Welcome to the Deep Dive. We're really glad you're
here with us today. Yeah, absolutely welcome.
If you're tuning in, we kind of know exactly
the kind of person you are. You have this relentless
curiosity about the world, and you want to be
well -informed. Right. You're looking for those
genuine aha moments. Exactly. But you also don't
want to feel buried under just an absolute avalanche
of information overload. Oh, yeah. Nobody wants
that. You want to look at things from multiple
perspectives, understand the core of an issue
quickly, and ideally walk away with a shifted
paradigm. And that is exactly our mission today.
It's a fun one today, too. It really is. We're
taking a brilliant concept from a piece titled
Business and Politics Are Not Teaching and Learning.
It's a post found over at hackscience .education
by Dr. Gary L. Ackerman. And we are going to
fundamentally rethink how we measure success
in education. Which is huge. Yeah, because to
understand why our educational metrics are so
flawed, we actually have to take a hard look
at how we measure success literally everywhere
else in our lives. It's a profound shift in perspective.
We spend so much time trying to optimize how
we learn or how we teach without ever really
questioning the very rulers we're using to measure
that progress. If rulers are broken. Exactly.
The premise we are exploring today forces us
to step back and look at the dominant frameworks
of our society. We have these massive overarching
structures that dictate our daily lives, and
we have just sort of blindly taken the measurement
tools from those structures and tried to apply
them to the human brain. Okay, let's unpack this,
because to see the mismatch, we first have to
establish a baseline of what those dominant structures
actually are. Right, the big two. The big two.
The core argument here points out two major human
endeavors that essentially run our modern world.
business and politics. Yeah. And the defining
characteristic of both of these arenas is that
they are built to be measured easily. They are
designed around outcomes that are, for the most
part, objective and unequivocal. Think about
the psychological comfort of that word. Unequivocal.
Leaving no doubt. Leaving absolutely no doubt.
As human beings, we are deeply, deeply uncomfortable
with ambiguity. We want to know where we stand.
We want to know who is winning and you know who
is losing. Give us the scoreboard. Right. Give
us the scoreboard. Business and politics have
become the dominant forces in our society precisely
because they provide us with the illusion of
definitive answers. They give us that scoreboard.
And we are completely addicted to that scoreboard.
Let's look at the business metric first. In the
commercial realm, success equals profits. It
is an incredibly clean equation. Very clean.
If the profits are sufficient for the owner or
the shareholders, The business is deemed a success.
You don't have to debate the philosophical merits
of the company. You just look at the bottom line.
Did the line go up? Did the number go up enough
to keep the people holding the purse strings
happy? That's it. And notice the underlying simplicity
of that standard. It isn't about human flourishing
or some cosmic truth. It is simply about an agreed
upon financial target. It's a mutually accepted
reality. Exactly. You hit the margin, you succeed.
You miss the margin, you fail. It provides an
immediate, universally understood state of affairs
that you could just put on a spreadsheet and
hand to a board of directors. Then we pivot to
the second major endeavor, which is politics.
Now, the currency is entirely different, but
the metric is just as clean. In politics, success
equals votes. The winner is the individual who
gets more votes. But there's a catch. There is
a catch, a very deliberate nuance here that we
need to highlight from the source. The true metric
isn't just the raw math of the ballots. The actual
definitive measure of success is being the individual
judged by the certifying officials to have received
more votes. What's fascinating here is that even
within systems, we desperately want to be purely
objective. There is a distinctly human mechanism
required to finalize the reality. The raw count
of votes is data, sure. Right, it's data. But
the certification by designated officials is
the actual finish line. That certification process
is what transforms a pile of paper ballots into
an unequivocal societal outcome. We rely on that
official stamp to tell us who won, so we can
all just move forward. But of course, as much
as we love these clean generalizations, business
equals pure profit politics, equals certified
votes. They aren't absolute laws of physics.
No, not at all. There are nuances and there are
incredibly revealing exceptions that prove just
how desperate we are to maintain the illusion
of perfect measurement. Let's examine the political
exception first, because it perfectly illustrates
the tension between messy reality and our need
for a definitive metric. The historical example
the text highlights is the 2000 presidential
election in the United States. And looking at
that strictly through the lens of systems and
measurement, it's such a crucial example. The
year 2000 election demonstrated to the entire
world that the process of official certifying
election results is not always a frictionless,
perfectly objective metric. Far from it. It revealed
that the very mechanism of certification, which
is the ultimate metric of political success,
can become extraordinarily convoluted. It pulls
back the curtain on the machinery. We treat political
victory as a simple math problem, but that specific
moment in history showed us that when the margins
are razor thin, the human element of judging
and certifying those results comes under immense
stress. Yeah, the system gets pushed to its absolute
limit. Right. It proves that even in a system
meticulously designed to produce an unequivocal
winner, the path to reaching that certified metric
can be chaotic. Yet the system still ultimately
relied on that final certification to establish
the objective reality of the outcome. We see
a similar tension in the business world, too.
