Ideas I wanted to remember and share.
“Children starting school this year will be retiring in [2070]. Nobody has a clue what the world will look like in even 5 years time, and yet we’re meant to be educating them for it. The unpredictability, I think, is extraordinary.”
– Ken Robinson [TED talk]
I thought this was worth coming back to. From an article titled “Heart Before Head: The Legacy of Steve Jobs.”
Jobs: “Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.”
You: What do my inner-voice and heart want most for me to do with my life?
Jobs: “Believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.”
You: If I trusted that eventually the dots will connect when I follow my heart, what would be my vision and what would I do next?
Jobs: “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.”
You: What big choices would I make if I only had a short while left to live?
In high school, I made a website on ancient Roman architecture as a class project in world history. That was over ten years ago. A few days ago I got an email:
I recently came across your resource website at http://www.robinstewart.com/personal/learn/romarch/links.htm and I found it to be extremely helpful in some personal academic research I’m doing — I just wanted to say thank you. As a student and an educator, it is a rare treat to come across such thoughtful and concise online resources like this, especially the older ones. In my humble opinion, this is one of the timeless treasures of the Internet.
I forwarded that along to the teacher of the history class, with the subject line “History project website still useful more than ten years later…” His response:
Hi Robin. Wow. That is really kind of awesome. I wouldn’t have bet money that the site was still on-line. Bravo all over again.
I guess this is why I keep things around on my website.
To plan a statistical hypothesis test, specify the model you will use to test the null hypothesis and the parameter of interest. Of course, all models require assumptions, so you will need to state them and check any corresponding conditions.
When the conditions fail, you might proceed with caution, explicitly stating your concerns. Or you may need to do the analysis with and without an outlier, or on different subgroups, or after re-expressing the response variable. Or you may not be able to proceed at all.
–Intro Stats (De Veaux, Velleman, Bock)
From the trenches of science, it’s easy to label evolution deniers and global warming skeptics as dumb or at least uninformed. But we should remember that the scientific method is not an intuitive process, and takes a lot of time to learn.
For one thing, the scientific method is based on probabilities, which humans famously misunderstand. We play the lottery because we have a chance of winning, even though that chance is vanishingly small. We tend to think of very large or small probabilities as less extreme than they actually are, so when scientists say there is a 95% chance (or even a 99.9% chance) that, say, smoking causes cancer, it is easy for us to simply hear “they’re not sure.” Intuitive science is based on stories and anecdotes, rather than quantifiable statistics. We might pray and then find out that our friend returned to health. So there’s “a good chance” that the one caused the other. Isn’t that the same as scientists saying “there’s a good chance” that antibiotics were the cause of her recovery?
For another thing, it’s not immediately obvious that we need controls and placebos. If we want to find out whether an intervention works, why would we do an experiment that doesn’t actually use the intervention? Worse, isn’t it morally wrong in many cases to not give the intervention? In order to prove that an educational or healthcare strategy is effective, we have to not use the strategy in some classrooms and hospitals. Scientists are monsters!
These are just the first few tricky aspects of science that come to mind. As I re-read the Intro Stats textbook, I’m reminded how subtle a lot of this is, and how even professional scientists can sometimes get it wrong. That doesn’t mean we should be skeptical of science as a whole, though science itself relies on a healthy skepticism of individual results (another subtle distinction!). It does mean that scientists and journalists should try to explain the scientific process, over and over, day after day, when presenting results to the public. Because if you’re not doing science every day, it’s easy to forget how it works.
I hope to do what I can to help everyone do more science every day.
Apparently, a lot of people have read Three Cups of Tea, the book about Greg Mortenson’s work building schools in rural, mountainous Pakistan. Many have written reviews, and some have disputed his details (though not the broader story).
The normal reaction is to be amazed and inspired by the tenacity and success of this unusual character. And I don’t want to downplay that too much. But I look at the story from the perspective of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers; Carol Dweck’s Mindset; and Dan and Chip Heath’s Made to Stick (among other important books).
From those perspectives, here is a very unusual American who is most comfortable living with and working to help rural, mountainous tribes halfway across the world. It is no great mystery why he is good at that; Mortenson grew up in a foreign country with both parents dedicating their working lives to charity projects. He served in the army, learning to cope with discomfort and yet more foreign cultures and situations. He went to nursing school, learning to listen and care for patients. And finally, he spent many years practicing rock climbing and mountaineering, learning to survive in that sparse, rugged landscape. When he stumbles into Haji Ali’s village, he finally, miraculously, finds himself at home.
