2008 February | stimulant - changing things around. . .

comment on: “Atheism is not enough”

posted in commented by Alec on February 29th, 2008 :

A comment from Chris Bisignani’s blog:

How do you reconcile these ideas with the fact that some of us want to Care about more than one thing?

For instance, I’m extremely ambivalent about veganism. In general, I’m struggling with how to reason about individual action of precisely the type you criticize. I don’t think the way for the concerns associated with veganism to be championed is by an ad campaign aimed at creating more vegans. The long term solutions will involve decentralizing food production, making it easy to be vegan, pairing animal rights to human rights, etc. Systemic concerns.

But, I don’t care enough to devote my time to those things. On the other hand, it’s easy for me to make the incidental decision to be vegan. Incidental decisions are what’s really behind _c_aring. Caring (that is, Caring) requires Devotion, and I only have enough time to Care for a couple things, if that.

Initially, I thought my confusion about this was due to problems reasoning about low probabilities. I’m increasingly suspicious that these are false issues raised by the difference between conceptual and functional consistency. When we talk about consistency, we fail to differentiate (worse, there’s a very blurry line separating the two, with a width as large as your difficulty estimating the impact of decisions involving small numbers in big systems — i.e. low probabilities). Being vegan is conceptually consistent but functionally irrelevant. Comparing the cost of veganism to the probability of benefit is impossible — I cannot make predictions about most of the incidental decisions I make motivated by a desire for conceptual consistency (e.g. I don’t want to be party to cruelty to animals; I want to live sustainably, in the environmental sense; etc.).

To muddy the waters even more, I’m not willing to rule out incidental decision making as valueless. In many cases, a data dearth is the issue. This is the problem ThoughtAndMemory.org is trying to solve: they want you to be able to get information about a corporation’s behavior along several dimensions (think environmental, political) at the point of purchase by taking a picture of a UPC with your cell phone. Informed decision complicates these issues.

Any suggestions?

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comment on: “A Theory of Society”

posted in commented, edumication by Alec on February 29th, 2008 :

A comment of mine on a fantastic post over at The Wry Observer:

I’m pretty excited about these ideas. It is worth noting at least two ways in which past theories have implicitly accommodated learning:
-The characterization of comparative advantage (in all domains, not just goods and services) as a consequence of differences in information
-The unstated conflation of learning and problem solving often leads people to sloppily interchange perseverance (and therefore, effort — originating in desire) for education. This is most clearly seen in cultural currency the ideas behind characters like Horatio Alger.

Correct me if I’m misreading you, but I think it’s more accurate to couch learning as an unaddressed pillar of empowerment (where I see choices, resources, goods, services, desires, and so on pointing).

Question: you separate the economic and social theory (in talking about originary concerns, at least). Why? How? Typically, I see people doing this implicitly by mechanism (e.g. behaviors deriving from communication are social, those deriving from property exchange economic). This is an increasingly blurry distinction.

The thinking that I’ve been doing lately around education (and in particular, the political and economic roles of education) has been focused on my kinda-silly experiment attempting to derive my moral, ethical, and pedagogical system from assuming the primacy of free-will (yet to be defined). In attempting to define [free-will], I’ve discovered the need to dispense with the focus on choice, for many of the same reasons you have. In a lot of ways, it’s getting to the point that free-will and empowerment are interchangeable, for me.

_SO_ much more to write up. Will do so in another comment/blog post, sometime.

Thanks!

Interested and waiting,
a.

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so, i don’t think i see people elsewhere posting their comments on other blogs on their own blog

posted in commented, overheard, sysadmin by Alec on February 29th, 2008 :

Is that for a good reason? Is it annoying, to you guys? If so, let me know.

Until then, all posts beginning with “comment:” will be exactly that: comments I’ve posted elsewhere, linked and recorded. It’ll even have its own category, along with a newly created category for all those “overheard” posts.

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{innov, corpor, educ}ation

posted in slush by Alec on February 29th, 2008 :

Said more carefully, the operational culture of educational institutions has more inertia than that of corporations. While it is clear that research universities innovate more than many companies, the past three decades of corporate culture and strategy have yielded many more innovations than their academic and educational counterpart.

