Survival of the fit enough

In my perusings I just came across this interesting item:

Michael Vick says new Eagles coach Chip Kelly “taught” him how to properly hold the football while running. The 10-year veteran was apparently being serious. “The other day, I broke out in the pocket, and the first thing Chip told me was to tuck the football,” Vick said. “So I showed him how I was running with it, and he looked at it and he knocked the ball right out of my hands. And he was like, ‘Hold it like this.’ And what he told me felt comfortable. I had a tighter grip on the football. That should secure that problem as long as I work on it.” It’s beyond belief that Vick is implying that he not only didn’t know how to properly hold the football, but had never been taught by Dan Reeves, Jim Mora Jr. or Andy Reid, but here we are. Vick has lost 12 fumbles over his past 35 games, which is far too many.

How do four people – Vick, Reeves, Mora, Reid – who do a thing at the very highest level, who have pretty much done it all day every day for their whole lives, not notice there’s a basic, outcome-changing problem and take easy steps to fix it? Is that surprising?

In the book discussion over at The Long Eighteenth I’ve been trying to both discuss and, predictably, demonstrate this effect. Gikandi looks at the slavery / culture of taste complex; sees the one is both enabling and constraining the other; and apparently can’t think of any way that could make sense other than grand psychic defense mechanisms like repression and libidinal sublimation. Big effects must have big causes. Has Vick been repressing a desire to lose this whole time? Or did he just carry the ball a way, mostly not drop the thing, and therefore never think or feel much about it? After all, fumbling’s part of the game.

Do analyses like Gikandi’s repress a dark terror of the mindless operations of unreflective habit? We all get to have our favorite theories, but jobs go smoother if you use the right tools. In a book in large part about the history of the judgment of taste, with a 30-page bibliography, Gikandi mentions “French anthropologist” Pierre Bourdieu just one time, as having called “a set of socially acquired dispositions and predispositions” habitus once (218). Habitus, a concept more pertinently developed in Bourdieu’s Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, is the new grip that would have fixed some of Gikandi’s fumbling; but like Vick, Reeves, Mora, and Reid; Hume and Jefferson and the Beckfords; teachers, students and administrators, he’s been getting along well enough without it.

Slavery and Taste in the Long Eighteenth

Hey Chums, the collaborative reading of Simon Gikandi’s Slavery and the Culture of Taste has begun today at The Long Eighteenth (Dave Mazella and friends’ blog) with a smashing post on slavery, aesthetics, and the making of modernity by JoEllen DeLucia.

Having just turned in this semester’s grades, I will now turn to this project. The Long Eighteenth will be hosting guest posters on all of the chapters of the book all week – including yours truly on Wednesday, discussing ch. 3, “Unspeakable Events: Slavery and White Self-Fashioning.” Please join us for a rousing discussion of a fascinating book, which no one expects you to have read (yet).

What counts as success

Reading final papers and course journals now, this smacked me between the eyeballs. For better or worse, this is what counts as a major success to me (from an introductory world history journal, so don’t sweat the typos). Our topic this semester has been ‘conditions of work’:

The last couple weeks, in class, we have investigated the research process and our second papers. I am learning that no matter what time period we are individually studying or what country, most of the same rules apply. There will always be a certain “group” within a population that is getting miss treated because they can be. In most cases, victims are not victimized because of some racial intention or ill-will, it’s because of necessity. I think that when something needs to be done that no one else wants to do, society “volunteers” people to do it. If that group doesn’t have the power or will to object, they fill the void. Once this precedence is set, the negative connotations follow.

Is that the end of the story? No, of course not. But to me, at least, this cleans out the hero/villain juvenilia and the ideological just-so stories and gets the line of investigation pointed toward increasingly better understanding. Yay you, unnamed student.

Um, yay me, sort of

It’s been a complicated little patch.

Two weeks ago I started giving a series of public talks for the local library system on “Nazi Book-Burning: Censorship, Ideology, and Dissent.” They were sparsely attended; apparently spending leisure time listening to professors pontificate about depressing topics is not plan A for most people. But I did not actually pontificate – I passed out brief selections from All Quiet on the Western Front and we tried to figure out what the Nazis didn’t like about it, using a Nazi student manifesto as a guide. The discussions were lively, especially the one attended mostly by middle school students. I was touched by their curiosity and eagerness to think. I also participated in Rachel’s talk for the same series, on the Nazis’ “degenerate art” exhibition. She took a similar approach, showing slides of both degenerate and approved art and working with the audience to puzzle out which was which, and why.

The Sunday before the Monday I started that, I hung out with my friends from the Music Department by participating in their Cape Fear New Music Festival. Along with new music the festival featured a performance of Schoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire,” which was the subject of a mini-conference at which I discussed the historical reception of the piece using Glenn Gould’s 1964 speech on Schoenberg (pdf). Gould was an odd critter, which may account for his silly denial that Schoenberg should be understood in any context but the history of tonality. It may also account for his assertion that contrary to lore Schoenberg is not at all difficult; my impression is that Schoenberg’s pure cerebrality can be as easy as following instructions if taken at face value, but is baffling to anyone who expects music to have an element of feel. Anyway, I did a Bourdieuian number on how dwelling on Schoenberg’s difficulty might enhance the distinction of one’s taste and skill, creating distance between audience and practitioners that Gould decries but may be in the (second) nature of ‘high’ culture. Oblivious to this para-musical dynamic, Gould forecast that the use of atonality in popular scifi and horror movie scores would make Schoenberg part of the popular canon by the year 2000. Not so much, as it turns out.

Later in the week Rachel and I were on the local NPR station doing a segment on her obeast project for “The State of Things.” The occasion was the publication of her book, A Guide to the North American Obeast, for which both I and Dyke the Elder did essays. We were joined by Marilyn Wann, also in the book, who ably represented the fat activism perspective. Rachel and I talked about the construction of authoritative scientific discourse, the magical transformation of feelings into facts, and the traps laid by procrustean identity categories.

Sandwiched in all this was the next round of voting on MU’s general education reform. By a 61-59 vote, the ‘alternate core’ adding back required science, history, and religion classes passed. I had opposed this because it also removed the linked learning component, which still may be voted back in in the next round of voting. At this point I’m hopeful of that, but ready to roll with whatever we end up with.

This past week was focused on student and faculty research and creativity at MU. Two of my students presented work: Daniel Dessauer on conflict minerals in the Congo, a piece informed by the ‘mobile pedagogy’ Dyke the Elder and I have been working on; and Michael Duprey on network analysis of Cosa Nostra, in which he found that formal hierarchies of power are overlain by knowledge and organizational networks in which the critical ‘bridging’ nodes are quite different than a linear top-down leadership model would suggest. I also went to a talk by Yale sociologist Elijah Anderson, who blew me away with his masterful story-based rhetorical style and made me think yet again about the limitations of the argument-and-point style of academic analysis.

