I think there’s a huge opportunity for a trusted media source that takes on spin from all quarters and throws it back in the face of the spinner. (link)

I wonder whether it’s humanly possible to be spin-free. Granted there’s such a thing as deliberate, deceitful spin, and that it is in principle possible for all people to eschew that. But where is the dividing line between “spinning” something and “presenting it as I interpret it from within my world-view”?

In other words, bias is an inseparable companion to different world-views, one person’s honest “as I see the truth” is another person’s nauseatingly biased spin.

Shall we define “spin” as a conscious biasing of presented fact? Well, if I’m aware of multiple ways of interpreting something, and choose to present the most persuasive case possible for the interpretation I believe is sound (i.e., resonates with my world-view and preconceptions), that’s conscious… So is it “spin”?

I think that’s one of the reasons I like travel, especially adventurous travel to exotic places and cultures and conditions. Drop me into a totally unfamiliar environment, and I’m happy as a bug trying to figure out how to function. It also might explain why I’ve gone through a whole string of hobbies and enthusiasms and sports and professional interests: once the terrain gets too well mapped, so to speak, the appeal fades. Some people like exercising skill and expertise; I like acquiring it.

I may be somewhat extreme in this regard, but I doubt that I’m wired completely differently from most of the human race. I suspect that we learn most efficiently, and are most captivated by the learning, when we’re tossed into the deep end and have to figure out in a hurry which end is up.

In my experiences as a student, a teacher, an educational researcher, and a teacher of teachers, one of the things I’ve noticed is how reluctant most teachers (myself included) are to leave students behind. We conceptualize instruction as leading students along a carefully-engineered path to understanding, one step at a time; any student who stumbles, strays, or straggles and gets left behind will be lost. Thus, being conscientious of our responsibility to all students, we put great effort into ensuring that every one (or at least every one who tries) is with us for the whole journey.

And this, I think, has disastrous consequences. To prevent any from being left behind, we must keep all together in a tight cluster that moves more slowly than most need. Which means that we are nowhere near saturating most students’ capacity to absorb new ideas. Which means that many students get bored, and turn their excess capacity towards “off-topic” matters, such as side conversations, crossword puzzles, daydreaming, or social posturing. And which also means that few students learn as much or as rapidly as they are capable. Perhaps more insidiously, it means that few students have the opportunity to develop the intellectual skills essential to sense-making in a fast-and-furious environment.

At the root of all this is a fundamental misconception about pedagogy. Above, I said:

We conceptualize instruction as leading students along a carefully-engineered path to understanding, one step at a time;

As soon as we think this way, we’ve lost. That’s the “transmissionist” view of instruction, the idea that we transmit knowledge to students. That idea has been pretty thoroughly discredited in educational research circles, in favor of the constructivist view that students must construct their understanding through a sustained and effortful sense-making process. Knowledge isn’t a set or sequence of facts that can be presented in a logically optimal order; it’s a messy, complex, massively interlinked network of ideas and connections and perspectives and ways of thinking that can only be fully appreciated through extensive and repeated revisiting and re-contemplation. It’s not linear. As Jay Lemke observes (Lemke 1990, p.17),

In fact, it can be difficult or impossible to teach a thematic pattern one piece at a time because it often takes a mastery of the whole pattern before any of its parts seem to make sense. It is not just in science that we find concepts that can only be fully understood in terms of one another: Each piece of the puzzle makes sense only if you already have all the other pieces. This is one of the fundamental problems of science teaching, and indeed of teaching and communication generally…

What is the alternative? Throw students into the deep end. Engineer a rich, thorny, messy, meaty problem or question for them to wrestle with, dump on some ideas and tools that they haven’t yet mastered, and then let them struggle. Scaffold and coach, yes, but don’t try to lead them through. And definitely don’t try to force all students to follow the same path to comprehension. (This is, in essence, what my colleagues and I at UMPERG call Question-Driven Instruction.)

