| Education, Manipulation |
[Feb. 26th, 2008|02:47 am] |
It all starts out innocently, teaching our children to manipulate.
"Please" they say, and look at us happily. Well surly we must reinforce this. If they don't get what they want when they say please they wont learn say it. So its an imperative really that we allow ourselves to be manipulated, just for educations sake.
Its also a two way street. There are things we want the kids to do and we demonstrate a wide range of manipulative skills to coax them. Teaching by example
Star and I have been trying hard to get William to learn to read. He has to put it mildly varying levels of interest in the activity. We recently went through a period where he basically wouldn't read for us at all. So we backed off for awhile and largely dropped our efforts.
But he is interested in TV, and TV access being regulated is a valued commodity. In the past as a final measure we would try to bribe him into reading by offering TV. In his anti-reading moments he would not succumb to this. Now as his memory of the reading wars have faded he has turned this around, and started negotiating for TV by offering to read a book (counter offer 2 books.. sold!). His reading has started to improve again. The circle is now complete.
Math has been developing slower. Currently my best strategy for this is to leverage his interest in playing Hide and Seek. Not the hiding bit, but the counting before you seek part. He has to count by 2's before he can seek. Hopefully this will have some pay off in adding and multiplying later on. Who knows what else its teaching him about the ways to get what he wants. |
|
|
| My Current Electoral Opinion |
[Feb. 4th, 2008|11:19 pm] |
I think Hillary will make the best president of the 4 likely candidates.
I think she will be a divisive figure if elected, she will galvanize her opposition. I think that if she wins it will be by a relatively smaller majority than an Obama win could be. She will have smaller coat tails and a smaller margin in congress. In short I think this will lead to a grid lock dynamic in Washington...and I think thats a good thing. The less they do the better.
The problem is that I am not convinced she would win against McCain and I would rather like to see a democrat in the white house. If only so that they can investigate the hell out of the current crop of republicans and force the republicans to internalize their defeat in the hope they they come out with something better that public choice theory on a power trip.
We need a changing of the fief. |
|
|
| My Feynman Moment.... |
[Jan. 26th, 2008|12:31 am] |
I am going over neurogirl's Inovation Academy Petition, which lead me to look up the California State Science Standard.
Kindergardners are supposed to know the following about physical science:
Physical Sciences:
1.Properties of materials can be observed, measured, and predicted. As a basis for understanding this concept:
a. Students know objects can be described in terms of the materials they are made of (e.g., clay, cloth, paper) and their physical properties (e.g., color, size, shape, weight, texture, flexibility, attraction to magnets, floating, sinking).
Sounds good!
b. Students know water can be a liquid or a solid and can be made to change back and forth from one form to the other.
I like it! Throw in a gas and I am extra happy.
c. Students know water left in an open container evaporates (goes into the air) but water in a closed container does not.
Water evaporates.. oh good gas... though steam would seem more obvious...err why are we talking about containers?
What do you mean water can't evaporate in a closed container? Ever seen the inside of a half drunk water bottle? The water can also diffuse through the plastic and evaporate on the other side!
Next thing you know they will be asking for the total temperature of a group of different color stars :(
Page 1 of http://www.cde.ca.gov/re/pn/fd/documents/sci-stnd.pdf |
|
|
| Parody or irony? |
[Jan. 14th, 2008|11:24 pm] |
Caustic article on Facebook in the guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook?gusrc=rss&feed=technology
The article opens...
"I despise Facebook. This enormously successful American business describes itself as "a social utility that connects you with the people around you". But hang on. Why on God's earth would I need a computer to connect with the people around me?"
So let me get this straight, someone is writing on an internet site a article being read by people around the world "Why on God's earth would I need a computer to connect with the people around me?"
So is that self parody or unintended irony?
My second thought is that I want to meet Peter Thiel.
Have any of you all met him? |
|
|
| More envitonmental fun... I really liked the second paragraph |
[Feb. 21st, 2006|01:40 am] |
100 years?
In 100 years the future environmental debate will be about when we should disassemble the earth to help construct the “Matrioshka Brain.”
Having the earth be hotter will just mean more potential energy to tap. So consider global warming as a mass energy savings program if that makes you feel better.