This past Wednesday was university awards day. I was pleased to see many deserving folks recognized for their good work, and was shocked when my name was called for the Cleveland award for excellence in teaching, which is our big lifetime-service award. It feels a little ironic given the struggle it’s been to embed what I think are pretty basic pedagogical orientations in the general education program, and I have mixed emotions about being noticed at the best of times – let alone when I haven’t dressed for the occasion. I also note that I was turned down for promotion the year I won my last teaching award. But I also know I’m just a little intellectually and emotionally wrung out right now, and I’m really grateful to be at a place that enables and encourages me to do all this stuff I love.

You’ve heard about modeling, sounds interesting, but you are not a programming Ninja

Help is at hand. Check out Gene Bellinger’s Insight Maker. It’s Web-based, it’s free, you can play with it by yourself or with friends or colleagues.Think of it as a mind map where the pieces interact.If you are a programming Ninja, you may find the models too simple. But it’s plenty sophisticated enough to provide instructive entertainment for the rest of us.

Placing concreteness

One of the things you figure out pretty quickly if you pay attention to what students say is that a lot of them engage with the materials we show them in a very concrete way. One example of that from today’s draft intro paragraph peer review session in World History was the student who kept trying to turn prompts on reconceptualizing its paragraph into a recipe for which words to say and how to arrange them. “What have you figured out about how conditions of trade changed?” became “How many times do I need to repeat the assignment topic phrase ‘conditions of work’?”

Lots of information in a pile, no analysis. A peer shrewdly asked if there were any people involved. So we got ‘Portuguese’ on the board. Then we talked about what kind of work. Trade, as it turned out. So we added ‘trading community’ to Portuguese. Another peer asked if the issue was storms at sea or political conflict. So ‘community’ got complicated to include seamen and kings, we added ‘conflict’, and broke out ‘political’, ‘economic’, and ‘social’. Was any of that sorted out in the draft paragraph? No, so it’s not about adding or moving a word or two, it’s about figuring out what you want to get at based on what you know. At the end the student came up and took a cellphone picture of the board.

Yesterday in the ‘bad literature’ seminar the group presenting on the religious erotica genre (their choice) were struggling with audience. It turned out they assumed that the people who read things are the people those things are about. So the audience for shocking erotica about monks boinking transvestite novices must be young Catholics considering the monastic life. I asked if the audience for Huckleberry Finn was orphans and runaway slaves, and whether they would respect me as a professor if the only books I read were about aging white male professors at nice little regional universities. They had brought up and passed over quickly points about authority and credit/discredit, so I prompted them to get a little more stubborn about developing those analyses. It didn’t take long to work out that an audience of non-Catholics might have reasons to be interested in literature discrediting Catholic authority.

Another fascinating assertion in that discussion was that because all fiction is based on fact, it might as well be treated as such. So the facts about a novel’s rhetoric and context can be read right off of the text. As a fan of science fiction I was tempted to ask about the factiness of phasers, warp drives, and Wookies, but time was running short so we deferred examination of creativity and imagination to our next meeting.

Incidentally, it has occurred to me that part of the problem with the concept of linked learning is that we can see courses, but we can’t see links. We can’t see learning, either, so it’s all very confusing.

(Crossposted at Attention Surplus.)

Another one on linked learning

Some of you may still have a shred of interest in this topic, so here below is a post I just wrote for my school’s gen ed debate blog. Again, the issue is a challenge to the plan that just passed the full faculty, by a group that want to add back more ‘liberal arts’ courses and incidentally remove the linked learning component. (Btw Dave, re: evidence I have done other posts compiling links to lots of educational research and comparable cores at other unis.)

As some of you may know, I run a tennis group up in the Cary area. I have about 100 players on my distribution list and some subset of us get together twice a week to play and socialize. I also play in USTA leagues in Cary, which puts my network in the hundreds.

Because it’s Cary, and because it’s tennis, a very large proportion of these folks are mid to high level professionals. I play with CFOs and chief accounting officers of major corporations; state legislators; small business owners; pharmaceutical executives; IT and data security professionals. We hang out after we play and talk. As a result, over the years I’ve accumulated a fairly dense ethnographic understanding of how these folks think and what they want. And because I’m a college professor, we’ve talked a whole bunch about how they think about college education and what they want from it.

It is absolutely true that, as Lloyd just said in the last post, they have abysmally low expectations of the value of a college degree. They routinely interview and hire candidates with fancy educational credentials who just as routinely turn out to be fundamentally unprepared to be useful. From ample experience, they expect college graduates to be clueless and high-maintenance. They are resigned to this fact. They hope for a little technical polish as a writer and communicator (they get even that rarely) and a general middle-class culturing, by which they mean an acceptance of the value of the enterprise and a certain amiability about following instructions. Because they don’t expect more they don’t look for more, as Lloyd said.

When I talk with my friends about a more ambitious agenda for college education, one that involves teaching students to be resourceful, independent learners who can make connections, figure things out for themselves, and adapt responsibly to complex, unfamiliar situations, they get a faraway, wistful expression. These dispositions are rare and precious to them. I was talking this weekend with a consulting engineer who works regularly with the state department of transportation and a P.A. at a major cardiology center. They bonded over the irrational outcomes that are regularly produced in infrastructure and medical care by rigid systems of rules designed to intercept bad decisionmaking and create predictability – because the people involved can’t be trusted to think their way through the variables of particular cases, and a mediocre outcome is better than a disastrous outcome.

Which brings me to general education. There is enormous value in transmitting what is already known to the young. A firm grounding in the traditions of knowledge is essential to the educated person. Such an education can do much to guard against disastrous outcomes. But as proponents of the alternative core have amply shown, exactly this grounding is the focus of the vast majority of general education programs at our peer institutions, as it has been for many, many years.

And these are the graduates my informants find so disappointing.

It may be that our students ‘should’ be able to learn a more resourceful kind of thinking from our classes, but mostly they don’t. And not just ours. And it’s for the simple reason that we don’t show them how. This is why I think the alternative proposal is out of balance – because the wonderful things in it don’t have the impact they should as long as we’re not intentionally showing the students how to put them together and make something of them. This is the college education my tennis buddies would love to see, and that they’re mostly not seeing. This is the opportunity we have now at MU with the Linked Learning initiative, which is why I think it’s short-sighted to vote it out just in case we vote it back in again later.

Post-Paper Blues

What happens to you when you work hard on a project, and then the work is done? Do you feel like celebrating? My response is to become mildly depressed and slip into a funk. The thrashing around will continue until the next project begins to take shape. In the meantime, I am glad to have business-related stuff to work on in the inbox. Short-term focus is a lot better than no focus at all. Is this normal? Or pathological? Thoughts, anyone?

What’s Your Zombie Type?

The Physicalist[*] created a handy philosophical zombie flow chart. It’s not only a useful walk-through of various philosophical positions, but it is also simply a pleasure to read. An excerpt:

Your antecedent epiphenomenalism (or dual aspectism) is what enables you to think zombies are conceivable

I see a line of philosophical fortune cookies in the making.

[*] The “Physicalist” is a pseudonym. The Physicalist is kind of like the Mentalist, except that he believes that the physical and mental are the same thing; which makes him exactly like the Mentalist. Except for the belief, which science can never explain.

