Today I met Shabnam and she offered me a job at Arvan Cloud to help them with their version of School 42 for the Kariz program. It is a good idea.
These few weeks, I have been constantly thinking about how everything that we know, and how everything that makes the humanity is the interface of us and the world. And so basically how I must write a book named “Interface”, or perhaps “Cyborg”.
There has been this thinking of mine which has long been in making now. The idea of Networked Evolution; Toolbox Theory; and much else that I have been thinking recently all are getting back to this very idea that Education is the navigation of this high dimensional space. This is perhaps a form of meta- physics and penned science and I very much appreciate if it is so, but then think about it (and think about it deeply) you’ll see that it is very true. I’m not sure about the rest of the world but what I had read about the education didn’t follow the scientific method and so I’d have to do it this way too. My one and perhaps only concern is to actually build
Something better than there is right now. And I guess that is the problem: I do not have the budget and the resources of putting a bell labs decades searching and seeing the validity of this work and hence I would do it by making the hypothesis and then making it work and measure how better or worse will it work ( than all the randomly made things we have to suffer from)
So the high dimensional space: Imagine a person in the real world. If we take the Toolbox Theory; which says:
Education happens by taking new tools; exploring them; and putting them into the toolbox of “All Things We Know”;
And then using the tools in the Toolbox: What we know; our literal and abstract tools; making connections with them and making new tools or performing tasks; makes us have a new (and interesting) new state which is either a new tool or experience. Given that people get to navigate the different tools and topics makes it a graph; and with multi dimensional spaces.
This all gets juicy when we have the discoveries of the Foundation Models. Their Embedding Spaces and the very very interesting fact that these could imply the existence of Plato’s Forms space (with the recent findings that LLMs share a same embedding space and so maybe that space is a shared thing among all things that talk like us)
We have a space of Toolbox’s Tools. Imagine it as an Embedding vector space of atomic things people can learn and internalize. When we have such an space; then the most logical understandings will be: Shared zones (the ones with many points near each other in dense neighborhoods) will be “Topics”; like “Things related to programming” or “Things related to oil painting”. And then having this we may go on to say that there are “paths” in which people walk by visiting and taking tools that make them learn a particular thing and if we examine each of these paths we may end up seeing “Dimensions”. For example imagine there is a person who is trying to learn Mathematics and they are currently reading about algebra; sometime in their evening they are familiarizing themselves with Romantic era of classical music and reading about the latest research on deciphering the language of animals. They are then (at least) in three dimensions of learning; three paths they are taking at the same time:
By mapping those dimensions into our high dimensional space we may get this:
Different locations in different neighborhoods.
And when you are in a state like this; then you can see that Education could really be seen in this light: The Navigation of a high dimensional space.
And then there are other interesting things worth of thinking about which I may expand on in the next writings.