February 2004 Archives

James Macdonald has a thread of suggestions on learning to write. via MemeMachineGo.

Having created a couple of different weblogs over time I wanted to highlight this Perl module for aggregating rss feeds. I'm hoping to use this on my homepage soon as part of larger reworking of my site. xml rss-aggregate perl module

The Theory and Practice of Online Learning was recently published by Athabsca University. I found this via the consistently brilliant OL Daily by Stephen Downes.

I've also worked in tech support so I could relate to this story in Salon, "We don't support that." Working on internal support meant that I never had to learn the Mantra, but the overall process could be just as disappointing.

There's a new fiction magazine that just began publishing late last year. It's a revival of Argosy, a magazine that's been around more than a century.

I noticed the site while reading a news item posted at Blue Ear about the trouble the publishers were having getting their magazine onto the shelves of the chain bookstores such as Barnes and Noble or Borders. Having worked in bookselling before my interests were piqued. Even a decade ago publishers were exerting a growing influence over the books displayed at B&N. Over the course of my three years there I noticed the list of titles for table displays becoming more and more detailed, leaving the individual store and bookseller with less freedom to choose what to highlight. Things were never as monolithic as the critics portray, but the defenders of the chains need to be aware that there is power being wielded and they need to wield it as carefully as possible.

Sky and Telescope has an interesting article on observing thin crescent moons, shortly after they become visible. "Seeking Thin Crescent Moons" has a set of maps showing where some of this years early crescent moons can be observed in the Western Hemisphere. Unfortunately I already missed my opportunity in Peru a few days ago.

There's also a story about a newborn nebula that has been recently reobserved by an amateur astronomer in Phoenix. It appears that the nebula has been observed off-and-on over the past 30 years. Here's a perfect example of how amateur observing can make contributions to professional science.

David Weinberger has a nice essay at Salon about the "echo chamber" meme that seems to be pervading analysis of Howard Dean's fall and the supposed insularity of the internet.

Behind the echo chamber controversy lies the question of whether the Internet causes people to solidify their beliefs or to diversify them. Does it open people up or shut them down?

This is a really tough question, and not just because it's hard to quantify.

First, it assumes that it's bad to solidify beliefs because that closes one's mind. But beliefs aren't simply propositions to which we assent. They are also the foundation for action and for political solidarity. The relationships of belief and doubt, and belief and actions, are far more subtle than the echo chamber meme credits. Deaniacs and Bushies alike need places where they can gather with supporters and exalt and commiserate -- and do so without naysayers from the other side

Second, the existence of echo chambers doesn't mean that the participants only go to echo chambers. Even if I spend most of my online time in my echo chamber of choice, the minority of my time may bring me into contact with a more diverse range of opinions than I would have encountered without the Net. That seems to me to be the relevant statistic, however elusive it might be.

Besides, we humans -- echo chamber participants or echo chamber castigators -- rarely engage in deep, meaningful and truly open conversation with people who fundamentally disagree with us. I have never debated a neo-Nazi, and if I did, I wouldn't do so with an open mind: No way is that son of a bitch going to convince me that he's right. No apologies. Being grounded in some beliefs is a condition for having any beliefs. And that has nothing to do with echo chambers

So, does the Internet open people up or shut them down? The existence of echo chambers by itself doesn't answer the question. And we should probably worry whether "open" and "shut" are themselves metaphors that shut down our understanding of how we decide, believe and act.

This is the best refutation I've seen yet of the all too common passive-aggressive argument on the part of some conservatives, such as David Brooks, that liberals should stop being so angry about the policies of Bush because it just isn't seemly. Or the argument that Arnold Kling makes saying that conservatives are more interested in discussing consequences instead of motives. Just face the facts that everyone is arguing from a position, and that having a position is sometimes a good thing.

An intriguing interview with Jim Griffin at the Register about the intersection of technology in the form of wireless, piracy and creativity. He begins with a very promising start, at least to my ears:

We have to start with the a priori notion that we must democratize access to art and knowledge. That's a baseline notion of a civilized society. We have libraries that will get you any movie, and any song, and any book; and price or money should not stop you hearing those songs. Museums go even further, with the idea that great art should be able to travel, to come to you, and feel free.

For anyone who doesn't start with that notion, you have to ask who they're working for.

From there he continues:

The flow of information once digitized, this anarchy of art and knowledge and creativity, can't be controlled. We've designed our societies around the anarchy. For example, we've been emphatic about the notion that we can't control speech. We may send out the secret police and have all manner of efforts of control; but basically we don't believe in it.

So we're left with two paths here. Will we try and end the anarchy of art, or will we try and monetize it? Art and knowledge and creativity are fascinating to us because they make our lives better when they're not controlled. And we've monetized it successfully throughout history.

via Copyfight.

Found via Corante Apple Matters is this item on grid computing with Apple computers at larryhalff.com.

Larry also has some interesting tastes in music that appear to jibe quite nicely with my own. Check out his compliments to the Fax label, Maintoba (a new one to me), and Matmos and the Rapture (with a nod to Interpol for last year). I was disappointed by the Rapture but I loved Turn on the Bright Lights, so I'll have to check his recommendations more closely. I also like the picture heading at the top of his blog.

At the Weekly Standard Joseph Epstein reviews George Steiner's "Lessons of the Masters":

The "Lessons of the Masters" is a book about the teaching transaction, the dissemination (there's that damn fluid again) of knowledge as it is passed from generation to generation through teacher to student. Why do some teachers so captivate their students that what they convey leaves a lifelong impression? The standard explanations hold that the great teachers know their subject, have boundless passion for learning, widen and deepen consciousness, provide in their persons a model of how a great-souled person ought to live. This only leaves out the key element of magic--which is to say, the unexplainable reason for why some teachers can radically change lives.