Wild yeast sourdough starter

As a logical next step in my fiddlings with bread-making, I just baked my first sourdough loaf with home-made wild yeast starter the other day. To eliminate all suspense, it came out great – by which I mean, it reminded me of all the things I like about sourdough bread without introducing any new negative associations. I especially like it because I did it ‘all wrong’, which is what this post will now document.

“Softly now, softly now – try it, you won’t die.” Silkworm, “A Cockfight of Feelings”

So, how I went about this is I got on the ol’ internet and googled ‘sourdough starter’. A little reading got me pretty quickly to the further qualification, ‘wild yeast’ – thus distinguishing the truly artisanal starter from the kinds someone else made that you can buy for a whole lot of money from specialty baking stores, if you’re a clueless snob, or Amazon, if you’re even more clueless but at least not a snob. So once I had the correct verbiage for cheap-ass diy starter, I did some more searching and read through some instructions. (I omit the links because I just told you how to diy, get it?)

Well, opinions about exactly what’s happening with sourdough starter seem to vary a bit, starting with where the wild yeasts are actually coming from. Is it the air around us? Is it the flour? Is it the whole grains you must treat with excruciatingly careful reverence to yield their Gaiant bounty of biomagic? With just a slight knowledge of these matters, I decided it was probably all of the above, plus everywhere else, since that’s where yeasts are. So I ignored the instructions that said I had to be careful not to cover the starter vessel with plastic wrap or anything else impermeable. I also ignored the instructions that said I had to hermetically seal the starter vessel, sterilize every instrument that ever came in contact with the starter, wear a hazmat suit, never use stainless steel, always use stainless steel, never use silicon, always use silicon, and so on.

Go Green!

In fact I pretty much ignored every single instruction designed to seal off the wild yeast starter from the environment it had somehow come from. I also ignored all the instructions designed to make my starter a delicate, difficult thing that required constant, meticulous care. I know people whose lives are given a rich sense of meaning by arranging to provide constant, meticulous care to other creatures, but that’s not me and if it was, I’d pick creatures other than yeasts and lactobacilli.

Speaking of lactobacilli, I paid a lot of attention to discussions of the multi-biotic nature of sourdough starter. It’s not the yeasts that are making the sour, it’s the bacteria. But the bacteria don’t make the bread rise, and they also have a tendency to make the ‘spoilt’ version of sour when they get lonely and pig out. So a functional sourdough starter is actually a community of beasties each creating some of the conditions for each others’ happiness, encouraging each others’ strengths and discouraging each others’ excesses, and incidentally each handling part of a fairly complex little biological process that assembles into a tangy leavening. Which of course wasn’t at all what they ‘intended’, but makes an excellent complement to garlicky cream cheese. So anyway, ‘building’ a starter is a process of getting that community together to work out a harmonious relationship under the conditions they enjoy.

“Control is when others’ locked-in interactions generate a flow of collective behavior that just happens to serve one’s interests.” Padgett and Ansell, “Robust Action and the Rise of the Medici, 1400-1434;” see also Padgett and Powell, The Emergence of Organizations and Markets (2012).

Those conditions are: flour and water. We’re talking about fermentation here, after all, which in real life is hard to keep from happening if you’ve got moist sugars around. Which brings up the mold problem, of which there’s plenty in my house, the dominant strain for unmysterious reasons being ‘bleu cheese’. But fortunately, between the acid the bacteria start producing right away, the alcohol the yeasts start producing soon enough, and the natural division of labor among the artistes of organic decomposition, mold is not actually much of a threat if you’re not trying hard to kill the yeast and bacteria somehow.

Mmmmmmm, stinky.

OK, so I read a whole lot about ambient temperature, water temperature, using bottled water, using distilled water and adding minerals back in, using orange juice, using pineapple juice, using white flour, using rye flour, not using white flour, not using rye flour. With just a slight knowledge of these matters, I reflected on the global success under the most extreme conditions of yeasts and lactobacilli, and decided not to sweat any of these factors too much (although, in principle, I wouldn’t have been completely surprised if a chlorine spike in my suburban tap water had set the critters back a bit). I did decide to take some of the chance out of the lactobacilli, mostly because I had an old tub of plain yogurt handy. And no, it was not any particular brand or type of plain yogurt, but it was past its expiration date as it happens.

I also looked at a lot of instructions about getting a kitchen scale, getting one that measures in grams because they’re more precise, calibrating hydration ratios, using a tall, straight-sided vessel with a dedicated lid, sterilizing this vessel and your hands before handling it, scraping down the sides so that, gosh, I don’t know. So anyway, here was my beginning recipe for my wild yeast sourdough starter:

Some flour
Some water
Some plain yogurt.

Roughly the same amount of each, by eyeball, probably a bit less yogurt because I thought of that as a ‘supplement’.

“They always say, the right amount’s fine. Lazy people make rules.” Silkworm, “A Cockfight of Feelings”

All of this went in a plastic bowl (with sloped sides because it has sloped sides) I also eat cereal, pasta, and curry from sometimes; with some plastic wrap loosely draped on top. This then went on a corner of the kitchen table I wasn’t using for anything else right then. I am woefully ignorant of the exact temperature of this spot, but I can guarantee it was neither hot enough to bake nor cold enough to freeze my arse. I started with bread flour, I think, but I ran out of that before the next feeding so I switched to rye for awhile because I had a bag of that open and it kept getting mentioned in the instructions. Then for awhile what I had open and easy to get at was some white whole wheat flour, so I used that.

And speaking of feeding, I read all kinds of instructions about pouring out exactly [some ratio I forget] of the starter before each feeding, adding back [another exact ratio I forget] of flour and water, doing this once a day at first and then every 12 hours, carefully swabbing down the sides of the container, adding strips of tape to allow precise measurement of the starter’s expansions and contractions, holding the container between your knees and counting to 6,327 by perfect squares, and checking carefully for ‘hooch’, which is such a precise technical term that at least half of the folks using it have no idea it’s why there’s NASCAR.

Medicinal purposes only, of course.

What I did instead was pour some out and add some back, roughly the amount it had expanded in the interim; when I remembered it, which was anything from a couple times a day to every couple of days. I tried to keep it pretty soupy because I read the beasties like to be wet, and I’ve found this to be true. I did this for something between a week and two weeks – I did not keep track. About day 2 or 3 it got that sourdough smell, then it settled into a kind of sweet peachiness I had not expected. I got back onto the internet and found a long forum thread on the many, many different permutations of ‘sweet peachy’ smell ranging all the way to ‘spiced apple’ that can be expected from a properly harmonizing community of yeasts and bacteria. Reassuring. So when I got sick of waiting any longer, although I think I was supposed to, instead of pouring out the extra I poured it into a bowlful of the flour I happened to have handy and open right then. Whole wheat, rye, and kamut as I recall – kamut btw is fun stuff, an heirloom grain that has a lovely buttery flavor and adds amazing elasticity to a dough.

Here was the ‘recipe’: salt in the right amount for the flour, bit of sugar to be friendly, touch of olive oil and enough warm (tap) water to make a wet dough just drier than a batter. Because the beasties like to be wet. Once they’d fermented that up for most of a day, I stretched, folded, smeared, punched and kneaded in enough more flour that it would stay in a loaf shape (not doing this is how you get ciabatta); let it think about that for maybe an hour longer; threw it in a hot oven on the pizza stone; dumped some water in the bottom of the oven to get some steam to keep the crust from setting too quickly (thank you internet); and some time later there was delicious whole wheat / rye / kamut multigrain sourdough bread.

