Beyond Rivalry - education

The Value of Education -- Deciding What to Worship

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 07:55:00 -0400

David Foster Wallace, postmodern author who ended his life last week at the age of 46 (RIP), talks about the real value of education in his 2005 Kenyon College commencement speech.

I'm going to be away until the end of September and won't be posting, but I leave you with Foster's exceptionally honest words to college grads, which include these:

"Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realist, most vivid and important person in existence.

"We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it's so socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to…

His back to the fire

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 06:25:00 -0400

"My father took a camera everywhere. He took photos of everything. He had separate photo albums for sad photos. He said these were just as important. The pictures in these albums were of family funerals, of my mother returning from being fired at work, of my brother after he broke his wrist trying to jump over a tennis net. There were pictures of each of us having just vomited, or holding a failing test mark, or the moment after we found the cockatoo or the team we were supporting had lost. There was a picture of me, aged nine, looking up at the camera. In the middle of the night, I had knocked on my parents’ bedroom door. I was holding my blanket and in tears because I didn’t want to die. My father held the camera steady and pressed the button."

I started my photography career this way (still have the photos to prove it) but fast learned that others found my observational interest in their sadness and pain to be evidence of a cruel, cold, harsh, mechanical, sick, aloof, unsisterly, and decidedly misaligned heart and soul. The zoom lens circumvents some of the judgment but not entirely.

Anyway, read…

How To Really Be An Expert

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 07:20:00 -0400

Years of experience in your given field does not make you an expert performer. It can help -- if you have 10 years experience or more, that is -- and it can also hurt -- acting unconsciously and missing key information, being overconfident -- but what really helps is to spend most of your time practicing the hardest aspects of your job, profession, skill, talent, or field: "In other words, we like to practice what we know, stretching out in the warm bath of familiarity rather than stretching our skills. Those who overcome that tendency are the real high performers." Another factor that helps make experts expert is "regularly obtaining accurate feedback." This is true for a variety of fields, including nurses, doctors, athletes, crossword puzzle solvers, chess players, drivers, and, perhaps, politicans.

More at "The Science of Experience" in Time.

RIP Randy Pausch (1960-2008)

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 12:06:17 -0400

"Randy Pausch, a Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist whose 'last lecture' about facing terminal cancer became an Internet sensation and a best-selling book, died Friday. He was 47." He'd been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer almost two years ago. More at NYT and at Carnegie Mellon. This is his update page, which I've been following for about a year (servers at Carnegie Mellon must be overloaded; it's taking many tries to download today).

His Last Lecture is moving and inspiring, imo. Watch it.

Causes: Meritocracy (Notes from Status Anxiety)

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 05:45:00 -0400

Notes from Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety (2004). This is the fourth post on this topic; the first is here.

CHAPTER 3 - MERITOCRACY

Explanations for why one might be poor and what one's value to society is have grown "notably more punitive and emotionally awkward in the modern era."

From AD 30 to the latter part of the 20th century, there have been three stories for the "lowest in Western societies" that were consoling:

(1) The poor are not responsible for their condition and are the most useful members of society. This is the medieval and pre-modern story. God and/or the natural order are responsible for societal position. In this story, there's a sense of mutual dependence among the classes, and the lowest classes are acknowledged for making life easier for the upper classes.

(2) Low status has no moral connotation. Per Scripture. Neither wealth nor poverty are an accurate index of moral worth. Jesus was poor and good. If anything, poverty was good because it led to the recognition of one's dependence on God.

(3) The rich are sinful and corrupt and owe their wealth to the robbery of the poor. 1754-1989. Rousseau, Marx (1887), Engels (1845)

These weren't…

Shopping Camp at the Mall - Patriotic!

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 08:40:00 -0400

In news related to status anxiety, ruling class ideology, materialism, and creating desires: Marketplace reporter Benjamin Barber lauds shopping camp -- held at a mall, at which girls ages 6-12 visit stores to learn how to accessorize outfits -- as patriotic. I'm pretty sure he's being sarcastic .... More here. And Jezebel readers have something to say about it, too.

Collective Wisdom (Initiative) - Responses

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 14:05:00 -0400

A friend asked me to check out this Collective Wisdom Initiative website, so for the past couple of days I have been reading it, in bits and pieces. As she so understatedly said, "There is a lot of material here." I have a lot more to explore, if I choose to, and some time I probably will.

I want to respond to (my interpretation of) what I've read here, instead of sending long emails to a few people, which might be seen as personally meant when they're not; these comments are about me -- they're my response, my experience, my beliefs, etc., all subject to change any minute now.

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GENERAL RESPONSE

There is so much material here, too much for me to synthesise now, so I will comment on the bits and pieces I've explored that speak to me.

I think I have a vague sense of the overarching theme, something like "collective wisdom comes from truth and leads us to truth." Perhaps? I like some of the basic elements of: Seeking the Edge, Invoking the Daimon, Blessing and Invocation, Beauty, and Wholeness. They all speak to me deeply, as I interpret them.

The fundamental (I think?) belief that "Together…

Predicting Behaviour

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 11:55:00 -0500

Gavin de Becker's Book, The Gift of Fear, and Other Survival Signals That Protect Us From Violence (1997), is a book I recommend to everyone. To women as a handbook, to men primarily as insight into most women's experience, though I think we can all benefit from learning to recognise signals of violence, and from distinguishing between risks that our intuition warns us of, and unlikely risks, about which we worry fruitlessly.

A few bits that have spoken to me so far (1/3 through this time, my second reading of the book):

FIRST, that criminals are basically like us, not inhuman monsters, not other and therefore unknowable; and SECOND, that we successfully predict human behavior every day:

"People do things, we say, 'out of the blue,' 'all of a sudden,' 'out of nowhere.' These phrases support the popular myth that predicting human behavior isn't possible." Yet, de Becker says, we predict complex human behaviour every time we drive: "We expect all drivers to act just as we would, but we still alertly detect those few who might not." We also successfully predict "how a child will react to a warning," "how a consumer will react to a slogan," "how a spouse…

Obsolete Skills, Like Adjusting Rabbit Ears, Balancing the Tone Arm on a Turntable, and ... Getting to Know Your Neighbors?

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 06:10:00 -0500

Obsolete Skills, which is a wiki (edited by anyone who wants to, whether they are experts on the topic or complete dolts), not only lists them but describes some obsolete, almost-obsolete, and perhaps debatably obsolete skills in lucid detail. Not all of them, though. And some (q.v. previous link) aren't all that obsolete, which is sometimes acknowledged. Many are computer-related, but not all.

Head Injury and Addiction, Learning Problems, Homelessness

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 08:15:00 -0500

A lot more research is needed, but this report in the WSJ of studies led by Wayne A. Gordon, Ph.D., director of the Brain Injury Research Center at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, and Mary Hibbard, Ph.D., which have found a mild to strong relationship between previously unidentified traumatic childhood brain injuries and 'ills' such as learning disabilities, addiction, and homelessness, could change the type and efficacy of treatments for many people.

Descriptions of some of their studies, including classroom studies and studies among addicted and homeless populations, are in the article. One epidemiological study, in which 5,000 people were interviewed door-to-door in 2000, found that the 7.2% who remembered a "a past blow to the head that was followed by unconsciousness or a period of confusion" also reported "more than twice the rate of depression and of alcohol and drug abuse as others" and "had sharply elevated rates of panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder and suicide attempts" compared with those who didn't report a head injury.

Article accompanied by an embedded video.