And maybe, if we can bring ourselves to do this, our students will thrive on school the way that I thrive on travel.

References

Lemke, Jay L. (1990). Talking Science: Language, Learning, and Values. Ablex Publishing, Westport CT. ISBN 0-89391-566-1. (Amazon)

One of the ideas in the story was not proposed in reality until 2002. This is the idea that the FBI and Microsoft will keep the root passwords for your personal computers, and not let you have them.

The proponents of this scheme have given it names such as “trusted computing” and “palladium”. We call it “treacherous computing”, because the effect is to make your computer obey companies instead of you. This was implemented in 2007 as part of “Windows Vista” ; we expect Apple to do something similar. In this scheme, it is the manufacturer that keeps the secret code, but the FBI would have little trouble getting it.

What Microsoft keeps is not exactly a password in the traditional sense; no person ever types it on a terminal. Rather, it is a signature and encryption key that corresponds to a second key stored in your computer. This enables Microsoft, and potentially any web sites that cooperate with Microsoft, the ultimate control over what the user can do on his own computer.

Vista also gives Microsoft additional powers; for instance, Microsoft can forcibly install upgrades, and it can order all machines running Vista to refuse to run a certain device driver. The main purpose of Vista’s many restrictions is to make DRM that users can’t overcome.

The whole story is worth reading. I think it connects to my earlier blog entries about normalcy, Incarceration Makes Me Crabby and Waiting. But it’s got a new twist: a slow evolution to our sense of what is “normal”, and therefore acceptable, can be insidious.

(Tip of the hat to Daring Fireball for the link to Stallman’s article.)

(Go on, it’s not that long.)

For the record, I’m Catholic and very serious about it. I’m also a trained and practicing scientist with a Ph.D. in Physics. I was raised atheist, and converted while in graduate school because Catholicism made too damn much sense not to agree with. This was no sudden Road to Damascus conversion, but a long, careful, suspicious, examined, intellectual decision. (To mimic the star of one of Dawkins’ anecdotes, “I was wrong for 26 years.”) And I find no irreconcilable disagreements between modern science and Catholic theology; they talk about different things. Apparent incompatibilities usually arise from a flawed understanding of one or both.

I apply the same rigorous standards to knowledge of both the material and spiritual worlds, because they’re two sides of the same coin, and they’re both just dimensions of “what is”. The primary difference is that one can build a decent model of the material world by looking only outwards, but must look into the human psyche (one’s own and others’) for evidence about the spiritual.

Science is just “best practice” thinking. It should be applied to everything that’s worth knowing, because thinking is the only way anything is ever known. You get the evidence, the clues, wherever you can find them.

That means I subject beliefs — my own and other people’s — to challenge and scrutiny. It also means I have the humility to admit that finite minds will never completely understand the natural or supernatural worlds. All understanding is just a “working model”.

Contrary to Dawkins’ characterization, “faith” does not mean closing one’s ears to evidence or argument. That’s “denial”. Faith is having the guts to bet something you care about on the partial understanding you’ve got, even though you don’t have all the answers. And faith means accepting challenges to your beliefs with confidence that those beliefs will either be strengthened or corrected.

It is regrettably true that a great many religious believers refuse to examine their beliefs analytically and impartially. It is also regrettably true that a great many unbelievers make the same mistake.

(David Weinberger pretty much pegs Dawkins.)

I though the first half was about as bad as any movie I’ve seen in a long time (which, granted, is a fairly small sample), and the second half was surprisingly decent. Rather than write yet another movie review, I’d like to consider why I thought this.

What struck me as most horrifically bad about the first half was the pacing. There was no set-up, no accumulating tension, no dramatic build towards set-piece conflicts. Words scrolling into space at the beginning — a Star Wars tradition — summarized the situation and conflict, dispensing with the need to actually build the story. Instead, we are dropped right into action that would be climactic for most movies. In essence, we join the story halfway through. (I’m not talking about what happened during Episodes I and II; significantly new stuff happened in those scrolling words.)

