2008 June | stimulant - changing things around. . .

a new tag: weeklies

posted in slush by Alec on June 30th, 2008 :

As I said earlier, I’ll be declaring weekly a topic that I’ll spend that week focusing on, hopefully culminating in something human-readable, not simply obtuse.

The posts defining the coming week’s focus will be tagged weeklies¹.

Yes, until I put in a good interface to the tags, you’ll need to type out http://aresnick.mit.edu/blog/tags/weeklies. [↩]

let me know what you think, there are no comments [yet!]

this week: defining progress

posted in economics by Alec on June 30th, 2008 :

Progress is the problem

Illich was the first to point out to me the potentially toxic nature of the idea[l] of “progress.” And I have yet to come up with a satisfactory outlook on how to couch progress in a consistent, empowering, and safe way. I don’t want an asymptotic vision of progress that requires relinquishing our desire for scientific, technological, and artistic¹ development: while it’s clear that people should have the option of refusing the material trappings of progress to live alongside Walden Pond, it is also clear that I do not want to approach social engineering with that as a unifying vision.

I want a vision of progress that provides for its material trappings while stripping away its psychological baggage. This will be the topic I’ll explore this week,², but a provisional explanation follows.

What’s wrong with the world?

As I’ve tried to understand the overarching structure of those factors which make the world shittier, the need for a good definition of progress has appeared increasingly frequently.

If you consider the world’s problems, you can start backing out causes. Our judicial system is partly responsible for exacerbating many of society’s problems, ranging from drug crimes to corporate corruption. While fighting each problem is worthwhile, you are treating symptoms, not curing a disease.

As I trace the causes of the problems I see back further and further, I reach a relatively independent set of broken systems. “Independent” does not mean that they do not affect one another; it simply means they do not require one another. The judicial system is one example: even if the law affects our education system through its support for a litigious society, the law does not require schools to exist and botch other issues. Our approach to health care is another independent system. You could imagine compiling a list of these root problems, and then begin thinking about how to address them.

I’ve found that the several of the first-order solutions I dream up to these problems share a possible design defect: it is not clear to me why the current problems would not simply reappear, mediated by market pressures.

An example

To make this problem concrete, let’s consider consumerism and materialism. These words’ definitions are diluted; so, I want to begin our discussion with a constrained definition of consumerism: the placement of enough spiritual and emotional weight on the consumption of goods and services that the act of consumption and the products consumed become the primary modes to achieve “happiness.”

Now, even that definition suffers for a lack of precision — “happiness” is a slippery word — but it should be sufficient for our purposes. What if we break down consumerism into its constituents: what do people spend their money on? Food, housing, consumer electronics, entertainment media, appearance accouterments (clothing, makeup), etc. Each one of these pillars, holding up consumerism, seems like the right scale for a DIY revolution: it is on this scale that the technical concerns of making a set of activities and goods DIY-approachable converge. Furthermore — and perhaps, more importantly — it is on a scale at which social concerns also converge. If you wanted to popularize a set of tools and ideas in the DIY food and DIY science domains, you would suffer from a muddled message. The technical concerns involved in knocking down these pillars are straightforward. The social concerns are far more daunting. It seems that there is a proper scale: where you can both “stay on message” in hawking your solution and confront technical concerns cohesively. Independent of how convincing these broad strokes of a taxonomy are, if you are convinced that such a taxonomy exists, my uncertainty will be understandable.

Why is this a problem?

Division of labor evolved because of the productivity and quality gains it offered. This balkanization continues, with efficiency gains being eked out from further separation of concerns. Unfortunately, we passed long ago the scale of production at which individuals can derive personal satisfaction (a la “Shop Class as Soulcraft”): people often talk about how satisfying and empowering it is to cook one’s own food (much less farm it or make it from scratch). But at this point, we can have microwave dinners delivered to us. At some point along this spectrum of dependence, there is an efficiency sweet spot.

While there are plenty of savings to be made making and fixing things on your own, those savings come from trimming the fat that Main St. has slathered onto our existences by manufacturing demand. Here’s the real question: does DIY philosophy³ have as much of a place in an efficient, sustainable society as I hope?

Returning to the example of food: it is clear that making your own food is less sustainable than agribusiness could be (which is to say nothing of the industry’s current sins). What does this mean for where someone interested in revolutionizing how we approach food production and consumption should aim?

