Autonomous Car Collides with Bus: an illusion of abstractions?

The secret of success is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake those, you've got it made. -- Groucho Marx

re-edited 3/12/16

An Illusion is not Necessarily a Perceptual Error. It is usually just a rather run-of-the-mill experience. We encounter illusions frequently. To our personal benefit, our own bodies often produce illusions, e.g. 3D vision or directional hearing, or even the pains we experience from surprising external or internal systemic pressures, or, even, upon hearing bad news. The pain in our bare foot is not the tack we just stepped on; nor, the pleasure we feel, the chocolate we just ate.

We humans rely on illusions. We use them for better or worse to lead our lives. Seafarers have long guided themselves across oceans using star constellations. But we know now that there’s no Big Dipper, or Belt of Orion, to be found “out there.” Constellations of stars are illusions due to slow cosmic change and to our position as viewers. Human racial differences, too, have been a commonly encountered practically exploitable illusion due to slow change and social position. (See Philosophy & Racial Discourse.)

Wayfarers and pilots, too, may venture into or over deserts and forests, cross-referencing their positions along the way by triangulating imaginary lines-of-sight between “fixed” terrain features. (Even such “fixtures” as expected mirages of an oasis or other bodies of water can work.)

We humans are not unique in producing illusions in pursuit of the “goals” patterned in our genes. Our use of duck calls, fishing lures or pheromone hunting baits illustrates this. Animal species, too, may pursue prey or fend off predators by, feigning death, or, ferocity, or venomousness.

Illusion is not in the perception, in the appearance, but in what we take that appearance to be. We learn at a young age “Appearances can be deceiving.” We certainly hope so, when we aggressively yell to frighten off an approaching animal; or, when we go to meet someone on a first date.

How do we learn what is illusory and what not? By using as many of our senses as we can, in as many variations of position as we can manage, in order to see what happens. It is no accident that most illusionists do their presentations to audiences fixed in their seats. Or that séances are held in the dark. Or that proselytizers of every stripe discourage broad learning in their followers. Narrow perspectives blur the distinction between illusions and realities.

Not only do we vary the manner in which we confront what we suspect may be illusory, but we do it noting the context of presentation. Is it “normal”? Is the lighting different from daylight? Would art museums display their traditional exhibits under intense red light? (Try sorting blue, black and brown socks under incandescent light. Why is fluorescent light better for the task?)

Is image, tone, feel, odor, or taste sufficiently persistent? How far away (intense) does the apparition, tone, etc. seem to be? Smallness and haziness are indicators of distance. If we can estimate its height (or loudness, etc.), then, more is closer.

Strained or strange body positions on the part of the observer are likely to indicate something amiss. Cross a middle finger under a forefinger, close you eyes and touch the tip of you nose with both fingers simultaneously. You will feel two noses!

We tend to judge the reality of the perception that confronts us based on the degree of “normal” corroboration among our different sense modalities in the context of our estimation of the “normality” of the perceptual situation.

Is the image, tone, feel, odor, or taste sufficiently persistent? Can we compare it with tracings from memory, or with our hypothetical constructions about confrontations to come? Both past and future are processings left as mental traces, not the evanescent qualia that phenomenologists say present themselves to us only in the passing moment. (See Similarity: not a given; but, a composition.).

Motion pictures, or their derivatives, provide us an interesting example of illusion. They are composed of stills, or frames, the projections of which are clearly illusions, which appear less illusory when perceived quickly and sequentially. Their most important consequence is the illusion of cause and effect.

Cause & Effect. What conditions “connect” perceptual events into perceived chains of cause and effect? This feature seems to be “wired into” us; (or, as Immanuel Kant proposed much earlier, cause-effect is a essential structural component of Mind - Verstand) Cause-Effect is often an illusion we must take pains to recognize as such; e.g. Post Hoc, Propter Hoc. (See Cause = Perceptions + Assumptions )

How do we correct a suspected misconception as the reality of a perception? By probing any hunch – called in exalted educational circles, “testing our hypothesis” – to see if it holds up under questioning. Usually fatigue, boredom and feelings of risk set in long before any “personal hypothesis” is thoroughly criticized. (See Good Lies, Wise Evasions )

Reality, Knowledge? Just Presumptions? Some long while ago, at a cocktail party, in my late youth and early marriage, a chemistry professor, having had a bit too much chemical and having heard from my in-laws that I was still in my middle-twenties (!) stumbling around after a profession, confided in me: “Consider Chemistry! By the year 2000 we will be all efficiently taking various pills instead of eating, having to waste our time and effort chewing, so-called-healthy crunchies for hors d’oeuvres.”

Granted, time passes, new things are discovered, the old dies away. Today’s knowledge becomes tomorrow’s superstition; today’s realities, tomorrow’s illusions. This seems inevitable in a culture which practices an empirically-based knowledge acquisition model.

An Equation-like Metaphor. But this is no argument for returning to a culture of unquestionable, alledgedly prophesy-based dogmatism. Rather, think of “reality, R,” as a limit condition, a congeries, at least, of truths, T. The disconfirmation of hypotheses, as a procedure (a function), D, which moves us away from previous illusions and toward “reality, ” as the number of disconfirmations, D, increases, likely to infinity (since we and the universe around us evolve). Knowledge (i.e. Compiled Truths, {T}, which will in the limit comprise Reality, is the residue of practical, experimentally exercised caution. See Knowledge: The Residues of Practical Caution..

A metaphorical equation: (lim K/_{(D → ∞)}) = {T} ⊆ {R}

Read this: In the limit, our knowledge, K, as the disconfirmation of tentative hypotheses increases to infinity, approaches - via {T} - Reality (R),

a. T is the set of all truths, {T}, i.e. hypotheses that have survived disconfirmation tests;


b. {T} is reasonably expected by less-than-omniscient beings such as us, to be always less than (R).

I concede this to be a metaphor because I am not even sure it makes much sense taken literally. (See Measuring Educational Outcomes: truth, tricks and hype.) Certainly the total number of English (or other language) words (and the power sets of all their combinations and permutations) is less than the number of events discriminable by us in the universe as we know it, or even as we might come to know it in the future, given superior instrumentation and language to expand and communicate our experience.

Contingently Dysfunctional Characteristics: explaining AI failure. I do not have enough particulars to deal with the specific recent collision event. But I do have a broader concern that may apply to it. It is that there is a problem with the traditional notion of abstraction used by (only some, I hope) AI researchers.

The Platonic conception of abstraction introduced by Socrates in the Meno – the traditional use of necessary and sufficient (N&S) conditions -- common to many theoretic activities to this day, appears in full bloom in chapter two, “A Model of the Neo-Cortex,” of Ray Kurzweil’s book, How to Create a Mind.

(Compare Alfred Korzybski's "Structural Differential," shown above - from Science & Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (1941) - that he used to explain his conception of abstraction.)

This model of abstraction, call it the N&S model, is, what I will call a “ context pro-functional” accumulator. It sets up a checkpoint for the selection of candidates in a given class of situation, call it [S1], to moving up the ladder of abstraction. It allows items to climb that meet certain functional requirements for an AI construction goal. It may even cull out an [S1]-dys-functional elements, if they are of concern.

But such dysfunctional elements may be overlooked or disregarded, as being, for example of low probability of happening, or of low enough cost in the long run to allow to pass through. See Concept as Abstraction. A hindrance in developing intelligence?

But the [S1]-appropriate abstraction may also be a sort of “sludge-accumulator,” in that it allows to pass through any items with [Sn?1]-dysfunctional characteristics so long as they are [S1]-functional. A situation [S31] may arise in which the response set available contains [S31]-dysfunctional items that are nonetheless [S1]-functional.

So it is that an autonomous car might accelerate to pass a bus that has lain quiescent for twelve seconds, [S31], but may accelerate on eight because the bus driver left his running lights off, creating in the car an "illusion" of [S1], signaling a permanent stop.

