ADDITIVE LEARNING

January 22nd, 2021

Can a grade become an identity?  The quintessential cocktail party question hints at an answer.  What is the question that arises without fail between two strangers making chit chat?  What do you do?  

More than a name, or a family, or a history, we define one another primarily by what we do.  Putting the virtues and folly of this habit aside, it’s worthy to examine how this habit effects the young, as encapsulated by this question:

How did you do on the test?

If a child does poorly on a test, what effect does that have on that kid’s sense of identity?  Attaching one’s self to an identity is certainly a poor idea, but during youth it’s an anxious consideration, and perhaps even a temporary necessity.  The straight A student is commonly introduced as such to extended family and friends, but what about the student struggling with D’s and C’s?  He spends time with his friends and likes the drums. 

We are all painfully aware of the hierarchical frameworks with which we class people.  Grades are an enormously misplaced part of these frameworks - this isn’t a new thought.  Even many straight-A students sense something wrong with this grading system.  But few can explain why, and how it’s such a bad system.

The answer hinges on two important concepts.  The first is that practice is a self-reinforcing system.  We tend to think of practice as a regular action that improves something.  But think of a practice in terms of eating.  Everyone eats every day.  As a quick aside, the word practice comes from the Latin practizare meaning merely ‘perform’ or ‘carry out’.  This is what we do with eating everyday, we perform an act of consumption, we carry out a diet either by design or whim.  Does the practice here mean that we are all improving our diets steadily by default of simply eating?  No not at all.  But the practice does reinforce itself.  Poor food choices perpetuate, and it’s not unlikely that such choices perpetuate in a worse direction through.. practice.  It doesn’t take much practice before we have an epidemic of obesity.

If this concept of self-reinforcing practice is imported into the world of education, and eating is swapped out for test-taking, what sort of conclusions suddenly become apparent for the kid who regularly tests poorly?  Is such a practice likely to change and improve?

The second important concept necessary to understand the enormous flaw of tests is as simple as the comparison between subtraction and addition.  Tests are all about subtraction.  Any test has a perfect score, and with each misstep, some percentage is subtracted from this perfect score.  Our concentration on the student, from the perspective of the teacher, the parents, society, and even the student is all about how they mess up.  Grades are defined by how much they miss the perfect score, not by how many good answers have added up to this deficit.

The dismal ramifications of this perspective are heartbreakingly easy to point out:  we come to think that we should be perfectly prepared for what happens tomorrow, or next week, as though each action is part of a test.  So we overthink, trying to see all the places where we might misstep as opposed to just getting started and figuring it out along the way.  

The reality is that mistakes and missteps are where the real jewels of learning exist, but the industrial education system teaches us to avoid such mistakes and mistakes like death itself, and so learning on a large scale - especially self-directed learning - is impeded by a massive psychological gridlock.

If we grade a deep sea angler on the same metrics that we would a bird like a hawk, then it’s clear the angler is an absolute failure of a bird.  But of course this misses the fact that it’s a fish.  And unlike the bird, it’s learned how to hunt in pitch dark miles below the surface of the water.

The differences are eye-rollingly obvious, of course, but grading a fish like a bird is much what the industrial grading system does to some people.  There’s a certain knack to test taking, and those who strike upon it just end up being able to game the system for their benefit.  The point of education certainly isn’t to get all kids to clue into this knack: that’d be just as much of a waste of time and effort.  No, the resolution of these dismal and constipated practices has to do with that other operation of arithmetic: not subtraction, but addition.

Society and civilization is something we’ve built.  It’s an additive result of countless generations working hard to literally put things together.  Society has not emerged by the result of some kind of test that matches our ability against some sort of perfect grade - some sort of utopia that we falsely imagine might be a perfect grade.  No, society was constructed through exploration and tinkering.  By putting things and systems and people together and seeing what happens.  And look at what this practice has yielded.  We now have smartphones, vaccines that can be literally printed, that is put together in a weekend.  We have so many varieties of connecting it even seems to be backfiring.  But of course this is part of the process.  We try something and watch the effects.  And the whole thing ratchets ever upward as a result.

This sort of volley between effort and result is completely absent in the realm of test-taking.  You get one shot.  It doesn’t matter how you’d react to the result of your effort, that’s it, the grade is stamped, and the machine rolls onward.

It seems that it’d go without saying that the point of education is to produce better learners. But few if any seem to be saying this, let alone concentrating on how to make it happen.  If we were producing better learners than by the end of the absurdly long educational process, most all students would have learned to figure out the knack of test taking, but of course that isn’t happening: each student is practicing their trend, knack or not.

This focus on additive versus subtractive is one of the keys to redesigning education to work.  It’s quite strange and frankly sad to realize that building a company has more in common with playing with LEGO as a kid than it has anything to do with school.  