Pure profit is the undisputed king of metrics.
But we are increasingly seeing the rise of socially
responsible business practices. Which is a really
interesting shift. It's a fascinating exception
because it shows human beings actively trying
to rebel against the absolute tyranny of the
spreadsheet. A company might willingly choose
to sacrifice a fraction of their maximum potential
profit to ensure they are sourcing materials
sustainably or treating their supply chain ethically.
Which complicates the traditional scoreboard
immensely. When a business introduces social
responsibility, pure profit is no longer the
sole indicator of how that enterprise judges
its own success. They're trying to weigh morals
against money. They are attempting to quantify
morals and ethics alongside revenue. But even
with these notable exceptions, the complexities
of political certification or the introduction
of corporate ethics, the overarching paradigm
remains entirely intact. Exactly, because at
the end of the day, a socially responsible business
still needs to report its earnings, and even
a highly contested election still ends with someone
taking the oath of office. The primary measures
of success in both of these arenas are still
rigidly defined, highly visible, and above all,
quantifiable. But here's where it gets really
interesting, because the issue isn't just what
we are measuring. The real trap lies in how often
we measure it and the competitive environment
in which those measurements take place. We have
to look at the element of time. Oh, the timelines
are relentless. Think about the business world.
Things operate on an incredibly short -term loop.
Profits are typically reported four times each
year. Every single quarter, the clock runs out
the scoreboard resets and you have to prove your
worth all over again. It is a constant unending
sprint. And it is a sprint against everyone else.
It's a fierce competition for greater profit
and market share against other companies producing
similar products or services. You aren't just
trying to grow. You're trying to dominate a defined
space within a three month window. Politics operates
on a similar short term loop, though the intervals
are slightly longer. Elections happen every one
to four years depending on the office. But the
competition is even more severe. Oh, absolutely.
Yeah. In business, you can have two profitable
companies in the same sector. They can coexist.
But politics is a stark zero -sum game. There's
a brutal binary outcome. Elections have winners
who take office and losers who remain in the
citizenry. There are no participation trophies.
None. You either hold the power or you don't.
If we connect this to the bigger picture, we
can start to see the profound psychological conditioning
that is taking place. Business and politics are
the loudest voices in our culture. They dominate
our news feeds, our economic realities, and our
daily conversations. They're everywhere. Because
they both operate on these short -term, highly
competitive loops and because they both rely
on easily quantifiable metrics, they train us
to view the entire world through that exact same
lens. We are conditioned to want a quarterly
report for everything. We want to know our return
on investment right this second. We want to know
who is winning and who is losing in every aspect
of life. We've internalized the rhythms of the
boardroom and the ballot box. We expect immediate,
measurable, unequivocal results in absolutely
every human endeavor. And that expectation brings
us to the monumental disconnect at the heart
of our discussion today. So what does this all
mean? It means we are setting ourselves up for
massive failure when we take those expectations
and apply them to human development. The ultimate
argument here is that learning is completely
different. Teaching and learning simply do not
belong in the same universe as quarterly profits
and election cycles. The language Ackerman uses
to describe learning is the key to breaking this
conditioning. He defines learning as a natural
phenomena. Which is a massive philosophical departure.
It completely shifts the ground we're standing
on. Corporations are artificial constructs. Voting
districts are artificial constructs. We invented
the rules, we drew the boundaries, and we created
the spreadsheets. But learning, learning is biological.
It is an organic, experiential reality of being
human. And because it is a natural phenomenon,
it is inherently messy. It is not clearly definable,
and it is incredibly difficult to quantify. You
cannot take the cognitive development of a human
being and track it on a neat little graph that
trends perfectly upward every three months. This
raises an important question. If we strip away
the short -term loops and the artificial scoreboards,
how does time actually factor into education?
The reality of education is staggeringly long
-term. The true quality of a person's education
may not be known until much later in life. That
concept completely shatters the quarterly report
mindset. It really does. You might sit in a classroom
or read a book or have a deep conversation today,
and the actual value of what you absorbed might
not reveal itself for a decade. You might not
realize you learned something vital until you
are suddenly faced with a complex, unforeseen
crisis years down the road. Furthermore, judgments
of that quality can change entirely over time.
A piece of knowledge that seems trivial or purely
academic in your 20s might become the foundational
pillar of your worldview in your 50s. The value
of learning fluctuates based on your life experience.