Using the common N&S concept of abstraction is very much like an admissions procedure to an organization based on education, ethnicity, profession and income that welcomes anyone who meets these four requirements but ignores, say, their legal status, e.g. felon or not, their level of indebtedness, their history of violent public behavior, and the condition of their health.

How to Avoid Such Difficulties Basically it comes down to three things:

a. investigating broad ranges of functional situations;

b. looking at not only those characteristics that are pro-functional, but considering whether there are potentially dysfunctional characteristics that may manifest themselves in not impossibly remote circumstances;

c. building in different kinds of input systems to enable corroboration among them.

Scanners alone, like visitors' eyes at a seance, will not easily help their user recognize illusions.

For examples and to pursue these issues, see Physical Objects as Non-Individuated Entities. (A universe of constructs) )

Cordially
--- EGR

Cause & Effect: essential belief, misapprehension, moral hazard?

updated 071322

The brain is a construction of the brain. -- Nietzsche

There Must Be a Better Way! (The proctological principle?) I was waiting in a doctor’s office to arrange an examination, when a nurse answered a phone call. The irate voice on the other end of the line resounded throughout the small room: “I’m getting a colonoscopic exam tomorrow and I’m told I have to flush my system out by drinking a gallon of some insipid water concoction over the next twenty-four hours.” “That’s correct,” replied the nurse. “That’s absolutely ridiculous!” retorted the caller. “In this day and age there must be a better way to do it!” “No, sir. There is not,” responded the nurse.

A stream of expletives gushed from the telephone receiver. I thought to suggest to the nurse that she advise the patient to use a plumber’s snake instead of the prescribed water solution. But I kept my silence.

Practically Necessary Beliefs. Our way of life depends on a certain system of beliefs handed down through the centuries, although substantially modified in the process. Our notions of self-control, insanity, responsibility, criminality, and justice rest ultimately on the belief that some events relate to one another as cause and effect.

Daily we debate about who has done what; or, who can do what -- pretending all along that these “practical” questions have little to do with what “ivory-tower types” would call “philosophy.” In the debate we presume our investigations rest on a firm foundation: not merely the “belief,” but the “reality” of cause and effect. The operative train of thought here seems to ride on the Proctological Principle: if we (think we) need it, it must, in this day and age, be “a reality.”

Are Cause and Effect Illusions? Bertrand Russell recounts in his memoirs how, as a young man, he woke up in his bed one morning and came to a frightening understanding as to what David Hume meant by his theory of causation. All we ever observe, Hume had written, are correlations; regular sequences of event. Cause is our interpretation, our belief, more commonly, an assumption that normally observed regularities of precedence and propinquity will continue into the future.

Russell feared to step out of his bed onto the floor. It might, if Hume were right, suddenly open up beneath him, since there was nothing more than assumption to guarantee the persistence of its support. Thus, he would fall into an abyss of … nothingness (?).

(Russell’s reasoning here is somewhat inconsistent: If he could not trust that the floor, though sound and normal, would continue to support him, how could he come to any conclusion about what might happen next? Maybe he might float over the abyss!)

Being ultimately a pragmatist, as we all tend to be, Russell got past this fear and out of his bed and on with his life. Possibly he came to the realization that his bed, too, -- or the foundation of his house, or England in its entirety -- could just as likely open up to swallow him as he imagined the floor might.

Ultimately, perhaps, Russell, being a philosopher, might have come to concede (he did so, later) that there is more involved in identifying cause-and-effect relations than what our perceptions give us. Even today we warn our students, friends, associates, and acquaintances, perhaps, -- often futilely -- that mere “correlation” neither indicates nor denies “cause.” Little matter; if they are gamblers, day-traders, newspaper columnists, or political incumbents, they tend to ignore us.

Cause = Perceptions + Assumptions. Russell’s, and our, ability to act in this world rests heavily on structures of trust in generally unproven (and purely empirically unprovable) regularities of persistence. We construct edifices of trust with bricks of hope and desire cemented together with no more than the mortar of our assumptions. (See Varieties of Explanation & Cause.)

Immanuel Kant, some decades after Hume, presented a counter to Hume’s apparent empirical skepticism by denying that the human mind could go beyond experience, even such experience as augmented with scientific apparatus, to settle questions such as the “nature” of causation or objectivity. Our knowledge, Kant says, such as it is, is limited to phenomena.

Phenomena are constructed within the framework of human categories of understanding, which constitute the structure of the human mind, although interacting in someway with entities -- or entity -- of the extra-phenomenal world. Number, unity or plenty, says Kant, is a category of human understanding; not necessarily to be expected to parallel extra-phenomenal “reality.” (Check out the notion of quantum entanglement to appreciate how Kant's distinctions still retain relevance; although, he seems not to have considered how developing technologies and theories might interact to substantially expand human experience.)

It is amazing how many people in so many walks of life just hate this kind of theory: the theory that in culling out the true from the false, the wishful or delusional from the real, we ultimately invoke items of belief that themselves can only be judged, ad infinitum, by invoking other items of belief. (See Getting Down to Facts: can we avoid making assumptions?)

Is there a Bedrock of Knowledge? So what if claims of knowledge are always risky, resting on a potentially infinite chain of assumptions? Why the panic? Or more likely, the dismissive disdain? (Much more polite, if more condescending.)

I suppose it’s frightening. What? No absolute bedrock of The Known upon which to build our temples of Value, Prestige, Justice and Faith? Must everything be at risk? Can we, no matter how high our IQ or repute, how vast our wealth or influence, never be free from the risk of mistake?

Excepting formal linguistically constructed systems, i.e. knowledge by definition or stipulation, never, it would seem.

But does it really matter whether we occasionally stumble through life, rather than exhibiting perfection in all our decisions? Apparently to some people it does. Many who would reject the idea that knowledge may be essentially tentative are not inclined to even bother to present counter-argument or -evidence. Their basic concern, one might suspect, is more to preserve their incumbency in privileged positions; or, their right to importune others less empowered, i.e. to be in a condition of permanent moral hazard.

For references and to examine these issues further, See Buffering: Enhancing Moral Hazard in Decision-Making?

See also Varieties of Explanation. & Cause

Cordially
--- EGR

**Consider the similarities also in

Isaiah 45:7 (KJV) "I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things."

And, also, the conversation between Faust and Mephistopheles (1335-1337 and 1345-1358 Original German edition, my translation -- EGR) wherein Faust's question as to who Mephisto is is answered "I am a part of that power that always pursues Evil yet always yields Good."

Faust counters, "How can you be a part of something when you present yourself to me as a whole?", Mephisto replies,"... Although (you) a human, from that a tiny world of fools, may consider yourself a whole, I am a part of a part that once was Everything, the Darkness that gave birth to Light."

A Conundrum(?) about Empirical Knowledge and Empirical Belief.

addenda 031819

In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable; and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.” -- Karl Popper

No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong. -- Albert Einstein

BEGINNING:The Empirical Conundrum.

Original Assumption: Knowledge and Belief are not the same.

Belief may be a component of Knowledge, but Knowledge need not be a component of belief. Some beliefs are not knowledge.

Proposition A: Empirical Knowledge Claims are Defeasible (falsifiable), by virtue of their being empirical.

, i.e. defeasible means subject to withdrawal by virtue of possible (though maybe as yet unknown) countering evidence, CE. (See Three Human Dimensions of Conceptualization.)

Then,

Proposition B: Empirical Knowledge claims are, at best, Empirical beliefs.

So, it follows that

Proposition C: if something is at best an Empirical Belief. it is not Empirical Knowledge,

according to the Original Assumption.

Proposition C applies to anything that is claimed to be empirical evidence.

Thus Empirical Knowledge is not defeasible and consequently not empirical, gotten via the contrapositive of Proposition A.

Attempted Rebuttal.

But what is this CE? Is it Empirical Knowledge? If so, then by Proposition A, it is defeasible, ergo, merely Belief.