Assume DIY farming becomes mainstream. Even if DIY farming is empowering, market pressure will want to divide labor. And I don’t see⁴ how we can then avoid climbing back up the balkanization ladder — or even if there’s a reason to resist that ascent (other than avoiding our current situation).

No answers, yet

This specific example contains the seed of my problem: I don’t know how to reconcile my proclivity for DIY, decentralized solutions with market pressures. And this is why defining progress becomes important, and tricky. If we accept inefficiency, then this question is moot. Personally, as I said at the beginning of this post, I’m ambivalent. How do you reconcile a powerful desire for technological, scientific, and artistic development and exploration with an acceptable inefficiency?

I’ve painted an incomplete picture of these concerns, and as it stands, this concern doesn’t have any legs. Unfortunately, it will sprout some as the week goes on. But, please don’t let that prevent you from offering feedback of any sort!

And whatever modes you can fathom [↩]
See this post for more information on my writing schedule. [↩]
And yes, this is a poor phrase for a broad idea. I consistently have trouble characterizing this community — suggestions welcome! [↩]
Note that by “see” I really mean “imagine how you could guarantee:” I’m not suggesting that these enormously complicated systems will play out as I guess they will, but I think I can make statements about what seems like a bad possibility [↩]

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a new policy

posted in sysadmin by Alec on June 30th, 2008 :

So, Nagle made the point recently that I’m not always as clear as I could be on this blog. This blog serves several purposes, for me. I write to figure things out; I write to figure out how to communicate well; I write to avoid forgetting; etc. So, I’m going to set expectations a bit better: each week, I’ll start the week by declaring the question or issue I’ll be investigating in the following week. [At least] once weekly, I’ll invest significant effort into writing something coherent, cohesive, and approachable: a post where I focus on communicating ideas well to others. Outside of this, other posts during the week will be building up to that post, fleshing out pieces of the ideas, but not necessarily in a publicly-palatable way. Of course, this doesn’t mean that I’ll be writing about one topic, weekly. But it does mean that I’ll try to limit it to one difficult topic, weekly.

I’ve been looking for some way to give my thinking some schedule and structure, and this seems like a good opportunity. There is one other lesson here: I’m hungry for feedback, and I’m always happy to hear suggestions or complaints. Don’t hesitate to let me know.

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things to look at (June 26th - June 29th)

posted in links by Alec on June 29th, 2008 :

a few, tasty links
(June 26th - June 29th):¹

(more…)

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

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the line between action and reaction

posted in edumication, reform by Alec on June 27th, 2008 :

Definitions

So, I recently hinted at the ways in which blame, power, responsibility, and guilt inform our ideas about social reform when it comes to a minority¹ .

Exploring this requires we constrain our definitions of action and reaction. To do that, let’s [re-]introduce the idea of locus of control.

“Locus of control” simply refers to the degree to which a person feels as though they control themselves and their life. Typically, “internal” and “external” loci are discussed. For the purposes of this discussion, we will soften this definition to yield a spectrum of loci. For our purposes, the locus of control will depend on a mixture of internal and external factors whose ratio changes depending on the context and situation. For instance, someone may feel powerless in the context of their job, but completely confident in romantic relationships.

Our definitions of action and reaction now follow similarly. An act is committed as an “action” to the extent that the locus of control is internal. Conversely, an act is a “reaction” to the extent that the locus of control is external. These definitions are subjective. Whether an act is committed as an “action” is independent of its reception by others. Regardless of this post’s title, I won’t be drawing a line between action and reaction. It is necessary to note, however, that most people think we draw such a line.

We already support such a spectrum in our language. When people say that someone is accountable, at fault, to blame, responsible, behind [an event], or guilty of [something], they choose their language by the moral tincture of their vocabulary (which is in turn parametrized by the perceived locus of control). We can choose very carefully how to couch culpability. And for most people, how we do so is a function of how easily averted we see the circumstances in question. If we feel that we would have acted similarly — if there simply wasn’t enough information, or if it was the lesser of two evils, or there is some other mitigating factor — we see the choice as a product of circumstances, not bad judgment. If we feel that the person’s acts were poorly informed and justified, if we feel that we would have acted differently (i.e. better), we will see the choice and its consequences in personal terms of responsibility (e.g. “They should have known better”). Unfortunately, hindsight and foresight are very different. It is simple (and self-satisfying) to be judgmental in hindsight: we often hear about the need to “walk a mile in someone else’s shoes” precisely because hindsights distorts the projected locus of control It is when this intuition fails us that we approach our personal threshold between internal and external loci. And it is there that you can easily concoct moral gray areas.