And once the movie began, it rushed on in a rather breathless fashion, a near-continuous assault of exotic sets, ferocious combat, and narrow escapes. For me, at least, life-and-death struggle isn’t very gripping when it’s the norm, the baseline, the standard. It needs to hover around as a possibility, gradually growing in menace and import, until it bursts forth.

(The second half of the movie spent a little more time doing this right, dwelling on Anakin’s psyche and turn to evil. We know something really bad is going to happen, but not how or when. Or what new action-figure merchandizing opportunities might be revealed.)

Did you catch those key words two paragraphs ago? “For me, at least…” That’s what kicked me into Think Twice mode. Was it a bad movie, or a good movie made for someone else?

For several years now I’ve been noticing that television programming for children and teens has been evolving. Segments are shorter, cuts between camera shots occur more rapidly, and the whole has a much more “in your face” effect: a frenetic flurry to grab and hold attention. I noticed it first in MTV music videos, and later in advertisements and regular television programming. It’s elsewhere, too: billboards, print media, commercial establishments, videogames.

And I’ve been wondering what the effects are on young people’s cognitive habits and attention spans. The obvious hypothesis is that kids raised in an environment of sensory blitz will be (a) better at filtering out unwanted stimulus, and (b) easily bored in stimulus-lean situations.

I think it’s safe to say that most physics classes are stimulus-lean situations, at least when compared to music videos and first-person shooter videogames. Is anyone surprised we have trouble holding students’ attention? Maybe Revenge of the Sith isn’t so bad after all, if you’re in the right demographic. But it’s probably bad news for teachers.

And that raises some very interesting questions that I don’t have answers to. How can we adapt instruction to optimize it for students who are very very good at scanning and filtering massive sensory assault, but very very bad at pondering and cogitating? Should we even try, or should we stand our ground and try like heck to help them develop the mental muscles for pondering and cogitating?

I’m an educational researcher by profession. I tend to believe that I know a lot about how to teach well, especially physics. I’ve read the literature, attended the conferences, conducted research, engaged in countless discussions about teaching and learning, and published some papers. Yes, I’ve even designed and taught physics courses, though not much since finishing my Ph.D. (I’m on a research position, not a teaching one. Unfortunately.)

Which is why the following anecdote is acutely embarrassing.

This past July, my colleague, group leader, and travel buddy Bill Gerace and I spent two unexpectedly hot, humid weeks in Vitznau, Switzerland. We went to teach physics to hospitality management students (as we did in Singapore the previous summer). Does that seem bizarre? UMass has partnered with hospitality management schools in Singapore and Vitznau to offer a UMass baccalaureate. Students must fulfill regular UMass degree requirements, including “distribution” criteria of so many literature classes, so many science classes, etc. The partner schools used to ship their students over to UMass for a year or so to take all those courses, but someone figured out that it’s cheaper to send UMass faculty over to teach two-week intensive courses in various subjects. So, UMass asks its faculty for volunteers.

Knowing a good thing when he sees it, Bill jumped on the opportunity. He used the stipend to pay my travel expenses, so we both went more or less for free, inveterate travel junkies that we are. Bill taught, I helped out with computer tasks and improvised experiment/demo equipment, and I telecommuted to fulfill the duties of my “real” job. (Lest you think I’m a slacker, know that we committed to this trip before the big research grant providing my real job had been awarded.)

Back to the humility thing. A few days into the course, we reached the topic of “conservation of energy.” I have a way of explaining the concept that I think makes a whole lot of intuitive sense and should be brilliantly clear to students, so I asked Bill if I could teach that segment. He agreed, and I did. I tried to, anyway.

