Decentralization, Self-Education, and the Future of Information
Introduction
The first episode of The Wednesday Wanderer runs close to three hours, and most of it circles a problem Jace Galloway had been working on since school: who gets to hold knowledge, and how anyone can tell whether it is true. Jace came on to talk about the Library of Consciousness, his curated collection of documentaries and videos, and the larger decentralized education effort he calls the new Library of Alexandria.
A hundred days of high school
Around 1:46, Jace traces the project back to his own education. He remembers the No Child Left Behind years as "standardized everything." He also calls himself a top down learner who needs "the answer first," which a standardized test will not give you. By his account (around 5:51) he attended a cumulative hundred days of high school across his sophomore, junior and senior years. The rest of the time he was at home, reading Wikipedia, which his sister was not even allowed to use in college, and watching how-to videos on an early YouTube. Around 17:50 comes the payoff. He finished the pre-SAT in under an hour, scored about 200 points short of perfect, and a week later the school called in his parents and asked how he had cheated.
Yellow Submarine and the habit of checking
Jace's lesson in checking sources came from Napster. For years he listened to a downloaded "Yellow Submarine," and when his father brought home the CD, Jace was sure the album track was an extended version. Trying to prove it (around 25:35), he went back through his download history and found that the file on his drive did not match the size listed there. He had been listening to a clip of under two minutes. His takeaway, around 26:20: "being wrong is an opportunity to discover more truth." ZADAN then lays out his own method around 28:45. He searches a claim from a positive angle and reads the first five results, does the same from a negative angle, and looks for where the two sets agree. Negative claims, they agree, need checking as much as flattering ones: "The best thing to question is fear."
Crypto with the currency taken out
Around 45:58 Jace says he had followed cryptocurrency for years before asking what would be left if you removed the currency. His answer is a set of protocols for exchanging value, and once money is set aside, that exchange "can look like public services. It could look like government. It could look like school." Around 50:12 he names it the internet of exchange. He calls it a billion dollar idea "that you don't make any money from owning," and says anyone who wants to build it before his group does is welcome to. Applied to education, he argues around 52:04, decentralization would "cut out the authorities" and put teaching back in the hands of teachers.
A library with his name on it
The Library of Consciousness itself comes up around 59:15. Jace took the videos and documentaries he had collected over the past decade and set them up inside a Facebook group: the discussions tab works like any group, and the units tab turns it into a free course. Every video points back to its creator. Around 1:10:01 he explains why he dropped "the" from the name. It is his library, the material he used to challenge his own beliefs, and some of it he does not believe at all. He keeps a piece if it holds even 1% of an idea he was missing.
One lesson, recorded once
The idea Jace comes back to near the end (around 2:23:41) is the simplest one in the episode. A teacher today gives the same 50-minute class five times a day. Record that class once, store it on a blockchain, and "that lesson is saved for all of time," available to any student anywhere. The point, he says, is not to cost teachers their jobs but to get every child an education. Around 2:44:29 he puts it in one sentence: "I can give you my hour, but I can't give everyone my hour."
Conclusion
The episode was recorded in 2018, and some of it is guesswork. Jace sketches a speculative plan for Elon Musk to buy up car loans and admits it "could either be fantasy, delusion or vision. Time will tell." What holds up best are the habits underneath the guesswork: read both sides before believing something, treat a mistake as new information, and put what you know in a form that can reach more than one room at a time.
Listen to the Related Episode
"Decentralization of Information & Technological Advances" with Jace Galloway