This is not surprising: not only is educational culture older, academia starts with a space deliberately set apart from the real world, a semi-vacuum dedicated to learning. With market pressures that do not reward swaths of academic thought, if our values diverge from our pragmatism — which they do — creating alternative infrastructures to support all fields is necessary. It is perhaps one of the most unfortunate side effects of technology’s economic and cultural prominence that the boundary between education and the real world has been blurred in such a way (by no means necessarily) so as to hinder the study of less pragmatic domains. That is to say, the encroachment of industry upon academia — to be distinguished from the export of academia to the world — has made school’s rarefied air increasingly difficult to breathe.

Companies, on the other hand, are organizations that succeed because of a tight coupling with the real world. Indeed, many companies’ fortunes are determined by their ability to accurately predict the future in one way or another. Many balk at the suggestion that schools be run more like companies, and rightfully so. But I think this analogy is unnecessary. Analogies are useful for dealing with ideas that are too complex, subtle, or cumbersome to state explicitly. None of the advantages corporations possess are so hindered.

Now, maybe your disdain for academic culture is sufficiently old or deep that the it doesn’t seem weird that educational institutions are slower to change than corporations. But if we set this observation next to the alleged purpose and character of school, serious concerns show themselves. Education is supposed to create a fresh, creative, unconstrained world of ideas. School is touted as a process for refining the mind. The tradition of liberal education takes at face value the edifying properties of education. How do we reconcile these intentions with a fundamentally static organizational design?

Consider the following excerpt from an article by Bruce Nussbaum:

Enter design and design thinking. Over the past decade, design has evolved to become an articulated, formalized method of solving problems that can be widely used in business—and in civil society. Design’s focus on observing consumer/patient/student—human behavior, it’s emphasis on iteration and speed, its ability to construct, not destruct, its search for new options and opportunities, its ability to connect to powerful emotions, its optimism, made converts out of tough CEOs.

What’s the last institutional, organizational, or cultural shift you can think of in schools? The last one that worked well? Contrast that with the distance we’ve traveled moving from Frederick Taylor to Fred Brooks to Bruce Nussbaum. And those are just three data from potentially dozens of mainstream shifts in corporate culture.

Understanding this inertia is essential changing education; it is far more important than having the answers to how to educate. The explicit solution isn’t the important part. Conflating the inertia of schools with the subtlety of education is a mistake made far too often. The map is not the territory, and even lively debates implicitly constrained by mistaking school for education¹ are a recipe for obsolescence.

I owe this ever-useful recognition and articulation of a common, frightening intellectual climate to Noam Chomsky’s “We Own the World”:

Democratic societies use a different method: they don’t articulate the party line. That’s a mistake. What they do is presuppose it, then encourage vigorous debate within the framework of the party line. This serves two purposes. For one thing it gives the impression of a free and open society because, after all, we have lively debate. It also instills a propaganda line that becomes something you presuppose, like the air you breathe.

[↩]

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overheard in 26-139

posted in edumication by Alec on February 27th, 2008 :

G: I took a semester off last year, and it was by far the best thing I ever did. You just learn so much, actually getting out into the world.

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things to look at (february 22nd - february 27th)

posted in links by Alec on February 27th, 2008 :

a few, tasty links (february 22nd - february 27th):¹

If you’re interested, you can access my del.icio.us bookmarks here. [↩]

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self-esteem < confidence < empowerment < security

posted in edumication by Alec on February 25th, 2008 :

This type of constrained-language exercise was way more successful with my analysis of opportunity, right, responsibility, privilege, and duty. But, this post has been sitting in the pipeline for weeks, clogged. It’s not clear if there’s a quick wrap-up to this, and I’m concerned that this conceit is weak. But, here it is. Please, criticism is encouraged!

To return to “Shop Class as Soulcraft”, let’s take a look at a couple of sentences that caught my eye:

The effects of my work were visible for all to see, so my competence was real for others as well; it had a social currency. The well-founded pride of the tradesman is far from the gratuitous “self-esteem” that educators would impart to students, as though by magic.