Through all this I was aware that by failing to control for every possible variable the project could go horribly awry rather than pleasantly a rye. I reflected on the $.50 of flour and aggregate 10 minutes of work that would be irretrievably lost, and decided to roll those dice.

Does this mean none of the variables all that internet fussing is trying tightly to control don’t matter? On the contrary, I’m sure they do. But my little experiment suggests most of them other than flour, water, a container, and temperatures somewhere between freezing and baking are conditions of the ‘inus’ variety:

“The inus condition is an insufficient but non–redundant part of an unnecessary but sufficient condition” [quoting Cartwright, Nature’s Capacities and their Measurement, 1989, citing Mackie, The Cement of the Universe, 1980]. It’s best to read that backwards: you identify causal conditions sufficient to produce a given effect, but know that there are other conditions that could have produced the same effect. Within the sufficient conditions you’ve identified is a condition that couldn’t produce the effect by itself, is separate from all the other conditions that along with it could produce the effect, but must be among them for the effect to be produced through the causal pathway that’s been picked out. The inus scenario (any scenario containing an inus condition) shows up frequently in attempted causal analyses, and has to be accounted for somehow in any comprehensive causal theory (Chuck Dyke aka Dyke the Elder, “Cartwright, Capacities, and Causes: Approaching Complexity in Evolving Economies,” draft-in-progress).

There are lots of ways to skin a cat. Which means there’s an interesting sociology of popular science lurking in the internet’s various treatments of wild yeast sourdough starter. There are many strategies on offer, each presenting a series of essential steps to success. And each of the strategies will in fact result in a successful culture, while adding procedures that may be important only to offset the sabotage added by other procedures, or to create an outcome distinguished only by the specific way it was achieved; or not important at all except for attention focus or ritual (which, by the way, are not trivial considerations). Apparently when a thing happens to work one way, we can be inclined to leap to the conclusion that this is the one best way to make it happen; ignoring all evidence to the contrary, for example all the other ways described in their own loving detail by other practitioners just as convinced of the robust essence of their accidental triumphs.

Incidentally, this is also how I think about education in general, and general education in particular.

I Guess That’s Why They Call Them Zombies

In the New York Times’ “The Stone” blog, Gary Gutting reviews the old Monochromatic Mary and Philosophical Zombie thought experiments for the general public. I’m not going to hash through those, but I think one of Gutting’s statements is worth looking at because of how clearly it reveals a problem with the way philosophers think about physicalism and the mind:

When I feel intense pain, scientists may be able to observe brain-events that cause my pain, but they cannot observe the very pain that I feel.

So here’s a thought experiment. Imagine we are sitting in some bleachers and below us is a field of grass, marked off with white lines, a dirt pathway, and some square-shaped canvas markers. Upon this field, people move about, sometimes throwing and catching a spherical object, sometimes striking it with a wooden club, but mostly just standing around.

Is it reasonable to say that you are observing some “field-events that cause a game”, but that you cannot observe “the very game that is being played”?

Integrative General Education White Paper

First some context. As I may have mentioned once or twice, this year I got sucked into my university’s general education reform process, against the lessons of experience, interests of serenity, and focus on the teaching mission. I did this by reluctantly saying I would be willing to represent the Arts and Humanities on a committee no one else wanted to serve on, and because after three years of intensive collective deliberation, in committee and plenary, my colleagues had managed to produce a draft proposal that took a bloated, aimless mess of a core curriculum and turned it into a skeletal, aimless mess of a core curriculum.

In some sense I was and am fine with the latter. It was done intelligently, if not creatively, freed up a lot of units for minors or the elective explorations that are part of the heart of a liberal education, and went a long way toward fixing the problem that we were making many of our students loathe the liberal arts by subjecting them to a seemingly endless series of browbeatings. But even though the theme of integrative education had figured prominently and encouragingly in early discussions, by the final proposal it had completely vanished; so that like the old core, the new one had no conceptual or pedagogical coherence other than assertion that each individual course addressed a ‘goal’ and therefore was in its way essential to the formation of an educated person.

The modification I suggested to the reform committee, after a lot of discussion at the A&H level, was to add what we at first called a ‘cluster’ and later a ‘linked learning experience’. This is three thematically linked classes, from at least two different schools, taken together in one semester. Just that, for now – no requirement of faculty coordination or any other formally interdisciplinary apparatus. The idea is simply to, at least that once, show students explicitly a ‘liberal’ approach to question and problem formation, investigation, and perhaps problem-solving, in which disciplinary knowledge-in-depth is triangulated, reconfigured and brought into more widely effective alignments by interdisciplinary knowledge-in-breadth.

Despite the fact that to some of us this seemed like pretty tame stuff, the LLEs instantly became a bone of contention. As far as I know, no one disagrees that integrated learning is a ‘good thing’. However, in the larger discussions over the new proposal with the linked learning component, it became clear that a significant fraction of the faculty in general and the A&H faculty in particular did not see integrated learning as needing any particular attention; going so far as to assume it was a nice but inessential bonus, and/or something that could be expected to happen automatically if only a series of good courses were taken. As if that was how we all got it, ‘assuming facts not in evidence’ as the lawyers say. And certainly for many of us who have struggled our way to some kind of integrative intelligence, this seems like it must be true; although I can personally point to many, many experiences at home and at school from a particular kind of teacher that pulled me in this direction, along with plenty of others that tried to push me away.

But that’s the thing – I don’t know anyone who gets the importance of integrative learning who thinks it’s a luxury adjunct of a good education that can be left to chance. It’s the one thing that distinguishes ‘higher’ education from the various worthy technical educations, like plumbing, heating and cooling, business, nursing, history, and philosophy. It’s so important I negotiated away all of the required History classes to make room for a faint whisper of it. Not because the History classes aren’t good, or because there’s nothing essential to learn from history, but because someone who can learn and make connections responsibly will find their own way to history, literature, biology, statistics or whatever’s needed, and learn it a lot better than if it were jammed down their throats without purpose or context. (Here I remain strongly influenced by Dyke the Elder’s remark that he took Calculus three times, but didn’t learn the calculus until he needed it to do something else with; which in turn sensitized me to a vast educational research literature that says the same thing.)

But for a passionate fraction of Arts and Humanities, and Sciences too as it turned out, what matters far more than intentional integration is a critical mass of essential knowledges. Students are scientifically ignorant, so they need two science courses. They’re historically ignorant, so they need two history courses. Our uni has a religious tradition, so at least one Biblical religion class. Etc. These colleagues produced and published a draft alternate reform proposal, without the linked learning but with a couple more sciences and histories and whatnot; then withheld it from formal consideration out of admirable collegiality, and in confident anticipation that the full faculty would never vote for this scary, cumbersome linked learning stuff anyway. Sure enough, the full faculty voted for the linked learning proposal by a 60/40 margin. Now the opposition is bringing forward their proposal anyway, in a last heroic play to save what they can of the old core.

