stimulant

Prudential concerns overcoming the poetic¹:

G: “There’s this history class that I really want to take, but my advisor is teaching it. I think that could be dangerous.”

1. In Fred Brooks’ language of The Organization Kid [↩]

It’s essential to keep in mind that when you’re trying to talk to somebody about a field that perceived as rapidly progressing, you need to be more vigilant about securing the timeliness of your credibility. Reading Illich’s Medical Nemesis, I found myself constantly questioning his conclusions, given their foundation upon statements like:

Awe-inspiring medical technology has combined with egalitarian rhetoric to create the dangerous delusion that contemporary medicine is highly effective. Although contemporary medical practice is built on this erroneous assumption, it is contradicted by informed medical opinion.

My instincts suggested, “Well, maybe now that’s no longer true. Think of all the progress we’ve made!” Of course, I was forgetting what I already knew; namely, that the aggregate benefit of our increasing level of health care has not been shown to have any effect. In fact, a number of studies establish the exact opposite.

In any case, I found it interesting that even as a receptive reader, the instincts with which a cultural emphasis on progress has programmed me dominated. It’s a concrete example of what’s so hard about getting people to question the assumption that what we call progress is progress, and is actually the direction in which we want to go. In particular, it strikes me as very similar to the friction I encounter when talking to people about the role of technology in education, or the difficulty people have when trying to draw attention to the metrics we use in assessing students, as opposed to the “effects” of pedagogy as measured by those metrics. Embedding assumptions in an otherwise (ostensibly) open debate is an awfully effective strategy.

a few, tasty links (November 23rd - November 26th):

• Bar code printing with cake | NoSpace Blog
• Technology Review: Searching Video Lectures
• docstoc / find and share free legal documents
• OurStory.com - Capture your stories, save them permanently.
• Jack Slocum’s Blog » WordPress Comments System built with Yahoo! UI
• Cato-at-liberty » Naomi Wolf, Second Amendment Sister?
• Hey, Young Americans, Here’s a Text for You
• One Day in America - TIME
• Synaptic » Blog Archive » The Self-Organized Gene (Part 1)
• Hackszine.com: Turn your soundcard into an oscilloscope
• A Better Ajax Back Button Solution by Ajaxonomy
• Games Radar - PC news - PC - Feel inferior by watching 10 of the godliest gamers in action
• Confessions of an Aca/Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins: Gender and Fan Culture (Wrapping Up, Part Two)
• Statistical Data Mining Tutorials
• Multiple files upload in v1.2 | The Bakery, Everything CakePHP : Articles
• OpenMacGrid | MacResearch
• Open Source Physics
• car-chase.net | OpenLawmaking: My Knight News Challenge application (updated)
• Education Week - Commentary Guidelines
• MAPLight.org | Money and Politics: Illuminating the Connection
• ccMixter Welcome to ccMixter
• CyberSpace Law Lessons
• DecentURL tools
• SVD Recommendation System in Ruby - igvita.com
• Doing What Works - Home
• Skype buttons
• Heroku
• Visual Medical Dictionary | CureHunter
• Explorer Destroyer - Switch to Firefox, Make money from Adsense Referral
• Create a USB microscope - DIY Life

I have to confess, it’s a pretty depressing montage, in some ways. “Collaboration” turned into “instructions” turned into a “show-and-tell”? It feels like a progressive admission that instructables’s users are more like spectators. Don’t get me wrong: that feels accurate. I just wish it weren’t.

Nonetheless, I’m awfully glad instructables is around.

a few, tasty links (November 13th - November 21st):