The reasons these definitions matter

The idea of responsibility is frequently behind-the-scenes in our thinking: from the judicial system to our personal sense of guilt, the concept is the social manifestation of how we think about causality² .

I’m not going to cover all that ground today. In future posts, I will discuss how this definition controls our approach to social reform generally and education specifically.

For instance, I think that giving people an artificial sense of control is one of the primary strategies employed to motivate work under arbitrary constraints. In social reform, the seed from which all assumptions and tactical decisions grow is precisely the question of to what degree and in what contexts those you’re aiming to help are empowered (or disempowered). As a special case of working on someone else’s behalf, school is shielded by its good intentions, creating the illusion of partial, intellectual autonomy, despite the fact that the learning program instituted by most schools determines to what extent students are intellectually autonomous.

Physical restraint constrains a freedom that is fully developed and knowable (i.e. the freedom to move around, unhindered). Intellectual freedom is significantly muddied by the fact that its full, unhindered exercise requires careful care and practice. Traditional pedagogies actively train against this capacity. As such, even straightforward opportunities for autonomy are routinely perverted.

I’m eager to understand the nature of the hooks school (and more broadly, well-intentioned but incompetent social reform) has in students (and more broadly, those whom the reform aims to help, as well as those who support reform).

Many such duplicities are built into the foundation of the system we’re trying to reform. Figuring out how to discuss and think about responsibility is as important to social reform as a careful conception of causality is to scientific investigation: it is a component fundamental to the phenomena we seek to control and understand.

By this I mean a minority of power, not of number. [↩]
Which is itself a pretty sticky situation [↩]

a penny for your thoughts, there is only 1 comment so far

things to look at (June 24th - June 26th)

posted in links by Alec on June 26th, 2008 :

a few, tasty links (June 24th - June 26th):¹

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

let me know what you think, there are no comments [yet!]

“at least it has an ending”

posted in politics, slush by Alec on June 24th, 2008 :

From Cory Doctorow’s talk at GoogleNYC, talking about his book, Little Brother:

“[…] who discover, after a terrorist attack on the Bay Area, that destroys the Bay Bridge, that in fact that as bad and terrifying a terrorist attack is, it at least has an ending. Whereas the police response to a terrorist attack has no graceful ending, it continues unbounded, and has a natural inertia that causes it to grow and grow and grow. In the name of security, all things are possible.

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things to look at (June 23rd)

posted in links by Alec on June 23rd, 2008 :

a few, tasty links (June 23rd):¹

My del.icio.us bookmarks are available here. [↩]

let me know what you think, there are no comments [yet!]

sorry for the downtime

posted in sysadmin by Alec on June 23rd, 2008 :

Silly typo after some theme tweaking broke everything.

Site should be back up and running now; let me know if there are any problems.

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two pressure points

posted in economics, politics by Alec on June 23rd, 2008 :

Social reforms involving a minority¹ approach their task with a mixture of two strategies:

Changing the way those in power perceive those whom you seek to help.
Changing the way those whom you seek to help present themselves to those in power.

This is not as subtle a statement as I’ve made it seem² . There is the existing power structure and those who suffer within it. Myriad factors influence the minority’s situation; however, these factors penultimately terminate with how the empowered and disempowered relate. Deciding which tact to pursue is a process frequently fraught with unspoken judgments and assumptions about how self-reliant the minority is or could be. This builds into the foundation of many reform efforts a basic tension between the helpers and the helped.

Consider attempts to address racial inequality in the United States. Affirmative action attempts to force a dissonance between the way those in power see a minority and the way they are treated. Some contingents lash out at such efforts: Bill Cosby caught flak for his [in]famous “Pound Cake” speech, as well as plenty of accolades, split by exactly Rotter’s idea of a locus of control.

And with that, we skirt a linguistic quagmire: the way people differentiate blame, responsibility, guilt, and power. I’d like to sidestep the issue. What’s pertinent is not a careful analysis of causality³ , but an understanding of how people’s perception of the loci of control in a situation determine the character of suggested reforms.