Which leads me to the actual matter of this post, an integrative general education white paper I’m working on for possible distribution as part of the reform committee’s advocacy for the proposal we just passed. This is still pretty rough, and I invite discussion. I should say that I have entirely given up on persuading the proponents of the alternate proposal, for present purposes anyway; I now think there are conceptual, dispositional, and emotional divides that are prohibitive to bridge in the short term. So this document is intended to clarify the issues for the people who voted for the linked learning proposal the first time around, and solidify their support for that project. I’m still not sure whether to prefer a rhetorically neutral presentation or a more direct, conversational address – this is the latter:

*******

Colleagues, although the General Education Committee is proud of the work we’ve done over these last several years, and of the faculty’s recent vote endorsing the plan so long and carefully deliberated, we welcome the opportunity to reflect further on MU’s goals and how to accomplish them. We appreciate that everyone in this discussion is motivated by commitment to get our general education core right, and to move MU to new levels of excellence.

On the surface, it may seem there is very little difference between the two proposals. The numbers work out about the same, while the new proposal adds back a couple of classes, takes out a couple of classes, and replaces the Linked Learning Experience with ‘further studies in the liberal arts’. Deciding between the proposals could be as easy as deciding if you think a required History class is more important than a required Speech class. The committee deliberated each of those decisions carefully and intentionally, but we are well aware that many other well-reasoned choices could be made.

However, this discussion is not just about nitpicking curriculum details, and therefore the committee would like to clarify what we see as the larger concepts at issue. And the one thing we would like to be clear in everyone’s mind during the coming discussion is that our plan is not a bad version of a more comprehensive core – for better or worse, it is a different concept of a core.

So first, we acknowledge that our plan omits or makes optional wonderful, important courses. Not just a few, not just a required History or a second Science or a richer engagement with foreign language. Statistics, Calculus, Genetics; Classics, Economics, Political Theory, Anthropology; World Religions, Women’s Literature, Sociology, Psychology, Ethics. Some familiarity with all of these and more is arguably essential to responsible citizenship and effective, meaningful living in the modern world.

Second, we acknowledge that our plan does not promote mastery in any of the areas it does cover. A brief foreign immersion does not create mastery of a foreign language. One Science class does not create mastery of the principles and practices of science. One Math class does not create broad-based numerical literacy. One History class does not a historian make.

Nor would two. In paring down the core’s coverage to a painful minimum in which many excellent things were lost, the committee was not just sinking to a least common denominator. We were embracing intentionally the hard fact that core curricula are not in any position to cover everything or to create broad-based mastery. Compared to the vast scope of scientific knowledge that affects our everyday lives, and the vast scope of scientific ignorance that afflicts our public discourse, two classes are as inadequate as one – two slender reeds against the flood. We think it is clear therefore that if coverage and mastery are the goals, the core is doomed to failure. We have already tried a more comprehensive coverage and found it wanting, mastery lacking. A class more or less, here or there in a much smaller core is no solution.

Fortunately, there is a much more realistic and sustainable way to think about what core curricula can accomplish. If we consider that the problem is not ignorance itself but narrowness and rigidity, a settled mind and lack of curiosity, the same class that would be an inadequate and swiftly-forgotten introduction to the vast content of a discipline can be an admirable invitation to the core concepts and investigative methods of that discipline. It can open students’ minds to new questions, new ways of thinking, new strategies of living effectively in the world, and lead them toward developing the relevant competencies themselves over a much longer lifetime than our curriculum can cover. In this model, the goal shifts from producing people who know a couple of things about a couple of things, to producing people whose curiosity is empowered, who learn actively, figure things out for themselves, work reliably without close supervision, adapt effectively to unfamiliar, complex and ambiguous situations, repurpose knowledge responsibly to meet new challenges, and problem-solve creatively.

Ideally, this shift would occur within each of the classes we teach. However, the same effect at a larger scale can be promoted through an intentional, transformative arrangement of separate classes, each doing ‘its own thing’. Just as a pile of stones is not a bridge, and a pile of flour, sugar and butter is not a cake, a pile of courses is not an education. This is where the Linked Learning Experience comes in. By bringing three different courses into simultaneous thematic alignment, linked learning engages students in multiple approaches to question and problem formation, investigation, and problem-solving, making thinking ‘outside the box’ virtually inevitable in a way separate classes simply cannot. Furthermore, through linked learning students can see directly the broader relevance and unique strengths of each field of study, enhancing their own awareness, resourcefulness, and appreciation for the value of continued learning – in the best tradition of the liberal arts.

In the committee’s view therefore, the Linked Learning Experience is the core of the core, the transformative element that takes the few credits available to the core and turns them into a real education. Linked learning is emphatically not, in our view, an optional addendum to a debate about how much of the old core we are going to keep. It is a new way forward.

We’re all moocs now

I am excited to discover a startling technology that will change how we teach, learn, and even think! This technology efficiently stores the accumulated knowledge of our most expert minds. It is easy to access with skills a child can master; combines visual, auditory, tactile, and even olfactory stimuli to activate any learning style; can be enhanced with images, charts, graphs, and other media; and can be shared by one or many at times of their own choosing.

Yes, believe it or not this technology makes the entire treasury of human knowledge available to everyone at virtually no cost! Just a small fee to compensate the material and intellectual labor of its producers; or with sufficient public demand and institutional support, no cost to end-users at all. And because of its low cost and ease of access, this technology encourages new knowledge and new knowers at a historically unprecedented rate and intensity.

Perhaps best of all, this technology is many times more efficient than lecture for information transfer. It will therefore allow us to ‘flip’ our classrooms, liberating teachers and students from the drudgery of rote learning, moving content acquisition to home self-study, and freeing up class time for discussion and reflective integration.

This revolutionary technology is called ‘books’.

What’s my point? We’ve been in the technological new regime for over 500 years. Mass information storage and availability has not been the issue for a very long while, although the new digital media are tremendous conveniences. My point is that it’s downright bizarre we’re still treating lecture like a respectable teaching strategy and flailing about trendy new alternatives to it. My point is that as long as we treat oral transmission as the teaching / learning default, we are culturally pre-literate. My point is that it’s long, long past time we could be doing much, much better. Click through to the links for more on how to notice and think our way out of this trap, thanks to the physicists.

My point, finally, is that the problem with moocs is not that they overthrow the great traditions of teaching and learning. The problem with moocs is that yet again, they don’t.

Where all the windmills at?

Well, any cultural system that so clearly works against its own manifest opportunities and interests for so long must be accomplishing something else(s) important. Any thoughts about what?

Complex systems made learnable

My friend and sometimes tennis partner David just emailed me this link to a story at Phys.org titled “Through a sensor, clearly: Complex systems made observable.” It’s right up my alley, he thought, and right up our alley, I thought.

Now, I don’t have either the math or the graphical chops to get under the hood of this research. But I think I understand what they’re up to, and I think I know enough to spot a couple of places where questions might be asked. For example, if I understand correctly we’re talking here about describing a snapshot of a complex system; it’s my impression that once the system is actually complexing, the data-crunching becomes prohibitive. But if so, one moment of a dynamical system is of limited utility, since it captures the system but not the dynamical. If I’ve understood correctly, this is not a criticism, but an appreciation of where we are in the learning curve.