Lego is an excellent visual example.  When a kid builds something on their own, of their own creation, we do not see what it could have been, we only see what was actually achieved, and it’s likely something to celebrate, even if merely for the effort.  But school is all about what a student has failed to achieve by measure of a somewhat arbitrary design.  The vast difference between concentrating on negative space versus positive form cannot be over emphasized.  How can we ever expect students to have the courage to start companies and build new things if we’ve had them focused almost exclusively on what they might get wrong?  It’s a bit of a miracle that anyone does make it through with a sense of wonder, curiosity and a drive to build intact.

Imagine a different classroom, with a different agenda.  Imagine sitting down for the first class of the semester and the teacher says: this year, you are going to launch a business, and this classroom is your resource, to ask questions and explore together what each of your businesses might look like and how to make the finances work.  As part of the state’s economic growth initiative, you are each being allocated $1,000 to bootstrap your ideas so that the community can have a chance to explore your creativity and ingenuity.  

The teacher could be the one who signs off on the appropriateness of each business idea, which releases the funds which the teacher further verifies is spent in the designed methods.

Business is just one area that presents a comprehensive example of additive learning: it requires integrating a variety of perspectives, learning a diverse set of skills and most importantly, it requires creativity.

And most importantly, the difference between a failed business idea and a failing grade on a test couldn’t be more pronounced.  The failed test automatically ranks someone against everyone else who did better, whereas, no one can really tell if a business idea is going to work or not, and when it fails, it’s much easier to take that failure as feedback instead of adopting it as an identity.  Even a failed business effort is usually full of lessons to learn that can then be applied to a new attempt, whereas with a failed test, there’s nothing to learn because the chance to apply it has already passed.

REAL DIFFERENCE

January 21st, 2021

Think different - it’s one of the catchiest, most effective marketing phrases ever. It’s at once inspiring and easy - easy because there’s no real need to prove that we are thinking different.  Merely the sense and desire to do so is enough of a pleasure that the real thing need not even be bothered with.

How does different thinking make itself known?  There is of course the ubiquitous evidence of people who don’t think alike, trumpeting their point of view at the opposition like a gunner behind a canon.  But the opposition does pretty much the same: trumpeting their own point of view with the same force and much the same method.  What, if anything is really different between the two?

Despite what difference in word choice might be at play, the two groups in such arguments are acting identically.  This the modern state of discourse and debate.

What’s interesting is that most people have a deep and genuine interest in opposing points of view, but only when such points of view are presented in a respectful and kind manner.  Surprise surprise.  What’s really different in this case?  The point of view?  Or the method?  Well both, but one has no hope of being effective without the other.

Dialogue and discourse aside, the true evidence of thinking different isn’t thought at all, but action.  We all generate and entertain a huge variety of thoughts each day, the large majority of which we don’t ever act upon, for better or worse.  In fact, most of our behaviour functions without thought, by virtue of the well oiled gears of habit.  

For much of the day even, our behaviour can be quite out of touch with thought, and which matters more in the long run?  Behavior has real consequences, especially if that behavior is compounded repeatedly.  Whereas a great thought which is only ever thought and eventually forgotten has all the effect of something that never even happened.

Truly different thinking results in different behavior - new actions which ride on a fresh logic.  Unfortunately, many, most, and perhaps all of us are quite guilty of coming across better ideas and doing nothing.  We are all aware of ways in which our life could improve if only we acted upon the ideas which describe the change of those ways.  But like a good idea never written down nor acted upon and lost, uncultured by memory we sail on as though ignorant of a better course.

Perhaps there’s room for an argument that we don’t take thoughts seriously enough, or rather, we have a very poor sense of which thoughts to weigh as more significant than others.  That thought about chocolate cake weighs heavier than the countless memories of how it feels after binge eating.  It’s a battle of two thoughts, and the choice of one over the other results in a different behavior.  The two, that is thought and behaviour have this strange relationship, sometimes tightly bound sometimes as loose as if the two have never met.  Automatic behavior rarely gets the second thought that it should and great ideas often doesn’t get the attention in the form of action that they most certainly merit.

THE VIRTUE OF INEFFICIENCY

January 20th, 2021

Ants have incredibly efficient brains.  They are tiny and dialled in with exceptional optimization for what an ant needs to do.  Any don’t spend time worrying about tomorrow, or fretting over what they should do with their day - they simply don’t have the brain space for that sort of experience.  They are, simply, too efficient for that sort of luxury, and worrying and the ability to fret over this and that is a luxury of a larger, more flexible and dynamic brain.

The same inefficiency that allows us to worry about something bad that might happen tomorrow is the same imagination that allows us to craft beautiful stories, songs and new theories about how tings work.  Inefficiency, or rather, a lack of hardwired specialization allows us to cognitively wander.  