Oh and don't worry about the people on the Ganges they will either be floating around Io taking in the beuaty of Jupiter or they be uploaded spread out over the ever growing allnet.
P.S Don't piss off the lobsters |
|
|
| ID or I don't konw? |
[Jan. 23rd, 2006|12:37 am] |
In response to> http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2006/01/supporters-of-science-must-adapt_22.html
I think that is a great tactical rhetorical message to get across.
It is still the case that one should not give ground to the ID folk that what they are doing is science. The criticism of the existing particular story of evolutionary history can qualify as science, but they didn't name their movement after their criticism but their favored alternative hypothesis.. The hypothesis that they advance has no basis in observation and there is no claim that any specific testable result would follow from it.
ID should be treated as philosophy. Which is fine, I like philosophy. But the philosophical claim is by no means new. It is the very old argument from design. While I wouldn't send my child to a public school except as a anthropology field trip, I otherwise would think it fascinating if they would teach ID as philosophy along with the classical design arguments. Particularly if they also gave the historic responses. I can just imagine the PTA meeting after a strong argument from evil, and regress argument were made. Or the teacher training in Kolmogorov Complexity to prepare students for the ID class!
If life is so complex irreducibly complex as to require a designer, where did the designer come from? How complex is that designer? If you compressed the designer what would be the length of his program? How again does it help to introduce a more unknown more complex more powerful entity that we can't explain, to explain a much simpler phenomenon like the first cell?
How did the designer come to be? “We don't know,” they answer. But thats the same answer to the question “how did life evolve given that it looks so irreducibly complex?” So answering a designer does not add any information to the system it simply pushes out ignorance one more step. Occam's razor (as well as complexity based compression theory) demands that we shorten the explanation from “GOD...I don't know” to the more simple “I don't know”
Finally I can't resist...The old creationist had an argument that evolution was like a hurricane going through a junk yard and making a 747. Which was fine except GOD is like having no hurricane going through nothing and poof there is the space ship enterprise. At least the 747 conforms to the known laws of physics, and there are in fact hurricanes and junk yards. |
|
|
| Cake or Death? |
[Jan. 16th, 2006|11:56 pm] |
"...According to Locke, it does not matter if you are a follower of Karl Marx or Ayn Rand, or any other would-be social programmer..." David Brin*
Followers of one lead to over 200 million murders, the followers of the other lead to a few dorm room arguments and what? good monetary policy? I think that matters.
It's like saying that the difference between Joseph Goebbels and Thomas Paine does not matter. But I prefer getting George Washington verses the alternative. I think that matters.
It hardly seems pragmatic to suggest otherwise.
...In response to another comment on the same thread...
"Ayn Rand's ideologies have never really been tried, I don't think, and that's perhaps because she oversimplified so many things."
I would say that Rand's ideas have been tried thousands of times but on an individual level, which is valid because she is not primarily a political philosopher. It is important to note that not all the individual experiments that I have observed have gone charmingly well though I would say several have. While Rands followers have continued the internal bickering, splits and denunciation's that occurred during her life in a way that i find distasteful they haven't gone out and committed mass murder and hence I think for that they should get better treatment than those of Karl Marx.
Rand simplified but so did Newton. Suggesting that simplifying is bad seems badly oversimplified.
Rand ignored and was ignorant of evolution and its impact on the mind. She was ignorant of cognitivescience (it didn't help that she died before most of it was done). But what I think she got right was the foundational importance of concepts and principles in trying to understand the world. Early AI failed because they though symbol manipulation was the key, where as I believe it will turn out to be concept formation that is the big hurdle to jump.
Bringing this back to Brin's essay... which I am criticizing because I truly do think he has tremendously important things to say and the great potential of someone who is fantastic at saying them)
Exalting the pragmatic over the idealistic is one thing. But its another to directly take on pragmatisms other alternative which is thinking in principles. Maybe its overly simplified to suggest that a complex system will conserver momentum, but it seems like a very handy rule that can get us past trying to work out all the forces involved and lead to some excellent results. True reality is not bunch of point masses, distributions and long tails matter, but those are principles too.