Thus, if counter-evidence CE is merely Empirical Belief; it is not really counter-evidence. Thus, Propositions B and C are gainsaid and consequently, Empirical Knowledge is, indeed, defeasible. (GO BACK TO BEGINNING.)

When you've gotten tired going repeatedly back to the Beginning, in considering the vulnerabilities of the above argument, see both
Pseudo-Science: the reasonable constraints of Empiricism
and
Knowledge: The Residues of Practical Caution..

Cordially, EGR

“Cat” is NOT a Cat. “Reform” is NOT a Reform.

"The symbol is NOT the thing symbolized; the word is NOT the thing; … -– S.I. Hayakawa (1949)

We live in a society where a “Going Out of Business Sale” sign on a store probably doesn’t mean that the store is going out of business after the sale is over. “Reality” shows on TV are far from reality, the confections of TV writers and producers. Brand names, too, are not infrequently assurances of quality that is non-existent.

Even our schools promote their own form of BS -- think only of the all-too-vagrant usage of such words as “challenged,” “basics,” “excellence,” “diversity,” “needs,” and “standards.” Unfortunately, BS, like other forms of S, can be infectious: it can produce a mind-set that borders on pathology.

Sean Cavanagh in an article, “In War of Words, 'Reform' a Potent Weapon,” (Education Week, 3/2/11) writes

A set of stock phrases, sound bites, and buzzwords has come to dominate the public discourse on education, summoned reflexively, it often seems, by elected officials and advocates who speak a shared, accepted language.

In other words, Big-Wig BS: on such rests the fate of our school populations.

To propose what you call a “reform” is to do two things:

a. it is to propose a change; and
b. it is to recommend that change as desirable.

Here is where the fight begins.

Not every possible change will be seen as a change for the better. Death is a change. It is not a reform. It is because people disagree on what is desirable that the controversy about school reform exists.

To examine these issues further, see The Need for and Possibilities of Educational Reform


Cordially
--- EGR

Disregarding Disagreement: rituals of misdirection

updated 11/5/19

I never met a man I didn’t like. -- Will Rogers

It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. —Baudelaire

We Americans pride ourselves on being friendly. Americans have tons and tons of “friends.” Some people use Facebook to count the “friends” they have. Hardly anyone refers to someone they know as an “acquaintance.” That sounds so off-putting, so unfriendly.

Want to be my friend? Just don’t get too serious. Talk about sports; show you’re a fan. That way, if we disagree, I can appreciate it as team loyalty.

Don’t bring up religion. You go to your church, I go to mine. (Weirdoes don’t go to any church, although some OK people might not go because they’re pissed off -- for understandable reasons -- with the clergy.) I’m OK; you’re OK. Enough of that.

Do you really want to talk about politics? (Did you miss last night’s game?) Well, OK, provided you stick to vague, fuzzy labels like liberal, conservative, libertarian, Republican, or Democrat. Maybe even socialism, or capitalism,progressive, or independent. Don't ask, "What do you mean?"

Don't talk about anything too technical, or too heavy. Otherwise, you begin to sound like a “wonk” or a “squint” and you get into serious altercations. Everybody knows that wonks and squints are just one step away from being “weirdoes.” Just remember some of our newer words of wisdom: Let it be, let it be.

Fellowship is based on entertainment value. Even news broadcasters -- you might say, “especially news broadcasters” -- know this. Much more than compromise and tolerance -- which put demands on our emotional, intellectual and moral strength --, it is memories of good feelings, presumably shared, that hold us together. (We still love Uncle Harry, the lecherous, drunken slob, because he’s attended family dinners forever.)

This is why we don’t study history or geography in school: too much of old, bad memories and other times and places. Out of sight, out of mind, out of existence. Our reality is found in the here and now of “reality shows.” If misfortune happens there, we know it’s just acting.

Planning for the future? We listen to those who make us feel comfortable, unchallenged, and we keep our fingers crossed.

For references and to examine these issues further, see Getting It Together: 
the nature of consensus


Cordially
--- EGR

Public “Science” Controversy: distrust is not the only issue.

edited 2/23/21

“We live in a society absolutely dependent on science and technology and yet have cleverly arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. That's a clear prescription for disaster.” -- Carl Sagan

No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong. -- Albert Einstein

I would never die for my beliefs, because I might be wrong. -- Bertrand Russell

Need Understanding Promote Acceptance? For as brilliant a scientist (and advocate of Critical Thinking) as Carl Sagan was, he makes a common, and erroneous logical leap: he appears to imply that to understand something is necessarily either to condone or advocate it.

This is wrong. Understanding something (or someone) is not to concede it some kind of validity or authority. But should understanding a practice (or person) bring us to conceding, at least, a live-and-let-live attitude toward it?

Consider the Aztec practice of human sacrifice. Or the regimes of Hitler or Stalin. We pretty much know why they did what they did. We have a good idea what their supporting religious and cultural beliefs and practices were, and how they were carried out. Should we thus adopt a live-and-let-live attitude toward them? Certainly our understanding of what they were about need not move anyone to see their examples repeated.

”Science” Perceived as a Special Interest. We live in a Market Culture. Caveat Emptor, folks! It’s not hard to understand why many people -- not necessarily only uninformed or ignorant people -- are suspicious of pronouncements about, say, global warming, safe vaccinations, or gender differences correlating with intellectual inferiority in science. They consider the sources, motivation and social contexts of the claims or claimants. All’s fair in love, war, and marketing. (See Bestowing Trust.)

Anyone with a memory reaching back more than twenty-five years -- or some acquaintance with history -- can remember when “science” was invoked to justify slavery, frequent wide-spectrum use of antibiotics and promiscuous electric-shock therapy, as well as systematic X-ray exposure to treat teen-age acne. And, don’t forget, tobacco companies could always find a scientist to insist that there was no link between smoking and cancer. (See The 7 biggest problems facing science, according to 270 scientists.)

But “Science” corrected itself, did it not? Yes, so to speak. But generally, only in areas that did not upset entrenched cultural hierarchies. It took World War II to convince most Americans that women could learn to weld and to construct machines. That non-Whites, even Japanese, Native and African Americans could loyally defend a country where they had been treated with so very much less respect than citizens of European derivation. That not all, if some, human behavior was controlled by environmental reinforcement.

U.S. University presidents, even, were abashed to find out that common “grunts,” returning working-class GI’s, could actually use the GI Bill to acquire a profession. WWII Veterans on the GI Bill neither destroyed private higher education -- as predicted by James Conant -- nor did their presence turn universities into "vast hobo jungles" -- as Robert Maynard Hutchins warned they would.

The Elephant in the Room? Two Antagonistic Conceptions of Knowledge.

“Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.” -- Karl Popper

In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable; and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.” -- Karl Popper

There is a deeper issue underlying the widespread skepticism about Science than suspicions about marketeering. It is that there are, roughly speaking, two competing concepts of knowledge embedded in our society. Many people, generally those with scientific training, or interest in scientific activity consider -- or at least give lip-service to the idea that -- scientific knowledge is an accumulation of hypotheses that are

a. tentative and correctible, (therefore, always possibly evanescent);
b. most persistently survivors of critical testing; and
c. cross-disciplinarily or experimentally mutually reinforcing.
d. Predictions are, at best, estimated with better than random probability.

This is the notion Einstein and Russell are alluding to in their quotes in the epigraph. I will refer this notion, albeit imprecise, as the notion of “Experimentalist Knowledge”. Any "Faith" one has in Experimentalist Knowledge is conditional upon its producing outcomes that someone values (in some "market"?), or at least, that one can hopefully predict (and, maybe, control -- barring certain kinds of complexity) through testing and adjustments in theory and procedure.

Within a professional context, Experimentalist Knowledge is not only given often precise expression, but carefully practiced, because any resultant publication must pass peer revue. Questioning can be quite intense and rigorous (and, to less prepared souls, annoying.} In the marketplace, as we will see below, something else happens.

