From the Seven Pillars of Wisdom:

“The public often gave credit to Generals because it had seen only the orders and the result: even Foch said (before he commanded troops) that Generals won battles: but no General ever truly thought so. The Syrian campaign of September 1918 was perhaps the most scientifically perfect in English history, one in which force did least and brain most. All the world, and especially those who served them, gave the credit of the victory to Allenby and Bartholomew: but those two would never see it in our light, knowing how their inchoate ideas were discovered in application, and how their men, often not knowing, wrought them.

Mind Hacks points to some interesting research on language and psychosis.

Mr Z illustrates the marked change in phenomenology that can be observed in such patients. He was a 30-year-old patient diagnosed as hypomanic with a history of bipolar illnesses. His mother tongue was English, and he had learnt Spanish after puberty. When he spoke in English, he was markedly thought-disordered and complained of hallucinations. On one occasion, whilst being interviewed by his psychiatrist, he addressed her spontaneously in Spanish, knowing that she was a Spanish speaker.

To his surprise, and hers, he discovered that when he spoke in Spanish, he no longer appeared to be thought-disordered. He commented on this difference by observing, in Spanish, that when he spoke in this language, he felt he was ‘sane’, but when he spoke in English, he went ‘mad’ (Zulueta, 1984). This bilingual dialogue took place within the space of half an hour. It would seem that in this case and in others with similar differences in psychotic phenomena across languages, the second language may, in some cases, exert a protective function in terms of psychotic symptoms.

Makes you wonder: if most of what you read online is in English, are the 2nd languagers (Dutch, Spanish, French et al) more likely to be writing sanely?

From Times Higher Education [via idiolect]

“If we don’t put ourselves under pressure, nothing interesting or exciting is going to happen. How could it? In fact, what we’ve done is spent three hours the previous night making sure that it doesn’t happen.

“Then we have the gall to offer these hours of preparation as morally sound. Self-protection is being offered to the world as a moral value. That preparation has been done to protect the teacher from the students. Teachers spend hours and hours preparing because they are terrified of bring caught out.”

Made me think. One of the best teachers I’ve ever had [one Mr Claughton] was never afraid to praise a question and then think about it with the class, making no bones about the fact he might not have an answer. It made you a) feel like you were learning with him, and b) value what he said more.

From Seven Pillars of Wisdom:

… it had seemed to me that discipline, or at least formal discipline, was a virtue of peace: a character or stamp by which to mark off soldiers from complete men, and obliterate the humanity of the individual. It resolved itself easiest into the restrictive, the making of men not do this or that: and so could be fostered by a rule severe enough to make them despair of disobedience. It was a process of the mass, an element of the impersonal crowd, inapplicable to one man, since it involved obedience, a duality of will. It was not to impress upon men that their will must actively second the officer’s, for then there would have been … that momentary pause for thought transmission, or digestion; for the nerves to resolve the relaying private will into active consequence. On the contrary, each regular Army sedulously rooted out this significant pause from its companies on parade. The drill instructors tried to make obedience an instinct, a mental reflex, following as instantly on the command as though the motor power of the individual wills had been invested together in the system.

This was well, so far as it increased quickness: but it made no provision for casualties, beyond the weak assumption that each subordinate had his will-motor not atrophied, but reserved in perfect order, ready at the instant to take over his late superior’s office; the efficiency of direction passing smoothly down the great hierarchy till vested in the senior of the two surviving privates.

It had the further weakness, seeing men’s jealousy, of putting power in the hands of arbitrary old age, with its petulant activity: additionally corrupted by long habit of control, an indulgence which ruined its victim, by causing the death of his subjunctive mood. Also, it was an idiosyncrasy with me to distrust instinct, which had its roots in our animality. Reason seemed to give men something deliberately more precious than fear or pain: and it made me discount the value of peace smartness as a war-education.

Thought this was worth thinking about.

One of the things that Shirkey writes about is how the new social tools and the powerline graph of user use / success / downloads / etc… has meant that there is no longer a high cost of failure. He uses SourceForge and MeetUp as two examples where if a software project or a meeting fails, there’s no real loss, because there is no institutional infrastructure that is lost along with it. On an institutional level, schools have an incredible infrastructure that makes them hard to change, but that’s really not the big problem when we question the change through this lens.

The big problem is that we never, ever have a low cost of failure. When schools fail, kids lose.

From Adam Phillips:

“If sanity is defined by how intelligible we are to each other, then we are living under tremendous pressure to be as transparent as possible. The problem may not be always or only how to better understand each other (and ourselves), but actually what we should do with whatever we don;t understand.”

Thanks Alexandre

From Will Richardson:

“What if we assessed teachers in large part on their abilities to create and consume content effectively as co-learners and co-creators with their students, and to share that work in transparent ways?”

Additional knowledge of the minutiae of daily life can be not just useless, but actually harmful to us when we make decisions.

