Eccentric Eclectica

Alex Cirillo Jr. at the Citizen League

2009-05-02T11:20:04Z

I shuffled off to an early morning Citizens League meeting on Thursday to hear Alex Cirillo Jr., vice president of community relations at 3M, talk about the Principles of Innovation. I went because I’ve been interested in this topic for at least ten years. I was also interested in seeing what the Citizens League would be like.

Cirillo began the session with a short 15 minute presentation, a time limit he admirably fulfilled. In that 15 minutes he gave us a good bit of information to think about. He defined innovation as “the use of knowledge to achieve an output that is new or novel, a pragmatic result.” To have an impact it must be transformational - large in scale and important in depth.

The key to innovation in an organization is mindset. “It is driven by a system of principles and practices which support and encourage the coupling of systems and creativity to solve a problem.” 3M accomplishes this through corporate values and social connection. Networks and the interfaces between groups are important roots for innovation.

His seven principles for innovation are:

Just because you can doesn’t mean that you should! The world doesn’t need a swiss army couch, even if it is possible. Timing and the need for an outlet are as important to successful innovation as raw creativity.
Resign yourself to the fact that there is no such thing as an LTQF (Long Term Quick Fix). This is where non-linearity and lack of control come in. See Glenda Eoyang on complexity
Be multilingual. Need to be diverse and bring a lot of people into the conversation. More perspectives means more success.
Be clear about the context in which you are working. Keep perspective. Situational awareness is needed to see what kind of innovations are needed.
Know when to think in black and white and when to think in color. More diversity.
The thing you should work hardest at is building confidence in your people. Be a teacher. Education and culture are important.
Be personally committed to making yourself and those around you excited about innovating. Be excited.

After the presentation we took twenty minutes to talk about the most important transformation needed in Minnesota and the people that should be at the table to talk about it?

My group talked about two major themes: productivity and sustainability. Who will be the workers of the future? How are they going to support us and the economy? Which naturally led to a discussion on education. I cautioned that focusing on education as a young person’s activity is foolish. We need to keep our eye on productivity for everyone, for all ages. Education is important but part of the problem is that education is built for a business world built on hierarchy. If we don’t change the expectations of the business world while we change education then our efforts in education may be moot.

Some of the people we wanted to invite to the table were young people, scientists, poets, grandmothers, engineers, designers, futurists, single mothers.

I asked where we should convene these meetings and we mostly agreed that all organizations need to open up, go out, and get diversity?

We reconvened as a large group and shared our ideas from the table conversations. I thought the whole event was quite well-done. They stuck to the schedule and accomplished a lot.

The question is what impact this will have. Most of the people at the event were self-selected because they were already members of the Citizens League. Going forward will require more and different people.

Finally Cirillo reminded us that “innovation is a contact sport.” We need to get out there and talk to people in order for it to work.

Cross-posted at TES Consulting, here.

April 2009 Recap

2009-04-30T13:23:46Z

Let’s see what’s been on my mind for April 2009

On education. Two interesting articles on stress and the purpose of art education lead me to write about Educational Responses to Stress - Emotion and Arts
A long essay by Bruce Western on reentry to society by former prisoners leads to Prisons and Punishment in America
More thoughts on talent and justice: Talent, Work, and Justice
Our crazy perception of time makes me ask Just How Long Ago Was the Civil War?, especially after an NPR report on a recently returned book stolen during the civil war. I got a link from Bob Collins at Minnesota Public Radio for this one.
Business, We’re Swimming In It includes one of the funniest parts of the movie Brazil and some thoughts about the elephant in the room at most conversations about change: the institutions we spend most of our lives in - business.

Business, We're Swimming In It

2009-04-17T18:21:51Z

I’m an occasional visitor to the local Socrate’s Cafe discussion group. Most of the time it frustrates me. It’s predominantly a white, middle-class group that never wants to talk about business or personal experiences with culture. The talk always returns to politics - usually national. And vague reifications about this culture does x, when it should be doing y.

Business is one of my ongoing obsessions that I wish more people would think about in a serious way. But public discussions focus on politics and commercial culture instead of the everyday organizational forms in which we all spend most of our days.

I was reading a commencement speech by David Foster Wallace which reminded me of the old adage that the fish never knows its swimming in water.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

“This is water.”

“This is water.”

