Education (ie enabling Learning) boils down to the Explore-Exploit Tradeoff.<p>Herbert Simon - "The criticism of Rote Learning or Practice (called "drill and kill") is popular. Nothing flies more in the face of the last 20 years of research which indicates that real competence only comes with extensive Practice. In denying the critical role of Practice one is denying children the very thing they need to achieve real competence. The Teacher's task is not to "kill" motivation by demanding drill, but to find tasks that provide practice while at the same time sustaining interest"<p>Put Papert and Simon together, and out pops the Explore-Exploit Tradeoff.<p>Its not just in Human but you can see how plants learn and how bacteria learn all run into the Tradeoff.<p>If most people need just 5% Explore and 95% Exploit to Survive then everything from economics, politics, society, culture ends up being Exploitative.<p>As soon as 1 person discovers gold in an unexplored part of the jungle, next day morning, everyone else will show up there. They don't need to spend the years running into dead ends the explorer might have run into. We see this all the time.<p>People have been wondering for a long time, how to Push the balance more in favor of Explore over Exploit. There is lot of historical, economic and social forces that keep the balance where it is.<p>Anything that cause a shift in the balance will have major economic and social fall out.