Pragmatism at root is doing what works. But what works? Thinking in principles combined with the experimental method. It's not one or the other, both are needed to do science. Our models and principles will always be “idealized” from the reality they are trying to represent, that is not a bug its a feature, otherwise we would just have to wait for reality to unfold and prediction would be impossible. The argument needs to be about what the correct models are and what experiments should be done to find out.
Further the thing that will dominate the future is not cycles, but exponential growth. Perhaps the next thing to take over after America will be a mmorg/fab lab consortium populated by uploads who occasionally want to in-corporal-ate themselves. Or to put another way, its probably not some existing big group that we can all point at anymore than people in the 1600's would have looked at James town and said, “man some days those guys will rule the world!” Because even pessimist must admit that it looks like America will stay on top for at least 20-30 years and by that time things can get really strange if Ray's Accelerating Returns pay dividends.
*In response to: http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2006/01/next-imperium-part-1_113745357518065491.html |
|
|
| Dangerous Ideas |
[Jan. 7th, 2006|01:06 am] |
In response to a confused Edge.org person on the fermi paradox...
Clearly the advanced intelligence out there is simply encrypting their communications so that it just appears to be random noise.
Also any sufficiently advanced intelligence would want to maximize it’s computational capacity and therefore would seek to encase the local star in a dyson sphere to capture as much energy as possible and they would want to harness this energy and let escape as little as possible. An efficient “Matrioshka Brain” might even let this energy escape as light near the level of the cosmic background. Encrypted data emitted as radiation from a 4 degree Kelvin source would be awfully hard to detect.
Certain estimates (kurzwiel, being only a median focast) suggest we as a civilization could be within a hundred years of creating such intelligence.
The best sci-fi write up of this idea (which has been kicked around futurist circles for some time) is Accelerando by Charles Stross. The real kicker is that the future environmental debate will really be about when we should disassemble the earth to help construct the “Matrioshka Brain.”
Now thats dangerous! |
|
|
| Musing on the education system... |
[Oct. 17th, 2005|10:21 pm] |
Automation is good. Applying the scientific method is better. Combining the two could be magic.
The education system we have is primarily based on sorting people. There is some merit to the idea that placing smart people around other smart and better educated people will generally lead to more smart educated people. But the fact is that those smart people would probably have learned close to as much by being around slightly less smart and educated people. This is to say if you can get into MIT what would the real educational difference be between going to MIT and a second rate school? What does MIT actually do to educate people that is different or better than the second rate school? Nothing.
Do the professors use scientifically engineered text books, course material, and tests? Can a given professor give you reliability and repeatability results for the tests they use? Do they have longitudinal studies showing that the practices and materials they use are better than alternatives? Nope. Basically they wing it, they make things up as they go along.
There are no statistical process controls used to determine if the methods being used are effective or not. If a student or a large number of students fail a test, does the school or professor try a different approach or do anything to help the student figure out what went wrong and how they can correct it? Almost certainly not. Classes are designed to weed people out, not help them learn.
Top schools are often seen as competitive and stressful places. Does being under stress help people learn? Nope stress inhibits learning. Why make the environment stressfully then? Because the goal is to sort not educate. |
|
|
| Intelligent Design and the Mysteries of Life |
[Mar. 30th, 2005|10:19 pm] |
My response to
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/03/time_to_pull_th.html
talking about
“Intelligent Design and the Mysteries of Life“
http://www.heritage.org/Press/Events/ev041905a.cfm
Hey I say we run with this intelligent design theory and see where it takes us. Lets start with kids and spiting up. What kind of wacky person makes feeding little babies a round the clock endeavor only to have them spit the food back out?
Next we need to talk about teeth. What kind of designer says... "hmm got a problem here I want to end up with a bunch of sharp enamel sticking in their mouths so they can bite stuff. Oh oh I know... just when they are about 6 months old and still breast feeding I'll shove the sharp enamel through their gums so they can bite their moms while trying to feed! But I wont do this all at once, no no I'll spread them out over months and months! I should make sure this really screws up their schedule and makes them wake up screaming in the middle of the night."
Conclusion: we were intelligently designed by Loki!
So I say bring it on, lets have a public debate. Lets get the theories talked about in the open.