So I started, and introduced my analogy between conservation of energy and financial accounting, making the point that money is never created or destroyed, but moved from one account to another, to cash in your pocket, to credit (or less debt) on your credit account, etc. This is is just like energy: it gets shifted around from one form to another, one “place” to another, but the total amount remains the same. (Nobody asked about governments that print money.) This should be really accessible to students also taking management classes, right?

As it goes on, I get increasingly uncomfortable. Eyes are glazing over. A crunch on classroom space has pushed us into the computer lab for this class, and more than a little key-pecking and monitor-glancing is happening. I ask questions and get very little response; the answers I do get are tentative and unsure, more like guesses than opinions.

And then it hits me. I’m doing it: the classic IRE triadic pattern of classroom discourse, in which the instructor “initiates” with a question, the students “respond” with an answer, and the instructor “evaluates” the correctness of the response. No “uptake” or chaining of responses to responses, no true dialogic discourse or exploration of points of view. This is quizzing, not discussion. I’ve just read an entire damn book about patterns of discourse, nodding in agreement as the authors expounded upon the futility of IRE-based teaching, and here I am torturing perfectly nice foreigners with it.

It’s not that I don’t really understand the theory or the arguments against IRE. I very much do, to the point that it seems self-evident. Rather, IRE-style teaching is so deeply ingrained in me from 20-odd years of being a student (not counting preschool or the interminable stretch of my dissertation work) that I fell into it without even thinking.

So I bailed. I tag-teamed off to Bill almost mid-sentence. No one can improv physics like Bill, so he picked up smoothly and continued the lesson (with significantly less IRE and eye-glazing).

Licking my wounds later and reflecting on the experience, I realized I had been doomed from the very moment I first desired to teach that lesson. I began by thinking about what was inside my head — the cool analogy I was going to make — rather than about what was inside the students’ heads. Rule #1 of teaching:

It doesn’t matter what comes out of your mouth (or shows up on your PowerPoint slides). All that matters is what happens in the students’ minds, so find out what that is and interact with it.

The myth of coverage is a corollary of this.

The morals of this story?

1. There’s a huge gap between knowing and doing. We generally do what we’re patterned on, not what we would choose if we thought about it. Especially under stress or on the spot.
2. If we really want to impact the way science (or anything else) is taught, we must change the formative learning experiences of our future teachers. It’s a bootstrapping problem.
3. Don’t lose sight of the goal for even a moment: in this case, developing students’ understanding. Teaching cleverly is not synonymous with making learning happen.
4. Self-monitoring and reflection are very powerful learning tools. I learned more from that one experience than from dozens of learned papers and discussions. (Bill likes to say that “All learning is through trauma.” He’s using learning in a narrow, strong sense and trauma in a general, cognitive one.)

So why was I surprised to find that Uganda is different?

The geographically erudite reader will note that the African countries I’ve previously visited are all in the southernmost portion of Africa, more or less between 17 and 34 degrees south latitude. Uganda is smack on the equator. My southern African countries all have a history of colonial rule, and the one I’m most familiar with — South Africa — is still recovering from the brutality of Apartheid. Uganda was a British protectorate, never a colony. Uganda has different ethnic groups, different languages.

Uganda is different. Duh!

If I stopped there, this essay would be a simple self-smacking of the forehead. In the “Think Twice” spirit, however, I’m going to dig a little deeper. Is there a moral here, aside from the always-apt “beware the trap of hubris”?

I think there is, and it has to do with the nature of knowledge, and the many kinds of knowing. I “knew” in an abstract, conceptual, and logical sense that Africa is variegated, but not in a deep enough way to affect my unexamined expectations. Perhaps this parallels the distinction between “passive” and “active” vocabulary. (A person’s “passive” vocabulary with a language is all the words she understands when she hears or reads them. Her “active” vocabulary is all those that come to mind, unprompted, for use when speaking or writing.)

