And Sometimes the Butterflies' Wings Carry it Over to Pollinate the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil

I got introduced to systems thinking by the management guru W. Edwards Deming. He made the point that when assessing a team made up of three people, it is easy to think that we’ll know how the group would perform simply by looking at the performance of each individual. The team performance of Tom, Carmen, and Jin could look like this:

Tom’s performance [T] + Carmen’s performance [C] + Jin’s performance [J] = team performance [x]

In fact, that might well be the least of the equation. The team’s performance is also a function of

Tom’s working relationship with Carmen [T~C] + Carmen’s working relationship with Jin [C~J] + Jin’s working relationship with Tom [J~T] + the dynamic that emerges between all three [T~C~J]

An equation that at first blush looks like:

T + C + J = x

Is actually

T + C + J + [T~C] + [C~J] + [J~T] + [T~C~J] = x

This is not a problem of simple addition. This is a problem of relationships and emergent phenomenon. Jin could be a great guy but cause the other two team members to perform poorly. Carmen may be a poor performer on her own but might make the team perform better. The symbol ~ sometimes adds and sometimes multiplies as team members bring out what is better in each other; it sometimes subtracts and sometimes divides as they, at other times, undermine each other or leave each other feeling like less. What emerges out of relationship is not simple and cannot be reduced to the parts. Systems are defined by emergent properties, not just their parts.

“In an avalanche, each snowflake pleads its innocence.”

-         - Proverb

And of course, the world in which we live is defined by system dynamics, by the interaction of systems and even the performance of systems within systems. Cultures and societies are not the product of just one person, they emerge out of a dynamic between people and their times and circumstances. Your work place, your town, your portfolio, your marriage… these are defined by not just by emergent properties but how they, as systems, fit within the larger system we call the environment. Like Russian dolls, our world is not only composed of systems but has layers of systems. Your respiratory system can perform in ways that allow you to run a marathon or be unable to rise out of bed; if you are king, this difference can ripple across a kingdom to shatter a fragile peace. 

Sometimes the butterfly stirs up a storm and sometimes it gets pinned inertly into the collection. It’s hard to predict which it will do by just looking at the butterfly. 

The Right Tries to Finish the Job of Roosevelt's Would-be Assassin

In 1912, an assassin rose through the crowd to shoot Teddy Roosevelt. The right desperately hopes that a century later, the assassin’s work will finally be done. The simplest way to understand their platform is to say that their election hopes rest on killing most of this Republicans’ most defining policies.

The turn of the last century was an ugly time for the working man. Work places were notoriously unsafe; the powerful capital machinery that made so many products could easily tear off a limb or kill a man: the machinery was designed for productivity, not safety. Households sent their children to work instead of school to earn enough to pay the bills; given that adults worked six 12-hour days a week, children seemed to get off easy having to work only 9 hour days. It was not unusual for factories employing young women to require them to live on the factory grounds, and while the constitution may have granted them freedom to easily come and go, their bosses did not.  Life was not just harsh. It was ugly. The rapid construction of towns and factories was transforming beautiful, natural landscapes into ugly and polluted scenes. Roosevelt was not the kind of man to simply acquiesce to these realities.

The 1912 campaign was a four-way race between Republicans, Democrats, Socialists, and Roosevelt’s progressive, Bull Moose Party. Politics had a little more texture back then. Roosevelt platform continued his defense of natural beauty (as president, Roosevelt had protected huge swaths of land like Yellowstone and Yosemite from development) and argued for progressive taxation, old-age insurance, regulations on business, an end to racist practices, the abolition of child labor, and woman’s suffrage.

What is it that today’s right wants? To reverse that.

The right wants to open up national parks for development. (Any candidate who would argue against drilling in ANWAR would never make it through the Republican primaries.)

The right does not just want lower taxes; most of them argue for a simplification of the tax code which is, it seems, code for a flat tax to replace the progressive tax for which Roosevelt argued. They see no reason why a man making a million a year should pay a higher percentage on his taxes than a man who makes only a thousand.

