So I have a lot to say about this and I will try to contain my enthusiasm and word count to a manageable number.
This does excite me and sparks off with concepts I have been mulling over for a long time. Because you have opened the door, it instantly snapped together with a whole series of new concepts that I have just learned over the past 4 months he on Hive.
In my viewpoint, to build this you would not need to re-do a lot of knowledge that has been tried and tested and as such I believe that bridging the gap between traditional education and this web3 tokenized education to be the most crucial.
Our main focus, when considering this project should be nothing other than competence. That is what drives the world forward in a sustainable way. Without people who truly understand what they are doing and who can complete the real life tasks successfully, there really is no value in having a system that teaches anything.
I would design a system that would attribute subject authorities with various soul-bound NFTs ro represent their credentials as well as their successful projects. Each NFT needs be assigned a value to carry weight within appropriate fields of study.
I would need to get more granular to explain it properly but the idea would be for a professional with a Doctorate in electrical engineering and 15 years experience designing and building successful systems to have a vote weight when validating the course information of a piece of education dealing with electrical engineering.
An electrician and a mechanical engineer could also vote on this subject, but you should not be able to collect tokens infinitely and all of a sudden someone with minimal knowledge and proven competence can outvote the Doctor with years of success in his resume.
Similarly, when this Doctor votes on a course regarding architecture then his vote weight must be modified based on the relevance of his knowledge. Hid Doctorate only barely touches the subject matter, while his practical experience counts very well into the subject matter due to the cross-disciplinary skills gained by installing electrical systems into buildings.
When the same Doctor has to assist in verifying a course regarding cardiology, his credentials nor experience count for very much and his influence within that subject is counted as a mere educated opinion. Someone with no proven education nor practical validation in any field would count even less in this regard.
There is a lot more nuance to this but this would be just a starting point to give a value of professionals in the web3 education world. It would get easier the more a system is built to include and test the various factors that would make this system work.
I could go on, but let me give you time to read and give me your opinion on this.
Love the article!
Hiya! Appreciate the enthusiasm, it clearly shines through :)
You've done a solid dive on some of the nuances surrounding point B—subject matter experts. As I understand, you'd advocate chunking up everyone's "expertise profile" into as many subcategories as reasonably possible, so that their impact on the system is proportional to their actual knowledge in any given range of topics.
If the way forward does cross this bridge, I can see a lot of tension forming between keeping things manageable/simple (e.g. fewer categories) and striving for precise representation (e.g. as many categories as are needed).
Knowledge in general is a fairly subjective topic, so I imagine a compromise would emerge 😊
Indeed. But in that case we can simply follow the nature of physics and nature.
It is just as ambiguous in many situations as to what constitutes the correct conditions for something to happen. But in every natural system there is a Range within which it happens and there are ranges on the extremes that it does not.
Whatever number we place on a person's skill, there is a safe range in which we can allocate to them.
I happen to work with a number of technicians. I can probably rate each one with an ambiguous set of numbers based on what I think his competency is and that competency would be derived from what I think of him and what I know of him. If I don't really spend time with a technician or don't like him, then I would have curated and ordered the technician's competency incorrectly.
But if we replaced my opinion with the statistics of his success, then that value would be far less subjective.
Sure, we dont use that system. We just know if we send this guy for that job that the chances are high or low of success and move on.
But if it were MY business I would totally have these statistics generated and use it as a way to manage my business, train my staff and avoid mistakes.
This is a fun philosophical discussion too, because we're straddling some questions of humanity—for millennia, we've relied on our gut feelings and intuition, and much less on precise measurement.
Along comes computation, and in a few short decades many people now have access to a gargantuan amount of computing power (few of these people maximize that potential). Now here you and I are, discussing hanging up most of that gutfeel and intuition and replacing it with a deep dataset of measurement. And we're not just riffing, we're having the conversation on a platform that is made of the tech that would theoretically support our ideas.
I'm mostly curious (versus for or against) about how we achieve harmony with a deeply measured existence. Once we get into it, can we get out? Will those who are uncomfortable with it be able to thrive without it?
Intense stuff. :)
Indeed. So there will always be those people who will choose the "gut feel" over data and analytics, especially from a computer.
Those algorithms are generally based on someone's expertise and this has directly led to other humans making remarkable advancements in many fields.
It goes along with the premise of not reinventing the wheel. The microbiologist does not create and invent his own microscopes, nor does he test and verify biochemistry experiments when conducting his breakthrough in study. He must work off the shoulders of others.
Thus we already do live in that kind of society, its just not digital yet and there are no quantifiable links to one part of the experiment or task and the other, yet.
Failure or perception of success in laboratories often are influenced by a multitude of factors no matter how hard we try eliminate them.
It takes time and repetition to prove or disprove something.
Finally some people still need to use their intuition to decide on whose shoulders to stand and what factors to remove, add or alter when an experiment fails.
In a different context we could align it to a baker or chef that follows a receipe. He may decide, like I do, to make an alteration. But he hardly begins my grinding his own flour. Or growing his own wheat.
So coming back to that question: Once we delve into this, can we come out?
If my above statement is true then we never really come out of it unless we are self sufficient gurus that do everything ourselves and become perfect hermits... then we do not have a society that needs other people at all.
You are right. This is fun. 😁😄
On the path to the singularity, it would seem. 😉
I also wonder if this digitization-of-all-the-things will have a short term impact on the general population's mental health (for good or for ill). We are now seeing some of the repercussions of web2 social media starting to air out on downside of that idea.
I can envision a future where more granular, quantitative insight helps, and also one where it hurts. As long as our brains have not yet evolved to rely on machine input, we will be old-school pattern seeking creatures that oversimplify and see stories everywhere. I feel like a data-driven reality will need to work hard to put up guardrails.
Reigning this discussion back on topic though... perhaps a big role of web3 education can start with a more pointed global curriculum in understanding the machines that underpin our digital existence.
There should be a global indication to help understand the context of the internet and group psychology as well.
I find that individuals are often both clever and kind and that masses of people are often neither.
We all want to be treated as humans but often lack the insight to treat people as human once we have no clue who they are, which happens when you move and react as a group.