From thinking to iterating
Last June, Alex Iskold wrote a piece about the new age of continual partial attention:

There will never be less information, there will always be more of it. Much more. The sooner we recognize it and prepare for this change, the easier it will be for us to embrace this brave new world. The age of Continuous Partial Attention has arrived and it is here to stay.

As Linda Stone defined CPA

“With [continuous partial attention], we feel most alive when we’re connected, plugged in and in the know. We constantly SCAN for opportunities - activities or people - in any given moment. With every opportunity we ask, “What can I gain here?”

Alex also noted that “these days we replace the deep thinking with rapid iteration.”

And he went on to say that this replacement “is not necessarily a bad thing!”

Fire Hydrants
In one famous experiment, the Harvard psychologist Jerome Bruner and his student Molly Potter had people identify the object shown in a slide as it gradually came into focus. If viewers made an incorrect hypothesis early on, they tended to persist with it, and had trouble identifying the object even as it became sharp.

Thanks Mike

Moral? According to NNT, it’s this:

“The more information you give someone, the more hypotheses they will formulate along the way, and the worse off they’ll be. They see more random noise and mistake it for information.

The problem is that our ideas are sticky: once we produce a theory we are not likely to change our minds. So those who delay developing their theories are better off … Remember that we treat our ideas like possessions and it will be hard for us to part with them.

Remember that we are swayed by the sensational. Listening to the news on the radio every hour is far worse for you than reading a weekly magazine, because the longer interval allows information to be filtered a bit.”

NNT goes on to describe Paul Slovic’s experiment with bookmakers. First, he showed bookmakers 88 variables in past horse races and asked them to choose the most useful ones. Then he gave them the ten most useful variables and asked them to predict the outcome of races. Then he gave them ten more variables and asked them to predict again.

The increase in the information set did not lead to an increase in their accuracy; their confidence in their choices, on the other hand, went up markedly. Information proved to be toxic“

More is not always better
It’s probably a little simplistic to think that these research caveats apply to all information. They apply to situations where you have to predict or forecast. That said, the caveats do seem to imply various things:

1. The iterative mode in the table above isn’t wholly accurate. It can actually lead to more costly mistakes (through the overconfidence it affords). The partial information is a given for both deep thinking and iterative mode, the real difference is frequency of updates. And iterative mode actually hinders the imagining alternative possibilities. We tend to stick with our first possibility and then not be able to ditch it in favour of the fire hydrant.
2. The iterative mode assumes that the brain is an information processing machine. My guess is that this is idealised but wrong. The brain seems much more like a meaning making engine.

Anyway, as far as RSS readers go, I’m going to ditch some of my BBC news feeds , and (not that he does this) have a think about adopting/adapting Ton’s people oriented approach. And I’m going to renew my subscription to The Week

From NNT:

My biggest problem with the educational system lies precisely in that it forces students to squeeze explanations out of subject matters and shames them for withholding judgement, for uttering the “I don’t know”. Why did the Cold War end? Why did the Persians lose the battle of Salamis? Why did Hannibal get his behind kicked? Why did Casanova bounce back from hardship? …

I am not saying causes do not exist; do not use this argument to avoid learning from history. All I am saying is it is not so simple; be suspicious of the “because” and handle it with care, particularly in situations where you suspect “silent evidence”.

From Conor O’Neill:

“Expecting the public service to build webapps for us is a fool’s errand. They would spend €100m, take five years and it wouldn’t work when it was finished. However, if they make each department’s data available along with some simple APIs, then citizens can do it for themselves, or pay someone to do it. Free unlimited access to all APIs for individual or non-commercial use and some small pay-as-you-go for commercial use…

So what data do we want and need? Anything available under Freedom of Information from crime rates per county to court cases to tax revenue by category. If it exists, we want it.”

Yup. Just been looking for what I’d naively hoped were simple things: an API to help me sort out a GP nearby locator, and an API for OFSTED stuff. Ho hum. Am now fervently hoping the Guardian Free Our Data campaign works. Especially given the conclusion of this (very good) report:

In sum, recognition is slowly emerging in Europe that open access to government information is critical to the information society, the scientific endeavor, and economic growth. However, recent trends towards more “liberal” policies face opposition. This comes from treasuries as well as from entrepreneurial civil servants in charge of “government commercialization” initiatives, who are sometimes tempted to engage in anti-competitive practices. Therefore, these issues require consideration at the highest policy making levels of government.

Great post here (by someone who used to be a real curator):

“real curators don’t just leave a record. They assiduously build their collections, so that each new entry is made in full knowledge of its predecessors and with a deeply thoughtful anticipation for what comes next. These collections vibrate like a spider’s web with each new entry.