Like presidents before him, Roosevelt wanted to send troops to intervene in labor strikes. Unlike presidents before him, Roosevelt’s intention was not to break up the strike but, instead, to socialize the mines in order to protect the workers. Roosevelt wasn’t afraid to take on Morgan backed corporations and capitalists in general. He wasn’t anti-capitalist but he certainly did not see it as government role’s to merely support capitalists in the oppression of labor.

The right, of course, thinks that it is labor unions and their unreasonable demands that keeps us from economic nirvana. It’s their goal to put a stake in the heart of the already faltering heart of labor unions.

You might say that the right would never reverse the abolition of child labor but that would be only if you focused on just American children. Fair trade would put up barriers to trade with countries with unacceptable environmental and labor policies. Free trade advocates on the right have no compunction about buying cheap products from a country that puts children to work.

It is true that no one on the right (publically) argues for taking back the vote from women. They do, of course, have no trouble with reproductive laws that would, among other things, make it illegal for a doctor to perform even abortions that would save the life of a mother. If only women couldn’t vote, the right would have an easier time getting such legislation passed.

The right’s candidates argue against business regulation as if they were fighting rabid communists and while they are sympathetic to those who want medicare and social security (Roosevelt’s old-age insurance), they point out that we simply can no longer afford such luxuries.

We could use a candidate like Roosevelt. Even bullets couldn’t stop him.

After he was shot in 1912, his assistants insisted that he go to the hospital. He spit into a handkerchief and, seeing no blood, concluded that he would live long enough to deliver his speech and ordered them to take him to the auditorium.

The audience - in this time before cell phones, TVs, or even radio - had no idea that Roosevelt had just been shot until he dramatically opened his suit jacket to show the spread of blood. When his aides saw this, they panicked at the sight of so much blood and again insisted that he rush to the hospital and he again shook them off. (Now that is a called an attention getting opening and is far more effective than a joke.)

Roosevelt explained to his audience that his issues were more important than his safety. He stood up for those who those who could not defend themselves – women, children, minorities and even nature. While he lost his bid for a third term, all of his issues eventually won.

It would be a shame to let the right do what the assassin’s bullet could not. On the centennial of this failed assassination attempt, let’s keep the man’s ideals alive. 

The Doldrums of the Donald Leading the Pack

Could any single stat do more to convey Republicans' dismal prospects in 2012 than the fact that Donald Trump leads in the polls? Your chances can't be particularly serious when your leading candidate is not particularly serious.

Personally, I think that even though Donald is not smart enough to be president, he is smart enough to realize that  there is no way to buy the kind of publicity he'll get by toying with the idea of running for president. He may not know what the country needs but he does seem to know what the media needs. 

Donald Trump is, as a candidate, the opposite of Ron Paul. Paul has created and popularized a set of policies that have little to do with the real world; Trump has created and popularized a personal image that has little to do with the real world. 

Donald challenges Obama's proof that he was born in the US. This strikes me as a serious issue. About as serious as Donald's failure to provide any certificates proving that that is really his hair.

It Occurred to Me (Tweets from Mar 2011)

Maybe next month we need a May Skeptics' day. April Fools' Day credible, May Skeptics' Day incredible.

Irish guy commenting on their financial woes: "Capitalism w/o bankruptcy is like Catholicism w/o hell. It just doesn't work."

Republican presidential race has begun ... a reminder of the gap between effective politics and effective policies.

Libyan Foreign Minister Moussa Koussa quit and flew to London. No confirmation yet that he'll record a self-titled rap album.

They call it the express line but obviously they don't really want you to express your opinion.

iPod: just coincidence that the 1st generation to be discovered by sonogram would so eagerly embrace a product that envelopes them in sound?

The older we get, the more our lives are the product of habit. Time, having been around nearly forever, is in the habit of moving forward.

Another day working in the suburban home office ... another day w/o any clear opportunities to test my deodorant's adrenaline trigger.

Idea to end dependence on foreign oil and create jobs: rebuild all highways as Escher Expressways - downhill in every direction.

Best known for his experiment with a man-to-man rather than what he despairingly called a "zone" defense, he was a unique baseball coach.

"My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will." - William James

I'm not saying that he grew up in a secluded little podunk. I'm just saying his town's time zone was 37 minutes off from anywhere else.

Commerce Dept. revised GDP growth from 2.8% to 3.1%, or an extra $42,000,000,000 (about Warren Buffet's net worth).