A Competing Tradition. Eternalist Knowledge is a more ancient concept but still quite active today. It is given lip-service, at least, not only by adherents of certain religions, but also by many mathematicians, theoretical physicists, philosophers, mystics and "humanist" educators.

Eternal Truths are:

a. unchanging and eternal;
b. beyond being challengeable by “so-called tests”; and
c. often indifferent to other claimants to truth.
d. Predictions are considered to be either certainties, e.g. (logically?) derived from more basic Eternal Truths, or speculations of lesser concern.

Within a professional context which typically includes non-professionally prepared participants -- e.g. a laity --, there is at most a perfunctory "peer review" with a bias toward maintaining the authority of the professional over the layperson. Questioning, unless ritualized, is not encouraged.

So if adherents of Experimentalist Knowledge warn about global warming, those of Eternalist Knowledge might reply in dismissal, “Our Faith in X (or Y or Z) is our assurance that we will be exempt from such travail.”

Whether or not they are very devout adherents of eternal truths, many people’s ideas of science are as sophisticated as weather-forecasting TV permits. Snow, if predicted, often amounts to little. And yet, despite mathematical models and predictions, we get surprises. In the communities where Eternalist Knowledge dominates, lip-service is often reinforced by practices and rituals. But it, too, like Experimentalist Knowledge, can be transformed by the ethos of various markets.


An Important Caution. The reader ought not assume that what follows from the distinction Experimental or Eternalist is that either of the two traditions is being offered as "superior" to the other. In a disagreement it will all depend on what claims are made and which tradition is invoked. Nowadays a minor flesh wound is not treated with a prayer service. Nor is a geometric axiom invoked in a cry of mourning.

People who recognize certain items, e.g. holy scripture, foundational moral axioms, domains of discourse or procedure as "worthy" of pursuit are likely committed to justification by certain forms of Eternalist Knowledge. So also may be scientists who engage in debates about "Laws of Nature", or whether the Universe consists basically of "wave or particle"; or, whether individual rights ought to override "needs" for social stability. Or whether a mother's or her foetus' life should take precedence. Or, even, what criteria should be used, if any, to implement discriminatory treatment of populations, e.g. who gets a rare vaccine, or pardon for criminal behavior.

(The wisdom of recognizing the Experimentalist-Eternalist distiction seems to indicate that the much-vaunted pursuit of Artistic or Philosophical Authenticity, the degree to which a person’s actions are congruent with his or her beliefs, must take second-place to a modicum of hypocrisy, if only for survival purposes.)

Debating About “Science” in the Market: a slogan-fest.

The arc of the moral universe really is bending toward progress. -- Michael Shermer, The Moral Arc, (Henry Holt, 2015) précis of article appearing in Scientific American, Jan. 20, 2015

Professional interaction and market interactions are quite different, even among adherents of the same type, i.e. those of Experimentalist Knowledge, Empiricists, or those of Eternalist Knowledge, Eternalists. The epigraph of this section is certainly strange. For appearing in a generally Empiricist publication it looks suspiciously like an Eternalist statement.

Let's put some questions to Shermer. What is this "arc of the moral universe" in empirical terms? How does one determine the direction in which it bends? If one considers that 200,000,000+ people, mostly non-combatants, were killed in wars in the 20th century and that the slaughters continue into this 21st, where might this moral universe be situated?

Or is this article's appearance in Scientific American merely meant to get Eternalist adherents to buy a subscription?

Consider the punditry published in even scientific journals about Global Warming, or Vaccination, or Spanking, or anything purported to be of Public Concern. There the rhetoric begins to heat up: individuals are treated as though having melted together into uniform sampling groups or opinion-blocks, e.g. Scientists, Religionists, Believers, Atheists, Conservatives, Liberals. Reifications and hubris abound. False consensus likely rules the day.

Does knowledge of either kind even matter here? Or is this game best described as Fools Fooling Fools? C.P. Snow in 1959 anticipated a scholarly schism into two basic cultures, the Scientific and the Literary. Has his prediction been visited not only upon Academia; but, with a vengeance, upon our national culture as a whole?

To examine these issues further, see Knowledge: The Residues of Practical Caution.

Cordially
--- EGR

Can Criminal or Immoral Behavior Be Dealt With Objectively?

To be objective is to aspire to knowledge that bears no trace of the knower -- knowledge unmarked by prejudice or skill, fantasy or judgment, wishing or striving. Objectivity is blind sight, seeing without inference, interpretation, or intelligence. -- Daston & Galison, (2010) Objectivity, p. 17

... only those (experiments) that produce quantitative results are really susceptible to scientific evaluation. -- D. L. Hand, (2014) The Improbability Principle, p. 29 [1]

Behavior. Harry punches Sam in the head. Sam falls to the ground. Can you imagine a human, much less a robot, or Martian, able to “objectively” judge, on the basis of what it has just seen, whether a criminal act -- much less an immoral act -- has been commited?

Even wanting to carefully avoid “subjectivity” in their characterizations, few humans would venture such a judgment as being “objective” without believing or wanting to “know more” about the situation. A trained computer scientist would not bet his or her retirement savings on a specific characterization of “what the computer is now doing” from merely photos of the machine and its outputs -- even if cheating a little on “objectivity” with a record of data recently entered


”Looking Like” ≠ “Being.” As the ancient dictum expresses, “Appearance is not Reality.” But this is not merely an ancient prescription. As Daston and Galison describe in their important book, Objectivity, the concept of objectivity in the quote above is, has been and continues to be common to many scientific undertakings, particularly from the mid-19th to the mid-20th Century.

Although newer, less restrictive variations of this “blind-sightedness” have developed, the “traceless” notion lingers on in many contexts.(See Daston & Galison,Objectivity on: Structural Objectivity, p. 253; Trained Judgment, p. 309; and, Einstein’s “wholistic” approach to the objective/subjective distinction, p. 305) This is especially true in public education and social services, where, even as they mostly act in disregard of the “theory” in their practice, special educators, planners and administrators give lip service to behavioristic notions, e.g. functional analysis, stimulus, and reinforcer, as though their efforts were rendered more “scientific” by the adoptions of such vocabulary.

Pedagogy and Community. Which is more “objective?” A beautifully detailed painting of a bird; or, a photograph of that same bird? 17th to early 19th Century scientists worried that if every detail of a real bird were depicted, students, scientists to be, would take the variations to be critically definitive of the species. Thus, they idealized their expensively produced instructional lithographs for the sake of objectivity, e.g. being true to nature, and normative to classification.

Beginning in the mid 19th Century, scientists, having instruments which enabled them to see many, many deviations in phenomena from what people commonly thought to be normal, were concerned not to let local prejudice, cultural assumption or technical ignorance dictate reality. More importantly, machine-aided observation and duplication was cheaper than lithography, and enabled the development of geographically broadly distributed scientific communities.

Neither approach has surpassed all others and later conceptions of “objectivity” developed which still “share the stage” with them, depending upon which scientific discipline or community is involved. (See Daston & Galison, throughout.)

Morals, Law & Ethics. Partisans of different approaches to the objectivity-subjectivity distinction believe(d) it to be a moral duty to assert their position against their mistaken opponents. Truth, enlightenment and moral fibre depended on it. And yet none of them could employ arguments for their positions that were recognized as purely scientific; they required, at least, commitment to ideals of science that were basically a priori philosophical.

An interesting question is whether commonly expressed concerns for improving society, legally and morally, at both communal and individual levels, can be dealt with sufficiently “objectively” to employ science, some science, any science, to answer problems such as criminality, learning, equity, health, and the like. (See Can Science Improve Moral Education, Too?)

The notion of objectivity, particularly the one mentioned in the prologue, is a kind of one-size-fits-all approach. There is reason to believe that practitioners -- recall D. L Hand, above -- who demand that would-be objects of their science be strictly measurable (as “objective” a characteristic as one might want) will discover that their quests are as likely of fruition as is squaring the circle. (See Measuring Educational Outcomes: truth, tricks and hype)

The point? Categories of human behavior, human actions, to the extent that they are purposive, e.g. mens res commissions, deliberate and/or intentional, will not be considered to be “objective” enough for scientific treatment.