Educational researchers know (heh) that there are many kinds and degrees of knowing, and that we don’t fully understand all that’s involved in the thing we blithely call “knowing” [Redish-2003tfp]. It’s complicated. For useful knowledge, we need to have the right “mental resources” in our heads, and we also need to have the right associations and triggers in place so that those resources are “activated” in the appropriate contexts.

When do I understand the concept of “force”? When I can spell it? When I can quote a definition? When I can recognize the presence of one in simple and familiar situations, or in subtle and novel situations? When I can use the concept as a tool to reason with in familiar contexts? In unfamiliar ones? I doubt there’s a person on the planet who can do all of these things in all possible cases, infallibly, so does anybody really understand “force”?

If that doesn’t hurt your brain enough, consider metacognitive knowledge: knowledge about your own knowledge. To quote my colleague and former dissertation advisor, Bill Gerace: “Sometimes you know something. Sometimes you know you know something. And sometimes you know you knew something, but don’t any more.” What’s going on there?

And, as Uganda has reminded me, sometimes you only think you know something.

I’ve been in Uganda for the last week, visiting my good friend and colleague Silas Oluka at Makerere University in Kampala. Tuesday we met up with Silas’ brother Stephen in order to visit a couple of rural schools. Stephen runs the government office charged with periodically inspecting the 3000-odd schools of Uganda’s Central District for quality assurance — a daunting task, given that his office consists of eight inspectors and one motorized vehicle.

The most immediately noticeable thing about Stephen is his size. He is very, very tall: the well-proportioned kind of tall that one doesn’t notice until someone else stands next to him or he dips down to pass through a doorway. The second most immediately noticeable thing about him is his joviality. He laughs frequently, deeply, and authentically: not the sniggering of the cynic or the giggling of the juvenile, but the gleeful peals of one who finds life to be an endlessly delightful comedy. He can be both jovial and serious at the same time. I saw him very gracefully and cheerfully, yet very pointedly, reprimand and warn a school headmaster when he found a stick prominently visible by the headmaster’s office door. “That’s a pointing stick, right? Used only for pointing?” (Said with laughter in the voice and steel in the eyes.) To me, the stick looked just about perfect for delivering a serious, no-messing-around hiding.

Stephen may be an extreme case, but joviality seems to be a common and general trait of the Ugandans I met and observed. Silas articulated the world-view succinctly: “It is better to laugh at problems than to be unhappy. What does unhappiness accomplish?” (Apologies if I didn’t get the words quite right.)

The Makerere University Guest House is not exactly a high-end establishment, though you wouldn’t immediately suspect this based on their prices. My last morning in Uganda, I was in a hurry to rise, shower, shave, dress, eat breakfast (something of a fiasco), pack, and meet Silas. Spending a half-hour in the shower wasn’t part of my plan, but the Guest House had other ideas. Just after I’d thoroughly coated myself hairline-to-toes with a good soapy lather, someone upstream of me turned on another shower. Or so I hypothesize; all I really know is that my shower suddenly faltered from a warm and adequate (if not exactly invigorating) stream to a cold and pathetic little dribble. Uh oh.

So I waited for my water pressure to return. And waited. And waited. At one point, it returned (glory hallelujah!), but petered out again after a ten-second tease. It even disappeared entirely for a short while. I don’t know exactly how long I stood soapy and hopeful, but I’d estimate somewhere around 25 minutes. When my errant water finally returned, I was moments away from screwing up my courage to rinse the now-gummy soap residue off in the agonizingly cold dribble, and punting on the shampoo. (“Agonizingly cold” may be an overstatement, but anyone in my family will affirm that I’m a wimp about cold water. I’d choose boiling oil first.)

While I waited, I got progressively colder, and progressively angrier. I’m no stranger to the vagaries of third-world travel, so I was initially unperturbed, willing to roll with the punches. Then a little disquieted. Then increasingly irritated, until I was fuming at the temerity of a hotel that charged first-world rates for a spongy saggy bed, lumpy pillows, criminally negligent breakfast service, and a water supply that could apparently only support one shower at a time within a bank of nine rooms.