Where's a good lawyer? Shouldn't UCONN be disqualified? By what stretch of imagination are they in the West?

1848, Europe was convulsed by revolutions in places like France & Germany, dozens of states in total. Similar dynamic in Middle East today?

I lost my mood ring. I'm not sure how I feel about that.

Newsweek's cover asks, "How Ignorant Are You?" And I'm thinking, "I wouldn't know, would I?"

Like dogs watching television, we participate in systems that we vaguely understand and can predict only within fairly narrow boundaries.

Elizabeth Taylor was committed to marriage, just not any specific husband.

In the future, people will take consolation in the fact that while they have no time to socialize, they do have time for photo ops.

Armageddon deferred, stock market rallies.

Life's not fair. It's a circus.

Just once, she thought, it would be nice to have a day when my bliss follows ME around.

The more hassles you try to avoid the more of life you do avoid.

His interest in the cognitive science major abruptly ended when he learned that they didn't offer classes in telekinesis or mind reading.

Poll of rich (average $78 million, 73% w/ at least $25 million) reveals they wouldn't feel financially secure until they got 1/4 more.

You have to love the symmetry. For days media (rightly) fixates on threat of nuclear disaster. Then reports polls that show we're concerned.

Can't find droid phone setting that makes callers sound like Scooby Doo, Elmer Fudd or Darth Vader. Pity.

How fitting that people avoid use of the word "evitable" whereas they can't seem to avoid use of the word "inevitable."

Baseball gods must favor the oddly named. Yesterday, old stars Vida Blue & Rollie Fingers signed balls while new star Coco Crisp hit them.

Middle East revolutions then earthquake in Japan. Wonder which is more traumatic: nature's impersonal attacks or troops' personal attacks?

Product idea: omni-directional wheeled suitcase electronically "on leash" to your smart phone, just follows you thru airport.

After the bad eggplant harvest He covered his losses on baba ghanoush futures w/ calls on hummus. Running a deli had become so complicated.

For longer than he cared to admit, he thought that a brothel was a soup kitchen.

The Chrysler Ambiguity. Stunning design but only comes in shades of gray.

Time to give back that hour you got in the fall. With money you pay interest. With time you just hope it was of interest.

Once, only sailors got tattoos. Now the fad has spread about the same rate as the popularity of cruises. Something about the ocean.

Those shape-up shoes really work. I've noticed that the general population is getting much more fit.

Like telling boneless chickens to relax.

The paradox of prediction: if you predict the unpredictable, haven't you just made it impossible for anything to be either?

Exxon CEO says oil prices not yet hurting economy. And then whispered into the mic, but we have not yet given up on that.

Charlie Sheen is marketing a new Tiger Blood concentrate. Just add millions and it makes you irresistible to certain women.

Your moment of pop anthropology: McDonald's Wedding Packages Have Hong Kong Lovin' It http://yhoo.it/ell3RU

NPR interviewer was inquiring about the agenda of facebook & twitter. I wonder what he thinks is the agenda of the phone or internet.

The audience thinks that it is viewing programming; the advertiser thinks that it is programming viewers.

Low-carb Thursday was never caught on like Fat Tuesday.

They’d stopped using traditional graphs. Today's report pictured his portfolio as a small kid trapped and forgotten in the bouncy castle.

His glasses askew, heart racing, and coffee splattered about, Tom instantly resented the local newspaper's new pop up advertising.

In '70s, IBM sold a 1 MB memory computer for $4,674,160. Today, you can get 3 GB computer for $473.99. From $4 million per MB to 15 cents.

He was the worst kind of confused. Which is to say, he didn't even realize that he was.

Dad was really surprised at how spicy was his dab of guacamole at the Japanese restaurant today.

He admitted it wasn't a big difference, like the one between grunge rock, garage rock, and indie rock. Still, how could she not notice?

Cognitive entropy: point at which energy to adjust one's worldview to accommodate new facts seems greater than energy required to avoid them.

Easy to imagine thought caption over heads of confused looking tweens at mall: life was so much easier when we just liked to chew stuff.

I wonder if leprechauns are flattered or offended at our stereotypes of them.