This conclusion will no doubt be found obnoxious by those who have long looked to the “human sciences” to lead us into a shining future. (As a long-time practitioner in a “helping profession,” I find it somewhat dismaying, myself.) However, despite doubters continuing their long practice of disregard (i.e., distracting, “non-reinforcing” responses) one awaits a logical, reasoned argument to the contrary.

For examples and to examine these issues further, see The Functional Analysis of Behavior: 
theoretical and ethical limits.)

Cordially
--- EGR

REFERENCES



[1] Hand, D J (2014) The Improbability Principle Scientific American. New York.

Support Disappearing for the “Common Core:” what that tells us about education reform.by Gary K. Clabaugh, Ed.D.

A fundamental lack of agreement concerning the means and ends of public schooling is the basic reality that has troubled, presently troubles and will continue to trouble every serious national school improvement effort. The only way to generate broad national consensus is by formulating goals that are so vague as to be practically useless.

This even applies to goal setting at the local level. Google search a sample of school district mission statements and see for your self. Most consist entirely of happy talk and buzz words. It is in this way that a broad, but mud puddle shallow, consensus is maintained. But if we press for details, the broad consensus invariably disappears.

At first it looked as if the “Common Core,” which focuses on “core skills” and is supposed to promote “real understanding,” was the exception. It appeared to enjoy wide public support. Forty-six states initially joined in. But the latest PDK/Gallup poll of the public’s attitude toward public education shows that as people learn more about the “Common Core,” their support vanishes.

The early absence of public opposition was apparently born of ignorance. A year ago two thirds of those polled said they hadn’t even heard of these standards. Now more than three-quarters have heard of them; and 60% of those surveyed don’t like what they heard.

This isn’t the first time public support for national education standards have evaporated. Two decades ago President Clinton urged standards-based school reform; and Congress responded by passing the Educate America Act. It featured wildly ambitious, although vague and sloganistic, goals. One objective, for instance, was that by the year 2000 every child was would enter school ready to learn. Other goals were that: U.S. students would be first in the world in mathematics and science; every school would be free of drugs, violence unauthorized firearms and alcohol; and every school will offer a disciplined environment conducive to learning.

Who wouldn’t welcome such utopian, if vague, outcomes? But experienced educators could only wonder what Congress had been smoking when they passed such a law, because it certainly could never be realized. But before their unachievable goals went up in flames, Congress wisely backed off, deemphasized standards, and substituted a loosely linked string of projects and computer purchases.

Then, in 2002, came No Child Left Behind. Here again, Congress attempted to set national standards. But they dodged the consensus bullet by defining key standards so vaguely that it gave states lots of wriggle room. For instance, states are required to employ only “highly qualified” teachers and set “one high, challenging standard” for every student. But each state is permitted to establish its own definitions of these terms.

The wimpy result was utterly predictable. With few exceptions, state officials did their level best to adopt definitions that suited their existing circumstances. With the shameless aid of President Obama, for instance, California officials circumvented a federal court ruling and straight facedly declared novice interns “highly qualified” teachers — which is the logical equivalent of declaring black, white. Why do this? They are unwilling or unable to make teaching in California’s educational Calcutta’s sufficiently attractive to draw and retain teachers who actually are ”highly qualified.”

No Child Left Behind also requires schools receiving Title I funding (based on the number of impoverished kids enrolled) to make “adequate yearly progress.” But here they made the mistake made in writing the Educate America Act: namely, instituting impossible requirements. In this case they prescribed that all students must reach 100% proficiency in grade level math and reading by 2014, under penalty of mandatory intervention. Well, 2014 is here, and the patent ridiculousness of this goal now is obvious to all. Or perhaps I should say, obvious to all but the most incorrigible Pollyanna’s. Of course, any competent educator could have told them this demand was preposterous — had they condescended to ask.

Predictably, these would-be reformers are now confronted with a long and rapidly growing list of abject failures to meet NCLB’s requirements What should be done? Well the feds certainly cannot intervene as the law prescribes. The disruption would be epic. So, the practical “solution” is to grant waiver after waiver. In fact, since February of 2012, 43 states and the District of Columbia have been granted waivers. In fact, NCLB might eventually be washed away by a tsunami of waivers that were necessitated by the law’s unrealizable requirements.

Federal politicians, past and present, claim that they build wiggle room, discretion and definitional laxity into their educational goal setting to avoid excessive federal oversight. But tightly defined national standards would, in fact, be political suicide. Why? Because their formulation collides head-on with the fundamental reality that Americans cannot agree on what the nation’s school kids should know or be able to do — or, for that matter, how they should learn it.

What is to be done? Well, to avoid the consensus problem, “leadership” will continue to concoct vague goals. This strategy pushes more and more actual decision-making onto frontline educators. The closer one gets to actual classroom practice, the more counterproductive vague goals are. When it’s time to actually teach somebody something, you can’t feed that bulldog bullshit. Real decisions have to be made. That's why the motto that Harry Truman displayed on his presidential desk fits every frontline educator: "THE BUCK STOPS HERE!" Of course, where the buck stops, so does the blame.

For examples and to examine these issues further, see The Nature of Consensus)

— GKC

Should Schools be Clone Factories?

The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to an uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government. -- James Madison

Many of us seem to long for the deep excitement, the sense of mission, the pervasive invigoration that was provided by the Cold War. Lacking the imminent threat of "mass participation in that Grand Incineration" that gave such cogency to our duck-and-cover drills, we miss the struggle against a world Communism that gave so much meaning to life and so much federal funding to U. S. industry and education.

So we dig up Frankenstein, Body Snatchers, and the Manchurian Candidate! We worry about WMD’s, terrorists, polygamists, militias, and other harbingers of the apocalypse. And we fuss and fret about cloning. We express apprehension, vexation, or reservation about the possibility of creating genetic duplicates of humans.

In reality, we have been cloning, or at least, trying to clone, educated minds for millennia. What do religious leaders want? Doctrinal clones. What do political leaders want? Political clones. What do ethnic leaders want? Ethnic clones. What do parents want? Clones of themselves.

To examine these issues further, see Cloning Student Voice

Cordially,
-- EGR

SLOGANS: junkfood, dead-weight or poison?

updated 071219

The False Consensus Effect is stronger in situations with ambiguity --- Borgson & Weber (2008)

There are many examples ... of situations in which disparate groups of politicians and the constituents they represent have joined together in common cause but consensus has represented nothing more than a superficial commitment to a simple slogan.
--- Susskind & Cruikshank, Breaking the Impasse, 1987, p.63-64

It's time again for political campaigners to fill our media almost 24/7 with Buzz-Words and Sound-Bites. And would be office-holders provide slogans galore. Much of it is Shakespearean: tales full of sound and fury, signifying little, if anything.

Slogans are motivational devices. Their point is to get you and others to do or avoid things you might not otherwise -- in someone’s opinion -- do or avoid. Any discomfort or reticence you might feel is to be compensated by your knowledge that you, by accepting the slogan, are now part of a group, a member in consensus, a sharer of the faith, of the brother-and-sisterhood, of the movement, to accentuate the positive and de-emphasize the negative and don't mess with Mister In-Between.

Slogans are often factually false, e.g. “X-Mart: where America shops!” Slogans often promise more than they can deliver, e.g. “Yes, we can!” Their vagueness often makes potential enemies seem like fellow travelers, “A sound economy is our primary consideration.”

But forget about truth, promise and clarity: another point of slogans is to bypass your careful consideration, your judgment, your inquiry, your weighing of options: Don’t ask questions; just do it!

But slogans are often little more than motivational junk food. At first taste, they’re yummy, or disgusting, depending upon your point of view or commitments. But any deeper ingestion and you may come up with a strange taste that puts you off: you realize that what you thought was meant by the slogan is something others can’t go for. Slogans provide no lasting sustenance to focused action.

