Note, this is unfinished and will be added to over time. --- As I procrastinate, I have been listening to Rory Sutherland a tad too much. He is one of those speakers that is effortless to follow where I can't help but be rapt in attention. He seemingly has an uncountable number of fascinating examples and stories through which he conveys a myriad of insights that mix psychology, sociology, technology and marketing. While there are pedagogical insights that could be gained through analysing how he convinces millions to voluntarily engage in complex educational ideas in their spare time through short-form content, here I will take some of his thoughts around value and explore a different direction concerning the purpose of education. It is also more freeing given that it does not necessitate producing value in pursuit of monetary gain, can produce value for the sake of value and can have deeper levels of direct instructional intervention. # Laws of conservation are not found in subjectivity: this allows for alchemy Alchemy aims to change forms of material, such as from iron to gold, without some kind of expensive or burden that must be endured. Though, we think that such production is ridiculous and hence fictional media often portrays alchemy as involving severe tradeoffs, such as that of animal or human sacrifices where soul covers the worthiness gap to justify an equal trade of material. This idea that things do not come for free is embedded within *physicalist* thinking with concepts of conservation of energy and momentum. But digging deeper what does gold even represent? It is the ability to exchange it for money, goods, and services. Whilst gold is physical, its value lies in the constructed *social imaginaries* that our society shares. Digging even further, what do goods and services provide a person ...? With repeated questioning we continue traversing this chain, but at the end we arrive at some notion of value or utility that is experienced by the consciousness, such as: the feeling of love, the joy from getting that acceptance letter, the satisfaction of drinking a hot chocolate on a cold winters day, the feeling of flow as you play a sport, the gratification from purchasing something or the peace of sitting on a bench in nature watching the world flow past. However, unlike 1kg of 22 carat gold, we see from these examples that the notion of value (or utility) is neither well defined nor can be measured in objective ways. Whilst some areas are more so linked to biology such as the instant pleasure from consuming sugar, many are socially constructed ideals that are formed through the education system and informal learning in exposure within our environments. That is, our parents, friends, social media, advertisements signal to us what should be valued, and beliefs are so strongly encoded that actions abstracted from biology like graduating or buying a Lamborghini can deeply stimulate our emotions. In fact, they are so deeply encoded that many interpretations of the world are non-conscious: try to close your eyes and listen to the sounds around you, can you hear them without judging its origin and meaning? **If our experience of utility is not objective following rules of conservation, can we not define, teach and learn how to increase our conscious feeling of experienced value, without incurring material costs?** That is, at its core alchemy represents the production of value out of nothing, and if we can define value however we wish, we can indeed produce it out of nothing. Hence, the ideal represented by alchemy can exist! # Subjectivity does not mean that all is wishy-washy Great, now what? Should we all start walking up to homeless people telling them that value-experience is subjective and alchemy exists hence 'just feel better bro' then walk away whilst sipping on a venti double vanilla iced matcha latte with oat milk... --- # **IGNORE BELOW - IN PROGRESS** what do i want to argue: * its not as simple as saying anything goes * even if the grounding is not strong (even if there are no axioms), there do exist structures in the way that value is experienced * For those who studied logic, if we take a clearly false fact like 'Nandu is sane' then we can construct a proposition 'Nandu is sane -> the moon is made of tofu' that is true. * but we still do exist in a physical world with real constraints and limits, our thought is mediated by the physical environment, eg. what kinds of interactions does an open square with seating in a middle of a town promote. that is it is not of a space of anything goes, but nonetheless the structures of value experience are not wholely consistent with our notion of productivity, lack of consistency that exists within structures still opens up room for * these structures tie the societal to the psychological and biological. * change still requires effort * Even if value is experienced subjectively and can be produced without materials, that does not mean that anything can be done without effort. Even if value can be produced out of materially nothing, it does not mean that it comes at no cost. That is not to say that all value exists within pure subjectivities and that experiences are created equal. There is biology ... but the us In the past or even in some areas of life, our struggle is tied to the basic necessities. Whilst i posit the existence of alchemy, there are still basic things that we need to live and survive in our life. Such struggle for necessities is justified at the cost of value. But now, we struggle