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.

He continues:

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and [unintelligible — sounds like “displayal”]. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

A scene from Brazil sums it up nicely.

Just How Long Ago Was the Civil War?

2009-04-17T00:37:45Z

I heard a story on All Things Considered this afternoon about a book that was returned to Washington and Lee University in Virginia, 145 years after it was stolen. Let’s see 2009-145 = 1864. That’s nearing the end of the American Civil War. The Battle of Gettysburg took place July 1-3 of 1863. The South surrendered at Appomattox on April 9, 1865. Washington and Lee University is located in Lexington, VA near the western border of Virginia.

What impressed me about the story was that the book had been in the same family for three generations. The grandson of the Union soldier who stole the book in 1864 died recently and gave the book to a friend who returned it to the library. The reporter didn’t mention how recently the grandson had died but it’s still amazes me that the Civil War could be so close in someone’s memory.

Perhaps this is part of the reason why grudges, once they get started, can last so long. Suppose that Union soldier told his grandson to hate or distrust the South. One hundred plus years later and the hatred might still be tended.

It also reminds me of an extended figure used by Alvin Toffler at the start of "Future Shock". I remember him estimating that there were only 800 generations of human civilization between the present and the invention of agriculture. That number isn’t very large but the changes that have occurred are immense.

It’s interesting how shifting the units of measurement changes our perceptions of distance. So 2000 years, 20 centuries, and 2 millenia are all the same length of time but each of them connotes or feels slightly different. If a generation last 30 years then there are 66 generations between now and the beginning of the Christian era.

When you get beyond human scale it is even more difficult to understand units. When reading professional literature in astronomy or geology you often see references to gigayears - a billion years - and myr for millions of years. Wikipedia says the preferred ISO 31-1 usage is Ma for a mega annum.

The more you dig into it the more complicated the business of standards becomes. NIST - the National Institute of Standards - has an entire book on the conventions used in the international system of units.

Here is what it says about the basic unit of time - the second:

The unit of time, the second, was at one time considered to be the fraction 1/86 400 of the mean solar day. The exact definition of “mean solar day” was left to the astronomers. However measurements showed that irregularities in the rotation of the Earth made this an unsatisfactory definition. In order to define the unit of time more precisely, the 11th CGPM (1960, Resolution 9; CR, 86) adopted a definition given by the International Astronomical Union based on the tropical year 1900. Experimental work, however, had already shown that an atomic standard of time, based on a transition between two energy levels of an atom or a molecule, could be realized and reproduced much more accurately. Considering that a very precise definition of the unit of time is indispensable for science and technology, the 13th CGPM (1967/68, Resolution 1; CR, 103 and Metrologia, 1968, 4, 43) replaced the definition of the second by the following:

The second is the duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom.

It follows that the hyperfine splitting in the ground state of the cesium 133 atom is exactly 9 192 631 770 hertz, ν(133Cs)hfs = 9 192 631 770 Hz.

At its 1997 meeting the CIPM affirmed that: This definition refers to a cesium atom at rest at a temperature of 0 K. This note was intended to make it clear that the definition of the SI second is based on a cesium atom unperturbed by black body radiation, that is, in an environment whose thermodynamic temperature is 0 K. The frequencies of all primary frequency standards should therefore be corrected for the shift due to ambient radiation, as stated at the meeting of the Consultative Committee for Time and Frequency in 1999.

Prisons and Punishment in America

2009-04-14T20:07:50Z

I’m not sure why this particular issue has begun to obsess me over the past few months. I think it’s connected to my wastage of talent that pervades the world and the crazy belief that poverty teaches us lessons.

Punishment is also an American obsession. In Five Myths about prison growth John Pfaff offers a number of statistics and reports that he says prove that long sentences, low-level drug offenders, and technical parole violations have no effect on prison growth. Those are the first three myths he deals with. The fifth myth is that incarceration growth has not decreased crime. Go to Slate and read through his article and the links if you’re interested.