For people who like to get down to the nuts and bolts, the vagueness of slogans makes them practical dead weights. You try to interpret them so as to get something done, and some ideologue quibbles about what the slogan “really means” -- as if their interpretation were the only one possible.

Under these circumstances, slogans become impediments to practical implementation. Again, depending upon your point of view or commitments this may be either a disappointment or a relief. Those who champion the slogans, of whatever kind, try hard to shut down diversity of interpretation and force a narrower, possibly self-serving interpretations on everyone.

And pity the person -- if they deserve it -- who actually takes the slogans literally and later discovers that reality that is far more complex and resistant to their administrations than they imagined.

Many dare to run for office. Few are chosen. And, even fewer are adept enough to be successful.

For more references and to examine these issues further, see Analyzing Buzzwords, Slogans & Mottoes


Cordially
-- EGR

Laws and Policies: weak bulwarks against bad character?

Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at it destination full of hope. --Maya Angelou

Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny. -- Thomas Jefferson

The secret of success is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake those, you've got it made. -- Groucho Marx

Sadly, what Maya Angelou says about love holds also for hate, if it is strong enough to overcome the natural impulses of self-preservation. The many suicide bombers we hear about daily in the news media attest to this. Organizational efforts to protect its leaders, or even, its lowest-ranking members, can provide no foolproof barriers to those intelligent and ruthless persons willing to sacrifice themselves to overcoming them.

Conversely, leaders, despite their frequent and even vehement lip-service to widely shared organizational interests and ideals, may pursue their own exclusive, private interests even at the risk of severe collateral damage. (Of such, recent events in US politics provide ample evidence.)

Many people in organizations shield themselves from these realizations. Instead they hold on, often unconsciously, to a more peaceful, comfortable model of organizational behavior that misrepresents the nature of much organizational activity.

In his book, Ambiguity and Choice James March (with Johan P. Olsen, Bergen: Universitetsforlaget, 1976) presents a critique of this Edenic conception that he calls an oversimplified, albeit traditional model of organizational activity:

a. the cognitions and preferences held by individuals affect their behavior;

b. this behavior of individuals affects in turn organizational choices;

c. organizational choices affect environmental acts;

d. environmental acts affect individual cognitions and preferences.

This cycle is assumed closed and connected, e.g. a->b->c->d ->a->b->c….

However, March continues, there may be attitudes and beliefs which do not interact with organizational behavior: for example, rules may prevent racism in hiring. Conversely, organizational obligations may elicit behavior that has no basis in individual preferences, e.g. group-think.

March asserts that this simple model, a->b->c->d, predisposes us to assume that what appeared to happen, did happen; and, that what happened was intended to happen or had to happen.

He continues that nothing happens that can be used by organizations independent of persons who interpret these happenings as relevant events. Organizational functioning, therefore, requires trust in such interpreters. But this trust -- better, credibility (not seldom “credulity”) — in "happening-interpreters" may be extended or withdrawn as individual circumstances require.

Certain problematic happenings may fail to attain status as such within an organization because persons in positions of influence do not want to be bothered with them, whether for lack of interest, courage, resources or competence. So long as the costs can remain hidden, problems need never be acknowledged as existing. (See Hiding the “Elephant in the Room”)

For a restricted case study illustrating such a situation and its collateral damages, see

 THE ORGANIZATIONAL PROBLEM: ILLUSION AND REALITY

. (For broader case examples this late Summer 2017, consult your news media outlets.)

- Cordially, EGR

Authority is Like a Condom

The Condom is a Cuirass against Pleasure and a Spider's Web against Danger. -- Madame de Staël (1766 - 1817) The authority we possess often distances us from others, making the pleasures of companionship or of even more ordinary forms of social intercourse strained, if not impossible. Yet, authority does not in and of itself, protect us from brute force, as any battered spouse with a restraining order knows full well.

How Does Authority Protect?

All new teachers, like many old-time missionaries, or any person newly thrust into a leadership role, discovers that the reputation of those who bestowed authority upon them may matter very little. Kids, for example, are not impressed with State issued teaching licenses. People raised in one religion, or in older forms of the same religion, are resistant to the new authorizations that have ordained the newcomer.

Authority of any kind is ultimately based on consensus, an agreement to acknowledge the validity of that authority. This consensus may based on traditionally shared beliefs, values and attitudes, or be merely expedient acquiescence or outward conformity.

This is the reality of the moral freedom we enjoy as individuals, if we only think about it. We, each one of us, can choose, if we are willing to live with the consequences, not to acknowledge as pertinent to our lives, any "authority" whatsoever. (The possibility of such disregard is why those in authority try to aggrandize power. See Usurping the Rights of Others)

This is no weird, esoteric practice to be carried out by bald monks on a mountaintop. It is exactly what we do to a great extent when we visit other countries and cultures: we acquiesce in behaving so as to keep ourselves out of jail, or to avoid social opprobrium; even though we disregard whatever other concerns a native of that culture might have. Sight-seeing in a church does not mean you will be a convert.

Not acknowledging as authority what others do may lead to conflicts of many kinds. But accommodating diversity is what makes possible the differences between families, religions, cultures and nations. But diversity, still, is what sometimes makes teaching and preaching an uphill battle. (Especially where coercive power is lacking.)

To examine these issues further, see The Indeterminacy of Consensus

Cordially --- EGR

Why American Educators Should NOT Prepare Students for the World of Work by Gary K. Clabaugh

I once interviewed a candidate for Director of my university’s Graduate Teacher Education Program. She was a twenty-year administrative veteran of a big city school system who also had been superintendent of two suburban districts. During the interview she kept emphasizing preparing children for the world of work. So much so, in fact, that I began to wonder if she thought schools should do anything else.

I asked her if she also embraced other priorities. Looking puzzled, she replied, "Like what?" “How about encouraging the development of decent human beings?” I suggested. She frowned and said that sort of thing was up to parents and other non-school agencies. Then she added with a measure of condescension, "I seem to have a broader vision than you do of what education is about."

I still wonder how she came to that curious conclusion. But I have never wondered about the origin of her mindless commitment to schooling that focuses myopically on making the U.S. workforce more internationally competitive. That misbegotten priority has dominated every governmental education "reform" since A Nation At Risk— that 1983, Reagan-inspired, blanket condemnation of American public education.

An educator’s primary concern should not be making American workers more competitive. That goal is buncombe. American workers will remain uncompetitive so long as they earn more than their foreign counterparts, so long as public policy actually rewards the export of American jobs, and so long as corporate plutocrats care more about the thickness of their wallets than they do about America.

This is why educators should forget international competitiveness and concentrate instead on things like encouraging compassion, cultivating wisdom, sharpening thinking, searching for what is universal in the human experience, and helping kids to focus on value, not just price. No matter what our politicians and their minions urge, corporate interests should not be given priority over transcendent goals such as these.

Besides, this misdirection of public education is based on a phantasmagorical world of work that has little counterpart in reality. Far more radical changes in schooling would be required to actually prepare kids for the real world of work.

For instance, school leaders might want to further accelerate the rapidly growing outsourcing of school bus driving, cooking, janitorial services, and the like. Then more kids could actually witness loyal employees they may have known for years being discarded like an old shoe. The soon-to-be discarded might even be directed to visit classes and share their experience. Then students will be better prepared for the day when they too might be thrown away.

Periodically screwing the kids out of their lunch money would also be instructive. Leaving them hungry and frustrated would prepare them for the sort of corporate shenanigans that make retirement funds disappear.

Devoting ever-larger amounts of the school budget to administrative salaries and fringe benefits might also be helpful. It would prepare kids for a work world where employees are made worse off so that corporate chieftains can be even more ridiculously well off.

Educators might even want to close American schools, put the youngsters on the street, then open new schools for cheap-to-educate kids in places like India. That way students will be better prepared if their adult job is exported.