attempting to increase economic production from our figures of 1000x to 1100x to produce more goods or services in an attempt or proxy to value. But does such an increase in economic production translate to any increase in real tangible value? Of course we have graphs of earning/happiness etc ... but this is with respect to a population that has been socialised to accept value in particular forms. Rather than producing such contrived forms of value where we play a variety of stupid games, why not go straight to the source? Rather, here the core takeaway I want to present, is focusing on how material resources can be translated into experienced value. # How is efficiency translated in value? Five hundred years ago the majority of the population were farmers, though with technological innovations comes efficiency increases to where less than 1% of the UK workforce are farmers now. However, do the economic efficiencies get translated into value? For example, many people go to work at jobs they do not enjoy to produce economic value, where the capitalistic pressure for monetary efficiency gains at the cost of inequality is used by many to purchase a BMW that is primarily used as a means of commuting to and from work! That is, economics is based of objective definitions that can help us make sense of larger societal pictures, but we should not forget that these are proxies to value: where the efficiency of the translation between economic and real value is often lost. Partially this is due to the impossibility of coming to some well-defined objective translation: but this is precisely where we can take advantage of alchemy! In certain spaces, efficiency has come to become a heartless word that is connoted with mega-corporations that try to reduce costs under any consequences: though this is not the fault of efficiency. Rather, laden within efficiency lies some optimisation problem where we try to maximise or minimise something. To strive for improvement is not bad persay, but it places increased responsibility on how we define what we should strive for. --- **the following I am in the middle of writing, please ignore ...** For example, effective altruism .... Efficiency is not bad, but we need to get to the core of what we want to be efficient about. We focus on proxies that significantly divert us from the goal at hand. The meaning of efficiency depends on how we define the optimisation function. that act as are proxies giving us some objective base on which the larger picture can be made sense of, however it is laden with reductiveness where at its core, value is tied to our conscious experience that is highly flexible. Though note, this objective does not have to be well-defined. In fact we can define an objective in a manner that accounts for subjectivities! # The role of education in performing alchemy Some things are difficult, they counter aspects of current social norms, and parts of human nature if left to the most low-energy effort ... but education exists in a strange spare where you can have dedication and commitment to time ... that can counter efforts of social norms Education is positioned uniquely in that it sits in a space where it can effect the formation of what is deemed as value within the child, as well as principles that can aid in governing the direction of a society to focus on maximisation of value. Rather than teaching a child to perform the quadratic equation 0.2 seconds faster, or being able to increase efficiency through more effective engineers who can increase the technical specification of a car by 10%, which fails to translate to real value when averaged across time. Could education instead focus on teaching the child to be able to derive value within themselves, that is through meta-cognitive control of thoughts. Or through enjoying simple social experiences with friends. Or through providing value, thereby creating a reinforcing loop of deriving value through providing value. As well as civic skills of how to participate in a democracy to lead a nation in a direction that converges to maximising the true value at its very root, and not simply economic value. With increases in efficiency, you would expect there would come a less-so focus on efficiency so that you have the freedom to be able to pursue the humanities and otherwise beauties of life, but rather itseems that the system has created a reinforcing cycle, which had molded the values of people to be that of consumption to gain value. That is the system is set up in such a way that motivates people to find and derive value from sources that are incredible resource intensive, even if they may not derive any further joy from it. Whilst marketing is powerful in forming our values, education has significant potential in pushing back ... though of course this is not without other systemic reforms that protect the mindset of children Let's go straight to the source. Urie Bronfenbrenner (1977, p. 528) “Most of our scientific ventures into social reality perpetuate the status quo; to the extent that we include ecological contexts in our research, we select and treat them as sociological givens rather than as evolving social systems susceptible to significant and novel transformation.” * Bronfenbrenner, U. (1977). Toward an experimental ecology of human development. American Psychologist, 32, 513–532. * given the social development of value, wouldn't it be more effective to nudge the development and experience of values themselves? todo: * tie in the experience at the buddhist monestary