Over the course of 185 dense pages George Steiner does not really explain the magic in teaching. Instead he provides partial portraits of some famously great teachers--Socrates (of course), Jesus, the Hasidic masters, Heidegger, Alain, Nadia Boulanger, and others--and takes up a number of issues, questions, and problems surrounding teaching. Among these are the responsibility of teachers for disciples, the tensions (erotic, rivalrous, etc.) between teacher and student, the differing nature of humanistic and scientific teaching, the blights of sexual harassment and political corrections on contemporary teaching, and the increasingly large role of masterly female teachers.

So Epstein doesn't particulary care for the book but the question of what makes a great teacher is a profound one that I think deserves more study. I only wish I had more time to take it up.

Epstein concludes with this telling passage about the times when teachers sometimes fail to connect with their students because the students don't want to connect. I saw this many times in at Yale and it was dispiriting.

As a teacher, I noted many students whom I came to think of as "good at school." The phrase, as I use it, is non-approbative and carries no more weight than, say, "good at soccer." These students have been trained to take tests, to write the A paper, to score high on their SATs. They understand that the first question confronting the college student is what the hell does the professor want. Once they discover this, they deliver it. They may or may not be genuinely interested in books, ideas, culture. But culture isn't their goal--business or law or medical school is.

One of the recurring questions raised around the Democratic political campaign is whether it is possible to change another person's mind? Arnold Kling was so outraged by a quote from Eli Pariser "Changing people's minds is overrated, most of the people in this country are with us, and it's a matter of getting them active and getting them informed." (taken from Politics of the Web: Meet, Greet, Segregate, Meet Again; by Amy Harmon, New York Times) that he decided to pen an entire column at TechCentralStation: The Downfall of the Anointed. His basic argument, following Thomas Sowell, is that the Left in the United States thinks it is annointed to know the truth and be morally superior to everyone who might disagree with them. Says Sowell:

Those who accept this vision are deemed to be not merely factually correct but morally on a higher plane. Put differently, those who disagree with the prevailing vision are seen as being not merely in error, but in sin. For those who have this vision of the world, the anointed and the benighted do not argue on the same moral plane or play by the same cold rules of logic and evidence. The benighted are to be made "aware," to have their "consciousness raised"...Should the benighted prove recalcitrant, then their "mean-spiritedness" must be fought and the "real reasons" behind their arguments and actions exposed.

But let's try to unpack the quote in more detail and see what it might really suggest. Hidden inside the commas is a big assumption, that most of the country agrees with Mr. Pariser. If Mr. Pariser were to come to doubt this assumption would that change how he feels about the effort or need to change people's minds? I think it would. Mr. Pariser isn't rejecting changing people's minds, he's mistakenly assuming that most people already agree with him. Admittedly this is an arrogant assumption, and Mr. Kling would have some justification in saying that the Left is arrogant because the assume everyone agrees with them. But this is different than claiming that the Left refuses to accept the value of changing people's minds. By attacking the statement about changing people's minds being overrated Mr. Kling is attacking a strawman, making the Mr. Pariser's position seem more absurd than it might be.

Of course this is all speculation. Mr. Pariser may be just as arrogant as Mr. Kling thinks he is. There are people on the Left and the Right who are arrogant enough to believe that the rest of the world either supports them or that the support of the rest of the world makes no difference because they know the divine truth. Criticize one extreme and you should criticize the other as well.

But let's ask philosophically what it takes for someone to change their minds. I think it is possible for people to change their minds. I can think of one personal experience from when I was in college. I took a philosophy course on relativism and one of our assignments was to read Donald Davidson's seminal paper "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme." I won't describe the argument of the paper, but I know it changed my mind on cognitive relativism profoundly. Before I had believed in cognitive relativism, afterwards I no longer believed in it.

The problem with trying to describe or understand the alteration of beliefs is the problem of unconcious thought processes and ideas. Most of our beliefs are unconscious and unexamined. Few people, unless they take a philosophy course, will think about whether cognitive relativism is true or not. Yet they will, if you describe the issue in appropriate terms, probably have an opinion on whether relativism is true or false. This holds true for most of our beliefs. Adding to the confusion, our beliefs are connected very closely to our emotions and our self-image.

Persuasion and rhetoric are based on a mostly rational attempt to discover methods by which we can manipulate another person's beliefs, and hopefully change them to a position we desire. Advertising clearly shows that this kind of action can have an effect. Education, words, and reading also have an effect but it may not be as strong as an emotional appeal. Pariser is engaged in an emotional argument when he says most people believe as he does. If you asked most people they would probably say that most other people believe most of the things they do. This is an emotional assumption made by many of us. If we didn't believe that others shared our goals it'd be hard to ever trust them. Kling wants to argue rationally in order to change minds and this is a worthy goal, but it's not the only way to argue and it's not the sole province of one political faction to argue one way or the other.

Changing minds is possible but it is expensive, emotionally and intellectually. Because our belief changes are mostly hidden from even our own consciousness there is little reward or feedback for the person who tries to argue with their opponents. It's easy to become lazy and dismiss your opponents, to become stuck in an echo-chamber. Humility, intelligence, personality, and education, all go a long way to preventing someone from becoming stuck inside their own beliefs.