I’m really interested in his fourth myth, though, because I think it goes to the heart of the debate. Pfaff writes:

Myth No. 4: In the past three decades, we’ve newly diverged from the rest of the world on punishment. Given that our incarceration rate before the mid-1970s is one-seventh the rate of today, it is easy to think that we’re suddenly acting like outliers. But the fact is that American views on punishment have been harsher than Europe’s since the birth of this country (although politicians may overestimate the extent to which they must be tough on crime to win elections). More strikingly, if we look back historically at the lockup rate for mental hospitals as well as prisons, we have only just now returned to the combined rates for both kinds of incarceration in the 1950s. In other words, we’re not locking up a greater percentage of the population so much as locking people up in prisons rather than mental hospitals. Viewed through this lens, what seems remarkable is not the current era of mass incarceration but the 1960s and ’70s, during which we emptied the hospitals without filling the prisons. Any reform agenda that does not acknowledge the ingrained nature of our punitive impulses will surely fail.

He basically concedes the argument that America is a more punitive culture than Europe or anywhere else in the world. From that point of view he concludes that nothing can be done to improve the situation without running up against the American penchant for revenge and punishment.

On the other side of the issue there is an article from last year by Bruce Western on Reentry after prison. Western argues that there are three fallacies that have led to mass imprisonment in America.

An us-versus-them mentality. “For tough-on-crime advocates, the innocent majority is victimized by a class of predatory criminals, and the prison works to separate us from them. The truth is that the criminals live among us as our young fathers, brothers, and sons. Drug use, fighting, theft, and disorderly conduct are behavioral staples of male youth.”
The fallacy of personal defect. “Tough-on-crime politics disdains the criminology of root causes and traces crime not to poverty and unemployment but to the moral failures of individuals. Refusing to resist temptation or defer gratification, the offender lacks empathy and affect, lacks human connection, and is thus less human than the rest of us. The diagnosis of defective character points to immutable criminality, stoking cynicism for rehabilitative efforts and justifying the mission of semi-permanent incapacitation. The folk theory of immutable criminality permits the veiled association of crime with race in political talk.”
And the free-market uber alles. “The free market fallacy sees the welfare state as pampering the criminal class and building expectations of something for nothing. Anti-poverty programs were trimmed throughout the 1970s and ’80s, and poor young men largely fell through the diminished safety net that remained. For free marketeers, the question was simply whether or not to spend public money on the poor—they did not anticipate that idle young men present a social problem. Without school, work, or military service, these poor young men were left on the street-corner, sometimes acting disorderly and often fuelling fears of crime. We may have skimped on welfare, but we paid anyway, splurging on police and prisons.”

The problem here is that Pfaff isn’t even engaging the arguments made by Western. Pfaff says that it is a myth that America recently became more punitive but concedes that America has locked up more people than other cultures for much of the twentieth century. Pfaff dismisses prison reform by saying that reform won’t work because of our culture. But what if we change the culture?

Educational Responses to Stress - Emotion and Arts

2009-04-08T00:22:37Z

I mentioned a recent study about stress and poverty earlier today. In summary, there appears to be a link between allostatic load (a psychological and physiological measure of stress) and average performance with working memory tests.

So how could we respond to this?

Drake Bennett has a story at the Boston Globe about teaching emotional intelligence. Since Daniel Goleman published Emotional Intelligence in 1995 there has been a growing chorus of educational researchers and reformers calling for emotional education. To me these seem like two things that were meant to come together. If stress is partly about managing emotion then learning how to do that better seems like it would be a very good thing.

The RULER curriculum is tailored to different age groups, but in general it involves dozens of sessions: workshops in which students discuss feelings they are having or interview each other about their emotions, role-playing exercises in which they act out different emotions or are presented with emotionally charged situations, then have to work through how to defuse them. There is an emphasis on learning a richer vocabulary to describe emotions, the idea being that students better able to express how they feel will be both more conscious of their feelings and less likely to be misunderstood by others. And there are Ekman-like courses in basic facial expression recognition - many kids, Brackett says, confuse surprise and fear.

One of the central tools of Brackett’s system is something he calls the “mood meter,” a 2-by-2 chart on which kids can plot their subjective state along with their energy level. Brackett argues that doing so allows kids to better understand what they’re feeling and even why. High energy and positive is excited, low energy and positive is relaxed; low energy and negative is sad or depressed, high energy and negative is agitated or angry. A more fine-grained, systematic understanding about what emotions are, Brackett argues, is a key step in learning how to anticipate and control them.