Wonder if Center for Disease Control tracks sale of tissues to track spread of colds. Or searches key words to spot trends on facebook.

This head cold is similar to sucking helium. I'm light headed and sound like Mickey Mouse. Plus it sucks.

Justin Bieber just turned 17. Poor kid. Seems so young for a comb over.

It's true that he was thoughtful, if by that you mean that he gave a great deal of thought to how he was thought about.

"Today you are you, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You." - Dr. Seuss.

Gleick's new book, The Information, shipped today to my doorstep. Engrossing, intellectually provocative, and fun.

How do you call in sick from home office? Work is done via phone and computer; isn't informing them you can't work proof to the contrary?

http://twitter.com/#!/iamrondavison

Taxes Fall Outside of Historic Range - But are Still Too High

Like a murder of crows, politicians and talk show hosts endlessly caw about the debt as a consequence of rampant government spending. Usually in the same breath, they decry high taxes. 

It's worth pointing out that - at the federal level at least - taxes have never been so low. Not just the lowest they've been in the lifetime of our president but outside the control charts set since his birth.

Companies use control charts to distinguish between common cause and special cause variation. Simply put, a control chart shows normal variation in a process. It can be applied to a factory floor to track defects, a high school to track dropout rates, or even to tax rates for a country. 

The control chart below shows tax rates as a percentage of GDP since 1961 - the year our president was born. 

Put simply, this suggests that any administration ought to be prepared for tax rates as low as 15.4% or as high as 20.8%. Taxes always varied within in this range. 

And then two things happened. One, the Great Recession lowered taxes. Two, and more importantly, conservatives finally institutionalized tax cuts as an annual rite, like virgins offered to the volcano. Obama, unable to end occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq but able to institute Universal Health Care, continued George W.'s blind adherence to cutting taxes no matter what spending was required. 

Do we have record deficits? Yes. And spending does play a part in this. But the part that every politician and the media seem to blithely ignore is this: taxes have plummeted below their old range. Not just their lowest, but lower than any reasonable prediction would have suggested even four years ago. 

I could opine at length about this. For now, I'll just point out these facts. You consider whether there is a good reason to believe that the lowest federal tax rate in all the developed world should have suddenly fallen to a new,and even lower range. 

Not So Much Unreasonable As Its Own Reason

It might be that you’ve found your personal reason if it seems unreasonable to everyone else.

Some things you do might do for money. That’s a reason everyone gets.

Other things we do for no extrinsic reason but just because of their nature. That, too, is a reason that everyone gets. We revel in a hug or great music, savor food or beautiful art simply because that’s part of the human experience.

Finally, there are things that you do simply because that is who you are. How can you explain why you’re compelled to write poems, play the ukulele, make fun of jokes, walk the high wire, juggle, or collect found art that others would categorize as junk? If there is no reason outside of the thing itself, it might just be your own “raison d'etre,” or reason for existence. (Or at least one of the reasons.)

If, by contrast, you have a reason for doing the thing other than that thing itself, it might just be that you’re still at least one level removed from your true passion.

To others your passion might seem unreasonable but perhaps it is simply the case that the thing is not so much unreasonable as something that is its own reason. 

Get a plot before they put you in one

He and his friend Jerome had their own religion. They believed that we are all caught in an elaborate story written by a deity / screenwriter who had invented far too many characters. So many characters, in fact, that he could no longer provide properly engaging plot lines for them all. The point, then, was to attract this deity's attention so that he would notice you and provide you with more interesting character development arcs and plot twists. In short, the goal of their religion was to gain celebrity and, failing that, notoriety.

First you got celebrity, then you were given a plot. And this religion was not purely an act of faith. Their proof of its validity was the contorted and often fascinating paths that the lives of celebrities took.

He and Jerome even had t-shirts. "Get a plot before they put you in one," it read.

Heaven or Hell?

What if eternity is a place where you live among people who may be a different gender, of different skill sets and abilities, different races and styles, but who, in terms of how they fundamentally live their lives,

• have no more (or less) compassion than you
• are no more (or less) loving than you
• are no more (or less) mean or thoughtless than you
• do no more (or less) than you to realize their own potential
• put no more (or less) effort into life than you
• are no more (or less) brave than you
• are no more (or less) selfish than you
• do no more (or less) to make themselves or the world better than you

What if, in short, you lived for eternity in a world where no one was any different than you in terms of the emotions they evoked or nurtured? What if you were the only one who had the power to define whether it was heaven or hell and you only had that power now? 