This adaptation of the argument from trickster has been brought to you by the association for the reaffirmation of Norse Gods. |
|
|
| Inspired by Brin |
[Mar. 18th, 2005|10:39 pm] |
My Reaction to the following:
http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2005/03/aside-how-us-saved-world-by-buying.html
First let me gush complementary, that was fantastic, its wonderful to see sensible understanding and analysis!
I ain't much a good writer ... so this is a weird project to give myself ... but I want to resell what I think was Brin's basic message in my own wacky terms. Humor me please.
In America we have known (in some broad metaphorical sense that countries know things) for the last few hundred years how to do business, be productive, improve our productivity and create technology i.e we have had a largely capitalist economy. The question is how do you go from a substance economy like India and China to a modern technology-market driven economy? Note that the communism that China tried and the socialism that India tried were abject failures.
What we are trading China for all those goods we buy is basically a compressed education in how to create a market driven economy that doesn't take a two hundred years. China becomes focused on learning the skills of manufacturing, then product creation in a market by meeting the demands of our market (i.e. our people). We get lots of stuff. We enjoy getting lots of stuff. Once they learn these skills they can then transfer some of their effort from making us stuff, to making themselves stuff in what is a continuous process that improves their standard of living. During this time we don't as people fret go back to becoming subsistence farmers, but move on to learning new things in a way that is a bit scary because no one ever quite knows what those things will be down the link. But so far it has all seemed to work out, and we still seem to be improving our productivity at a nice clip.
more...
( Read more... ) |
|
|
| We are doomed! |
[Feb. 28th, 2005|08:15 pm] |
I sit down at the computer at near 8pm
"Up"
I look down
A confused look stares back, "Up"
I pause to make giving in a tad dramatic, and lift bambino into my lap
Wife, knowing my concern says, "you shouldn't sit at the computer if you don't want him to look at the monitor before going to bed"
I turn the monitor off...darkness
"working"
"working"
"working"
A small hand pushes the the on button monitor...it goes on...
"WORKING!"
We are doomed, it's intelegent and it has its own agenda! |
|
|
| William is trying my patience... |
[Feb. 7th, 2005|01:51 am] |
Today was the first day William intentionally kicked a ball. About five months ago I started kicking a ball around the house to model the behavior. Off and on for I have tried to encourage him to kick the ball. Generally I roll the ball slowly to him, and would pick it up and throw it back. This also makes me happy, as throwing the ball is good. But the soccer dad in me longed to see him kick the ball!
I have tried strategies such as rolling it into his foot while he is walking... “oh good you kicked the ball!” Grabbing his foot and kicking the ball with it...”William is kicking the ball!” But mostly I just run around the house kicking a ball hoping he gets the idea. But months and months have gone by and no kicking.
Last week he started to get the idea that kicking has something to do with his foot and the ball. But his initial idea was to try steeping on the ball. Now granted I had also been modeling this behavior as it is a standard way to stop a ball in soccer. But this maneuver usually involves balancing on one foot while stopping the ball with the other. William didn't quite get the balance part and just proceeded to try and walk over the ball, which is much harder.
But today I rolled the ball and he kicked it. I kicked it back, and he kicked it again. There was a full 2 minutes of kicking! I knew that having kids was supposed to try ones patience, but I never realized how much!
In other news, I had my first full day off of work in 2 weeks, and my life should be returning to normal after Tuesday. |
|
|
| Debate by blog, a series of excerpts |
[Aug. 26th, 2004|11:44 pm] |
Brad Delong: WHAT IS VALID IN MARXISM?
Tyler Cowen: Marxism promotes an alternative idea of freedom, namely freedom from the market.
Me: freedom from freedom?
Jean-Philippe Stijns: When in a bargaining position, one party has substancially stronger bargaining position, there is not much freedom left for the weaker party. At that point, the weaker party may well be better off (abstracting from growth and other concerns) in a state-run production system where harvesting a maximum of value-added from workers is not, in principle at least, the goal of the enterprise. No freedom in such system, but these weaker parties didn't have much freedom of choice to begin with....
Me: slavery > freedom?
Jean-Philippe Stijns: If we are to have a rational discussion about Marxism...Since when were workers even in the Soviet Union considered owned by their employers?