Real curators think with their collections. The collections are intelligence, memory, conceptual architecture made manifest. I love the idea that someone would take up this function in the digital world. But that’s not what I see the new “curators” doing. This richer, more authentic, more sincere rendering of the term could accomplish something astonishing. It would help sort and capture contemporary culture with some feeling for context, relative location, relative weight, what goes with what. This is the sort of thing that Pepys accomplished, unwittingly, with his diary. This notion of the curator has yet to find its champion. I don’t think we quite yet have a Pepys of the present day.”

Made me think of The Culture of Collecting again, and the problem with collecting things that aren’t “objects” as such: how do you easily spot what’s missing from your collection of thoughts? In other words, how can you usefully use all these wonderful online tools to avoid thinking kitsch thoughts or blandly repeating yourself?

From Scientific American:

“There is such a thing as expertise when it comes to complex emotions or emotional skills, such as the one of cultivating benevolence,” says Antoine Lutz, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who led the study. “That raises the possibility that you can train someone to cultivate this positive emotion.”

From the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (p.30):

[n.b. the lift coincides with the introduction of GCSE’s to avoid the O-level/CSE divide. Similar evidence at the BBC]

Aside from standards debates, it does make you wonder a) whether the GCSE syllabuses are more female-friendly, b) whether boys need Lutzesque training in empathy and c) if the choice is one of a two-tier O-level/CSE or a two-tier boy/girl, then which one’s preferable?

[Update]
just found this Pinker vs Spelke conversation on where

The speakers discussed research on mind, brain, and behavior that may be relevant to gender disparities in the sciences, including the studies of gender bias, discrimination, and innate and acquired differences between the sexes.

From Black Swans(p.74):

“People tend to fool themselves with their self-narrative of ‘national identity’, which, in a breakthrough paper in Science by sixty-five authors was shown to be a total fiction. (’National traits’ might be great for movies, they might be help a lot war, but they are Platonic notions that carry no empirical validity…) Empirically, sex, social class and profession seem to be better predictors of someone’s behaviour than nationality (a male from Sweden resembles a male from Togo more than a female from Sweden; a philosopher from Peru resembles a philosopher from Scotland more than a janitor from Peru, and so on.)

From Cnet (via Alan):

Even if you just checkmated your new friend in India or took your Russian opponent’s rook, new chess Web sites like Chess.com are encouraging niche social networking. CNET News.com’s Kara Tsuboi sat down with the site’s founder to find out what has attracted more than 100,000 members in less than a year.

This is kind of interesting. It equates self-employment with entrepreneurial activity, which I’m not sure is a particularly good indicator - skunkworks and the like are surely entrepreneurial albeit within the confines of an organisation - but good fodder nonetheless for sweeping statements in the pub.

“This paper examines the influence of religion on the decision for people to become an entrepreneur. Based on a large-scale data set of nearly ninety thousand workers in India, this paper finds that religion shapes the entrepreneurial decision. In particular, some religions, such as Islam and Christianity, are found to be conducive to entrepreneurship, while others, such as Hinduism, inhibit entrepreneurship.

In addition, the caste system is found to influence the propensity to become an entrepreneur. Individuals belonging to a backward caste exhibit a lower propensity to become an entrepreneur.

Thus, the empirical evidence suggests that both religion and the tradition of the caste system influence economic behavior, suggesting a link between religion and economics.”

“When anyone asks how I can best describe my experience in nearly 40 years at sea, I merely say, uneventful. Of course there have been winter gales, and storms and fog the like, but in all my experience, I have never been in any accident of any sort worth speaking about. …… I never saw a wreck and never have been wrecked, nor was I ever in any predicament that threatened to end in disaster of any sort. You see, I am not very good material for a story”

- EJ Smith, Captain, RMS Titanic , 1907

Fast forward 5 years to 1912.

Captain Smith seems fabulous material for a story, and a least a discussion. Is there a sweet-spot for mistakes (and learning from them)? Or do we just have to accept that big unpredictable icebergs come along every now and then? (It seems that George Bernard Shaw and Arthur Conan Doyle had very different viewpoints on this at the time). If we do just have to accept it, then it seems that it is at least as important to learn how to cope with the icebergs as to steer the ship.

From The Black Swan:

“It is one thing to be cosmetically defiant of authority by wearing unconventional clothes - what social scientists and economists call ‘cheap signalling’ - and another to prove willingness to translate belief into action.”

Struck a chord for a couple of reasons.

1. a lot of cheap signals (e.g. bookmarks in delicious) seem to create value when aggregated
2. one of the things that frustrates me online is reading posts that are “more of the same” - cheap signals I suppose, which I’m as guilty as the next person of sending.

Ho hum.

John mentioned a lovely little quote at dinner last night, from Hermann Abs (apparently one of the great post-war bankers):

Profit is to business as breathing is to life.

Necessary, but not the point.

This is disturbing for lots of reasons.

“A loose confederation of online troublemakers who call themselves Anonymous have declared war on the Church of Scientology by flooding its servers with fake data requests, describing the attacks as punishment for the Church’s alleged abuse of copyright laws and alleged brainwashing of its members.”