Innovation and Wonder

National Human Genome Research Institute

I think that most generations of human beings around the world have probably said, “How incredibly lucky we are to be living in the most exciting time in all of human history.” We should be no different. I see so many people taking for granted the explosion in human knowledge, understanding, and technology. Here’s a list of things, off the top of my head, which I find awe-inspiring:

• the mapping of the human genome
• global telecommunications
• social networking and technologies of emergence
• advances in space exploration
• medical science technology
• revolutionized cancer treatment
• AIDS as a chronic, manageable issue rather than a death sentence
• stem cell research and re-growth of organs
• harnessing sustainable energies
• the global discussion on and appreciation for universal economic development

Education and Urgency

For awhile now, I've had this nagging sense of urgency. Perhaps it is the product of growing up in a culture with a rather consistent narrative about success, one that lauds the achievements of self-made, twenty-something millionaires as if they were the new lords of the universe. Or perhaps I'm just hanging out with too many people in grad school while I'm still figuring things out. Either way, I ran across the site of designer Alessandro Segalini and found these inspiring words. I can't find them anywhere else, so Alessandro either wrote it or paraphrased it.

I asked the Professor about the secret of success; two words.
The Professor said: “Right decisions.”
Then I asked how I can make the right decision; one word.
The Professor said: “Experience.”
I asked what is the secret of experience.
The Professor said: “Wrong decisions.”

John Dewey - Portrait by Anthony Hare

And in the same place, I found this John Dewey quote. I did a report on John Dewey when I was in grade school and it made a big impression on me, even as a very young person. Finding this quote has inspired me to look further into the life and philosophy of this great educator.

I believe that education is a process of living, and not a preparation for future living.

Practical Wisdom and Incentives

Barry Schwartz, in a TED talk, speaks about the value of practical wisdom and the problems with reliance on rules and incentives. Near the end of his talk, he quickly lauds Aaron Feuerstein as a moral hero for having gone against the pressures of Wall Street after a fire destroyed Malden Mills. He chose to keep everyone on the payroll at immense cost to the company and to shareholder value because doing otherwise would irreparably damage the Massachusetts community where they were located, according to Shwartz.

Robert Reich also mentions the actions of Feuerstein in his book, Supercapitalism. Malden Mills had to file Chapter 11 in 2001 as a direct result of the $15 million it took to keep everyone paid and the insistence on staying in Lawrence, Mass. where wages remained high in spite of more “competitive” wages elsewhere (North Carolina or subcontracting in China). Feuerstein was fired and replaced with someone who took most of the jobs out of the community.

Barry Schwartz’s talk was in 2009, eight years after the bankruptcy, “Three thousand employees, he kept every one of them on the payroll. Why? Because it would have been a disaster for them and for the community if he had let them go. Maybe on paper our company is worth less to Wall Street, but I can tell you it’s worth more. We’re doing fine.”

Obviously not. Feuerstein, according to Reich, is an anachronism, a “corporate statesmen” in an era of ruthless competition.

I find myself to be “of two minds”, as Reich puts eloquently. I want to live in a world where people and organizations can make decisions that are morally and socially beneficial to others, but I also see that as an impossibility given the current economic context. Shareholder value will continue to trump any sort of ethical stance until we find a way to reassert ourselves as citizens with moral agency.

Design as Storytelling

Being in the process of my first real estate purchase, this article about the redesign of the mortgage disclosure form (MDF) caught my eye:
www.fastcodesign.com/1663487/home-buying-makeover

This sort of project is precisely what excites me about design. Buying a home, especially in America, comes with a powerful narrative fraught with emotion and passion. The confusion of documents composed of vast seas of black and white legalese is unsettling at best, perhaps even counterproductive. In comes a group of people who understand the importance of the experience and are able to synthesize the perspectives of lenders and regulators as well as (and more importantly) the borrower. An accessible and communicative MDF will not prevent a future mortgage crisis all by itself, but it provides an empowering mental model for the layperson. This model can serve as scaffolding upon which the details of the transaction are hung. Lacking a working mental model, we have no insertion point for new vocabulary, no way to create patterns and relationships. Foundational understanding allows us to be involved in the telling of the story of how a situation fits into our lives. Design, therefore, is not the story but the stage.

Another fine example:
http://www.jonkolko.com/educationCourse370Taxes.php

Pattern and Surprise

I love the process of slowly recognizing a pattern in your own cognition and then later discovering an explanation of it that is supported by scientific research. This happened to me the other day when I read that human beings prefer to look at fractal patterns over non-fractal patterns, and we like our fractals with a density of 1.3, which oxymoronically exhibits “low complexity.” Complexity, but not too much. Michael Gazzaniga writes about this in Human: the Science Behind what Makes Us Unique.

