Say it again

I’ve done more thinking about torture in the last six years than I ever imagined would be necessary. One of the few consolations of today’s awful landscape is hearing a respected person use clear, simple words to show how wrong it is.

This is from hilzoy.

I would have thought that anyone who was thinking about endorsing torture would first stop and think very, very carefully about whether it is actually effective. […]

Arguing about torture without asking this question is like arguing about whether you must, absolutely must, eat your children to keep yourself from starving to death without first checking to see whether you have any other food available.

It’s the best 532 words you’ll read this week.

The importance of environmental design (why whiteboards are awesome)

By environmental design, I do not mean environmental engineering or anything related with environmentalism. Rather, I want to talk about designing our environment — that is, the physical world in which we live — to make our lives better.

I have not traditionally put much thought into designing my living space. Sure, I set up my room nicely (both functionally and to a lesser extent aesthetically), but prior to the last year, I had never thought about how much my environment impacts my productivity and happiness.

For example, last fall, a suitemate and I came up with the idea of purchasing a whiteboard for our suite’s common area. We thought it would be a fun and useful way to collaborate on our many problem sets.^[1] The idea percolated in our minds until one day we broke down, went to Staples, and purchased a whiteboard and the necessary accoutrements.

To say that the board was a success would be an understatement. It worked out so well, in fact, that we shortly thereafter purchased a second board, and then a third.^[2]

What did we use the boards for?

First and foremost, they performed even better than expected at helping us with our original goal of collaborating on problem sets. The boards enabled us to offload our thinking into a shared space — a commons — which meant quite literally that multiple people could work on a given problem simultaneously. It also meant problems could be put on the board, ignored (or at least not actively worked on) for a bit, and then resumed.

Compare this to doing problem sets alone, on a piece of graph paper. With graph paper, when you’re not working on your problem set, the problems are not in view — they’re in your backpack, desk drawer or, most likely, on your floor. In any case, you’re unlikely to glance at them when you’re eating or chatting with friends. But if the problem exists on a whiteboard just next to your breakfast/lunch/dinner table, in the room where you and your friends spend 75% of your time at home, you’re bound to gaze upon it from time to time. Chances are also that at some point you — or one of your friends — will have a breakthrough. And when you do, there will be no delay before you can start working again.

That last point is key: Whiteboards operate in realtime and thus have no “startup time” — i.e., there’s no pause between when you want to start working and when you can actually start working. The few things that might actually slow you down, like not being able to find a marker, can be eliminated with a little thoughtful design.^[3]

The boards didn’t just give us a way to do our homework together, though. They actually helped us learn the material more thoroughly, by keeping our work visually in front of us, and by facilitating the social connections that helped cement our new knowledge. They also served as a mechanism for my friends and me to share information that was not directly related to our course work: My friend Spencer taught me some of the basic mathematics behind Western music, and the boards have been used more than once to parse Arabic and Latin sentences.

But the boards’ usefulness did not end there. Over the past months, they have, among other things, served as an oversized message board (I’m at the library. Want to grab dinner at 7:30?); an ad hoc grocery list; and aided in the development of a theory of how best to pick up strangers.

As the above examples suggest, the dry-erase boards became wholly integrated into our daily lives.^[4] Here’s why I think they worked so well — and were adopted so quickly.

First, as I hope I have illustrated above, the boards were genuinely useful. This may seem painfully obvious but I still think it’s worth stating: Things that are useful will get used.

Second, they were right there, so we didn’t have to go out of our way to use them. How many times have you found a new website or downloaded a cool new program, only to find that a week later you’ve forgotten that it even exists?

I think there are two primary lessons to be learned here.

The first lesson is that our environments facilitate our thinking much more than we tend to think they do.^[5]

The second lesson I will sum up in the form of a new law:

Nicholas’s law of technological adoption:

The rate of adoption of a new technology is directly related to its utility and inversely related to how much effort it takes to incorporate it into your established workflow.^[6]

I’m curious to hear what people think of all this.