And then I remembered Stephen. I pictured him in the same situation, and knew he would be in hysterics, shaking the walls with laughter.

It didn’t make me laugh, and it didn’t entirely dissipate my irritation, but it did make me realize that I, not the shower or the hotel or Circumstance, was the source of my unhappiness. And that, at least, helped me to put my umbrage back in the bottle. Even if I was irritated, I was conscious of the fact that I didn’t have to be.

When I told Silas this story, he laughed — predictably — with a perfect blend of amusement and sympathy. Then he said that Stephen would have gone to the hotel desk to inform them of the problem, and done it in such a way that he and the staff all had a good laugh together. And then he told me a Ugandan aphorism: “If you turn the tap and water comes out, or you flip the switch and the light goes on, you’re not in Africa.” Said, of course, without a hint of self-pity.

So here’s my question: is umbrage a choice? Are irritability and joviality merely choices that become ingrained habits? Can a taciturn Yankee like myself simply decide to adopt Stephen’s stance towards life and then achieve it through perseverence, or does one’s brain get irrevocably wired with emotional reflexes early in life?

Either way, I’m looking forward to visiting Uganda again. With or without water pressure.

My most scarce commodity, by far, is time. Given my goals, resources, and lifestyle, I’m neither cash-limited nor opportunity-limited nor knowledge-limited. I’m time-limited. There just isn’t enough time to do a quarter of the things I’d like to do. And so I maximize efficiency, trying to make every minute count. Call it temporal frugality, if you will.

I really, really hate wasting time. If I’ve got a ten minute wait before my ride home is leaving, I’ll find something productive to do. (“Productive” can be defined fairly broadly; poking about the web counts, if I’m informing myself about something I’d like to know more about.) I arrive 30 seconds to three minutes late for almost every meeting and appointment, since I aim to arrive exactly on time and I usually overlook some speed bump or another; arriving early would mean (gasp) waiting. And even my recreational outings and vacations are planned and executed with brutal efficiency, for optimal satisfaction per unit time.

I may be a little more hyper this way than most of my associates — okay, significantly more hyper — but in my social context, a concern with temporal frugality seems rather normal. Most of my friends and colleagues are similarly time-limited. Even the retired ones are busy with all kinds of travels and entertainments and worthy projects. Heck, I’ve seen people get busier when they retire.

So when I travel about southern Africa, as I am this semester, I am truly nonplussed by the multitude of people I see waiting. Just waiting. Sitting by the road, or under a tree, or on the step of a shop. Some are waiting for a bus. Some are waiting for a friend. Some are waiting for a random passer-by to stop and buy a mango. Some, such as security guards, are getting paid to just be there. And some, as far as I can determine, are just killing time. (Ouch.) I’m pretty sure that many of these waiters are in it for the long haul… hours, probably.

It would absolutely rend me to wait like that. I’d probably need trauma counseling. So how do people here stand a life so full of waiting, of doing nothing? As I suggested in my last post: for them, it’s just normal.

And I wonder what my pace of life would look like to them. Equally intolerable, perhaps?

Saying South Africa has a crime problem is a bit of an understatement. The World’s Most Dangerous Places (5th edition, 2003) gives SA a danger rating of three stars out of five for having the highest per capita crime rate in the world. Murder, rape, mugging, and car-jacking are rampant. Leaving something in plain sight in your car or yard here is pretty much equivalent to placing it by the road with a big “help yourself” sign, or so I’ve been told.

I’m not a sociologist, but the general causes of this crime epidemic seem obvious enough.

