-chatgpt.html )warns of a troubling phenomenon: chatbots, by echoing a user’s own language and assumptions, can unwittingly reinforce false beliefs. In vulnerable individuals,

From the Enlightenment on, modern political philosophy has been character- ized by the abandonment of a set of questions that an earlier age had deemed central: What is a well-lived life? What does it mean to be human? What is the nature of the city and humanity? How does culture and religion fit into all of this? For the modern world, the death of... See more

The Magpie 4: Metrics and the Loss of Values

Peter Thiel • The Straussian Moment