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I recently found a sticky note from around 2004 on which I had written: “In the future, artificial intelligence may obviate the need for certain skills, but the act of learning is a very human process that proceeds at human pace.”

Since then I’ve been puzzling over what exactly I meant by that. (It’s a classic example of obvious or profound?) Here’s what I think I meant: The rate at which humans learn is essentially limited. Of course, the pace of learning does vary somewhat in different situations, but this variation tends to be within, say, an order of magnitude and there is no known way to get around these limits.

Whether by impatience or optimism, I frequently forget this. As soon as I learn something useful or exciting, I start trying to rapidly explain it to others, expecting them to learn it using far less time and effort than it took me. While in some sense it’s generous to assume that others are such fast learners, it’s also a form of hubris for me to believe that my explanation is somehow orders of magnitude better than the explanation given to me. It would be as if I somehow found a magical shortcut that makes teaching and learning easy.

None of this is to say that great teaching doesn’t exist — it does, and in every domain teachers have worked tirelessly towards making learning more efficient and more fun. Motivation, support, curriculum, collaboration, and many other factors help optimize human learning. The point is simply that these optimizations have diminishing returns. That is, there’s a theoretical maximum implying that it’s impossible to learn all of calculus in one week. (On the other hand, it is possible to teach in a way that is arbitrarily ineffective — say, by putting a student in a room with no supplies and yelling at them all day.)

If all of this is true, then we would not expect any educational technology to dramatically improve student outcomes, unless we were replacing dramatically ineffective prior teaching methods. In other words, to claim that a dramatic improvement is possible is to state that the current methods are dramatically poor — in which case, there are probably plenty of alternative improvements which do not require advanced technology.

The only way technology can dramatically “speed up learning” is by making certain skills obsolete, so that it is no longer necessary to learn them at all. For example, humans in the developed world can get along fine without knowing how to grow food or survive in the wilderness (or do long division). Modern technologies have obviated the need for those skills. Some people might still want to learn them, but for those who don’t, the learning time has been effectively reduced to zero — a dramatic advance! That in turn leaves time and energy for learning other things that have become more important (say, computer skills).

This is why my focus within educational technology has always been toward obviating the need for a skill rather than tweaking the learning process or transferring existing lessons to tablets and smart boards. This is why I’m so interested in Bret Victor’s work on graphical tools for math and programming that could obviate the need to learn traditional, difficult methods for algebra, calculus, and debugging. It’s why I’ve spent so much time working on tools that make it possible to do data analysis safely without learning all of the details of statistics and visualization techniques.

But perhaps my sticky note was simply a reminder to have patience for learning. Wisdom is prized precisely because it cannot be short-circuited.

Posted in UXPA Seattle

“Landing in the middle of the status hierarchy actually makes us less original. When [psychology researchers] asked people to generate ideas, their output was 34 percent less original after being randomly assigned a middle-manager role than a president or assistant role. In another experiment, merely thinking about a time that they were in a middle-status role caused participants to generate 20-25 percent fewer ideas […] than thinking about being in a high-status or low-status role.”

-Adam Grant, Originals (p. 84)

I suppose “death by middle management” is basically cliché at this point. But normally I just hear people joking about it. It occurs to me now that middle managers are a good case study for examining the problems with traditional management hierarchies, because middle managers are subject to the stresses both of trying to please those above and trying to be responsible for those below. (To put it another way, the system gives them less than one-person’s-worth of power, yet more than one-person’s-worth of responsibility.)

The way I interpret the experiment’s results above is that being in a power hierarchy at any level stifles creativity, but middle managers receive a double dose.

“The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, in a 2008 analysis of all studies of the low-fat diet, found “no probable or convincing evidence” that a high level of dietary fat causes heart disease or cancer. Another landmark review […] stated “there is no significant evidence for concluding that dietary saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of [coronary heart disease or cardiovascular disease]”.

“In the last 10 years, a theory that had somehow held up unsupported for nearly half a century has been rejected by several comprehensive evidence reviews, even as it staggers on, zombie-like, in our dietary guidelines and medical advice.”

-Ian Leslie, The Sugar Conspiracy (The Guardian)

Adam Grant, Originals (p. 40):

When managers vet novel ideas, they’re in an evaluative mindset. To protect themselves against the risks of a bad bet, they compare the new notion on the table to templates of ideas that have succeeded in the past. When publishing executives passed on Harry Potter, they said it was too long for a children’s book; when [the division president] saw the Seinfeld pilot, he felt it was “too Jewish” and “too New York” to appeal to a wide audience.

The book goes on to cite studies which found that managers, test audiences, and the creator of a given work all had poor track records when predicting the creative work’s real-world success. Instead, the most accurate predictions were made by creative peers evaluating one another.

It makes you wonder why today’s companies still make most of their decisions via manager approvals. Which also makes you wonder if there might exist a more effective approach…

 

A core thesis of Nonviolent Communication (Rosenberg) is that there is no such thing as right and wrong or good and evil. Rather, everyone simply has needs which may be met or unmet. “Moralistic thinking” judges an action or person that meets your needs as “good” and one that does not meet your needs as “bad”. Rosenberg argues that all violence is caused by such judgements and offers techniques for interpreting the world more compassionately.

