The Case for Asynchronous Learning

How organic curiosity can replace deterministic learning models

In the aftermath of a Cambrian explosion of information made manifest by the internet revolution, synchronous education models from the institutions of old began to show their impotency in this ever more chaotic world we live in. The collapsing gravitas of institutions left in its wake a deterministic learning model that’s ossified itself into the backbone of this culture. The key feature is that all movement traverses forward in this system, the progressions are piecewise, finite, and distributed equally irrespective of one’s capacity or the needs of the subject at hand. As long as the information can be squeezed into a semester unit of time, the mind can be comforted that chaos has been contained as long as one surrenders both their freedom and will for a brief moment in time so that the projected aggregate pleasure will outweigh the temporary suffering of the process. It’s a simple transaction; sacrifice time and pleasure to yield society’s once prestigious rite of passage to then be considered a forthright, functioning adult ready to be a contributing member of society indefinitely. That’s the bill of goods we’re sold in these deterministic education models we’ve created, unfortunately, though it’s just a bill of goods and not much more.

Linear Growth

One of the primary problems with deterministic learning models is that it imposes linearity onto its infected hosts, as they’re unable to consider a world where exponential growth is even a possibility. The default assumption then becomes one of a zero-sum game, that all growth and life progressions must happen in finite, linear quantities, implicitly denying the potentiality of a generative will. This same concept bleeds into conventional hiring practices, where “experience” then becomes this collectible item that any career progress must be justified through a heuristic of predetermined time spent in some cohort, almost like a prerequisite course in a university. The premise behind the GPA further accentuates this, it being an indiscriminate average denies the possibility of exponential growth. A fourth-year college student with 75% of the coursework completed and a less than perfect GPA will mathematically be unable to graduate with a 4.0 GPA. Linearity has imposed itself as this superstructure that is immutable, irreversible, and inked into perpetuity, and while the creators of this rubric see this as a feature, in the grand continuum of humanity this is most certainly a bug.

There’s No Exit

Linearity becomes a downregulating force that inhibits the exceptional and torments the struggling as the integrity of the process becomes sacrosanct. Instead of embracing chaos by cultivating talent how it may emerge, when it may emerge, an ignorantly blind uniform application to all becomes the defacto standard. For the exceptional, there’s little reason to overcome the process, as doing the bare minimum becomes the expectation. What could then be an opportunity to catalyze greatness in real-time by accelerating curiosity and consequently output via an exit exam of sorts, the halting function is preferred. This same bureaucracy torments the struggling, as their internal learning models may require greater activation energy that does not get accurately represented within the predetermined unit of time. The straggling student has no possibility to demonstrate exponential growth from a severe deficit in performance, meaning any tail-end spurts of productivity increase will mostly get overlooked. This seems to be mirrored in the synchronous labor models, that work is performed within an eight-hour period incorrectly measured not by output but by the length of time, thus duration in the cohort becomes the primary litmus test. Fundamentally there needs to be the possibility for exit to represent nonlinear growth for periods of exponential progress. Linearity denies exit as it does not consider exponential rates of change in its assessments, only the uniform moving average.

The Need for Chaos

Both the natural world and the human psyche have been fueled by chaos since its inception, linearity denies this premise. It’s likely the fear of chaos that catalyzed the creation of linear systems but it’s a great folly to then make it the base mode of operation. Whether man was in a hunter-gatherer society battling at his wits ends against the unforgiving forces of nature or in a constant state of war between other tribes we’re lying to ourselves that linearity has ever been the assumed prerogative. Prolonged periods without food followed by exponential increases in calories defined man’s primordial life, it was never synchronous other than the solar cycles. Chaos creates conditions for ingenuity, when survival is on the line creativity gets accelerated to its limit. Highly “transparent” or better put “managed” and controlled environments are not what the human psyche adapted towards and because of this obsession with the predictable, we’ve both handicapped our ability to cultivate greatness and inadvertently created an existential crisis of meaning. The best that mankind had to offer has always embraced the unknown by lurching into chaos headfirst, breaking all preconceived rules along the way while overcoming the bleakest of odds at the behest of imminent failure. Whether these were explorers, inventors, or intellectuals it certainly does seem that without chaos the soul rots, man needs to overcome, and asynchronous learning models must be the best manifestation of learning given the preconditions of chaos.

Why Asynchronous Learning?

Deterministic, synchronous education models direct people towards the indexing of information while asynchronous models are generative in nature. Structured education in the form of university course lectures could in theory through exposure fuel new passions and curiosities but instead, the impetus for a perfect grade point average via the fear of academic failure overcomes those intuitions. Passionate curiosity is the fuel for exponential growth, an S-curve that may not always present itself within a premeasured unit of time. When information is internalized through organic curiosity, an internal model of relations is built. A network effect emerges between disparate nodes of information, better described as knowledge when synthesized by the learning agent. Unlike synchronous learning models that functionally coerce people to index information mostly against their nature, asynchronous models are generative and scalable. Asynchronous learning is not fueled by fear of failure, and learning becomes a lifetime habit subconsciously, rather than limited to a semester-long course.

The liberal arts education attempts to artificially construct this by exposing students to multidisciplinary learning, but the reality is that for most it becomes another race to the bottom for academic survival. While the vision of the liberal arts education is certainly noble, the great folly of the liberal arts education is that it tries to artificially inseminate organic curiosity through a structured regiment of deterministic information acquisition. At best it can only imitate the residue of action by the learning agent manifest at that moment, no amount of lectures on Einstein’s Theory of Relatively will ever contain the moment Einstein synthesized it himself, the essence of that moment can only come from within and instead of attempting to resurrect these moments we should cultivate people towards generation rather than indexing. It’s a difficult conundrum because societies expect a return on their time and effort but there might be some things that are not engineerable, especially those concerning the will.

Primordial man in the wild does not index all symbols of representation entering his visual conscious stream but rather synthesizes knowledge only for the immediate task at hand. Deterministic synchronous learning models risk over-indexing information as the immediate task at hand is purely artificial in scope. This would mean jumping straight into solving a specific disease, rather than synchronously beginning with all of general biology first. There’s a finite quantity of time we have in this life, thus learning more than needed for the task at hand becomes a major efficiency gain.

Generating a Model of the World

Fueling asynchronous curiosity stimulates a psychology that departicularizes time, life breaks out from the reference frame of a zero-sum game and instead opens up towards a life of infinite possibility. Exponential growth becomes embedded within the psyche as a drunken curiosity that accelerates learning faster than any synchronous program. This is the type of environment and psychology that cultivates greatness and overcomes any notions of envy. Generating models of the world creates a far more intimate and authentic relationship with knowledge as it no longer can be described as this foreign construct you’re trying to integrate into your consciousness but rather as an extension of your individuality. The normalizing function of a socialized education demystifies knowledge remedied only by the aura of personal discovery. Relational ownership of information matters and synchronous learning models do little in the way to make that happen. The same sense of discovery that inventors and explorers possess can take shape if one lets curiosity lead the way.

Why Now?

The internet has done a great job of reinvigorating the aura of a seemingly infinite terrain accessible by anyone, anywhere and anytime. It’s an ever-expanding savannah, with a seemingly limitless number of nodes waiting to be interrogated. The internet naturally aids asynchronous learning patterns as intrinsic to the internet itself is unending entropy. What was once the wild probing man’s curiosity to venture deeper into the world is now the modern-day YouTube comment with a provoking esoteric content recommendation waiting to be unturned. Embrace the chaos, embrace curiosity, embrace the internet, the time to unravel all is now.

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