The Human Redoubt

redoubt (plural redoubts) noun 

1. A small, temporary, military fortification.
2. A reinforced refuge; a fort.
3. A place of safety or refuge. 

This morning my mind was activated to a long-term fantasy I have heard regarding a creative enterprise, which is the production of laminated field guides and study guides. I have long been fascinated by these as part of my general interest in acquiring information and knowledge in a quick and efficient way. Throughout my life I have been stymied in certain educational endeavors, and being the arrogant man that I am, I tend to put the blame on the educational materials. Were they better, I always think, I would get this right away. Why does it have to be so hard?

Since the time I taught college physics, I have made my own such materials for my students, ones I distributed for my lectures, often designed to be accompanied by my overhead projector lectures in an interactive way. I actually learned a lot about how to do this by going to those free "no money down" real estate seminars in hotel ballrooms back in the day (early 1990s). I was impressed how in a few hours, they could teach you everything you needed to know about mortgages, equity, title insurance, etc. Their motivation was strong---they wanted to upsell you to a full cassette tape course at the end of the day.

It opened my mind to how much better instruction could be, and from that point onward, I made it a point to teach physics in a way that even students who thought it to be an impossible subject would find themselves, despite themselves, understanding the subjects and being able to solve certain problems.

In those days, I often thought about starting a business distributing materials to college students on how to "hack" your physics and mathematics classes. Basically how to get an A in the course despite any background, and thinking you're a dummy. Physics was actually very hard for me. That's why I pursued it. I wanted to study the hardest and most challenging subject, and I carried that all the way to getting a doctoral degree and working with some of the most brilliant minds on the planet. So I knew how it was to be frustrated by it, and how to overcome that in a way that someone with natural talent would never know.

How and why I got away from that is a long story, but not that interesting for the moment. What has stayed with me is the concept of hacking knowledge. Those laminated guides---everyone has seen them for sale---are fascinating to me because they are designed just for that purpose, to give you quick access to certain types of knowledge that is not meant to be complete in every detail, but rather to build an architecture of knowledge in your head that can be fleshed out later with the details.  That last phrase is my own, but I truly believe it.

Along those lines, one my hacks regarding taking courses in challenging technical subjects,  such as science and math, is that one should ideally acquire the textbook in advance of starting the class and memorize the table of the contents. I truly believe if I had done this simple step before many of my courses, I would have gotten much more out of them as well as higher grades. You don't have to understand any of the words you memorize. Memorize it like a poem, I tell people. It is like building the framing to a house with studs and beams.  The details will like the furniture you put in it later.

A good laminated guide might furnish this kind of jump start to any field of knowledge. Over the years I have had the impulse to undertake the production of these. I am handy with desktop publishing and not intimated by the design process. In fact that's the part I have always enjoyed and excelled at, going back to when I used my friend's bootleg copy of QuarkXpress on my roommate's little Mac computer to design my physics lecture notes. 

The part that always challenged me was the production process. How do you make these things? How does one distribute and sell them? These questions always weighed heavily on my mind and stopped me from advancing. It goes to my longstanding confusion about the question: how does the world really work, as if everything is a form of secret knowledge passed on from one person to another.

It was four years ago that I underwent by last burst of initiative to try to produce my own line of laminated study guides. I have an infinite number of ideas, more than I could possibly ever pursue. I could occupy myself happily for the rest of my life making them, if I could get started. I decided to actually do research and found myself contacting and visiting printers in downtown Phoenix, discussing what they could produce for me. Not satisfied with the initial answers, I prodded them for leads to find printers who would produce exactly what I wanted, showing them samples from the box of such guides I had acquired over the last thirty years. I was lead to a printer in Alabama who was the only known one to produce certain types of such guides, that fold in a certain way that I found desirable. It is the attention to details that count.

So what happened? Why didn't I follow through. It was certainly because at the time I was out of work and did not have any spare capital to devote to this. Almost certainly this would be a money-losing project at least at first. The people who make money at this are the ones who can do it at huge scale. I am particularly impressed by the woman in Washington state who has made and produced the Language Map laminated guides one has seen for sale in Barnes and Noble for many years in the foreign language sections (foreign language learning is actually a huge area of interest for me in this regard). They are simple and not very useful, but she has been selling them for years. I would love to meet her and shake her hand (and pick her brain too). Part of me just is curious about how people do these things, the way Mr. Rogers visits people at their occupations and learns what they do.

One of many products for sale by author Kristine K. Kershul. One of my heroes. She has made a cottage industry out of this since the 1990s.