The really important question is whether that possibility comforts or frightens you. What you might wish were different in that life could be something you ought to think about changing in this one.

Not a Smart Phone

"Yeah right," he heard the voice say in the pause after she declared her love. This was the first hint that something was wrong.

It started with little quips. "You wish," it would say when someone had just done a little advertisement for themselves. "As if," and "Oh really?" were common interjections into other's comments.

Finally, when he heard it tell a client, mid-conversation, "Your family is so dumb that during the Civil War you fought for the West," he realized why he had gotten such a good deal on this ridiculous phone. He hadn't bought a smart phone. He had, instead, accidentally bought a smart ass phone.

Seasonal Music

Today I got to listen to Celtic music. It was grand. Curiously, Celtic music is - like Christmas music - a seasonal offering that's hard to find on the airwaves at any other time.

It made me wonder what it would be like to live in a world in which all music is seasonal. 

"What's that music we listen to in July, around Independence Day, with the guys who miss their mama or girlfriend and just want to drink to forget?"

"Plus they love their country. Don't forget the patriotism."

"Yeah, that."

"You are talking about country music."

"Yeah. It would be great to hear that now."

"Don't be a fool. That's still 8 months off."

Love songs, of course, would be played in the weeks' leading up to Valentine's Day. Folk music would be played around Labor Day, the music of the working man. 

Rock and roll - the music of release and anarchy - would be the music to kick off summer around Memorial Day. 

I'll leave it to the reader to decide when we should play Sinatra and the jazz singers (leading up to that most grown up of seasons, tax season?), jazz instrumentalists (November when the leaves fall like Oscar Peterson's fingers on the keyboard?), reggae (August at the peak of summer vacations?) or classical music (March, when Bach was born?)

I did say that it made me wonder. I didn't say that the idea was wonderful. 

Stork Delivers Babies / Black Swan Delivers Perpetual Apocalypse

This last year has given us some momentous news: eco-disaster with the Gulf Oil spill, devastating earthquakes in Haiti Chile, and Japan, threat of nuclear meltdown, riots in the Middle East, and sluggish recovery from a financial crisis.  Economic, ecological, urban, energy, and political systems have all been pushed beyond their presumed limits.

It might be that global news and the Internet have simply brought events that decades ago would have been marginalized in the back pages of our newspapers to the forefront of our attention, resulting in a sense of perpetual apocalypse. Or it could be that the modern world has been overshadowed by a flock of Black Swans.

Nassim Taleb's bestselling book, The Black Swan, tells the story of how experience only predicts the future as long as systems are stable. Of course, the defining events shift the system boundaries rather than stay within them. (Taleb tells the story of the turkey convinced that he's loved and cared for and that his owners want the best for him until the day before Thanksgiving when ALL of his experience is suddenly made meaningless and his world view is shattered. The events of 9-11 and the Great Recession, of course, are events that change what is predictable.)

Our modern world may just be so dependent on interdependent, ultimately fragile systems that a parade of news like we've seen in the past year is inevitable. Even if the probability of any one system collapsing or causing destruction is only .1%, we live in a world so populated by these systems that the probability of ONE system reaching a tipping must be close to 100%. Somewhere, a political system will have reached a tipping point and a people will be thrown into violent clashes and social turmoil. An energy system will either become expensive, unstable, or blow up. And the list goes on.

This is a time of perpetual apocalypse for a simple reason: we depend upon systems that we still understand only dimly and can predict and manage with even less confidence.

Isn't it time to invest massive amounts of research money into the development of better models for understanding and managing these systems? The world will not become less complex, but only more so. If we have to live with Black Swans, perhaps we can at least get them to fly in formation.

There's Always Another Man

"I think that there is another man."
He laughed. "There's always another man."
"Not always."
"Always," he asserted.
"That's a ridiculous claim. There is not always another man."
"You think that you are not competing with some other man from the first conversation? The other man is the man she's somehow constructed in her mind. At any moment, he can alienate her affections from you. He's perfect. You're not. You, however, have one advantage over him: she can introduce you to her friends. As long as you affirm her desirability and don't embarrass her in front of her friends, he's the 'other' guy rather than 'the' guy."
"So, there's always another man."
"That's what I said."