1. Start with years of apartheid, resulting in two distinct but symbiotic societies: one affluent and first-world, the other deeply impoverished and third-world. The underclass has been systematically brutalized, marginalized, relocated, and disenfranchised.
2. Suddenly change the political system, give political power to the underclass, and dissolve long-standing economic sanctions and boycotts. This results in an explosion of economic growth and consumerism and a new middle class, but with high unemployment and a still-impoverished underclass.
3. Open the borders to even more impoverished, desperate people from the rest of sub-Saharan Africa. Then try to shut down the massive inflow, mostly unsuccessfully, resulting in hordes of impoverished, desperate, and now illegal people.
4. Mix in an HIV/AIDS epidemic that devastates family structures and creates entire subcultures of orphans raising orphans.

Is it any wonder the social contract breaks down?

(If you read this, Mom, remember that I’m spending most of my time in a small town in the boondocks. Crime, especially the violent types, is much less prevalent here than in the cities. Jo’burg and Cape Town vie for the title of murder capital of the world, and little Alice isn’t even close. However, what what I’m about to say applies here as well.)

One consequence of rampant crime is a proliferation of locks, keys, gates, fences, razor wire, alarms, unfriendly dogs, private guards, and signs that say “24 hour armed response” (usually with a silhouette of a gun, just to make sure you get the point even if you don’t read English so well). I wouldn’t be surprised if a secondary consequence is lower back pain and a tertiary one is boom times for chiropractors, since most people carry around several tangled gobs of keys big enough to anchor an offshore oil rig. The locks in doors and gates tend to be the old-fashioned type (with keyholes that go all the way through, with that stereotypical “keyhole” shape), meaning that many of keys are long, thick, and heavy.

What both amuses and disturbs me is that most doors and gates lock from both sides. A key is required to enter or to exit. Most locks are kept locked all of the time. As a visitor, even a long-term one, I have few keys. (Probably a good thing, from an orthopedic perspective.) All of which, taken together, means that my ability to get out of any building I find myself in is questionable.

The only way out of the university building in which I have my temporary office is to travel the length of a hallway, up a flight of stairs, down a flight, along a short hallway, dog-leg left, along a much longer hallway, through a gate into a kind of entrance hall, and through a final set of doors and gates to the great outdoors. There are several closer doors I could exit through, except that all are locked full-time. From both sides, of course. The closest door to my office is never locked, but the security gate over it is actually welded shut.

I’ve been told this cuts down on theft. I believe it: I couldn’t carry a computer that far, much less do it without being noticed.

The first-floor windows are all barred. My only way out is locked at some unspecified and unpredictable time during the evening, so if I work late, I must telephone the main guard office and request release. And if a fire starts somewhere between my office and that gate, well… Let’s not go there.

So what is “normal”? In the US, it is normal to have egress from any place, any time, unless you’ve had the misfortune to end up on the wrong end of the justice system. In South Africa, it is normal to massively restrict movement to minimize theft. We optimize on convenience and fire safety, they optimize on physical and material security. Each is rational in its context.

More interesting, perhaps, is my reaction to finding my sense of normalcy violated. When I want to exit someplace and am thwarted by a locked door, indignation surges. How dare it! Somewhere, deep in the freedom-loving recesses of a brain raised on the Bill of Rights and the unbridled pursuit of personal convenience, I feel I have an inalienable right to go outside. (Sounds more dignified to call it “freedom of movement”, eh?) Rational or not, it boggles my mind that people voluntarily live like this. The difference between a fortress and a prison, as has oft been observed, is mighty slim.

How many other unconscious expectations, not shared by others on this planet, do I hold? How do people’s unspoken and conflicting models of “the normal” impede communication and understanding? It’s easy for me to learn how someone lives differently than I do, but it’s a whole lot harder to learn how they think differently. You know that old saw about “walking a mile in someone’s shoes”? I may learn a lot about their shoes, but it’s still me doing the walking. How do I walk a mile with someone else’s feet?

I’ve met people who live in conditions of poverty and deprivation that I would find absolutely unbearable. If I were forced to live that way permanently, without hope of escape, I suspect I’d be depressed and bitter until the day I died. And yet these people are not only not depressed, but often quite upbeat. Why?