• FQXi: Foundational Questions in Physics & Cosmology
• Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics - About PI Overview
• Convergence | The Unique Effects of Including History in College Algebra
• VPython
• How to Repair a Book’s Binding - wikiHow
• Y.A.I.A.- Yet Another Ipod Amp - The World’s Biggest Show & Tell - tech, diy
• MAKE: Blog: DIY Polygraph always catches the crook
• sieve of Atkin: Information and Much More from Answers.com
• OpenEEG hardware
• Coilgun Handgun - The World’s Biggest Show & Tell - tech, offbeat, diy
• How to Win at Monopoly ® - a Surefire Strategy
• High Voltage Multiplier - The World’s Biggest Show & Tell - tech, offbeat, diy
• Outside In
• Tinkering at Home, Selling on the Web - New York Times
• hedgehog lab blog ? Blog Archive » Squirrel IoC - bringing Javascript out from the dark ages
• openEyes - Eye tracking for the masses
• Flash Physics Engine Box2DFlashAS3 1.4.2
• Timepedia Chronoscope
• CSS Sprites: What They Are, Why They?re Cool, and How To Use Them - CSS-Tricks
• Convert your 4th Gen iPod to use Flash Memory - The World’s Biggest Show & Tell - tech, life, diy
• Why a stay-home dad can be bad for boys (but not girls)| News | This is London
• Database of Synaptic Connectivity of C. elegans
• MAKE: Blog: HOW TO - Turn your iPod mini into a flash based iPod
• SeatQuest - Know where you sit.
• Kloonigames - Monthly experimental games
• Bugatti Veyron versus Eurofighter Typhoon - FileCabi.net
• The Tech - Top Salaries Paid by MIT From 2005?2006
• ms_index.jpg
• Computerized Etch a Sketch - The World’s Biggest Show & Tell - tech, art, diy
• stubble
• MAKE: Blog: Winners of the Circuit Bending Challenge
• The Sleuth Kit & Autopsy: Digital Investigation Tools for Linux and other Unixes
• Code of Conduct | Ubuntu

I know these are normally depressing, but this exchange between a girl and her TA was heartening:

G: Yeah, logs are pretty fantatsic.
TA: They’re pretty cool.
G: They made playing violin more fun.
TA: How do logs connect to playing the violin?
G: The notes that you play, on the string, where they are proceeds logarithmically. ¹
TA: No way.
G: Yeah! It’s like the energy levels in an atom.
TA: I had no idea.

And the student had just taken a test and they weren’t freaking out and the TA was nice and things weren’t perverted.

1. For more about this, here’s a pretty good explanation about what’s going on when you play the violin. [↩]

Consider the policy implications of taking climate change seriously.

“We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals,” said F.D.R.“We know now that it is bad economics.” These words apply perfectly to climate change. It’s in the interest of most people (and especially their descendants) that somebody do something to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, but each individual would like that somebody to be somebody else. Leave it up to the free market, and in a few generations Florida will be underwater.

The solution to such conflicts between self-interest and the common good is to provide individuals with an incentive to do the right thing. In this case, people have to be given a reason to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions, either by requiring that they pay a tax on emissions or by requiring that they buy emission permits, which has pretty much the same effects as an emissions tax. We know that such policies work: the U.S.“cap and trade” system of emission permits on sulfur dioxide has been highly successful at reducing acid rain.

One of the hardest parts of policymaking is the fact that the parties involved are part of a tremendous, tremendously complicated system: the world. The last sentence of this excerpt reminds me of people who say that punitive systems work in school, or people who note that corporal punishment works. The reason that I (and most people) don’t take claims like this seriously¹ is because it is clear to us that punitive measures can change behaviors, but this is simply a mutation of the manifestation of an underlying problem. A friend of mine puts it this way, “Rules don’t change behaviors, they just change their form,” the idea being that rules frequently push behavior underground or lead it to take on a new, subtler or more obscure form. Inevitably, punitive systems end up playing whack-a-mole, and invest tremendous amounts of time and energy into an effort that does not solve the problem, but can give the appearance of solving the problem, from sufficiently afar.

This is true for groups and companies, too. Companies as a whole are awfully good at pursuing their interests. The most consistently frustrating theme in environmental awareness and reform is the assumption that these concerns are not prudential, but to use David Brooks’ contradistinction, in some sense poetic. The idea that environmental awareness is only some sort of moral or ethical choice, and not a prudential one, is not only obnoxious, but a tremendous strategic mistake.

Environmentalists rarely reconcile their forecasts of negative consequences with their assumption that self-interest is not enough to move people. They’ve constructed a self-fulfilling prophecy by consistently focusing on what they see as the worst consequences — Florida is underwater, millions will die, etc.² And a silly as this sounds, they need to focus on smaller scales.