Similarly, David Brooks talks about how we prefer music that conforms to traditional patterns of composition while still offering moments of surprise. For a long time, I have noticed that I’ll quickly dislike a piece of music if it is too predictable, even if I know that I enjoy similar works. The parts of music that I love the most are those little divergences in the melody, the playful spots in the rhythm, the interesting pairings of harmony. I have unconsciously smiled countless times when something catches my ear that my head wasn’t expecting.

This is probably part of the reason that culture is so slow to change. There is a great example of the way our brains accept or reject things that don’t conform to our previous experiences. I heard it on an episode of RadioLab. Parisian ballet goers responded to Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring by rioting against it. It was so new and groundbreaking that it is speculated they went momentarily insane. If I remember correctly (I’ll have to go back and listen again), he was received the very next year in the same city with resounding acclaim. And we know the piece best from Disney’s Fantasia.  It’s not so controversial anymore, I suppose, but our brains are certainly picky the first time we encounter something.

Reach and Reciprocity

I feel as if I’ve only just learned how to learn.

I’m currently reading David Brooks’ The Social Animal. In it, Brooks references the idea of Reach and Reciprocity found in Richard Ogle’s Smart World.

“Start with the core knowledge in a field, then venture out and learn something new. Then come back and reintegrate the new morsel with what you already know. Then venture out again. Then return. Back and forth. Again and again. As Ogle argues, too much reciprocity and you wind up in an insular rut. Too much reach and your efforts are scattershot and fruitless.”

For a long time I have intuited the concept of Reach and Reciprocity without it becoming conscious. When I read a book and it seems to have “come into my life at just the right time,” or some such sentimentality, I realize that I had simply reached out to some knowledge that could be effectively integrated with my past experience at that time. In delving into a new topic of interest, I spend a lot of time finding just the right book that will match my current intellectual standing and motivations, that will most efficiently convey a wide, solid foundational understanding.

When I learned to play the banjo, I knew, from having experienced skill level plateaus with the guitar, that it would be essential to start with the fundamentals (I still can’t use my pinky very well to play guitar). I spent two weeks just using my right hand, learning the strumming technique before playing a single chord, let alone a song. With my muscle memory in place, I could let that focus drop away and begin to think about how to position my left hand as the right kept strumming away, bum-ditty bum-ditty bum-ditty.

I wonder how much earlier I would have been capable of this limited self-knowledge. How much earlier I could have learned how to learn, been able to acknowledge and examine, in some small way, the tumultuous processes of synthesis going on in my skull. Can this knowledge of ideas and how the brain develops and organizes information be successfully implemented and passed on in the classroom? Perhaps therein lies the rub. Young minds may simply not be at the point in their development where they can effectively venture out to gather up the concept of reach and reciprocity. To learn how to learn, we must simply do it, and suffer the results of inevitable failed attempts. But the greatest teachers carry this knowledge and serve as excellent guides along the way.

Ethics and Economics

I have noticed in myself a rather strong emotional reaction to the economic crisis, especially as concerns the financial sector. I think I’ve narrowed it down to a disappointment and anxiety over what I see as a lack of ethical principles being applied to the credit system. I don’t like to think that we live in a world where there are a minority of individuals in a supposedly democratic society outside the rule of law as established according to our collective values. It doesn’t even bother me specifically that some individuals within the financial system would choose to flout generally accepted standards of ethics. All types of people make these breaches of ethics all the time if the price is right. What has been so unsettling is to learn that the system put in place to monitor such action and to bring violators to justice has been systematically dismantled over decades.

It is overwhelming to think of how to go about reestablishing the prudent rule of law when a self-interested and seemingly impune minority has so much power and wealth.

However, I am reading Robert Reich’s Aftershock right now and have just finished reading this…

In order to fix what needs fixing, we need to be clear about what broke. The underlying problem is not that financial institutions were reckless, although they were. The ultimate solution, therefore, isn’t just to make them more prudent. Nor is the central problem that consumers borrowed too much, although they did. The solution, therefore, isn’t merely to get Americans to save more and consume less.

To summarize: The fundamental problem is that Americans no longer have the purchasing power to buy what the U.S. economy is capable of producing. The reason is that a larger and larger portion of total income has been going to the top. What’s broken is the basic bargain linking pay to production. The solution is to remake the bargain…

A fundamentally new economy is required — the next stage of capitalism. But how will we get there? And what will it look like when we do?

There are essentially two paths from here. Only one will get us to where we want to be.

To be continued.