For quite some time, many have raised reservations about the so-called “culture of praise” that dominates school. Backed up by solid research of psychologists like Carol Dweck and documented in our schools by works like Alfie Kohn’s Punished by Rewards, there is a growing backlash against the prominence of self-esteem in educators’ thinking.

Over the past fifteen years, there has been a trend in the debate on education reform that has shifted the focus from the moral and philosophical to the psychological and political dimensions of education. Use of the language of philosophy and human rights has been supplanted by strategic arguments predicated upon developmental psychology and political currency. The outrage has been at our educational institution’s failure to teach students, not at the manner in which they propose to succeed. Even if the institutions themselves are attacked, their aims are not. This presents a thorny situation for those interested in education reform: it is possible for two people to vehemently want the same changes in schools for [philosophically] diametric reasons, raising the question of conscionable collaboration. Bringing some of this vocabulary back into the discussion has a lot to offer our thinking about “self-esteem.”

Before going further, let me explicitly define self-esteem, confidence, empowerment, and security. Keep in mind that these are artificially constrained definitions, concocted for the purpose of use in this post.

self-esteem: the belief that others think well of you, allowing for you to think well of yourself
confidence: the belief that others should think well of you, that you are entitled to think well of yourself
empowerment: feeling capable in one or more domains
security: faith in one’s value or potential value in all domains

It should be immediately clear that as defined, self-esteem and confidence are fundamentally different creatures than empowerment and security. It is sloppy (but convenient) for me to suggest they are on the same continuum by calling them comparable. In doing so, some may think that it is possible to move up this set of inequalities, from self-esteem to confidence to empowerment to security. I actually think when people try to lay the groundwork for others’ self-esteem and confidence (particularly in children and students), they sabotage their personal development of empowerment and security. As defined, self-esteem and confidence are necessarily determined by an external locus of control 1, and this often ends up meaning that immersion in an environment that [hyper]focuses on these aspects of someone’s life (e.g. school) leads to significant personality shifts supporting and perpetuating a mindset characterized by an external locus of control.

Anecdotally, this is manifest in the close agreement between Carol Dweck’s work and what I see daily at MIT: namely, students who are accustomed to success becoming not only intellectually unadventurous, but extremely insecure and emotionally fragile in the context of the perceived academic abilities and success. For those unfamiliar with Dweck’s work, take a look at the following summary of one of Dweck’s characteristically stark experiments, from a recent feature by Po Bronson in New York Magazine, entitled, “How Not to Talk to Your Kids: The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids”:

Dweck sent four female research assistants into New York fifth-grade classrooms. The researchers would take a single child out of the classroom for a nonverbal IQ test consisting of a series of puzzles—puzzles easy enough that all the children would do fairly well. Once the child finished the test, the researchers told each student his score, then gave him a single line of praise. Randomly divided into groups, some were praised for their intelligence. They were told, “You must be smart at this.” Other students were praised for their effort: “You must have worked really hard.” […]

Then the students were given a choice of test for the second round. One choice was a test that would be more difficult than the first, but the researchers told the kids that they’d learn a lot from attempting the puzzles. The other choice, Dweck’s team explained, was an easy test, just like the first. Of those praised for their effort, 90 percent chose the harder set of puzzles. Of those praised for their intelligence, a majority chose the easy test. The “smart” kids took the cop-out. […]

In a subsequent round, none of the fifth-graders had a choice. The test was difficult, designed for kids two years ahead of their grade level. Predictably, everyone failed. But again, the two groups of children, divided at random at the study’s start, responded differently. Those praised for their effort on the first test assumed they simply hadn’t focused hard enough on this test. “They got very involved, willing to try every solution to the puzzles,” Dweck recalled. “Many of them remarked, unprovoked, ‘This is my favorite test.’ ” Not so for those praised for their smarts. They assumed their failure was evidence that they weren’t really smart at all. “Just watching them, you could see the strain. They were sweating and miserable.”

Having artificially induced a round of failure, Dweck’s researchers then gave all the fifth-graders a final round of tests that were engineered to be as easy as the first round. Those who had been praised for their effort significantly improved on their first score—by about 30 percent. Those who’d been told they were smart did worse than they had at the very beginning—by about 20 percent.