I also appreciate that there’s a devil in the details of observer design; that is, the sensors have to be able to tell the difference between information and noise, nonlinearity and randomness. In effect this means that the sensors have to be able to learn to discriminate intelligently, which most human brains are not that great at. But they’re just doing feasibility at this stage, and I gather they think if they can use graphical modeling to specify some system parameters, they can eventually walk-in the data-gathering to yield more satisfying descriptions.

Well, I bet about half of what I just said is at least a little bit wrong. What I hope is that I’m just wrong and not ‘not even wrong‘, that is, that I know at least enough to be worth talking to further by someone with a better understanding. And this brings me to the question for today, which is this. Given that the project here is to represent and understand complex systems, which explicitly include “biological systems [or] social dynamic system[s] such as opinion or social influence dynamics” – that is, to start with, citizenship and life itself – what responsibility does a university general education core program have to bring students up to a kind of elementary competence where they can participate responsibly in this kind of conversation? What and how would we have to teach to make that so? And what in the reverend paleo-disciplines and contents might need to retool or move aside to enable this development?

UPDATE: if nothing else comes of this post, at least I’ve learned what it means to be ‘fractally wrong‘.

McGinn, Again

Obviously I haven’t had much time to post lately, but I was revving up to dismantle Colin McGinn’s recent review of Ray Kurzweil’s How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed — a review rife with the sorts of problems I pointed out before with his review of Deacon’s Incomplete Nature.

Lo and behold, someone beat me to it, and did so with more gusto (and endurance) than I possibly could have mustered. Friends, I give you Ron Murphy.

EDIT: I should note that I haven’t read Kurzweil’s book and suspect strongly that I would not find it satisfying.

“If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”

I’ve been thinking about democracy lately as one of a collection of strategies for managing complexity. The proximal stimuli are the recent American elections and their associated issues; the Eurozone ‘crisis’; and the Italian elections just now concluded. The immediate stimuli are an application I just wrote for a really interesting NEH summer seminar in Rome, titled “Italy in the Age of the Risorgimento – New Perspectives,” and a discussion of “Post-Democracy in Italy and Europe” at Crooked Timber.

Let’s stick with Italian politics. I’ve personally been following them more or less closely since the early 70s, when I was in Italian public school. The chronicle of this period is quite rich and contested, with the movement of the Communist Party into play for inclusion in the government (the ‘historic compromise’), right-wing paramilitary backlash sometimes called the ‘strategy of tension’, left-wing student and paramilitary activism, and in general lots of splashy violence, all of it collected under the rubric of the ‘years of lead’. This was clearly a period of crisis, although I must admit that it was not much visible in the lives of the kids I was hanging out with.

When I went back to Italy for a semester as an undergrad, Dyke the Elder plotted my political education by giving me the task of keeping a journal of the Italian press from left to center to right. Every day I would go to the newsstand and buy at least three papers, most commonly “Avanti!” and/or “il manifesto,” “Rinascita,” and “Il Secolo d’Italia.” Two things struck me at the time and have stayed with me since. The first was that having this range of explicitly partisan press in easy newsstand juxtaposition did a lot to discipline all sides’ relationship to ‘the facts’, so it was possible to get a pretty reliable skinny of events from any of the papers, accompanied with explicitly polemical analysis. The second was that Italian politics were again in crisis, this time most prominently over NATO and the placement of nuclear missiles on Italian soil, and the movement of the Socialist Party under Bettino Craxi into a position of leadership; according to many, at the expense of anything still resembling socialist principles. I could always get a good political tirade with my coffee, Totocalcio and groceries, but life went on.

When I was in Rome for my dissertation research Italian politics were in crisis over the collapse and fragmentation of the Communist party. More recently of course Berlusconi and the populist/nativist Northern League created a new state of permanent crisis, the media-savvy prime minister presiding over a circus-like political spectacle nicely foreshadowed by the notorious Cicciolina. At this point the common, and often at least half-accurate, perception of Italians that their politicians are a pack of grossly incompetent clowns who somehow also manage to enrich themselves with ruthless efficiency at public expense became the near-explicit basis of government; Berlusconi’s point being essentially that if it’s going to happen anyway, you might as well at least get some entertainment and vicarious wish-fulfillment out of it. That this shameless affrontery made enough sense to enough people to keep him in power for as long as it did (and maybe again now, even after his ‘ultimate’ disgrace less than two years ago) says something important, I think, about what sorts of functions Italians outside the talking classes take politics to perform. That more morally rigorous aspirations have been consistently damped and absorbed through succeeding regimes (see, e.g., Machiavelli, Mazzini, Garibaldi, Crispi, Turati, Gentile, Togliatti, Berlinguer, Pertini, Craxi, ‘mani pulite’ and the Second Republic) says something more. Grillo is unlikely to be a game-changer in this arrangement, but he’s the usual sort of fun intervention.

During most of this time I was also becoming a historian, which involved learning about all the ways Italian politics had been in crisis since the Risorgimento, which itself effectively created a national overlay for the regional and factional crises that had been going on since at least the Renaissance. In short, if you want to you can construct an account of Italian politics in permanent crisis for at least 500 years; although as we can see by my own short experience, the details vary quite a bit from time to time. And of course it’s self-evidently silly to call a dynamic that persistent a crisis, so it helps that the social history of Italy can be told as an account of long stretches of relative stability, relatively untroubled by the frantic political sideshows. I would now say ‘metastability’, however, since ‘the same’ outcomes kept being produced by ‘different’ means, hence the Lampedusa quote in the title. That is the story I now find the most fascinating.

To put my thesis bluntly, no one has ever gotten what they wanted out of Italian politics unless what they wanted was what they could get. I’d recommend that as a general orienting hypothesis about a lot of things, for example Iraq, Iran, Arizona, Russia, China, Baltimore, Britney Spears, Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, and women’s rights. What is the possibility space? How are agents built, e.g. constrained and enabled, in relation to the possibility space? What can we read back about possibility from how agents act? It seems to me that our analytical contrasts are severely distorted by the notion that intentions are a special kind of cause exempt from all the formation and interaction dynamics of complex systems. Let’s see if we can do better than Feuerbachian pseudo-theologies of empowerment, flattering though they may be. In any case, here’s how I put it in my NEH application, in pertinent part:

I’m assuming I’ll learn lots of new things and reconfigure some old ones, so any plan of study is necessarily speculative. But going in, I imagine it would be interesting to think forward from Gramsci’s contested analysis of the Risorgimento as a ‘passive revolution’ driven from above by elites, and connect that with recent developments in complex systems analysis. I’m thinking, for example, of Terry Deacon’s contrast between dynamical systems and self-organizing systems in Incomplete Nature. Just to gesture at that here, it seems to me that there’s only so much an active/passive agency analysis and abstractions like ‘modernity’, ‘capitalism’, ‘the state’, and so on can tell us about nation-forming and -forcing processes. At this point we could be looking for the kinds of emergent, self-organizing poly- or para-intentional actor networks and assemblages Gramsci was starting to notice and trying to reconcile with the structure/agency constraints of the Marxist revolutionary project and conceptual vocabulary. I guess if I were to frame this polemically I might say something about getting out of the agency metanarrative without falling through its structuralist or post-structuralist looking-glasses, but that all seems a little tired now and I’m much more interested in theories as hypotheses for figuring out what was going on and how it was going on, at various scales.

