Thread by @EpistemicHope

I went to a pretty cool high school, based on Saint John's College's "Great Books" curriculum.

Saint John's doesn't use textbooks; they only read primary sources: to learn mechanics, you study the Principia, for instance. To learning relativity, you read Einstein's papers.

At my school, we _did_ use textbooks, but we also read a lot of the classics of literature, history, and philosophy: Homer, Herodotus, Euripides, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Augustine, Shakespeare, Descartes, Dante, Locke, Rousseau, Dostoevsky, etc.

The cornerstone of the curriculum was a daily, 2-hour Socratic seminar called Humane Letters. We would read the texts (mostly history and literature in the first two years, and history and philosophy in the later two) for homework and discuss them in class.

In hindsight, the epistemic standards were pretty warped.

A large fraction (maybe a majority?) of my classmates were from devout Christian families.

And I later found out that my 10th grade Humane Letters teacher was an anonymous young-earth creationist blogger.

The local culture definitely didn't have the philosophical taste, or precision, or naturalistic grounding, that I later found in the Sequences.

But there WAS a strong spirit of inquiry. There was a shared sense that what we, the teachers and the students, were doing here MATTERED, that the big questions mattered, that the great conversation of the Western cannon mattered.

To an extent that I think most people would be surprised by, the students became _enrolled_ in the endeavor of the school.

I was more into it than most, to be sure, but the median student, by 12th grade, "got it", and felt that there was something valuable and important about the kind of inquiry we were doing.

I watched a lot of my classmates mature from jerkoff teenage boys who mostly cared about girls and video games and dicking around into the sort of young men that had thoughts about virtue, and were reflective about how those thoughts should impact their lives.

(In addition to still caring about girls and video games of course.)

This was a charter school. There was a good deal of self-selection for families that were invested in finding highly specific educational opportunities for their kids, and some selection because kids who didn't or couldn't do the work were unlikely to stick around.

But there were no tests to get in. And there was no tuition.

This was important to the ethos. As preppy as some of this is (we did wear uniforms, for instance), in an important way, it was Democratic.

There was an underlying ideology that there was such a thing as a liberal education, and that that was a worthwhile thing for a free person, and that anyone, if they were willing to do the work, could partake in it.

There were a lot of people there that had a sincere love of what we were doing.

I had a teacher that offered to tutor me in Greek, free of charge, during the summer, because I was interested in learning, and she was invested in my curiosity.

(Note that I was TERRIBLE at Greek. But I still wanted to learn.)

The school hosted an Illiadathon every two years, where we would stay up all night and take turns reading the Illiad (Lattimore translation, of course) aloud.

A lot of people showed up for that.

We felt a strong camaraderie with each other.

Part of this was that it was just _hard_: this was a lot of work, typically 3 hours of homework a night. And we were all in the same boat with regards to that.

But also, we were in Humane Letters together, for two hours a day, for 4 years, investigating and wrestling with these texts, in dialog with each other.

We knew each other in a much deeper way than high-school classmates typically do.

We, appropriately, took pride in what we were doing, and felt a pretty intimate closeness with each other.

By the time we graduated, my classmates shared a rare bond.

We felt camaraderie because we were doing a hard thing, that mattered, together.

To shift gears, I'm slightly disgusted by most forms of Authentic Relating.

It seems to me that most forms of Authentic Relating, and especially "AR games", are aiming to create the _feeling_ of a similar kind of closeness, without putting in the work, and without any dedication to a higher aim.

When AR people say that they want to "connect" with me, depending on the nuance, I sometimes feel almost-offended or indignant.

Connection is a _side effect_ of people doing difficult, meaningful, things together.

It is as if they want to play a game that helps them (or us) to _feel- as if we have connection without bothering with any of the substance.

I feel something-like-offended at the idea of intentionally setting up a context in which we can trick ourselves into experiencing each other AS IF we are doing something that matters together, if you're not serious about that at all.

"You don't have the right to the kind of relationship I have with people who have gone the distance with me."

(I do want to emphasize that I'm accentuating here, to make the point crisp. Authentic Relating doesn't have to be like this.

And in my experience, Circling is much less likely to be superficial in this way.)

Now of course, there are lots of ways to connect and bond, that I appreciate, which are much more limited than "Eli's 4-year high school experience".

But they are all about something beyond the connection itself.

All of them aim towards some higher good.

This vignette of my high school vs authentic relating games, is an evocative example to gesture in the direction of what I mean when I say (as I sometimes have) "I only connect with people over virtue."

This is descriptive statement about me. Empirically, this is how I connect with people.

But I also endorse it. If I could push a button that would change this property about me, I wouldn't press it.

I don't WANT to feel connected with someone except insofar as that connection is grounded in a motion towards some virtue: curiosity, selflessness, thoughtfulness, courage, determination to be better, etc.

In my world, that is what connection, and camaraderie, and feeling-of-togetherness is FOR.

For strengthening and solidifying attempts to attain the Good.

That's what FRIENDSHIP is for.

Having fun with people is good, but only in the breaks between striving at worthwhile projects with them. The FOUNDATION of a relationship is that you help each other become better.

Fun like a spice that you add to a dish. An extra good thing, on the margins, but not the main thing, and distasteful in large quantities.

Eating straight turmeric is probably unappetizing. But it is also anemic. It's nutritionally incomplete. It lacks the substance that makes food nourishing and satisfying.

In the lead up to the first EA Global, I was working with the conference team running the event. (Though admittedly, I was pretty ineffectual in 2015, and I don't think that I, personally, actually contributed much value. I've become much more competent since.)

We would be working in the office, late in the night.

Every hour or so, we had a mini-dance party: we would get up, put on a song, and dance to the beat for five minutes, moving our bodies, and socially connecting.

And then the song would end and we would get back to work.

(I'm pretty sure that this was instigated by @TylerAlterman. He was one of the leaders on the team, and this seems like very much his style.)

@threadreaderapp unroll

In my world, this is how it's supposed to be.

People working hard to make the world better, feeling connection and camaraderie in that, supporting each other, and having fun together in the spare moments.

*for learning relativity.

[wince]

Man, that typo is so painful.