Manuel Allgaier's Quick takes

By Manuel Allgaier @ 2024-11-13T09:38 (+5)

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Manuel Allgaier @ 2024-11-19T10:45 (+26)

How tractable is improving (moral) philosophy education in high schools?

tldr: Do high school still neglect ethics / moral philosophy in their curriculums? Mine did (year 2012). Are there tractable ways to improve the situation, through national/state education policy or reaching out to schools and teachers? Has this been researched / tried before?

The public high school I went to in Rottweil (rural Southern Germany) was overall pretty good, probably top 2-10% globally, except for one thing: Moral philosophy. 90min/week "Christian Religion" was the default for everyone, in which we spent most of the time interpreting stories from the bible, most of which to me felt pretty irrelevant to the present. This was in 2012 in Germany, a country with more atheists than Christians as of 2023, and even in 2012 my best guess is that <20% of my classmates were practicing a religion.

Only in grade 10, we got the option to switch to secular Ethics classes instead, which only <10% of the students did (Religion was considered less work).

Ethics class quickly became one of my favorite classes. For the first time in my life I had a regular group of people equally interested in discussing Vegetarianism and other such questions (almost everyone in my school ate meat, and vegetarians were sometimes made fun of). Still, the curriculum wasn't great, we spent too much time with ancient Greek philosophers and very little time discussing moral philosophy topics relevant to the present.

How have your experiences been in high school? I'm especially curious about more recent experiences.

Are there tractable ways to improve the situation? Has anyone researched this?

1) Could we get ethics classes in the mandatory/default curriculum in more schools? Which countries or states seem best for that? In Germany, education is state-regulated - which German state might be most open to this? Hamburg? Berlin?

2) Is there a shortage in ethics teachers (compared to religion teachers)? Can we get teachers more interested in teaching ethics?

3) Are any teachers here teaching ethics? Would you like to connect more with other (EA/ethics) teachers? We could open a whatsapp group, if there's not already one.

Joseph Lemien @ 2024-11-19T16:39 (+6)

I went to high school in the USA, in the 2000s, so it has been roughly twenty years. I attended a public highschool, that wasn't particularly well-funded nor impoverished. There were no ethics or philosophy courses offered. There was not education on moral philosophy, aside from that which is gained through literature in an English class (such as reading Lord of the Flies or Fahrenheit 451 or To Kill a Mockingbird).

There is a Facebook group for EA Education, but my impression is that it isn't very active.

My (uninformed, naïve) guess is that this isn't very tractable, because education tends to be controlled by the government and there are a lot of vested interests. The argument would basically be "why should we teach these kids about being a good person when we could instead use that time to teach them computer programming/math/engineering/language/civics?" It is a crowded space with a lot of competing interests already.

Charlie_Guthmann @ 2024-11-19T18:10 (+1)

Charter schools are a real option in many places. In Chicago if you have money and wherewithal you can open a charter school and basically teach what ever you want. The downside here is you will not be able to get the top students in the city to go to your school because there are already a select few incredible public and private schools.

Vidur Kapur @ 2024-11-20T20:31 (+1)

In England, secular ethics isn't really taught until Year 9 (age 13-14) or Year 10, as part of Religious Studies classes. Even then, it might be dependent on the local council, the type of school or even the exam boards/modules that are selected by the school. And by Year 10, students in some schools can opt out of taking religious studies for their GCSEs.

Anecdotally, I got into EA (at least earlier than I would have) because my high school religious studies teacher (c. 2014) could see that I had utilitarian intuitions (e.g. in discussions about animal experimentation and assisted dying) and gave me a copy of Practical Ethics to read. I then read The Life You Can Save.

Manuel Allgaier @ 2024-11-13T09:38 (+6)

Update: Pushing for messenger interoperability (part of EU Digital Markets Act) might be more tractable and more helpful.

Forwarding private comment from a friend: Interoperability was part of Digital Markets Act, so EVP Ribera will be main enforcer, and was asked about her stance in her EU parliament confirmation hearing yesterday. You could watch that / write her team abt the underrated cybersecurity benefits of interoperability esp. given it would upgrade WhatsApp's encryption

TLDR: Improving Signal (messenger) seems important, [edit: maybe] neglected and tractable. Thoughts? Can we help?

Signal (similar to Whatsapp) is the only truly privacy-friendly popular messenger I know. Whatsapp and Telegram also offer end-to-end encryption (Telegram only in "secret chats") but they still collect metadata like your contacts, and many people I meet strongly prefer Signal for various reasons: Some people work in cybersecurity and have strong privacy preferences, others dislike Telegram (bad rep, popular among conspiratists, spam) and Meta (Whatsapp owner). For some vulnerable people such activists in authoritarian regimes or whistleblowers in powerful organizations, secure messaging seems essential, and Signal seems to be the best tool we have.

While Signal is improving, I still often find it annoying to use compared to Telegram. Here just some examples:

1) it's easily overwhelming: No sorting chats in folders, archiving group chats doesn't really work (they keep popping back to 'unarchived' whenever someone writes a new message), lots of notifications I don't care about like "user xyz changed their security number" and no way to turn them off

2) no option to make chat history visible to new group members, which is really annoying for some use cases

3) no poll feature, no live location sharing

4) no "community"/supergroup feature, people need to find and manually join all different groups in a community

5) no threads (in Telegram that's possible in announcement channels)

I wouldn't be surprised if we're collectively losing thousands or even millions of productive hours and valuable attention on Signal (I would strongly recommend Slack over Signal, but for some use cases or some users Slack doesn't work). This seems high in scope, neglected and tractable to me.

Curious to get your thoughts on:
a) Disagree with my argument? Am I missing anything?
b) What's the bottleneck of Signal? Is it a matter of prioritization, funding/talent (edit: probably not, see harfe's comment), or something else? Does anyone have insights?
c) Can we help? How?

harfe @ 2024-11-13T11:12 (+8)

In my opinion you have not really argued why it is neglected. As a starting point, they seem to spend roughly $35 million per year: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824506840. $14 million of those are for salaries, so I would be surprised if new features are strongly bottlenecked by money and talent.

I am just guessing on these issues, but my suspicion as for why some features such as "live location sharing" and "display past encrypted messages from the group chat you were not a member of but only just now joined" are not (yet) implemented because they do not fit well into Signal's approach to security/privacy.

Manuel Allgaier @ 2024-11-13T11:35 (+1)

Thanks for looking up their funding situations, appreciate it!

I meant neglected as in "they don't seem to prioritize it for whichever reason", not necessarily funding- or capacity-constraints.

I see how they might not want to implement some of these features, though even in the case of "show message history" to new members, there could be more elegant solutions like giving members the option to opt-in to sharing their messages with new people in the group.

Other features like "enabling community chats / supergroup" or "better chat archiving & sorting chats in folders" seem not in conflict with privacy, at least not obviously. Generally they do seem to copy many features from other messengers (they recently launched stories, similar to Whatsapp status), they just seem a lot slower than Whatsapp and Telegram to adopt these things and far behind.

Manuel Allgaier @ 2024-11-13T11:42 (+1)