What happened in 2021 that made me stop was that I got a full time job that required intense effort for all my waking hours. Now I had the capital to finance the project, but no time or energy, so I put the whole idea on ice and it faded away.

Likewise the next job I had, until last December was even more demanding (and almost killed me). At the moment, I find myself in a much better situation, with an income sufficient to underwrite such a project, even if it doesn't make a cent, as well as the time and energy to devote to it. It feels like a now or never moment. But maybe I just like the idea of it, as a mental exercise that I nurture as a hobby.

But now there is also another thing to think about in this, which is AI. Back in the mid 1990s, one of the reasons I put almost all my original creative educational projects on hold was that the web came along and changed everything. All of my good ideas from the early 1990s, of cassette tapes, were out of date. It was one of the reasons I pursued the career I did after leaving graduate school. I knew the web was the future for publishing and knowledge transfer, and that I needed to learn how to do that if I wanted to think in a creative way. So I pursued that, and mastered it to be sure while earning a living and making money for other people and large corporations, but it was at the cost of never returning to my original plans. And here I am years later, remembering the days when my ideal was to create a cassette tape course that I marketed with fliers on college campuses. 

Tragically, I have learned that the web is actually a terrible way for a lot of education and knowledge transfer. No one could foresee that I think. Yet it is now what people expect. I don't think you can learn most subjects on the way, on the web, in a decent way. Interactive web courses are typically far inferior to classroom instruction. You don't learn things by pointing and clicking with a mouse and keyboard, moving your fingers in that little way. During Covid, I watched the entire world learn these lessons, that I had learned over the last twenty years the hard way and wishing the web had never been invented, so I could be in the world I was meant for. 

The only exception I know about web learning is that there are certain college courses, usually in the Humanities, that are normal college courses that were videotaped in the classroom before the web instruction really took off and changed the way people teach, and how students expect to learn. My quintessential example is Paul Fry of Yale, whose Introduction to the Theory of Literature taught me everything I didn't learn as an undergraduate English major. It is was made in  2009, when lectures were taught pretty much in the same style as when I was in college. This course and others of the same vintage will remain treasures of the old way of doing things. I'm so glad they were made before everything went to hell.

The last couple years it has been a different story. What stalled my momentum a couple years ago was the looming revolution of AI. Since late 2022, it has been obvious to anyone in the know that AI was going to disrupt everything, in ways no one could possibly foresee. I suppose I have been lucky that way to involved in software, since this is the industry that bore the brunt of the disruptions almost immediately. At this point, I've been able to adjust and now make my living actually building AI-centric tools.

But I also use AI, on my job to build AI tools and write code with it, and also in my personal life, in the form of ChatGPT. One of the things that ChatGPT seems to be good at is giving insight into the very questions that used to flummox me the hardest. How does this part of the world actually work? Say, for example, how does one produce and distribute a laminated field guide or study guide? 

I tried that technique out recently in regard to a similar project and found out ChatGPT could give me great insight into things that would have taken me quite a long time to research, down to what type of paper to use, and what types of printers to seek out. It was ready to give me a detailed marketing plan. It's not so much that these need to be the "correct" answers. I am willing to try and fail. I just need a good starting point. ChatGPT turns out to be excellent for this, when it is not hallucinating.

It was almost too overwhelming to have this. I had to take a deep breath after my initial experiment. It removed a lot of my limiting beliefs all at once. It removed many of my excuses. One immeidately finds out what life is like, without those excuses. What do you really want to do?

The AI revolution has barely registered on most people. Most do not know how disruptive it will be in the economy and the job market. In tech, we have know for two years that AI would replace, say, many lawyers. That's low hanging fruit. Lawyers will always be needed because you will need someone to blame when things go wrong. But the junior attorneys who draft documents--forget about it! The need for those will almost disappear completely over the next couple years. And yet this is just now coming into general acknowledgement among lawyers on social media. And this is just one example.

If your job can be replaced by AI, it probably will be. What will be left is what I call the human redoubt---the things that no AI can master. The next few years in large part will be the discovery of this human redoubt. Keep in mind that will have robots soon as well. 

I know I can beat AI hands down at making educational materials that actually work. Whatever attempt it makes, I can take that and make it better, more informative, more practical, and more beautiful.

So maybe I am not as out dated as I thought I was. Maybe this is my time to shine after all, to be part of he Team Human resistance to the end of the world as we know it. Or maybe I'm hallucinating. At minimum, AI has me on the defensive against my own stubborness, having run out of excuses.