U.S. politicians have bullied educators about this world of work thing for so long that some have actually begun to think this is their proper prime directive. It is time for them to wise up and pursue more worthy objectives.

For additional thoughts on this topic, see Tracking in Public Education: preparation for the world of work?.

Best of Luck,

Gary K. Clabaugh

Bad Actors in Organizations: an illusion?

One of the deep, dark secrets of American organizational life is this: it doesn’t matter how someone talks or acts -- name your nastiness! -- so long as no one higher up perceives that behavior as making them personally run a risk.

The converse is this: it doesn’t matter how innocent or justified an action is, say, by policy, law or tradition; if higher ups interpret it as a personal risk to them, e.g. shaking the boat, then the fury of “the organization” will descend upon the actor.

Did you see the boss’ nephew slipping money out of the cash drawer? Don’t be the sole messenger of that event! You’ve seen your CEO sexually harasses other employees? Forget it, or forget about a promotion! Your superior officer wants you to “acquire” special materiel and change the books to cover your tracks? Do it, or request a transfer, or resign! Your dean or president wants something shady done? Will you be seen to be “accommodating to administrative intention?” Decide now if you want to get on the administrative “money track” or remain forever a lowly paid technician.

Organizations have rules, regulations and policies. But there is a basic Existence Rule: X only happened if X was duly noted and recorded by authorized persons. Out of sight, out of mind. Out of mind, out of existence.

So, it still takes courage to make a complaint. Spinelessness is a precondition for survival and growth in many an organization, whether corporate, military, governmental or educational.

Educational institutions, in particular, prefer the spineless for promotion. Until that situation changes, all talk of improving schools, at any level, is pure gas.

To examine these issues further, see THE ORGANIZATIONAL PROBLEM: ILLUSION AND REALITY

Cordially
EGR

The Liberal Arts: House of Intellect or of Questionable-Repute?

True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing.-- Socrates

It’s been some 2500 years since Socrates persuaded the denizens of the Academy to accept one of the world’s grandest absurdities: the belief that successful practitioners, in general, do not “really know” what they are doing. This cooks down today to the common academic prejudices that

a. practice, hands on experience, or apprenticeship, is an inferior approach to learning; and
b. seat time in a lecture hall provides a superior education; and
c. the glibbest person on a topic is likely the most knowledgeable, and consequently, the most authoritative.

To “know something” – according to Socrates -- is to be able to articulate it or demonstrate it in the manner of a geometrical proof. Contrary to popular belief, Socrates was not engaged so much – if at all -- in reflective critical thinking as in cultural warfare. Most important for us today, Socrates and followers provided a criterion of membership in what in modern times would be called the Intelligentsia.

A second tragedy was Socrates’ influence on religion, via Plato and then Aristotle. Early Christian Aristotelians, pressured by Constantine for uniformity in order to morally legitimate state interventions, invented “Rational” theology. Statements of belief were formulated and could now become became a matter of life and death. “Creeds” had to be memorized and recited for admission to one or another competing congregation of true believers. Acquaintance with theology defined a religious Intelligentsia as opposed to the merely pious plebians.

How many millions of people have been sacrificed on the altars of the Intelligentsia, both religious and secular? Lenin, for example, considered himself, as well as Marx and Engels, members of the bourgeois intelligentsia, destined to lead a generally "falsely conscious" working class into revolution. Like Stalin, Hitler suffered through a fairly standard religious education as a child, but each man pursued his own phantasm of doctrinal purity: economic vs racial.

ACTA, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, has resolved in 2011 to ensure that college graduates

“… have the skills and knowledge they need in math, science, American history, and economics.”

Why these subject areas? Behold the Non Sequitur!

“Students can’t think critically, and succeed professionally, if they don’t have anything to think about.”

Is there a logical connection here? Is this really a concern for critical thought; or, a sales pitch for a particular type of education?

Ought we to believe that if people can’t get a college cafeteria meal, they’ll likely starve to death? If they don’t work out in a college gym, their muscles will likely atrophy? If they don’t learn to sing Gaudeamus Igitur they, growling, will likely devolve into feral animals?

Even though it is still considered a sign of advanced educational achievement, wisdom, even, to tip one's hat to Socrates' despair about the possibility of knowledge, in reality many, if not most, people hold (more wisely) to the following:

Inarticulate knowledge must not be despised: we grasp theoretical ideas only if we have sufficient experience to give them meaning.-- Stephen Toulmin Return to Reason (2001,174)

To pursue these and related issues, see Moral Education: Indoctrination vs. Cognitive Development?

Cordially
--- EGR

Institutional Realities vs. "De-Biased" Realities

The limits of your language are the limits of your world. -- Wittgenstein

What is a language? A dialect with an army. -- Old joke among linguists.

Bias is an instrument of institutions to control depictions of reality.
(See Institutionalization) Bias is pervasive. We can’t escape it completely. Even our nervous system biases our perceptions at fundamental levels.

Source: https://goo.gl/images/9xnvjl

Bias is also relative. But this need not be a constant concern. We should only worry about bias when it favors or disfavors those who are making decisions for us. This is why we look to find “disinterested,” “objective,” “unprejudiced” judgments to support our decisions.

Of course, people who are unprejudiced in one situation may be highly biased in another. It is we, ourselves, who need to discriminate when this is so. That is the problem.

Every organization that persists through changes of leadership or mission becomes an “institution.” As an institution it imposes ways of perceiving and thinking on its participants. The benefits of membership, you will be told, outweigh the costs of the conformity expected of you. You may have to subordinate your own judgment to that of the traditions, practices, etc., i.e., residues of former and present leaderships. You will have to learn which “elephants in the room” are to be ignored. Institutions seldom invite the examination, much less the mention, of “de-biased realities.”

An important point: what we imagine to be our "natural" languages are highly institutionally reconstructed means of communication. As we grow out of the sole influence of family and neighborhood, especially as we go through schooling, our languages become refashioned to meet the demands of the institutions we go through. We subordinate our dialects to our institutional languages for the promise of support and protection.

Scientists, even, sometimes fall into the trap of thinking that their professional pursuits purge their working language of institutional biases, that their speech is a neutral medium of communication. This can stifle research by restricting both theory and practice within the boundaries of passing academic or corporate philosophical preferences. (See for example, The Functional Analysis of Human Behavior.)

Just as radical forms of Behaviorism and Empiricism of the last century impeded progress in psychology and economics, (see The Mathematics of Behaviorism: an informal examination), so it is that naive "natural language" notions of conceptualization and abstraction undermine progress in applicational development in AI. To examine this further, see More Related Issues

Cordially
--- EGR

Do Schools Really Need to Cost So Much?

"As the purse is emptied, the heart is filled." - Victor Hugo

Many communities are wealthy enough not to concern themselves with duplication of services. Public schools, community centers, service organizations, and community colleges offer essentially the same activities - often competing with each other, jealously guarding their own prerogatives to stamp their brand name on offerings to an oversupplied market. High schools offer courses in calculus, astrophysics, or jewelry making, competing with the local community college or community center for the same "customers." The reality is that school systems are expected to do many more things than teaching students subject matter, and these things cost money.

Maybe it's time for someone to speak up and say, "If you want our system to run a farm system for the professional football leagues, then you're going to have to pay extra for it and not expect us to do it under the cover of 'physical education.'"

Perhaps it is time to tell parents that their tax dollars will be used to enhance classroom learning; that if they want to play status games with their neighbors by having their children compete for entrance into "prestige" universities, the local schools are not going to spend money on special AP courses for that purpose.

To examine these issues further, see Cutting Public School Costs . . . Intelligently. Can It Be Done?

Cordially,
-- EGR

Teaching & Chronic Scarcity: Dodging the Need for Triage. by Gary K. Clabaugh, Ed. D.

New teachers routinely have to deal with too many students, insufficient time and too few resources to thoroughly do their jobs. In short, they struggle with chronic, severe scarcity. And that struggle leads to a centrally important question. Whom can they help without unduly shortchanging others?