Fashion: the Consumer as Status Symbol

Another excerpt from the book, The Fourth Economy: Inventing Western Civilization from 1300 to 2050. This is from the chapter on the information economy.

“Man is a social being. We can never explain demand by looking only at the physical properties of goods. Man needs goods for communicating with others and for making sense of what is going on around him. The two needs are but one, for communication can only be formed in a system of meanings. His overriding objective as a consumer, put at its most general, is a concern for information about the changing cultural scene.”

Mary Douglas[1]

Fashion – Could Any Social Invention More Obviously Be a Social Invention?

The purpose of fashion is to stimulate demand. It’s a pretty brilliant ploy, really, to compel people who have a perfectly good product to replace it.

The new production methods worked very well for making clothes. In the decades after Crowell’s success with continuous production, the textile and garment industry grew about two or three times as rapidly as any industry. By 1915, only steel and oil were larger industries than the clothing trade[2].

“’The way out of overproduction.’ Wrote one fashion expert, ‘must lie in finding out what the woman at the counter is going to want; make it; then promptly drop it and go on to something else to which fickle fashion is turning her attention.’” Constant change was essential to prosperity of manufacturers and retailers.[3]

The information economy was rich in symbols used for communication and computing. The genius of fashion is that it made the consumer’s goods a symbol, one they would pay dearly to enhance and maintain. In an age that was - at least politically - increasingly democratic, fashion was an important symbol of status, signaling rank. Fashion became fashionable just as aristocracies faded. Fashion made the consumer a symbol. 

---

[1] James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986) 101.

[2] William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1994) 93.

[3] William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1994) 94.

The Fourth Economy as a Table

This is the framework I've used to define the last 700 years and predict the next 50. 

Not To Brag But I Just Solved the High Cost of Education & Health Care

Teachers make so much more than average workers, the talking heads shout. This isn't fair.

Fox recently reported that teachers make an average of $51k while the average American worker makes only $38k. There is an easy cure for this disparity: just stop requiring college degrees for teachers.

Men with university degrees make $55k; those without make only $32k. Women with degrees make $45k; women without make only $25k. People with university degrees cost employers about $20k more.

Given that teachers are required to have college degrees, no one should be surprised that teachers make more than the average worker. (No one, that is, but Scott Walker or Fox news analysts.)

But if the Republicans are serious about lowering teacher wages, there is an easy way to do that: stop requiring that teachers complete college or even high school. The savings potential is enormous.

Next up? Massive savings in health care costs by no longer requiring medical school for doctors.

The Optimism of Conspiracy Theorists

Conspiracy theories sound dire but they reflect optimism about events. The premise behind one is if there really is a conspiracy than someone really is in control and if only we could wrestle control away from the conspirators, life would be wonderful. 

Rather than believe that random and sometimes awful things happen, conspiracy theorists, like all true believers, trust in a higher plan and in the possibility of making the world better if only we put the right people in charge. 

Shaping Schools to Individuals (rather than vice versa)

The book, The Fourth Economy: Inventing Western Civilization from 1300 to 2050 is done. I'm now ready for the editing phase. The central notion is that social invention will become as intentional in this century as technological invention became in the last. The goal of this social invention will be to create institutions and organizations that not only create more value but better adapt to the reality of real, rather than idealized, people. Here is an excerpt about the future of education.

Schools can better adapt to real human beings by designing education to accord with some of the best theories about who people are.

Someone quipped that after Howard Gardner defined various kinds of intelligence, the question shifted from whether your child was smart to how your child was smart. Gardner writes and talks to these different ways that people learn, think, and create careers and change communities and lists 8 kinds of intelligence.

His list of intelligences:

§  Spatial- the artist or architect with the ability to conceive of and manipulate objects in three-dimensions,

§  Linguistic – Poets and speakers who use words and language as their tools.

§  Logical-mathematical – the computer programmer or math professor who can reason and manipulate numbers.