Brackett and his colleagues have started a consulting firm on Emotionally Intelligent Schools

Over at Greater Good magazine Karin Evans has an article on Arts and Smarts. Is there a connection between intelligence and art education? The studies aren’t ironclad but they do seem suggestive of a positive connection between the two.

I particularly liked the following quote from a book called Studio Thinking.

Working in high school art classes, they found that arts programs teach a specific set of thinking skills rarely addressed elsewhere in the school curriculum—what they call “studio habits of mind.” One key habit was “learning to engage and persist,” meaning that the arts teach students how to learn from mistakes and press ahead, how to commit and follow through. “Students need to find problems of interest and work with them deeply over sustained periods of time,” write Hetland and Winner.

"Studio Thinking: The Real Benefits of Visual Arts Education" (Lois Hetland, Ellen Winner, Shirley Veenema, Kimberly M. Sheridan)

Talent, Work, and Justice

2009-04-07T15:08:56Z

A few weeks ago I wrote a bit about the immense amount of talent that gets wasted or ignored in the world today. I claimed that the problem was based on a winner-take-all morality that has infused Western society. CEO salaries are just the most recent example. I think any argument that can be made against oversize CEO salaries can also be made against celebrity salaries in sports or entertainment.

A few days ago I came across this news item on employers squandering the talents of workers at the Work Foundation.

So far in this recession employers have been reluctant to lose the skills, talents and experience of their workforces. Yet at the same time they seem to be failing to make the most of them. Many people could be doing more, but are denied the chance to do so.

It’s nice to have some data and surveys to back up my intuition.

But it’s not just a matter of squandering talent. There’s also a matter of justice. Income disparities are not only a result of a winner-take-all society they also feedback into the system and cause further problems. Over the last 40 years the rich have gotten richer and have been on the hunt for a place to invest their money. They put it into the financial sector and that sector of the economy was overwhelmed and forced to chase after too many bad investments just to keep up. A point Helena Cobban makes at Just World News.

But the richest people and the hundreds of thousands somewhat less rich, could not invest the money themselves. They needed intermediaries, the financial sector. Overwhelmed with such an amount of funds, and short of good opportunities to invest the capital, as well as enticed by large fees attending each transaction, the financial sector became more and more reckless, basically throwing money at anyone who would take it. Eventually, as we know, the bubble exploded.

Recent research about stress and poverty reaffirms the link between opportunity and wasting talent. Money may not be the only way to intervene but it is important.

So what do we do about all this?

There are a lot of imbalances that we need to work out and they cover a lot of different scales.

At a world level we need to work on the distribution of resources between countries. America cannot be the consumer of last resort. Other countries need to take up the slack.
But replicating Western consumer culture will hurt as much as help. So at the national level we need to prioritize differently. Perhaps a consumption tax or a carbon tax will help America move forward.
At a community level we need to rethink work and corporations. The Work Foundation hints at this when it calls for greater flexibility for knowledge workers. Coworking could also help with this.
At an individual level we need to live humbly. For me this is easy, perhaps too easy, because of my family and my attitude. For now I’ll declare my solidarity with my friends over at Not An Employee

Sources for this post: Jack Vinson and Jon Husband

March 2009 Recap

2009-04-01T05:59:59Z

March 2009 blogging themes.

Money, wealth, morality. Borrow and Leverage, different languages of debt among the rich, the government and individuals; Poverty is Good for You, conservative scolds telling people that struggles, including poverty or a recession, are really good for you; Parables of Global Talent, a reaction to the entries for the “best job in the world” on an Australian barrier reef.
Education. Profesionalizing Academia and Breaking Bad, a television series and the revolt of the managerial class; Saving Education - the Bill Gates Way, Bill Gates is interested in education but he’s just another person essentializing talent over social structure.
Creativity and Complexity. Twyla Tharp on Creative Fears, notes from her book The Creative Habit; Glenda Eoyang on Human System Dynamics, notes from her presentation at Minnesota Independent Scholars Forum.
Philosophy. Bias and Naive Mathematics, is mathematics more certain than philosophy? Some Philosophical Methods, different ways to do philosophy.
Housecleaning. Miscellaneous notes, March 2009 reading list.

Borrow and Leverage - The Language of Money

2009-03-31T18:13:10Z

Listen to the way rich people and poor people describe the same thing and you will start to understand some of the divides in this country. The financial apocalypse has brought different ways of speaking to the forefront of our media and our attention.

