184: Business and Politics are Not Teaching and Learning

0:00Welcome to The Deep Dive. We are, uh, 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, um, this relentless curiosity about the world and you want to be well informed. Right. 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 are taking a brilliant concept from a piece titled Business and Politics are not teaching and learning. It's a post found over at hack science dot 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

1:02our lives. It's a profound shift in perspective. I mean, we spend so much time trying to optimize how we learn or, um, 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.

2:06As 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

3:07reality. 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.

4:11We 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. 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 that 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 for 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.

5:14We 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 into 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 material sustainably or treating their supply chain ethically, which complicates the traditional

6:16scoreboard 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

7:18on 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

8:19conditioning 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 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

9:23cycles. 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 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.

10:24That 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 world view in your 50s. The value of learning fluctuates based on your life experience. It's fluid. It's the absolute antithesis of a certified election result that is currently 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.

11:26But 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?

12:27How 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 has 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

13:31politics. 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.

14:34It 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 on a 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

15:39learned, 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 ruler's design for boardrooms and campaigns. It has been an incredibly enlightening deep dive today and we are so glad you came along for it. But before we part ways, we want to leave you with the 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 speedrun 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,

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