Recent discussion about uncontacted tribes in the Amazon⁴ spurred the realization that deciding why we implement a reform is often a subtle value judgment wrapped up in facile rationalizations. It is taken for granted that the front lines of social reform are along the boundaries of basic, human rights: quality of life, equal representation, etc. But, consider the case of the uncontacted, Amazonian tribe: the rallying cry was to leave them be. Several people suggest that these uncontacted tribes should not be isolated, but at least offered the chance for integration. Ethnocentrism is far more frequently fingered as cause for concern, conflating many issues. For the purposes of this discussion, I just want to point out that if anyone in a city lived in the conditions under which these aborigines live, the call for aid and change would be unanimous. There is no discussion of winding industrialization back to preclude the need for isolation. So, when do we decide that it’s the majority that needs changing, and when do we decide that it’s the minority that needs to change?

The reasons offered supporting the isolation of the tribe range from complaints about the fundamentally toxic nature of the industrial world to claims of cultural terrorism. Underlying these judgments is the assumption that we have the power and right to make this decision for the people involved. And it is this thread that connects the discussion of uncontacted tribes in the Amazon to most attempts at social reform. While completely distributed social reform is nominally possible⁵ , historically reform has comprised the reformers, those on whose behalf reformers work, and everyone else. Even if the reformers and their beneficiaries are one and the same, there is rarely explicit approval of reform efforts⁶.

The fact that reform necessarily involves varying degrees of participation (and as such, varying degrees of control and power) means that those who are more active implicitly make decisions for those who are not. When society at large decides a reform is “necessary,” it is frequently cast in a disempowering light: the needy well, need us to help. And we know best how to do it. But history doesn’t bear that confidence out (from welfare to affirmative action, reforms begun at large scales, under the public eye, by an institution as a whole, founder more frequently than attempts at self-regulation).

Looking over historical reform efforts, it is clear that reformers’ decision to focus on the majority or the minority is consistently tinged by moral judgment. Deciding at whose feet to place blame is a different task than deciding who is best equipped to change the situation, but it is a conflation we often make. And it’s not clear to me that we can generalize the answer to that question: the “give a man a fish” line of thinking oversimplifies the situation. Figuring this out is at the core of many of my questions: while it is clear that empowerment is the long-term goal, can we say anything about the extent to which the ends can justify the means? Even this language is misleading — the effects of the means with which a group is empowered is coupled more strongly to the social norms surrounding those means than the means themselves. More concretely: the disempowering elements of welfare or affirmative action are not money or college admission, respectively. The set of social norms surrounding each are what we’re really interested in engineering. How can we think about how strongly means are coupled to the norms they evoke? What are tools for controlling social norms? Doesn’t this process have exactly those problems I’ve touched on already?

Confusion abounds. At the core of the various metrics we have used to decide reform’s necessity is the idea of progress. And I suspect that the complexity of resolving that definition (well-documented by Illich) is largely responsible for this confusion (even without considering the emotional and philosophical complexity of charity). There’s a lot more to say about this, but I’d like to do it in a different — less abstract — context, which will be provided by forthcoming posts. Stay tuned.

By minority I don’t mean minority in number, but in power. e.g. Women. Or students. [↩]
Despite this, I’ve found it increasingly helpful to think in these terms. It seems that I’m after a cause-agnostic language for thinking about reform. It’s not clear that generalization is helpful, but I’ve made unanticipated — and unfortunately, undocumented — progress in classifying mistakes made in social reform. And I remain convinced that successful social reform is less a matter of doing things well than a matter of not making predecessors’ mistakes. [↩]
What we even mean by that in social situations is unclear. [↩]
UPDATED 062408: They weren’t lost. [↩]
I have no good examples, and would be extremely interested in hearing about some. [↩]
Save highly structured efforts that occur in contexts like a union. [↩]

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stimulant

changing things around. . .

a new tag: weeklies

this week: defining progress

Progress is the problem

What’s wrong with the world?

An example

Why is this a problem?

No answers, yet

a new policy

things to look at (June 26th - June 29th)

the line between action and reaction

Definitions

The reasons these definitions matter

things to look at (June 24th - June 26th)

“at least it has an ending”

things to look at (June 23rd)

sorry for the downtime

two pressure points

whoami

static

find old things