These habits of mind are common in MIT’s undergraduate population. From strategic class-shopping to fabricating personal and family problems so that Student Support Services can write a note to get an extension on a problem set or a rain-check on a test, MIT undergraduates are heavily emotionally invested in their academic and mental self-image.

This is not to say that the small pond/big pond transition does not occur; that is, many students do come to MIT and find that they are no longer at the top of their class, and have difficulty dealing with this. Consider the Facebook group, I am Sorry For Taking a Spot at MIT That Belongs To Someone Else:

Did you ever get the feeling that after looking at your test scores, the professors wonder why or how you got into MIT in the first place?
Did you ever feel like you took a spot here at MIT that should have gone to someone better qualified?
This is the group for you.

Despite this, and despite many MIT students’ pathological habit of intellectual self-deprecation, most MIT students are extremely fragile creatures when it comes to admitting that they don’t know something. Recently, I ran a discussion seminar addressing a number of issues in education. During one of the discussions a seminar attendee (and successful, straight-A student) commented that one of the hardest parts of taking back her intellectual autonomy from school was relearning how to achieve validation without teachers and grades. Even when the work wasn’t particularly interesting, there remained a significant pressure to please and excel, even within a framework she explicitly acknowledged as broken and perverse!

Consider the following excerpt from an article written for the MIT Faculty Newsletter by recently-retired Dean of Admissions of MIT, Marilee Jones, entitled, “New Kids on the Block”:

[MIT students] need praise and positive feedback. At MIT, we put too much stock in perspiration and not enough in inspiration. Because we think analytically for living, it is often hard to keep that skill, designed for the world of ides, from spilling into our social discourse. We can inadvertently become critical of ourselves and others. These students serve to remind us that we adults hold a special responsibility to encourage these future leaders of the world with words of kindness as we teach them the ropes.

I disagree with Jones’s diagnosis of why praise and encouragement are often absent from education,² but more pertinently, it is dangerous to meet a perceived need for praise with praise. A steady of diet of praise can preclude the development of empowerment and security, as we've defined them.

While I'll postpone a fuller discussion of Jones's article, I think that working with these narrow definitions of self-esteem, confidence, empowerment, and security gives us a chance to work out in which direction we want to proceed when faced with school's various perversions of self-image.

Essentially, the idea behind locus of control is to make relevant the perceived seat of power in a situation. The most common contradistinction made is between situation or personalities that tend to see external versus internal loci of control, meaning that someone will feel as though events or emotions are outside of their control. As an element in the social theory of personality and learning, the idea has figured prominently in discussions of motivation qua reinforcement. For an example of the concepts' use in thinking about the education of children, take a look at this paper [↩]
It's a conveniently flattering reason: "We habitually fail to give students praise because we're too rational." It's a line of reasoning that caters to the strange mix of expertise and arrogance that can accompany identifying as a "smart person." More to the point, this would imply that the personalities of faculty and staff differ fundamentally from those of students. I see no reason to predict this disparity; furthermore, my own experience does not support this explanation. But, this is irrelevant to our purposes. [↩]

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dopplr doesn’t know where gerlach, nv is

posted in narrative, slush by Alec on February 24th, 2008 :

But it does know where Black Rock City is. What’s Dopplr?

Dopplr lets you share your travel plans privately with a group of friends and colleagues whom you have chosen. It then tells you when people you know will be in the same cities. It also reminds you of people who live in the places you’re planning to visit.

So, I was putting in my trip out to Nevada this year for Burning Man, and when I tried to enter, “Gerlach, NV,” Dopplr gave me the following:

If you can’t see the image¹ , Dopplr said, “We can’t find exactly what you typed [Gerlach, NV] but we believe this may be nearby: Black Rock City, NV, United States.”

Notably, Black Rock City is:

an ephemeral town that exists for only one week each year, during Burning Man, a radical arts festival.

On a sidenote, if you’re interested, you can sign up for Dopplr and “follow” me here.

On another sidenote, I’m back on the [blogging] ~~band~~wagon.²

Available here on my photostream. And if you really can’t see the image — that is, if you’re having technical difficulties — drop me a line. [↩]
Update: I suppose bandwagon is pretty accurate, too [↩]

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