There are many examples of linguistic difference between rich and poor. For example consider the way we use the words “leverage” and “borrow.” Let’s go the dictionary first to read the definitions.

Borrow: to take or obtain with the promise to return the same or an equivalent: Our neighbor borrowed my lawn mower.

Leverage: the use of a small initial investment, credit, or borrowed funds to gain a very high return in relation to one’s investment, to control a much larger investment, or to reduce one’s own liability for any loss.

To find out how the word is used I looked up both using ProQuest Newstand. I limited the results to the Star Tribune newspaper over the last 30 days.

I got 9 results for leverage. Here are two examples related to money.

“In an interview Monday, Cooper said the demands of TARP began to conflict with the government’s own policies. For instance, the federal government was pressuring banks to use the funds as leverage to make more loans and to buy other banks. But such moves would reduce a bank’s tangible common equity, which has become a major focus of bank regulators and is considered a key measure of bank health.” — Star Tribune March 3, p. D1
“Investment banks “raced like lemmings over the cliff by abandoning the usual principles of sound risk management both by increasing their leverage dramatically after 2004 and abandoning diversification in pursuit of obsessive focus on high-profit securitizations.” — Star Tribune, March 17 p. D1

Notice the actors in these reports are banks, not people. Banks leverage, people don’t.

Next I looked up borrow in the same paper and same time frame. Again there were 9 results. Here are three money related examples.

“We help (customers) get on a plan for their financial success in order to buy (insurance and investments) through Thrivent in the future,” she said. Harvey’s top idea for employed folks without emergency savings: Open up a line of credit just in case. “It’s always easier to borrow money when you don’t need it. When you’re unemployed, there’s not a loan out there for you,” she said. — Star Tribune, March 15, pD3
Toby Madden, a regional economist with the Federal Reserve Bank in Minneapolis, said the seeds of the rising default rate were sown earlier in the decade when credit eased so people could borrow more. — Star Tribune, March 8, p D1
Last week, Gov. Tim Pawlenty tossed another $27 million on the table in his bid to boost K-12 spending about 2 percent in 2010-11, even in the face of a steep, recession-driven revenue slide. He’s willing to gamble with the state’s credit rating and borrow against future state revenues to do it. He said he’s also willing to up his K-12 ante another 2.8 percent in 2012-13, while freezing every other item in the state budget at his recommended 2010 level. — Star Tribune, Mach 22, p OP-1

Individuals and governments borrow, not banks.

Leverage connotes power and movement. The dictionary defines leverage as “power or ability to act or to influence people, events, decisions, etc.” before it mentions money. Borrowing is a sign of weakness, a lack that needs to be filled, which creates an obligation to repay. Borrowers repay their loans. What do leveragers do?

People and governments borrow, which puts all of us at risk. Think about the national debt discussion. I haven’t heard anyone tell us that we need to leverage our wonder-working American economy in order to save our asses from disaster. Instead the fiscal scolds tell us not to “borrow from our kids.” Strange that these people didn’t seem to have any complaints about leveraging the financial power of Wall Street.

Wall Street gets the linguistic benefit while people and government get the linguistic punishment. Haven’t we heard this tune before?

Clearing Out the Drafts: Miscellanea

2009-03-30T18:49:48Z

A podcast episode of Sound Opinions asked “What great bands had only one sound that they used again and again to good effect?”

Examples from the show:

AC/DC
Motorhead
Ramones
Stereolab
Rage Against the Machine
Cocteau Twins
Smiths
Creedence Clearwater Revival
Strokes
Run-DMC
Jesus and Mary Chain
Beirut
Galaxie 500
Jesus Lizard

Reminds me of an old question about the difference between creativity and originality. Is it possible to be creative without being original?

“Creativity may bloom but that does not mean it will be seen or appreciated by all.” Quote noted by Jon Husband at Wirearchy

I went looking for a quote from Bertrand Russell about the inverse correlation between certainty and intelligence but failed to find it. So I decided to post these instead.

“Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.”

“In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying.”

“The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.”

My own penchant to listen to other people instead of talking often fails in today’s world when the key to getting attention is to talk, a lot.

Barbara Kellerman promoting her new book Followership on Invisible Hand podcast.