I’ve spent 46 years as a teacher educator and have long wondered why so many of my colleagues fail to alert novices to this most difficult issue in teaching? Namely, how to deal with chronic scarcity?

I imagine some ignore this issue because their ivory tower is too far removed from reality for them to realize it even exists. Others dodge it because they don’t want to scare off candidates and thus lose their job. Still others simply are sappy sentimentalists intoxicated by the fantasy that pathological optimism and unreserved self- sacrifice will overcome all.

This is the very nonsense that Hollywood peddles in feature films about education: self-sacrificing teacher surmounts every difficulty through force of will, uncommon devotion and relentless optimism. But this happy horse manure only works in the movies. In the real world even the most dedicated teachers routinely face situations where their resources are so inadequate to the task that difficult, if not impossible, decisions have to be made.

Imagine you are in your initial year of teaching in the state abandoned School District of Philadelphia. Thanks to conservative up-state legislators both your school district and your inner city school are catastrophically underfunded. That is why you have a class of 45 first graders. And, thanks to mainstreaming, it includes a child severely handicapped by Down syndrome. Some administrator decided that your class was the “least restrictive environment possible.” The youngster is low functioning and has serious behavior problems. His uncontrolled actions ruin many lessons and he assaults classmates who obstruct his desires. Sometimes he even strikes out for no apparent reason. Once, while seated in the Caring Circle, he even impulsively kicked a classmate in the face.

You can forget about getting him transferred to special education. Such assignments do not begin until second grade. You have no aide. They all disappeared, (along with the school nurse and guidance counselor) because of draconian budget cuts. When you try to teach this youngster something it takes an enormous amount of your time and yields comparatively little. Meanwhile you have 44 other inner city youngsters to teach, each with their own needs, problems, interests and abilities.

The plain fact is, in a situation like this there is no way to adequately address everyone’s needs. So what is one of the first things you must do? Figure out how to distribute your time and resources to maximize learning for the greatest number while dealing with the guilt that these imposed choices induce. Unfortunately, your training never even suggested you might face such choices, much less explored how to deal with them. The romantic drivel that was handed you is no help. You urgently need to know what to do.

Fortunately, there is a time-tested method for coping when urgent demands exceed existing supplies. It is called triage, and those dealing with mass disasters practice it routinely. Here is how it works. All the casualties are sorted into three categories. Those requiring immediate life-saving attention receive it. They are assigned first priority. Those that can wait must do so. The dying is left untreated until the needs of the others have been satisfied.

Emergency medical personnel simply cannot afford to pretend that their time and resources are limitless. This grim but essential allocation saves lives. Yet teachers in training are rarely taught that they too will likely lack the time and resources to do everything that needs to be done and thus must perform triage. This lack of candid preparation tacitly encourages new teachers to expend unjustifiable time and resources on the most needy youngsters, while neglecting those who would most profit from their help. Such misappropriation is understandable, but ethically indefensible. (1)

Ignorance of the necessity of triage causes many potentially good teachers to blame themselves when they cannot do everything that needs to be done. This is one reason why, five years in, nearly half of newly minted teachers will have either abandoned the occupation or transferred to a new school.

Moreover, maintaining the fiction that triage is never necessary plays right into the hands of the politicians who, by perennially short changing public education, put teachers in situations where triage is ethically unavoidable. Then, making matters worse, these very same politicos demand that no child be left behind or, currently, that every child succeeds.(2)

It is past time to end this humbug. Teaching is just like any other occupation requiring extensive time and resources. Short-changing either results in sub-optimal performance. But at least the very worst outcomes are avoided when triage is employed.

Sincerely, GKC


1. See Edward G. Rozycki, The Ethics of Educational Triage: is Special Education Moral?

2. In December 2016 President Obama signed into law the Every Child Succeeds Act. It replaces the unlamented No Child Left Behind Act.

The Desired Ideal: a Docile Citizen? Or...?

It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of non-violence to cover our impotence. -- Mohandas K. Gandhi (See Was Non-Violence Gandhi’s Ultimate Goal?)

In the many years I taught classes in ethics, both inside and out- of the university, I encountered fewer than five or so implacable pacifists. These were people who professed themselves ready to sacrifice their nearest and dearest to death by unjust, intrusive attack, when they themselves could only intervene with violent action. In every case, I would ask them how they would justify letting their loved ones perish for the sake of their own, possibly egoistic, commitments.

They would reply to the effect that they believed in an after-life in which those loved ones would find a better situation. Also, they indicated that they were not ready to pursue that train of investigation: change the topic. (But see Belief, Disbelief, Truth, Falsehood and Faith.)

Adults, parents, teachers and counseling personnel all over this great country of ours have gotten into the habit of preaching to their children or underage charges that "Violence is never the answer." Every kid, when confronted with such easy pacifism, immediately recognizes two things:

1. What they are being told is false; and,

2. Their mentors are either not serious, or out of touch with reality, or liars.

All kids have to do is listen to the radio, watch TV, or pay attention to their elders' behavior to see more than ample proof that violence, on some occasions, is very likely reasonably, the unavoidable answer. Their easy preachment against violence, a dollar-store pacifism, is just one more depressing example of a major rule of everyday adult practice: "Do as I say, not as I do."

Another preachment kids encounter regularly is that if someone hits them and they hit back, they (the original victims) have "lowered themselves to the level" of their bullies. What's this "level" nonsense? Why is physical violence lower, more reprehensible, than the psychological torture inflicted by sharp tongues spreading malevolent gossip? Do psychological torturers imagine themselves morally superior because they refrain from touching their victims? They aren't; and, no kid who can fog a mirror thinks they are.

It's hard to be a parent, or teacher, or counselor. You don't want to encourage random unconstrained physical battle. Not because it's morally inferior -- look at the many sports which are both violent and educative because contact is controlled by rules -- but because it runs risks of outcomes that outweigh any benefits to be gained in the combat. Also, kids are prone to sudden seizures of anger, which, if restrained and reflected on, can be controlled to their benefit. (See Permissible School Violence)

On the other hand, who imagines that any kid with half a brain can't recognize hypocrisy? And what does this hypocrisy teach?

a. People in authority don't really want to get involved in having to exercise -- and make public -- their weak capacity for rational or fair judgment;

b. Talk is cheap. Fast tongue exercises authority as it dodges challenge;

c. Adults (superiors, leaders, gentry) are, at best, inferior teachers or models, who don't want to get involved with kids (inferiors, followers, servants) beyond what is absolutely necessary.

Docility is valued -- is preached to be a sign of "a superior person" -- because a docile person offers little resistence to a superior's importunity, is long suffering, and, in continuing traditions of hypocrisy, undermines himself or herself morally so as to destroy any basis for resistence to exploitation.

Pacifism, which starts out with the highest, the noblest, hopes of transforming human societies to tolerance and love, when glibly practiced in the contexts of our power-ridden institutions, becomes the means by which courage and forthrightness are fed to tyranny.


For references and to examine these issues further, see Doing Violence to "Violence"


Cordially
--- EGR

Mentors for New Teachers: just another fad?

Mentoring is a brain to pick, an ear to listen, and a push in the right direction. -- John Crosby

Mentoring -- one might think -- is just the most wonderful thing to come along in education for ... centuries, almost. Everybody seems to be talking about it; why, you can tell how successful it's going to be because just about every other educational conference you see advertised has loads and loads of presentations on mentoring. Or used to. Who knows? Perhaps it will even achieve the stunning success enjoyed by such innovations as open classrooms, or programmed learning!

Student teaching, we know, has long attempted to provide mentors for the fledgling educator by pairing him or her up with an experienced teacher. But the reality is often that each school principal picks the sponsoring teacher for reasons other than any concern to help the student teacher.

The colleges, generally competing with each other for scarce placements, have little control over how their students are placed or what is done with them should they be lucky enough to secure a placement.

To examine these issues further, see Mentoring: Are We Serious?

-- EGR