Now certainly, some who wander get lost, and it’s possible to wander into dark territory.  The brain can get itself stuck in a vicious cycle of bad thoughts which can create terrible pain.  But it’s this freedom to wander in the first place that is the core virtue of our inefficient brains - an inefficient brain that has made tremendous progress, far beyond anything any other species has managed in billions of years.

A luxury to worry certainly turns the perspective on the experience of worry inside out.  The realization that the ability to worry is a luxury can also beg an important question: is the luxury well spent if it’s taking the form of worry?

The answer is most certainly not.  Worry and anxiety is a signal that we’ve wandered in the wrong direction and that our thoughts, our brain, and our experience of the present is better spent pursuing a different direction.  That’s all anxiety is: a signal that the present is being misspent.  Switch gears and spend that present on something worthy and difficult and chances are good the mind will allow itself to be consumed - delightfully - in the task.  And when finally the mind emerges from a period of focus it lays claim to a jewel - a sense of accomplishment with which the present becomes tinted with relief.

It’s hard to imagine an ant gets to have such a variety of experience.  There’s probably not enough room, nor cognitive machinery to craft this mental adventure.  It’s too efficient for such fun.  That’s perhaps the crowning realization: play is just like worry: it’s a product of our inefficiency.  But who wants play to be efficient?  Where’s the fun in that?

REWARD SWAP

January 19th, 2021

Does a lazy person ever think about a workaholic and wonder how that happens with perhaps a touch of envy?  It stands to reason that if work really can become an addiction, then there’s a path to adopt that hot-tempered monster as one’s own.  Our bodies and minds toil for rewards, and despite how varied the task and how different the task might seem, none of it is all that different for the brain which is operating with a few different carrot cocktails that are all composed of more or less the same neurotransmitters.  A lazy person can wonder if the rewards of life can be swapped out to provoke a better, more fulfilling behavior that may eventually lead to a better life.

When the lure of the video game or the Netflix show is strong, palpable and seems overwhelming, how does the dreadful promise of frustration and effort required to do something stand up as a viable option?  The rewards of course are vastly displaced given the activity.  The reward of a video game or the Netflix show is nearly immediate, whereas the reward of work well done might not even exist if the work ends up as just a few wasted hours of frustration that seem to yield no progress.

The rewards of better behavior are almost always minuscule or nonexistent in the beginning.  Endurance and perseverance through that initial period requires a kind of imaginative faith - a constant reminder of the workaholic and the things they’ve managed to achieve.  Hope isn’t even appropriate because there is always proof all around us of what is possible.  It often just requires staying the course and remaining consistent.

Slowly the cocktail whipped up by the brain begins to shift, sprinkling in more serotonin and less dopamine.  And with even a small taste of the resulting reward, it’s not too hard to keep at it, if the memory of that reward can be cherished, hyped up with a frame in the mind and even obsessed over.

Before long, the same machinery that produces superficial days filled with quick-fix dopamine hits has transformed into an engine of productivity, steadily carving out a path towards better and distant goals.

TOO VAGUE

January 18th, 2021

There is a manner of speech prevalent today, and likely prevalent since the invention of language that consists of incredibly persuasive rhetoric with absolutely no substance.  We listen to far more than just the words and the compilation of their aggregate meaning when someone talks.  We listen primarily to the way someone talks, far more than the woven thread of meaning that may or may not exists through their sentences.

Tone of voice, volume, speed of speech, and if the speaker is visible, their facial expression, the tension of their eyes, the pose and movement of their body.  All of these combine to create an experience that isn’t necessarily in line with the words being said.  And if in fact nothing of any real substance is being said, than all these other methods of conviction still function.  An audience can be won over and grant a speaker legitimacy based on metrics that have absolutely no real meaning or relation to their words.  

This happens because all of these attributes that frame spoken words perform a second message which is in constant dialogue with the feelings of those listening.  A powerful voice that speaks words with a sense of certainty evokes a particular feeling in an audience.  Jordan Peterson is a speaker with this sort of urgency and force, but then again, so was Hitler.  Crowds are swayed not by words but by the way such words are framed with tone and volume, physical stature and fascial expressiveness.

All of this framing aside, the clearest litmus test for meaningless speech is to ask if such words can be acted upon.  Do they translate to something actionable in the tangible world?  Or if the speaker relying on the nebulous quality of certain vague words so that a message can be open to a wide interpretation?  Such language is often employed to assuage many view points, concealing exactly where the divisions and disagreements might exist.  Politicians and salesman speak with such vagueness to evoke a certain feeling, because it’s a feeling that casts the vote and spends the money.   Vague speech can inspire action without explicitly stating that action.  In this way speech can comprise of absolutely nothing and it can also describe via the same relative absence of subject.

Such speakers can be deactivated by simply asking for clarification and more clarification until the speaker corners themselves with only an absence of real message to point at.