§  Bodily-kinesthetic – the dancers and athletes whose control over their body lets them do with precision and strength what others are left to admire.

§  Musical – performers, song writers, and composers.

§  Interpersonal – the leaders, salespeople, and politicians who sense what others are feeling and know how to influence their emotions, reasoning, and actions.

§  Intrapersonal – the psychologists and theologians who are introspective enough to understand the inner life.

§  Naturalistic – the farmers and ecologists who understand and work with the rhythms and dynamics of nature.

Additionally, fairly popular notions of learning suggests that people have at least three kinds of learning styles: some are visual, some auditory, and some kinesthetic learners. If we assume that anyone of the 8 kinds of intelligences could mix with one of the three kinds of learning styles, we have a fairly complex menu of minds. In theory, we’d have 3 X 8, or 24 different kinds of minds. This suggests that in a time of entrepreneurship and social invention, we might create at least 24 kinds of learning experiences, if not even 24 different learning institutions. This customization of learning for different types of students would be just one example of how institutions could be made into tools for the individual.

In this context, thinking of developing an educational system that would work best for a particular kind of learner, one gets a better appreciation of W. Edwards Deming disdain for grades. Imagine grading a visual learner whose potential intelligence was intrapersonal – a person who might be brilliant at reading facial expressions, gestures, and body language for clues about another’s emotions and thoughts. Now imagine that this person was struggling to learn within a school designed for auditory learners where the intelligences that are emphasized are language and math. This child would get a low grade. In this system, they would be made to (unfairly) look stupid or inept or lazy. This would almost be excusable if it were really the case that the only way to make a living was to be good at math or language. In fact, a person who can read and influence others might make more money in sales or management than anyone using literature or algebra.

Deming said that if we know a student got a 92, say, or a 58, we know nothing about the student. The amount of learning a student gains is a function of an equation of X * Y = student score. X is the system and Y is the student. You can’t solve for Y – the student’s ability – without knowing X, the system’s contribution. And of course, for one child the system is a perfect complement to her potential whereas for another it is a miserable clash. For one student, the system works. For another, it does not. For the intrapersonal, visual learner, the interaction of the educational system and the student produces a 58. A grade of D. For the logical – mathematical, auditory learner, the interaction of the system and student produces a 92, or an A. (And it is worth noting that these grades, the A, B, C ‘s that are so ubiquitous, are remnants of a time before the information economy. They were first used by cotton buyers to communicate back to England on the quality of cotton. This was a time when information was very expensive and a single letter grade was so much cheaper to send across the Atlantic than a description of the particulars of the cotton. Even in an information age where every high school kid seems to have the equivalent of a telegraph in his pocket, the now ubiquitous cell phone for texting, we still distill the child’s academic performance into a single letter.) 

The question is not whether the student is smart but how. In a time of rampant social invention, there is no reason that new systems can’t be created that better suit the individual. School should be a means for a student to discover and develop his own potential, not be ranked against other students on criteria that may or may not have anything to do with his future.

In the end, the child’s GPA is a distraction from the real task of creating a life and career. GPA tells us how well the child performed within the school system, a vague approximation of the child’s subsequent performance with the larger social system. (Although, of course, a child convinced that the grade really is a good indication of who she is would be more likely to let this become a prediction of their behavior if it is a poor grade. Sadly, a school’s label of failure is more likely to predict life after school than the label of success. Subject matter is not all that children learn in school; they also learn who they are.) 

Tweeting Through February 2011

Coworker: What does it mean if the Groundhog comes out of his hole, slips on the ice, and ends up in traction? Perpetual winter?

Weather channel has older white guy and young black woman anchors. Apparently still no place for middle-aged Asian transvestites.

Egyptian transformation less interesting than (lack of or occasional spurts of) corporate transformation: outcomes of latter still undefined

Weather has knocked out information systems like phones and internet in places. I guess they'll be forced to rely on their knowledge and wisdom systems.

Tuesday, groundhog day. Wednesday, Chinese year of rabbit begins. Thursday, start of chipmunk month. Good week for rodent awareness. 

Learned why penguins waddle. If they took large strides they could slip.

If ratio of personal wealth to GDP for Mubarak was the same in US, Obama would be worth $2.1 TRILLION. Mubarak is worth $70B. Egypt's GDP is $500B.