She describes five levels of participation

isolates — who are unconnected to the group
bystanders — watch but don’t participate
participants — actors in the group, but little emotional investment
activists — acting and emotionally dedicated
diehards — may be the same as activists??

March 2009 Reading List

2009-03-30T16:04:44Z

Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons Rereading after seeing previews for the upcoming movie. Movie looks good. Book is still pretty good as well.
Choices, by Michael D. Resnik Primer on decision theory, probability, and game theory from a philosopher’s point of view. Good stuff as a reference.
Fashionable Nonsense, Bruce Wilshire Rutger’s philosopher attacks ‘analytic philosophy’ and over-professionalization of philosophy. Not quite clear on what his alternative program would be but he does give some good props to the American pragmatists and hints at a more phenomenological point of view.
Renewing Philosophy, by Hilary Putnam Some interesting hints about Wittgenstein and religion in the end chapters. Again not giving it enough time to find out what kind of renewal for which he wishes. Read a bit more and the book feels scattered, a number of lectures without connecting theme that I can detect.
On the History of Film Style, David Bordwell Basic outline of how the idea of film style has changed over time. Starting with the early standard picture which told how film became a medium and achieved it’s greatest visual synthesis in the silent era before sound brought it back to the staid confines of theatrical metaphors.
Born Standing Up, by Steve Martin Memoir about Martin’s early career in standup comedy. Quick read, some good bits of time period nostalgia. I hoped for more meat and reflection on how he created his standup comedy but the moments of reflection are slim.
The Family Trade, by Charlie Stross Fun and entertaining story about a young woman who finds she has the ability to walk between alternate worlds. The trait is controlled by the Clan, a group of feudal nobles who run the alternate-Earth society like a medieval fiefdom. She decides to modernize their trade by creating a better business model than mercantilist import/export.
The Powers to Lead, by Joseph S. Nye Brief and cogent book about the sociological research on leadership. Much better than most anecdotal business treatments of this topic - actually wrestles with power on a conceptual level.
A Demon of Our Own Design, by Richard Bookstaber Bookstaber was a quant on Wall Street from the 1980s to the early 2000s and witnesse the expansion of complicated financial instruments. He writes in 2007 that all of them are subject to normal accidents and tight-coupling which threatens to derail the entire financial system.

My favorites of the month were Stross for a rollicking good yarn and the Nye and Bookstaber.

Glenda Eoyang at Minnesota Independent Scholars Forum

2009-03-29T14:21:03Z

Glenda Eoyang from the Human Systems Dynamics Institute presented at the Minnesota Independent Scholars Forum yesterday. She gave a polished presentation on complexity and human systems.

She started by distinguishing two perceptions of time: linear and pragmatic. Linear time is what we usually envision time to be - a straight line from the past into the future. There are a lot of problems with this view and we spent some time talking about them as a group. I thought we got bogged down in this area a bit. Then she introduced pragmatic time that incorporates a multitude of different paths from the past into a multitude of future paths. Getting away from the single line of progress seemed to be the ultimate upshot and was a useful message to promote.

Adaptive action is the core of her work and she summarized a simple three step process to help analyze situations. First, what patterns do you observe? She offered three possible meta-patterns to classify observations: organized, self-organizing, and unorganized. Organized patterns appear familiar, predictable, reducible, replicable, stable, etc. Self-organizing patterns are constantly changing, irreducible, not replicable, emergent, interactive, familiar whole, surprising parts. Unorganized patterns are like a hot gas: constantly surprising, totally ambiguous, unpredictable, and unstable. Reminds me of classifying cellular automata a la Stephen Wolfram whom she no doubt has borrowed some ideas from although she didn’t mention him.

Second, so what does the situation demand? How should we intervene? Again she used the same typology for three types of intervention. If more control and predictability is needed then an organized intervention such as policy, procedures, team building, visioning, clear goals, branding, or six sigma will be appropriate. A more active response prompts self-organizing interventions: increase or decrease control, stand and watch, or jump in and play. Unorganized interventions such as telling stories, collecting histories, gathering data, anxiety containment, relationship building, or enjoying innovation may promote more random exploration.