People who don’t feel moved by calls to protect and preserve the environment are not obstinate or stupid. Everyone aims to make the best decision possible. Unfortunately, people are generally bad at systems thinking. The feedback loop connecting throwing your banana peel in the trash, as opposed to composting it, is very, very long. But the feedback loop connecting littering to making your surroundings uglier to your decision to throw your trash out is relatively short.

Environmentalists’ attempts to “wake people up” by highlighting the potential doom our policies could wreak is an attempt to compenste for the length of this feedback loop, to get the message home. Unfortunately, the prospect of catastrophe is distant from our everyday lives and people have been desensitized.

So it seems that there are two ways to address this problem:

• Increase people’s ability to think in terms of the effect of small changes on a system. Systems thinking is hard, and we’re never taught how to do it. Most people can’t/don’t.
• Decrease the scale of the examples and data relied upon and accept the commensurate decrease in drama, hoping that the fact that it is more concrete can make up for the fact that it is less dramatic.

Both of these are exciting directions. The second is clearly the easier (or at least, quicker) to implement; however, it does connect to the frustrating lack of data when it comes to policymaking and activism. There have been some pretty exciting attempts³ to bring systems thinking to our overwhelming positivist, reductionist educational tradition by initiatives like StarLogo, but it seems like a much longer, harder, and eventually far more valuable trek. And frankly, one I’m much more interested in. But one that seems to have much lower immediate returns (when looking for effective activism on environmental fronts in the short-term, at least).

At an even more fundamental level, environmentalists seem to take the assumption that environmental systems and design are somehow more expensive or inconvenient for granted. This is a historical accident: transitioning between any two infrastructures incurs costs. We’ve been honing the economies of scale and availability for the components of our current system of manufacture and production for a long, long time. I frequently find myself wishing that people couched environmentally-aware design more as good design, and less as Good design — that is, more as something strictly pragmatic and very much in the tradition of engineering profitable solutions, as opposed to a moral or ethical choice involving ideas like “what we leave the next generation.” I’m not suggesting that these ideas are wrong, just that they are a really disempowering position to take: telling people what they should do (or even just what they should feel like they should do) is a much less effective proposition than telling people what they want to do. Consider the relative efficacies of a priest and an advertising agent: everyone subscribes to the priest’s theories and doctrine, but everyone actually does what good advertisers want them to. One works forwards from what you should do, whereas the other takes advantage of what you want, and works backward from there to (ostensibly) conflate their interests with yours.

More activists need to think in terms of efficacy, instead of morality. Being right isn’t useful — most of the times, it’s a pain in the ass to take the moral high ground in a discussion. Being effective is a matter of working from your audience’s point of view instead of trying to impose your own.

1. Although for some reason, people take for granted the idea that jails make sense, despite the obvious contradiction between their allegations of rehabilitation and reality of punishment [↩]
2. That’s some list to follow up with “et cetera” [↩]
3. [bibtex file=read.bib key=resnick1996sed] [bibtex file=read.bib key=resnick2003tlt] [bibtex file=read.bib key=wilensky1999ltp] [↩]

In pretty nice retrospective¹ of Jacques Barzun, Arthur Krystal² wrote something that leapt out at me:

In fact, when I broached the possibility that his precise way of formulating ideas and strict attention to empirical evidence are distinctive qualities of the civilization that he saw disintegrate before his eyes, his response was gently quizzical. “Why must you find trauma where there is none?” he asked.

That’s awfully bleak: precise language and an attention to evidence are characteristic of a bygone era? Fuck.

1. found via Matt Lord [↩]
2. an essayist, writer, and editor of Barzun’s The Culture We Deserve [↩]

For anyone who thinks that tests and grades help anything:

G1: Hey! Do you have a minute? Can you do me a favor?
G2: Sure…
G1: I’m really scared to look at my test. I think I did really badly.
G2: Do you want me to look at it for you?
G1: Here — 
G1: Did I do badly?
G2: What’s badly?
G1: Here, I wrote down the distribution.
G1: Did I do below the “Danger” range?!
G2: No, no — look.
G1: [smiling] That’s awful! That’s like a C.
G1: Oh no.
G1: We only have the final left in this class.
G1: This is like, really bad.
G1: And I get another test back today, too!

Schools perverts learning. QED.