Do you know how people wildly gesture and twist in an effort to influence the bowling ball they've already released? That's parenting.

Super Bowl would be more interesting with same stakes as when Visigoths and Huns fought. Fans of winners get the women and homes of opposing fans.

Green Bay's population is 100,000 and 83,000 people are waiting for season tickets. Est. year you'd get tickets if you applied today, 2074.

Games provide flow but rarely provide meaning. Education provides meaning but rarely provides flow. Time to bring gamers into the classroom?

Riots in muddled east stem, in part, from bad job market. Economies are now limited by ability to generate jobs - not products.

Valentine's Day is to love what birthdays are to happy. At least no one sings "be romantic to her" while we stare self-consciously at a box of chocolates.

If you wanted the players to take losing seriously, wouldn't your team name be something other than cavalier?

Texting STOP It's like having a telegraph in your pocket STOP AT&T knew they'd be vindicated for holding onto the rights to that last T STOP

Shares traded on NYSE one day in 1830: 31. Shares traded 4 Jan 2001: 2 billion. Doubled every decade to 64 million times.

Catholic confession app. Assange and Jerry Springer are already funding R&D into how to hack the feed. http://bit.ly/eJP8ys

Curious. Grocery store item labeled, "restaurant quality." Didn't "tastes home made" used to be the compliment of choice?

Bad: increasingly employees face the same risk to future income as entrepreneurs. Worse: they don't share the same potential for returns.

MS wants license plate for KKK founder. I like the idea. It's an easy way for a community to tag and monitor the demented and hateful.

Walking is easy until you overthink it. At least that's what I keep volunteering to kids in strollers.

His teachers knew Abe had a great future when after electing him class president, his classmates voted to make his birthday a school holiday.

Still a little confused about whole Egyptian thing. When did the Pharaohs resign and why didn't that get any coverage?

Wonder if in the future electronic devices, instead of spending their remaining energy beeping, will just crawl over to a wall socket.

I consider myself tech savvy. For one thing, I regularly appear in 3-D.

House Republicans propose 0 budget for NPR. So awesome. For-profit news is obviously superior. Just compare BBC & PBS w/ Fox & MSNBC.

Obama presented his new budget at a middle school. That makes sense. Junior high kids can't seem to get enough talk about federal budgets.

Conclusion after full day in conference: powerpoint is to communication what hubcaps are to transportation.

The further removed you are from a situation, the more simply you can speak about it because actual situations are rarely simple.

20th century: people program software. 21st century: software programs people.

He said that he had a couple of thoughts. It sounded to me, though, like the thoughts had him.

Since 2005, the ratio of approvals for offshore gas and oil to wind projects is 4,603 to 1, about the same as ratio of inertia to vision.

Wonder how long it'll before the first NBA team has a team tattoo artist.

Caught my computer friending Watson on facebook without me. Great. Now our computers are going to start feeling superior to us.

CA - pop. 37 million / 8th largest economy in the world.Obama visits for 1 day? How about a law requiring the president live here odd years?

NFL announces that it must drastically cut players' pay and benefits in order to remain competitive with China. http://yhoo.it/hSsHNn

Interactive graph. From 1960 to 83, poor shared prosperity w/ rich. Since then? Only the prosperous prospered http://bit.ly/eN1fKn

Ever noticed? Apparent - something obvious. A parent - someone clueless.

Emotionally pithed. Just back from Old Globe. Saw Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. Miller was a genius. No wonder Marilyn fell for him.

Rush Limbaugh says that first lady is no swimsuit model then announces a new endorsement deal with speedo.

I confess. I want 3-D sound.http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/03/what-perfection-sounds-like/8377/

Writing: the process of banging your brain against the page until words come out.

Saw gas at $3.99 /gal. Oil by barrel is only $2.35. I think I'll just start making my own gas at home.

My brain hurts.

Presumably it is with some measure of guilt that the San Diego weather gods have returned us to our regularly scheduled program. Gorgeous.

It's great that they came up with the Oscars so that movie stars could finally get some praise and attention.

The distinction between best dressed and worst dressed seems so arbitrary. Everything cool eventually looks geeky and vice versa, no?

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