Third, now what will you do to shift the conditions for self-organizing? You can change the:

Containers that hold the system together until patterns form. Greater organization could come from fewer, stronger, or smaller containers; less organization from more, weaker, and larger.
Differences establish the pattern and build tensions to motivate change. Again organization can be fostered by having fewer, clearer, and smaller differences. The reverse would lead to more, fuzzier, and larger differences.
Exchanges connect agents together within the container and across differences. Tighter or looser exchanges move along the organized/unorganized continuum.

I liked the whole presentation. A lot of good food for thought. The container, differences, and exchanges typology sounded particularly interesting.

I had some questions:

How do you mediate between group and individual perspectives on pragmatic time? The number of histories that need attention grows quickly as the number of group members grows? This led me to thinking about Dunbar’s number and expanding the boundaries of our awareness beyond biological limits. Same for working memory, 7 +/- 2.
I was also reminded of the problems Anthony Giddens raises in The Consequences of Modernity regarding trust and self-reflexivity. Complexity analysis is good but hard to do in conditions of bounded rationality.

Some Philosophical Methods

2009-03-28T12:21:17Z

A limited outline of philosophical methods and history. Being a partial summary from Philosophy’s Second Revolution by D.S. Clarke

Clarke divides philosophy into three eras. Classical, Cartesian, and Linguistic.

The classical Greek philosophy used rational intuition, “a direct apprehension of the basic structure of things,” to understand the world and do philosophy. Rational thought was a direct source of evidence for physics, metaphysics, ethics, etc. The goal was a rational cosmology that explained the world and everything in it.
Introspection. Descartes and his descendants use intuition to understand the world, especially mental concepts. A division between internal and external worlds was reinforced, dualism rises. The natural sciences get the laws of the natural world, philosophy gets the laws of the mind.
Linguistic turn. Pierce rejects intuition and focuses on signs - “The only thought, then, which can possibly cognized is thought in signs.” Philosophy becomes the investigation of language. Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, and others continue this thread through to today.

This is as far as Clarke takes his historical survey.

I’d add some possible new methods/explanations.

Experimental philosophy, building off of the experimental economics tradition.
Social construction. For example definitions of art a la Dickie, Danto, and Eaton.
Complexity. There are hints of this in Hofstadter and Holland, especially for cognition.
Therapeutic — late Wittgenstein.

Poverty is Good For You

2009-03-27T12:21:29Z

I’m struggling to understand and explain a spectrum of opinions about the recession that I see exhibited by conservatives. I have three examples that seem to form a gradient around the idea of self-reliance and group action.

At the extreme is Charles Murray who recently delivered a lecture at the American Enterprise Institute entitled The Europe Syndrome and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism. I found the lecture via a link at Matthew Yglesias weblog.

The central core of Murray’s argument is that happiness requires struggle and that government policies that make happiness easier are fundamentally unfair because they take away the struggle for happiness that we all have a right to. If we don’t work hard for our rewards then our victories will taste sour.

Damon Linker at the New Republic calls this Donner Party Conservatism, a term he borrows from John Holbo.

it refers to the brand of conservative thinking that defends America’s relatively minimal welfare state and anemic economic regulations on the grounds that it’s good for people to have to struggle and suffer to get by — just like those plucky, entrepreneurial pioneers who resorted to cannibalism to avoid starvation while trapped in the Sierra Nevada mountains back in the winter of 1846-1847. For some Donner Party Conservatives, struggle and suffering are good because they call forth and demand great acts of virtue, which serves to replenish the ever-diminishing stockpile of “moral capital” that our nation has inherited from its (pre-liberal) past. Murray himself argues this point at length. But he also claims that struggle and suffering are good because they are a necessary condition of human happiness.

Michael Gerson made a similar call to virtue in the Washington Post last month in a column on Recession’s Hidden Virtues

Recessions and depressions are brutal beasts that stalk the stragglers, especially retirees and the poor. There is too much inherent suffering during a recession to ever welcome it. But times of economic stress, it appears, can also be times of cultural renewal. “One reasonable hypothesis,” argues James Q. Wilson, “is that the Depression pulled families together, and this cohesion inhibited crime.” Many Americans who struggled through the Depression adopted a set of moral and economic habits such as thrift, family commitment, savings and modest consumption that lasted through their lifetimes — and that have decayed in our own.

My third example is from last month by David Brooks at the New York Times. He starts his column in the same individualistic place that Murray begins at:

Our moral and economic system is based on individual responsibility. It’s based on the idea that people have to live with the consequences of their decisions. This makes them more careful deciders. This means that society tends toward justice — people get what they deserve as much as possible

But he ends at a different place, much closer to my own political views.