Getting down to cases and figuring stuff out is what my teaching is about at this point. So I would want to translate what I learn about the Risorgimento and its transnational linkages back to my classes in World History and Modern Europe both as content and as a model of how to do good analysis; and then extend those practices to other cases. For example, perhaps to look at trasformismo in comparison to other self-organizing, quasi-political strategies to manage the intractable complexities of modernization; or to investigate in my “Gender and History” class how the particular gender formations of modern Italy evolved around and through the opportunities and constraints created by the ‘fare Italiani’ project in its local, regional, national, and transnational contexts.

I’m out on so many limbs here I have to hope they weave together into something that will support a little weight. But I really like the idea of taking the stuff we’ve all been thinking about here at DV for quite awhile and focusing it on a notoriously hairy case study. Maybe the hair is inherent.

Which brings me to “Post-Democracy in Italy and Europe” at Crooked Timber. I haven’t read the book by Colin Crouch that’s under discussion, but it seems to me that to call the advanced industrialized countries ‘post-democratic’ they’d have had to once be democratic and now not be. And at least in the Italian case I’ve just sketched out, I’m not sure anything like that sort of categorical delimitation of the discussion can do anything but confuse us. Italy right now is more or less just as democratic as it’s been at least since the Risorgimento and arguably since the Renaissance, which is to say, not at all if we mean by democracy a formal system in which popular votes lead directly to explicit policy outcomes and intentional transformations of collective life; and amply, if what we mean by democracy is one domain of self-organizing dynamical systems – like markets, patronage networks, trade complexes, families, fashion – that take unmanageably complex inputs and constrain them into orderly outputs. And we can notice that while each of these systems creates means for human intentions to be effective, they do so by radically constraining what humans are able to effectively intend, in relation to more comprehensive systems that work the same way. Freedom is the recognition of necessity after all.

Recurring Payment

I don’t know if you guys remember this old post. Well, I was tickled today to receive a call from the lawyer, saying that they are once again sending me a check for $2.70, and asking if I could *please* cash it.

I have thrown a microscopic monkey wrench in their accounting system for six whole years.

Late Night Thoughts

Social systems are dynamic, internally heterogeneous, and loosely coupled. Some may object to my use of the term ‘system’ and certainly the word has a lot of baggage. By calling something a system, I am merely drawing attention to the fact that it admits descriptions in terms of parts, their properties, and the relationships between these; as a statement about something it really adds very little since all but possibly the simplest things can be described in such terms; however, we must call ‘it’ something, and by calling ‘it’ a ‘system’ I invite an analysis in terms of its constituent parts. The last sentence is slightly misleading however, because it suggests both that we can presuppose the thing (Brian Cantwell Smith’s Criterion of Ultimate Concreteness), and probably more importantly that any such thing is decomposable into parts, properties, and relations in only one right way. This is not the case at all; all but possibly the simplest things admit many analyses in which different parts, relations, and properties are distinguished and at different levels of granularity or precision, and accuracy. This needn’t be taken as an assertion of metaphysics so much as an assertion of pragmatism.

Obviously what sorts of descriptions are best is relative to purpose, context, and circumstance (if those indeed are three distinct things), but that only means that some difference between those descriptions must be able to account for their different utilities. There are a variety of information theoretic approaches that can be applied to such a problem. We can look at the complexity of the description itself, using something like algorithmic information theory; we can try to measure the amount of uncertainty a description reduces using Shannon’s mathematical communication theory, or we can try to look at the various approaches to measuring semantic information content that have been introduced into the philosophy literature. In a very general sense however, a good decomposition is one which is coherent and approaches some optimum ratio between the amount of information that can be extracted and the cost to do so.

So, social phenomena admit many possible decompositions; some may be better than others for some purposes and in some contexts; but here I want to ask: given the current state of social science, and our increasingly dire need for sound policy advice, what sorts of descriptions are we in want of?  To put this in a slightly different way, what sorts of descriptions are needed to improve our explanations of social phenomena, both to advance our theoretical understanding, but also to advance our practical ability to provide valuable policy advice? That’s a big question (of course), and I don’t think it has one answer (wink), so I want to specifically focus on the sorts of descriptions that, to put it crudely, would enable us to do good macro.

Let me stop myself her and express a view I adopted fairly early in my intellectual life: its long past time we stopy trying to explain macro-level social phenomena by projecting individual psychological or behavioral traits onto society: society is not the individual writ large. Nor is society something as orderly and well-engineered as, say, a mechanical clock. I can understand most of what I need to know about how a mechanical clock works by understanding how all the gears, springs, and other parts fit together: their respective properties and the dynamic relations between them. I don’t have to go much deeper than that. Their precise substance could be plastic, or brass, or wood: as long as they are rigid and sturdy enough to do their jobs, I don’t need to know. But in the open-ended, constantly evolving and boundary-transgressing world of human social systems, that sort of crude decomposition can only get us so far. Or put another way, descriptions which rely on the stability (in identity, function, etc.) of things like organizations, institutions, etc. — the low hanging fruit on the tree of knowledge– only help us when everything stays the same. But they don’t, even if for a long time it looks like nothing is changing. We see this is biological systems, for example, in which genetic diversity accumulates hidden by phenotypic homogeneity under some general regime, and when that regime changes, or some internal tipping point is reached, that hidden diversity rapidly becomes manifest in the distribution of phenotypes in the population.

As I said, society is heterogeneous, dynamic, and loosely coupled. By loosely coupled I mean that at reasonable levels of precision, most of its parts exhibit varying degrees of autonomy. Of course, autonomy is a contentious notion, but at the very least it means that behavior (of the parts in some natural decomposition) is determined in great degree by internal state rather than external inputs. That is, the parts exhibit relatively high degrees of independence from one another. Not too much of course; but not too little either, or they’d just be like the gears in some clock.

Back when, well back when I started reading things that led me to start thinking these sorts of things, the call to arms was something called ‘population thinking’ and ‘emergence’. The idea was to move toward ways of conceptualizing problems that avoid the traps of Platonistic essentialism. In particular that meant thinking about heterogeneous sets of individuals, and how the properties of their aggregates arise through their interactions. Methodologically, but to varying degrees of fidelity, this has been expressed in the rise of a number of interrelated approaches to modeling social systems. Fueled by advances in graph theory (especially from work in computer science) and the new ‘social’ web, we have the blooming of social network analysis which largely seeks to explain aggregate phenomena via the structural properties of social networks (however they end of being defined). In addition to (and in some ways complementary to) social network analysis, have been a variety of computational approaches to modeling, especially agent-based approaches which study how aggregate behavior arise from the interactions of modeled individual agents interacting in some domain or problem environment. These come in an exceeding abundance of variants that are difficult to describe.