1. Keep in mind that I am, along with all of the people with whom I live, presently in engineering school. We don’t write response papers or essays; we do problem sets. For better or worse, we live and breathe problem sets. I should also note that for the majority of our classes, collaboration is not only permitted but actively encouraged by our professors.↩
2. In the interest of full disclosure, I should acknowledge that the acquisition of the third board was driven as much out of my near obsessive desire for symmetry as it was out of actual need.↩
3. Early this semester, with the purchase of the third whiteboard, I got an extra set of markers that were magnetized. A friend noticed that they stuck rather well to our rooms’ metal doorframes. Ever since, I have kept a marker or two on my doorframe. Now, when I have a thought in my room and want to work it out on the dry-erase board, I mindlessly grab a marker on my way out to the lounge and I’m ready to go.↩
4. This has become something of a problem. I now frequently find myself looking for the nearest whiteboard (or reaching into my pocket for an erasable marker) when I want to explain something to someone. The problem is that this happens even when I’m places that rarely have publicly accessible whiteboards, like a restaurant or train station.↩
5. Variations on this theme have been studied for some time. The American psychologist J. J. Gibson wrote about the importance of environmental factors in shaping our thinking decades ago. I guess I’m more than a little late to the party.↩
6. As an example of this on a large scale, think about how quickly Facebook went from being non-existent to utterly pervasive. In a matter of months, it became part of the daily routine of millions of people and the sixth-most-visited site in the US. Imagine the possibilities if we could build a grassroots activist network with the same rapidity.↩

When incentives collide

Today I am wondering how to change the academic world so that researchers are rewarded for actively telling people about their work. Or, to be grumpy about it, so that they are punished if they do not share their research results more broadly.

I’ve been fortunate enough to work for two people who care very much about adding to the world’s store of knowledge. This means that they say “Yes” when asked to participate in research projects.

Having these folks as models is good for me, because most of my personal experience of researchers is negative, and left to my own devices I would probably be politely unavailable.

As it is, I try to accommodate the requests I get. There aren’t too many, and they’re not very onerous, so I’m not making a big sacrifice.

Recently it was a public health student. We met in a coffee shop, where I gave him a sixty-minute monologue. He scribbled while I worried about whether the noisy backdrop of rock music and coffee machines would interfere with good notetaking.

A few months later I got an invitation to the presentation of his thesis. This was remarkable on two counts: first, he’d apparently finished something, and second, he was bothering to tell his research subjects. I was slightly impressed.

There were seven people at the presentation, along with two unopened boxes of donuts. I sat through 40 PowerPoint slides with a better-than-usual narrative flow. It helped that the researcher was personable, and that the topic is relevant to my work.

Afterwards I asked about his plans for disseminating the results. Had he translated it into another language (this being a major point in both his research and his final recommendations)? Well – sheepish grin – no. Had he made arrangements to speak with the school district, local elected officials, or other policymakers (all governing some aspect that was addressed in his research)? Well, no. He had invited a few here today, but….

Was he going to speak with any community members, through mosques or churches as he himself had recommended? Well…it was better to leave that to community leaders who command more authority and respect.

I figured that was it, but then a man got up and introduced himself as the student’s advisor. He asked the student to leave the room, and then asked the audience to evaluate his work. Apparently our comments were to inform the advisory committee’s grading of his thesis.

Most people said nice, slightly generic things. I began by noting how scrupulous he had been in his interview process. Then I said if it were up to me to grade this project, I wouldn’t give it a grade until an effort had been made to share its results more broadly. I gave a few specific suggestions-masquerading-as-examples.

The student was summoned back and a condensed version of the comments read to him. I was moderately surprised that the general point about dissemination was mentioned.

I walked away feeling somewhat cynical that anything much would happen. It seemed that the advisors had to submit a grade quite quickly (it already being late May) in order for the student to graduate.

Moreover, there was a distinct lack of energy among both student and advisors about the ideas proposed. Visit a church to present your data? Meet with community members in someone’s living room? Approach the school board? Give a background briefing to legislative staff? I might as well have asked him to sew his own graduation robe – he quite clearly saw it as not his task.^[1]

At first I was angry, as much at the sheer wastefulness as on moral grounds. Then I started to think about why this response might be natural given the way the academic system is set up. Read the rest of this entry »

Another introduction

I’ve known Nicholas for longer than most people, and have always enjoyed his musings and ideas. I was delighted when he announced the launch of this blog, and am honored that he gave me permission to guest-post. Please feel free to contact me at srabibliotecaria at unschooled dot org.

Do schools kill creativity?

I just watched Sir Ken Robinson’s speech from last year’s TED conference. It’s old, but definitely worth a look if you’ve got 19 minutes:

First, I think his diagnosis is mostly right on target. Of course, this isn’t much of a surprise given that I’m highly skeptical of traditional schooling and subscribe to Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, which Sir Robinson seemed to be advocating. In sound-byte form:

We are educating people out of their creative capacities.

One critique: It may sound pedantic, but I think he really should have said that we are schooling — rather than educating — children out of their creative capacities.

Second, his delivery method was fascinating. I can’t remember the last time I saw humor blended so thoroughly and effectively into a speech. His talk is at heart an argument — a somewhat radical one, at that — against schooling as it is currently practiced. And yet he managed to avoid framing the issue in terms of “us” versus “them,” or seriously antagonizing large groups of people. Too often when we feel even slightly attacked, our defense shields go up and we stop listening. By putting everyone at ease through his humor, Sir Robinson doesn’t obstruct his message but instead makes it possible for us to actually hear it.