Me:
From the 1918 Constitution of the Soviet Union:
f. In order to exterminate all parasitic strata of society and to organize the economic life of the country, general compulsory labor is introduced.
18. The [state] recognizes work to be the duty of all citizens of the republic and proclaims the watchword: "He who does not work shall not eat."
If it quacks like a duck its a duck
The whole thing is a hoot:
http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/cgi-bin/mt_2004/mt-tb.cgi/43 |
|
|
| Foreshadowing of a life to come: |
[Aug. 14th, 2004|01:40 am] |
Tonight I had three children. No not in the laboral sense. But while they didn't try and climb out of me, at one point they were all climbing on top of me! Aliteraryaffair and her two beautiful and spirited children came over to play. As an aside her little girl is so cute that we literally had people leaning out of cars telling us how cute she was.
The experience was both exhilarating and dizzying. I am used to focusing on one baby. But now I had to distribute my attention across three people who all had different agendas. This is not like trying to entertain 3 adults because the three little ones often want attention at the same time in different directions and are not inclined to be happy about taking turns.
William was remarkably calm about the whole thing. I expected him to be more possessive of me than he was, so much so that I found it disorienting. But his behavior was remarkably normal for him in the sense that he often totally ignores me as he going about exploring and playing. I expected the change in context to alter that more than it did.
Another aspect I didn't expect is that the other kids were rather aggressive in making sure William was not interfering with what they were doing. William almost never experiences that at home and I think it confused him a bit, heck it confused me a bit. But this is one of the things siblings teach each other, and something thats probably very good for William to encounter to help his social development. Hey there are other people out there and they have their own agendas!
William doesn't talk, so when other adults are around I can carry on a quasi normal conversation. But aliteraryaffair's kids are both quite verbal. So I have this adult who I am very curious about, but the conversation is interwoven with a discussion of negative impact of sprinkles on a sherbet and how best to distribute a waffle cone among four people at a table. The answer to the latter is to smash cone on the table and swing your arms around until the pieces fly away. Now I dropped the thread that started this paragraph and thats exactly how I experienced the conversation
My normal if somewhat stilted way of getting to know people is try and find out about their history, what they are thinking about, and what they are doing. This is not a particularly successful way to relate to a 3, or 7 year old, let along an 11 month old. Faced with this I naturally, though often after some delay, adapt to this and start relating by well just playing. What this made me notice is that I almost totally do not do this with adults. I wonder if this is part of why I like children so much, it allows me to rekindle my playful self. I also wonder if there is a way I can reinvigorate this aspect of myself in the way I relate to adults. |
|
|
| No Bite! Run! |
[Jul. 26th, 2004|12:26 am] |
William and I played a game in the car today. He wanted to suck on my finger. I generally don't allow that because he can bite rather hard. But occasionally I let him put my finger in his mouth until he bites, and scold him with a harsh “No Bite!” If he looks distraught at this, which is often the case, I give it a few seconds to sink in and then try and empathize with him by mimicking his mood. After a few seconds things will return to normal and he will be onto a different activity.
Today however he put my finger in his mouth and looked at me with a heightened intensity. He pressed his teeth down but in a controlled manner that was not painfully. I looked at him a bit surprised, and adopted a pleasant and congratulatory manner. At some point he bit a down harder and I withdrew my finger and said “No Bite.” But with a more normal tone, as if I had found him doing something only slightly wrong.
Following the first bite he was very restrained, with a few probings as to what threshold I would react to. He also moved my finger to the side of his teeth ( he only has 6 ) and gummed me with some strength, which I thought implied some understanding of what caused my reaction. Beyond the practical, I was delighted to see William display an interest in my reaction and recognized his role in it. This is a good developmental sign.
I am quite hopeful that he has figured the impact of his bite out and will retain this incite. However he has not fully translated this to other kinds of biting, as he bit my leg a later in the day. Though I think he was mostly trying to bite my pants, my leg just got in the way. Someday he may even learn not to head but his mother!
In other news...
Williams version of walking is akin to Douglas Adams version of flying, it consists of throwing himself at the ground and missing ... for at least a few moments. |
|
|
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
rws1st's journal