In a recent post, Daniel Little discusses how what he calls methodological localism emphasizes two ways in which people are socially embedded: agents are socially situated, and social constituted. By socially situated he means how agents are locally embedded within systems of constraints: systems of social relations and institutions that determine the opportunities, costs, and choices available, i.e. the ‘game’ that agents have to play. Or to quote Marx:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.

The social constitution of agents is a more subtle thing, but something that anthropologists are generally poignantly aware of. People are encultured beings. Their behavioral and cognitive repertoire comes into being as part of ongoing social interaction. They are learned, but their learning is not simply a matter of knowledge acquisition, but of agent becoming: we fully exploit the affordances of our developmental plasticity. To say that I am an American is not simply to say that I have adopted a convenient label, but to assert an embodied fact.

Little goes on to discuss how these two perspectives on social embeddedness give rise to differing approaches to modeling social phenomena:

These two aspects of embeddedness provide the foundation for rather different kinds of social explanation and inquiry.  The first aspect of social embeddedness is entirely compatible with a neutral and universal theory of the agent — including rational choice theory in all its variants.  The actor is assumed to be configured in the same way in all social contexts; what differs is the environment of constraint and opportunity that he or she confronts.  This is in fact the approach taken by most scholars in the paradigm of the new institutionalism, it is the framework offered by James Coleman in Foundations of Social Theory, and it is also compatible with what analytical sociologists refer to as “structural individualism”. It also supports the model of “aggregative” explanation — explain an outcome as the result of the purposive actions of individuals responding to opportunities and constraints.

The second aspect, by contrast, assumes that human actors are to some important degree “plastic”, and they take shape in different ways in different social settings.  The developmental context — the series of historically specific experiences the individual has as he/she develops personality and identity — leads to important variations in personality and agency in different settings. So just knowing that the local social structure has a certain set of characteristics — the specifics of a share-cropping regime, let us say — doesn’t allow us to infer how things will work out. We also need to know the features of identity, perception, motivation, and reasoning that characterize the local people before we can work out how they will process the features of the structure in which they find themselves. This insight suggests a research approach that drills down into the specific features of agency that are at work in a situation, and then try to determine how actors with these features will interact socially and collectively.

Clearly traditional economics is particularly wed to the first approach. At the individual level, economic agents are typically modeled as completely informed, perfectly rational and self-interested agents. In equilibrium models, say of market behavior, that idealized agent *is* writ large: all agents are the same and face the same situation and have the same information. It would be fair to say that this simplifying assumption has yielded very interesting formal results, but their adequacy as a foundation for an empirical science can be robustly criticized–though there are indeed circumstances in which, say, markets perform in close accordance to such models.

The behavioral revolution in economics of the last twenty years or so introduced various sorts of ‘boundedly rational’ agents. For example,  Tversky and Kahneman demonstrate a number of ways in which real human agents violate these assumptions. In particular, their prospect theory holds that people have distinct utility functions for gain and loss domains (and that these domains are subject to framing effects). Generally speaking, Tversky and Kahneman found that people are risk-avoiding when facing gains, and risk-seeking when facing losses. However, some who utilize agents are assumed to have the similar enough risk preferences to justify ignoring individual differences. So while prospect theory’s agents are more psychologically ‘real’ than Homo economicus, they clearly fall within Little’s first domain. Other models do however include limited varieties of agents- usually agents with fixed strategies or preferences of one kind or another. What is most frequently omitted, perhaps because it is hard to model and hard to analyze, is the adaptive agent, agents who change and grow, agents who are socially constituted.

Recently, VOX, a policy and analysis forum for economists hosted a debate ‘What’s the Use of Economics?’ regarding the future of economics post the world’s economic crisis. In his contribution to this debate, Andrew Haldane, Executive Director of Financial Stability at the Bank of England blames the academic and professional economics profession for a number of sins contributing to the world’s current economic crisis. Amongst them is a failure to adequately take into account heterogeneity of economic agents in economic models:

These cliff-edge dynamics in socioeconomic systems are becoming increasingly familiar. Social dynamics around the Arab Spring in many ways closely resembled financial system dynamics following the failure of Lehman Brothers four years ago. Both are complex, adaptive networks. When gripped by fear, such systems are known to behave in a highly non-linear fashion due to cascading actions and reactions among agents. These systems exhibit a robust yet fragile property: swan-like serenity one minute, riot-like calamity the next.

These dynamics do not emerge from most mainstream models of the financial system or real economy. The reason is simple. The majority of these models use the framework of a single representative agent (or a small number of them). That effectively neuters the possibility of complex actions and interactions between agents shaping system dynamics…

Conventional models, based on the representative agent and with expectations mimicking fundamentals, had no hope of capturing these system dynamics. They are fundamentally ill-suited to capturing today’s networked world, in which social media shape expectations, shape behaviour and thus shape outcomes.

This calls for an intellectual reinvestment in models of heterogeneous, interacting agents, an investment likely to be every bit as great as the one that economists have made in DGSE models over the past 20 years. Agent-based modelling is one, but only one, such avenue. The construction and simulation of highly non-linear dynamics in systems of multiple equilibria represents unfamiliar territory for most economists. But this is not a journey into the unknown. Sociologists, physicists, ecologists, epidemiologists and anthropologists have for many years sought to understand just such systems. Following their footsteps will require a sense of academic adventure sadly absent in the pre-crisis period.

Amen.

Under pressure

Watching the Australian Open men’s final out of one eye, reading a spectacularly bad 19th C novel with the other. The tennis is unbelievable. Djokovic and Murray are putting each other under immense pressure, such that to compete, each has to be performing right at the limits of his capacity.

These are both guys who win most of their matches rarely going over 80% output. As of now, they’ve both been running at 100% for over 2 hours, and they’re barely out of the second set. For what it’s worth, at my recreational level I am mentally exhausted after two minutes of coaxing the best out of myself.

Both guys are making incredible shots look routine, and the errors they’re making are not chokes, but the result of forcing each other to go for a little bit more than makes prudent sense on every ball.

Artist Rachel is struck by the enormous inputs that are required to enable that kind of hyperspecialization of focus. They are in ‘the zone’, what she calls ‘art head’. Everything other than tennis is taken care of for them by someone else, and always has been. She thinks wistfully of what she could create if she never had to worry about anything but creating.

There’s nothing automatic about that chemistry, though. I’m thinking about how long it’s been since there was a critical mass of that kind of mental focus and toughness in the women’s game. Today’s women get all those advantages of managed life. They are physical marvels and magnificent players, like the men easily superior to their predecessors as ball-striking machines. But with the exception of Serena Williams, the top women of this generation are all mental crumblers, as we saw most notably in current #1 Victoria Azarenka’s shameful performance against Sloane Stephens (herself quite promising in this respect) in the Aussie semifinal.

We have only to go back to Margaret Court, Billie Jean King, Chris Evert, Martina Navratilova, and perhaps Justine Henin to see there’s no sex to this trouble. But gender there must be. Any thoughts about how?

Kerim Friedman on Gramsci

Carl, this should be right up your alley. Kerim Freidman has written an interesting piece on misreadings of Gramsci on Savage Minds. Since you are our resident Gramsci expert, I would like to hear what you have to say about it.