Lastly, I loved this:

If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original.

I think I’ll re-read that line every day for at least the next month.

These guys are crazy

I only caught the last half-hour of the most recent Republican debate, and boy was it terrifying: Eight of the ten candidates came out in strong favor of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” formerly known as torture. Mitt Romney wants to double the size of Guantanamo Bay. Only Rep. Ron Paul and Sen. John McCain argued that torturing people was perhaps not the best way to defend our values.

Rep. Paul pointed out that calling torture enhanced interrogation techniques was akin to Newspeak. Sen. McCain, the only candidate who has experienced the horrific reality of torture, gave an impassioned argument:

It’s not about the terrorists, it’s about us. It’s about what kind of country we are. And a fact: The more physical pain you inflict on someone, the more they’re going to tell you what they think you want to know.

It’s about us as a nation. We have procedures for interrogation in the Army Field Manual. Those, I think, would be adequate in 999,999 of cases, and I think that if we agree to torture people, we will do ourselves great harm in the world.

The rest of the candidates appear to be morally bankrupt. They seem to think our moral yardstick is Al Qaeda, and as long as we’re not as barbaric as they are we’re doing okay. They’re wrong. Our moral compass should be based upon our nation’s founding principles, not the actions of murderous thugs.

Also frightening were the frequent allusions to 24. Rep. Tancredo said that in the (entirely contrived and 24-esque) ticking time-bomb scenario he was “looking for Jack Bauer.”^[1] I was reminded of a scathing and rather apropos article from the American Conservative magazine. The entire piece is worth a read, but its thrust is summed up in its closing paragraph:

The devotion to 24 and its protagonist demonstrates what few may care to admit: in the war on terror, the conservative movement has become willing to sacrifice principle to passion and difficult moral reasoning to utility. As escapism, 24 is riveting; as a parable for our time, it is revolting.

Rep. Tancredo said that America is Western civilization’s last hope and tried to justify the use of torture as a means of defending Western civilization. That’s like burning down your home to defend against a prowler on the roof. When we start torturing fellow human beings, even under the assumption they have committed heinous crimes, when we “sacrifice principle to passion,” we destroy the very values we purport to defend.

1. Complete transcript online via the New York Times here. If you don’t have an nytimes.com account, try BugMeNot.com ↩

Launched

This site is, in short, a collection of things that I think and care about. Those things include free culture, educational philosophy, design, current events, technology, and engineering. I particularly like it when these things overlap.

This site is also my formal web-presence. Given that I spend about as much time online as I do in meatspace, I decided it would make sense for me to formally exist online beyond the confines of Facebook.

I should probably take a moment to say a bit about this site’s name. Unschooling is a liberal^[1] form of alternative education that falls under the ecumenical banner of “homeschooling” but, apart from the fact that it is an alternative form of education, shares virtually nothing in common with the traditional view of “school at home” (i.e., mom teaching biology to her socially deficient kids at the kitchen table). Unschooling philosophy is based first and foremost on the idea that children are naturally curious and should be free to learn about and explore the world largely as they see fit.

As you may have now guessed, I am an unschooler. This means that prior to going to college I lived without grades, tests, homework, formal curricula, and just about all the other trimmings of the modern-day American school-system. I deeply believe that unschooling is good both pragmatically and philosophically. Expect posts on this in the future.

It’s taken much deliberation — as well as a little inspiration — to decide to finally start blogging. My reasons for not starting earlier are pretty standard: I worried I wouldn’t have enough time to write and that the site would quickly stagnate. I feared the inevitable public judgement and criticism of putting my thoughts online for any and all to see. And I always had the lingering fear that the whole thing was more than a little narcissistic.

Those concerns may have faded a little, but they have certainly not disappeared from my mind entirely. What’s changed is that the reasons I do want to blog have managed to surpass my trepidation. Besides, I need to find a new way to procrastinate, as I’m starting to suspect I may have actually seen all of Facebook.

Just recently, I remembered a quotation I hadn’t thought about for nearly five years:

“Anything that I have ever done that was ultimately worthwhile, initially scared me to death.”^[2]

My first regular entry comes tomorrow. Stay tuned.

-Nicholas Bergson-Shilcock

1. I use liberal here mostly to mean free and not in the political sense. Unschooling respects the freedom of children and young people and is thus strongly non-coercive but ultimately not strictly tied to a single political movement. For what it’s worth, most of the unschoolers I know are politically left-leaning.↩
2. I have no idea where I first heard this. A little googling shows that it is attributed to Betty Bender, who, according to her search results, is famous for saying the above quotation.↩

About and Contact

Archive

bah