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Jiro comments on Ethics in a Feedback Loop: A Parable - Less Wrong
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The biggest problem with the education analogy is that humans are plural, but society is singular. If you want the Martian analogy to work for education, you'd have to have all Martians trying to tickle the same human, of which there is only one.
If there's only one human and an unlimited number of martians can tickle him, things work very differently than if there are many humans:
You can try to fix the analogy up by saying that "human" stands for an individual member of society rather than the whole society, but then the analogy fails because while there are lots of humans, a Martian doesn't pick an individual human but extends its tentacles over all the humans at once.
Furthermore, some of your uses of the analogy fail for other reasons. For instance, "Some think you should be able to pay for private tickling. Others say this is elitist. " But in the analogy, this should be "pay to have the right to tickle someone else", not "pay to be tickled", and even that's a bad comparison because tickling is defined as the cost of education, so "paying to tickle" means "pay in order to be able to pay the cost of education", which is tautological.
Taxpayers are plural. Some of them pay more taxes than others. Some of them would donate to a charity related to education, others wouldn't.
I covered that:
Yes, I meant "pay to have the right to tickle someone else" although I probably could have phrased it less ambiguously.
The pain of tickling is the cost to taxpayers of education. "paying to tickle" simply means privately paying for education.
"Paying to tickle" means "paying for the right to tickle someone else", and more specifically, "paying for the right to green-tickle someone else, despite the pain it causes him". That would amount to "paying the cost of education so that you have the right to charge taxpayers for education", which is still meaningless.
Ok, maybe a better analogy would be something along the lines of:
Some martians are able to afford expensive tentacle cream which stops the tentacles stinging, meaning that they can find more willing humans and become a deeper shade of blue then less well-off martians.
Certainly true :-D
The idea is that the green and blue Martian analogy can be used, as is, as an argument about education. I don't buy that.
Of course you can use it as an argument about education if you replace it with a better analogy.
Also, there's a country where most martians borrow so much money to buy cream that they have to work like 80 hours to hope to ever pay back the debt, as most humans only let indigo martians tickle them.
For the analogy to make sense, blue tickling has to be done to the same humans as green tickling. If blue tickling means "the employer (as an individual) hires an educated person and benefits", green tickling would be "the employer (as an individual) pays for an uneducated person to be educated". Pretty much nobody thinks that employers should be obligated to pay for people's education.
You guys have been making valiant efforts to apply the tickling analogy to education, but I really don't think it works.
Nowhere in the story is it implied that the humans a martian will pleasantly tickle once blue must be the same ones he unpleasantly tickled when green in order to become blue.
The analogy doesn't require that the same individual human who is green-tickled is the one who's blue-tickled, but the analogy does require that the humans and Martians who green-tickle them are an analogy for the same kind of thing as the humans and the Martians who blue-tickle them. So if "humans blue-tickled by Martians" means "employers hiring educated people on an individual basis", then "humans green-tickled by Martians" means "employers paying to educate people on an individual basis". Employers don't do that--the analogy fails.
You can't just say that blue-tickling means hiring and green-tickling means paying for education, without considering who is hiring whom, and who is paying to educate whom.
Is it?