Robert Wright, in his book Nonzero, chronicles the history of the world as the progress of biological and then social organisms to unleash new ways of collaborating in order to achieve mutual gains. This includes everything from the mutual advantage of organelles joining together inside a cell to the mutual advantages of paying taxes for shared services like roads and armies. It helps to explain the evolutionary development of human brains able to cooperate with ever larger social groups, as well as the emergence of human traits such as kindness and altruism.

Wright also makes it clear that there have always been plenty of situations where collaboration does not lead to mutual gains. When there is a fixed scarcity of food, water, control, or some other resource, violence and war have been the logical strategy to claim the limited spoils. (And the two situations are intertwined: competition for limited resources created the evolutionary pressure that favored human groups that were better at cooperating internally.)

I believe these authors offer two perspectives on a single phenomenon. Namely, we humans are flexibly equipped to deal with two distinct types of situations: those where collaboration results in mutual gain; and those where it does not.

When we act out of fear (including its variants, guilt and shame), we are using the part of our psyche that is adapted to scarcity and competition for limited resources. Scarcity calls for violence, and so our action will necessarily be violent. Nonviolent Communication describes a wide range of violent actions — not just physical but also relational and emotional violence, as well as violence to our own internal sense of worthiness.

When we act from a feeling of compassion (i.e. caring and love), we are using an altogether different part of our psyche that is adapted to the possibility of mutual gain. Such situations call for empathy — an understanding of others’ needs as well as our own — so that we can work together to ensure that everyone’s needs are met. Our action is likely to be creative, searching out opportunities for new forms of mutual gain.

Among other things, this helps to explain why people meet the expectations of their environment. If you approach someone with violence or by wielding power, they are likely to assume they are in a scarcity situation and will probably respond using their fear pathway. If you approach someone with compassion, they are likely to assume they are in a mutual gain situation and will probably respond using their cooperation pathway.

Mindfulness meditation and other spiritual traditions (with their practices covering gratitude, compassion, patience, etc.) can be seen as a way to train the mind to react to as many situations as possible with the cooperation pathway rather than the scarcity pathway. This goal follows from the understanding that cooperation creates abundance, whereas violence only leads to more scarcity.

It may be that when we talk about “angels and demons of our nature”, we are really referring to our compassion and fear pathways. However, calling one of these pathways “good” and the other “bad” is itself a judgement that inevitably leads to more violence. The Zen of Fear is to nurture compassion for that part of us that is designed to face scarcity.

“Most people assume the following formula: If you work hard, you will become successful, and once you become successful, then you’ll be happy. Success first, happiness second. The only problem is that this formula is broken. The formula is broken because it is backward. More than a decade of groundbreaking research in the fields of positive psychology and neuroscience has proven in no uncertain terms that the relationship between success and happiness works the other way around. Happiness and optimism actually fuel performance and achievement.”

-Shawn Achor (TED talk, via Corporate Rebels)

“I’ve learned that I enjoy human beings more if I don’t hear what they think. […] I’ve learned to savor life much more by only hearing what’s going on in their hearts and not getting caught up with the stuff in their heads. [When I focus on their] feelings and needs, I see the universality of our experience.”

-Marshall Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication (p. 151)

“All violence is the result of people tricking themselves into believing that their pain derives from other people and that consequently those people deserve to be punished.”

-Marshall Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication (p. 147)

Marshall Rosenberg (Nonviolent Communication, p. 16):

Long before I reached adulthood, I learned to communicate in an impersonal way that did not require me to reveal what was going on inside myself. When I encountered people or behaviors I either didn’t like or didn’t understand, I would react in terms of their wrongness. If my teachers assigned a task I didn’t want to do, they were “mean” or “unreasonable.” If someone pulled out in front of me in traffic, my reaction would be, “You idiot!” When we speak this language, we think and communicate in terms of what’s wrong with others for behaving in certain ways or, occasionally, what’s wrong with ourselves for not understanding or responding as we would like. Our attention is focused on classifying, analyzing, and determining levels of wrongness rather than on what we and others need and are not getting. Thus […] if my colleague is more concerned about details than I am, he is “picky and compulsive.” On the other hand, if I am more concerned about details than he is, he is “sloppy and disorganized.”

It is my belief that all such analyses of other human beings are tragic expressions of our own values and needs. They are tragic because when we express our values and needs in this form, we increase defensiveness and resistance among the very people whose behaviors are of concern to us. Or, if people do agree to act in harmony with our values, they will likely do so out of fear, guilt, or shame because they concur with our analysis of their wrongness.

For me, the most difficult part in learning to communicate nonviolently has been unlearning this widespread cultural practice of judging, classifying, and criticizing. I knew from my liberal arts background that there are two sides to any argument. But I did not really understand how taking a side, no matter which one, leads to violence and alienation. And I did not understand the depth of the notion that all judgement is self-judgement. (By far the greatest casualty in my past taking of sides was myself, as I heaped blame and judgement on what I saw as my own shortcomings.)

Note a crucial subtlety here: it does not follow that judging and criticizing are wrong. Such a statement would be a paradox, because wrongness is a form of judgement. Instead, I merely choose to avoid engaging in such activities as judging and criticizing, now that I see how they can lead to shame and violence. (Unfortunately, even that last sentence will imply judgement to anyone who is steeped in the prevailing culture of “should”.)

The subtitle of my blog used to be: “Because interesting thoughts deserve to be written down.” I’m now concerned that the word “deserve” implies rightness, which is a form of judgment. So I updated the subtitle accordingly: “Ideas I wanted to remember and share.”