For them, it’s just normal.

The world of educational research has long since figured out that although information can be transmitted and memorized, knowledge must be constructed by each individual. Learning (in the knowledge sense) is an ongoing process of sense-making as new ideas are integrated into the individual’s existing mental models of the world. And — here’s the kicker — how a person goes about that process, how she interprets new information and evidence, and even what she pays attention to in the first place are governed by the models she already holds. In other words, what you think you know largely determines what you see and what you will learn from it. (This perspective is called constructivism.)

In fact, humans are flat-out incapable of knowing “the truth”. From before birth we observe, model, observe more (filtered by the model), interpret (from the perspective of the model), and, when backed into a corner, revise the model. Our cerebral machinery processes and reprocesses the data of our limited senses before even the most rudimentary awareness intrudes on our conscious mind. We have no direct access to the raw stuff of reality. The best we can hope for is a collection of mental constructs that are not too fragmented, not to inconsistent, and close enough to “reality” that we can function without doing anything too stupid. If you talk to a physicist who is careful with his language, he won’t tell you about nature. He’ll tell you about models that explain, as completely and economically as possible, the observations we can make about nature.

(Are you religious? If you object to the previous paragraph on the grounds that it contradicts the notion of “divinely revealed truth”, please reconsider. Do you really believe the infinite deity and the wonders beyond this mortal coil can be perfectly, accurately, completely captured by any finite human mental constructs? We’ve been told as much about the divine as we need and can handle, no more or less.)

So it’s no wonder that people who feel President Bush is the devil incarnate can find copious evidence to strengthen their opinion, whereas those who believe he is protecting us against fanatical enemies from without and moral decay from within see many reasons to fortify theirs. We all filter, we all interpret, and our models are all self-reinforcing. We can’t help it. That’s just human nature.

Hmm… Sounds like a problem, eh? Aside from wallowing in existential angst, what can we do about this damnably inconvenient limitation?

Well, that’s why I named this blog Think Twice.

• Everybody’s world view makes sense to them, and very very few people are deliberately evil. If someone’s thinking seems obviously flawed or ill-intentioned, it’s a safe bet I don’t really understand it. And until I do, it behooves me to be very, very cautious about criticizing it. So when someone says something I disagree with and I’m inclined to condemn or ignore it, I should think twice.
• Alas, I am just as human as the rest of you (despite what my fourth college roommate said about physics majors). People I passionately disagree with are just as sure of themselves as I am of myself. Annoyingly, many of them are just as bright, well-educated, and well-informed as I. Perhaps more so. It would be hubris to think that my confidence is better founded than theirs simply because I’m me. I filter and interpret, too. So, when I think I’m right about something, I’d better think twice.
• What we know is merely an approximation of what really is, and reality is infinitely richer and more subtle than we’ll ever appreciate. When I think I understand something, I’d be wise to think twice.
• The most powerful tool we have for pushing back the limitations of the mind is awareness of those limitations. So I think, and then think about my thinking. People who like big words call this metacognition. (Once in a while, just to be careful, I think about how I think about my thinking.) Think twice! (Or three times, or…)

That’s the primary reason I named this blog as I did, but not the only one. I’m an oddball. People who get to know me in a limited context and try to place me in a convenient box — liberal, conservative, religious, rationalist, hyper-intellectual, impulsive, compulsively organized German, moody Celt, whatever — are invariably wrong. Or rather, they’re 10% right and 90% wrong. For that reason I very much dislike labels. Even labels that are technically correct, because I fit the strict definition, tend to be so encrusted with inaccurate connotations and assumptions that they rankle. So if you think you’ve got me pegged, think twice.

I wonder how many of us really do fit into nice neat boxes. Next time I stick a label on someone, perhaps I should heed my own advice. The problem is, labels are so darned convenient…