And they seem to understand the big thing. The nation’s economy is not just the sum of its individuals. It is an interwoven context that we all share. To stabilize that communal landscape, sometimes you have to shower money upon those who have been foolish or self-indulgent. The greedy idiots may be greedy idiots, but they are our countrymen. And at some level, we’re all in this together. If their lives don’t stabilize, then our lives don’t stabilize.

My tentative explanation for these three variations on the theme of individual responsibility and group actions is the fundamental attribution error from psychology. “When we are trying to understand and explain what happens in social settings, we tend to view behavior as a particularly significant factor. We then tend to explain behavior in terms of internal disposition, such as personality traits, abilities, motives, etc. as opposed to external situational factors.”

Murray is completely captured by the fundamental attribution error. Happiness comes from the individual and institutions, especially the government, are barriers to the achievement of “deep satisfaction.” Gerson is in the middle and Brooks starts with the standard conservative appeal to individualism but then concludes by holding his nose and acknowledging the need stabilize the group even if it means rewarding the foolish.

Saving Education, the Bill Gates Way

2009-03-24T00:16:33Z

Bill Gates clearly has a bee in his bonnet about education. A few weeks ago he was at the TED conference to give a speech on two topics: preventing malaria and reforming education in America. About malaria I have no comment, except to praise it for inspiring such luminous headlines as Rocket Scientists Shoot Down Mosquitoes With Lasers. Last weekend he was on Fareed Zakaria’s GPS program to talk about education again.

Back to education. The Gates Foundation lists four goals for education: making high school graduates ready for success, preparing them for postsecondary degrees, funding college scholarships, and establishing early learning programs. All of these are laudable goals.

The problem is that Bill Gates never actually talks about them in his public speeches.

At TED he spent most of his talk asking “How to make a teacher great?” On the face of it this is a good question but I think it ignores as much as it reveals. According to Gates getting the top quartile of teachers to teach all children would put America at the top of the education world.

Diane Ravitch has written a couple of good debunking blog posts about the quest for the mythical great teacher

The quest for the mythical great teacher—the one we must stalk like some rare beast of unsurpassed beauty—is tinged with contempt for the large majority of teachers who did not go to Princeton or Swarthmore or Harvard. I habitually read news articles online about what is happening across the nation in education, and I frequently read the comments. Whenever there is an article about teachers, it is often followed by a series of comments that express rage toward teachers. “She got what she deserved.” “These lazy teachers, they teach only 10 months a year, and they have the nerve to complain.” “No wonder our kids are failing when we have teachers like that!” “Why should they get a raise, they have an easy job.” On and on the complaints go. I have tried to figure out where all this anger toward teachers comes from. I just don’t get it.

One other thing: You mention the hype and spin that we often see in the media. It seems that many journalists won’t write about education unless they can find a miracle to write about. So they find a teacher or a school where kids who were completely indifferent to learning were suddenly transformed by the inspiration of one teacher or one school. A classroom full of sullen thugs turns into mathematical geniuses or poets. When people see this narrative again and again, they must wonder why every teacher is not performing similar miracles. After all, they went to the movies and they saw an existence proof. And, as many of our illustrious peers often say, “If it can happen in one school, it can happen in all schools.”

In another post she responds to a column by Nicholas Kristof extolling the four-year miracle top quartile teachers would unleash if we just got out of the way.

Kristof approvingly cites the economists who say that four consecutive years of a great teacher would close the achievement gap. Unfortunately he does not seem to realize that the economists were writing theoretically (and the relevant studies actually say that five consecutive years of a great teacher would have this result). This happy outcome has NEVER been demonstrated in any school or school district. It is a projection of an econometric speculation.

At the end of the TED speech Gates walks off stage to a standing ovation from the adoring crowd. I find this disturbing for a number of reasons. For one the standing ovation falls into the same people-focused hunger for leadership that seems foolish to me. A single person, even one as rich as Bill Gates, isn’t going to save us from our troubles. There is also a vein of irony in the fact that a person who dropped out of college is telling everyone how important college is for the future. I don’t want to argue by anecdote but it does make me smile a bit at the oddities the world throws up.