From that perspective, here is the story of a man who desperately, tenaciously tries to find a way to return to what he is most comfortable with. Psychologically, he is not unusual. What’s unusual is his exotic set of skills.
It’s easy for us to read this story and think about how hard it would be to leave home, live in medieval conditions for months, and organize the building of schools in hostile political and geographical terrain. But that is because we, unlike Mortenson, do not have extensive training doing charity work in primitive and hostile environments, and we do not feel at home in foreign countries.
From this perspective, I think the most interesting (and entertaining) aspects of the story are what he is not good at.
First, fundraising. He writes five hundred letters to celebrities he has never met. Later, he gives slideshow after slideshow all across the country to audiences essentially at random. He certainly understands tenacity; that’s how you win at rock climbing. But the way you win at fundraising is through connections and the media. The only significant money Mortenson ever received was accidental. A friend with connections to the mountaineering society writes an article for their newsletter, which is noticed by a wealthy ex-climber. Later, soon after 9/11, a journalist friend passes the story to a leading magazine, whose editors for the first time figure out how to describe the charity in a way that sticks: “books, not bombs.” Their cover story finally generates widespread donations. In all, Mortenson wastes years of time doing poorly thought out fundraising that has a minuscule probability of success. He read countless books on southeast asian culture and politics, but no books on effective fundraising. He should have responded to his failure by learning more or asking for help. He worked hard, where he should have worked smart.
Second, delegating. Here, Mortenson gradually improves over the course of the story. He delegates tasks that he is obviously not prepared for, such as driving, bargaining, and translating. But he only stops micromanaging the construction of the schools after Haji Ali (his most trusted mentor) walks him up a mountain and forces him to relent. And throughout the story he continues to insist on personally overseeing all of the projects that the organization undertakes. The board eventually convinces Mortenson to hire a few assistants for donor relations, website, etc., but he never hires another person to do the core work of overseeing the charity projects. In other words, he is ineffective at scaling the organization beyond what is essentially a one-man show. Again, this is not surprising, given that Mortenson has no training or experience in management. But he does not study management nor hire managers to make up for this shortcoming. Instead, he keeps the organization small.
If Mortenson’s true goal was to serve as many needy communities as possible in the rural Himalaya, he would be expanding the organization by training new generations of staff and volunteers to do the same work that he does, and he would be hiring fundraising and publicity experts to spread the word and apply much-needed political pressure.
But that’s not his goal. His goal is the same as all of us. To find our way home.
It bugs me that I still have not written up blog posts about some of the very best books I’ve read. In fact, my very first blog post was an unfulfilled promise to follow up with interesting thoughts on Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. There was too much to say, and not enough time to say it.
I think it’s true in general that the best books are difficult to summarize. Whereas I can easily summarize in a blog post the important ideas of a merely decent book, the really great books are concise and nuanced and reward a full and careful reading. What can I say in a blog post to do it justice?
So perhaps I will start creating placeholder blog posts, which simply tell you that a book is so worth reading, I’m at a loss to even describe it.
In college, I took a Congolese dance course taught by two elders from the Congo. One of the things they discussed with us was how the African borders drawn by European colonial powers essentially disregard the traditional nationalities and ethnic groups in Africa. For example, the cultural region of the Congo overlaps several modern African states.
I asked one of these wise men what seemed like an obvious question. Why were the borders not re-drawn after those countries gained independence?
He squinted at me and said, “What is your name?”
I answered hesitantly, “Robin…?”
He looked at me piercingly. “Robin, you have pure heart.”
“Um, thanks, I think?”
He went on to explain that power, once held, is not easily taken away. These countries had gained independence, but re-drawing borders would mean giving up power by losing land or even whole countries. The new independent rulers were no better than the colonial powers in this regard.
For some reason, this interaction has stuck with me. I don’t want to be totally naive. But I do want to be a little naive. To view the world with a “beginner’s mind” and approach tough problems with the optimism that people are capable of doing the right thing.
“Schools are government-run and their employees are unionized; how do you expect to get anything to change?”
-Evan Miller
“Children are phenomenal agents of change.”
-Jaime Lerner (former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil; via Scientific American)