It's fluid. It is the absolute antithesis of
a certified election result that is permanently
locked into the history books on a specific Tuesday
in November. To really drive home why learning
defies measurement, the text points out three
profoundly unquantifiable aspects of human nature
involved in this process. Let's look at the first
one. What is learned? Right. In a factory, you
know exactly what was produced today. 10 ,000
widgets. But in a learning environment, you could
have 30 people read the exact same source material
or listen to the exact same lecture, and every
single one of them will walk away having learned
something completely different. Because they
are filtering the information through their own
unique prior experiences, their current emotional
state, and their personal interests. Exactly.
One person might latch onto a historical date.
Another might be captivated by the psychological
motivation of a figure, and a third might just
learn that they strongly dislike the topic. You
cannot put a single objective metric on what
was actually taken away from that shared experience.
You just can't. The second unquantifiable aspect
is how well it is learned. In the business world,
profit is basically binary. It was sufficient
or it wasn't. But human understanding operates
on a vast, multi -dimensional spectrum. How well
do you know something? Do you just have the vocabulary
memorized so you can pass a multiple choice test?
Or do you deeply understand the underlying mechanics
so well that you can apply the concept to a completely
novel situation? How well is an aspect of human
depth that resists being boiled down to a clean
number? A test score might tell you if someone
memorized a fact, but it tells you almost nothing
about their true comprehension. which leads directly
into the third and perhaps most crucial unquantifiable
aspect, how long it stays learned. This is the
ultimate defeat of the short -term measurement
loop. We have all experienced this. You can cram
intensely for an exam as you get the perfect
score and hit the so -called metric of success
in that short -term cycle. But if the information
completely evaporates from your brain three days
later, did you actually learn anything? Learning
is a natural biological phenomena fundamentally
involves long -term retention. And tracking how
long a specific piece of knowledge remains viable
and accessible in a human mind over the course
of an entire lifetime is simply impossible to
quantify in the way we track market share or
votes. When you really look at those three elements,
what is learned, how well it is deeply understood,
and how long it actually stays with you, you
realize the absolute absurdity of trying to force
education into the mold of business or politics.
They are completely fundamentally incompatible
paradigms. It is like trying to measure the growth
of an oak tree using a stopwatch. The tool is
entirely inappropriate for the natural phenomenon
you are observing. That is a perfect analogy.
The stopwatch just doesn't make sense for the
tree, which brings this entire deep dive directly
to you listening right now. We want you to reflect
on your own persona as a learner. Why does this
philosophical distinction matter to your daily
life? It matters because if you are treating
your own personal growth and education like a
quarterly profit report, you are going to exhaust
yourself. You really will. If you approach learning
a new skill or understanding a complex topic
like a political election where you are either
an immediate winner who masters it or a loser
who fails you are setting yourself up for unnecessary
frustration. You are adopting a zero -sum mentality
for a process that is supposed to be infinite.
Ackerman's ultimate thesis that we're exploring
today is a direct call to action regarding these
conflicting frameworks. It all builds to this
singular vital conclusion. It is time we stop
conflating the two. We must stop confusing the
artificial highly competitive short -term metrics
of society with the organic deeply personal long
term reality of human development. Stop mixing
them up. Give yourself permission to step off
the imaginary educational treadmill. Just step
off. Let's do a quick distillation of everything
we've covered on this journey. We started by
examining the baseline structures of business
and politics. They are realms defined by easily
measured objective and unequivocal results. They
operate under relentless short term timelines,
quarterly financial reports and regular election
cycles. And they are highly competitive, often
zero sum games driven by quantifiable data like
profit margins and certified vote counts. And
then we contrasted those rigid artificial structures
with the messy, beautiful reality of teaching
and learning. Learning is a natural phenomenon.
It actively defies easy definition and it fiercely
resists quantifiable measurement. We explored
how the true quality of an education is a long
-term reveal, sometimes taking decades to fully
manifest. Furthermore, the deeply personal nuances
of what is learned, how thoroughly it is understood,
and how long it is retained simply cannot be
plotted on a corporate spreadsheet or tallied
in a ballot box. We have to actively break the
habit of measuring our minds with the rulers
designed for boardrooms and campaigns. It has
been an incredibly enlightening deep dive today
and we are so glad you came along. But before
we part ways, we want to leave you with a final
provocative thought to mull over, something that
builds on everything we've discussed but flips
it around a bit. Consider the implications of
time and failure. If the true quality of learning
is a natural phenomenon that can only be judged
much later in life, how might that change the
way you view the things you supposedly failed
to learn in school? If there are no true losers
returning to the citizenry and no quarterly reports
required on the state of your brain, does trying
to speed run your personal education actually
short -circuit the natural process of long -term
retention? It is a profound question. Does the
rush to measure actually destroy the learning?
We want to warmly thank you for joining us on
this deep dive. It is always a privilege to sift
through these incredible ideas with you. Remember
to stay deeply curious, be endlessly patient
with your own progress, and fully embrace the
unquantifiable lifelong journey of learning.