Morgan Spurlock: The greatest TED Talk ever sold | Video on TED.com

Morgan Spurlock: The greatest TED Talk ever sold | Video on TED.com

Thought and progress: a new approach to knowledge

I wanted to rescue this piece I wrote for the OWL Journal (compiled and edited by graduates at the University of Oxford). I am obviously quite embarrassed by this amalgamation of jumbled ideas, dizzying prose (heavily edited by someone more capable than I - thank you JvZ!) and general ignorance of the essential reading that would have filled the huge voids in the argument. The essential idea I still enjoy though, although it excites me less these days. (Please excuse the typos - copying text in PDFs with two columns is annoying.)

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Socrates: At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters [grammata=writing]. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. Theuth came to him and showed his inventions [technas, “arts”], desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them. Thamus enquired about their several uses, and as Theuth enumerated them, Thamus praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them.

It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts [technai]. But when they came to letters [grammata], Th euth said, “Th is invention, O King, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; I have discovered a remedy [pharmakon: potion, medicine, drug] both for the memory and for wisdom.” Th amus replied: “O most ingenious [technikotate] Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a power opposite to that which they in fact possess. For this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it; they will not exercise their memories, but, trusting in external, foreign marks [graphēs], they will not bring things to remembrance from within themselves. You have discovered a remedy [phar- makon] not for memory, but for reminding. You off er your students the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom. They will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

Plato, Phaedrus. Based on the Jowett translation; updated by Martin Irvine, 1996

In Ancient Greece, the Sophists were employed to educate the city elite, normally to prepare their students for political offi ce. These professional teachers would supply their students with a stock of answers and train them how to apply this received knowledge to maximize their infl uence. Th ey treated learners like vessels for knowledge and placed little or no emphasis on developing the learner as a thinker in his own right. By contrast, the Socratic approach was to free the learner’s mind through philosophical play (paideia) in the pursuit of excellence (aretē). Plato created stories that invited learners to explore vivid metaphors and relate their own context to the subject. The Myth of the Cave, for instance, can be seen as a metaphor for education (paideia) but could also be used to refl ect on the role of the educator as someone who goes into the cave to free the minds of those trapped by the shadowy and coercive imaginings of the Sophists.

So which approach to learning prevails in our schools and universities today? Is it the love of a subject that inspires a personal pursuit of excellence? Or is something else shaping our educational experience? Th e answer is that Sophist practices almost completely dominate our educational institutions to the extent that they are taken for granted. Obvious examples of Sophist practices include examinations and curricula, which are set by assessment bodies without ever taking the learner’s voice into account. As a result their eff ect on learning is rarely questioned. One possible consequence is the personal indifference towards their subject often displayed by school children and university students. Contemporary society’s approach to information betrays a Sophist attitude, too. Traditionally, news agencies, universities, publishers, and governments have acted as information gateways deciding how to present information to the public and which information to present. These organisations have privileged access to information and control the production cycles according to their own agendas.

The Internet has the potential to democratise both processes – learning in educational institutions and access to information – by allowing many more people to read, discuss, and publish their own ideas. But modern information technolo- gies can do more than just enrich existing practices. In the future, they can help to create the heterogeneous environ- ment that allows us to optimise the relationship between our minds and the external world, whether we work alone or within our community of practice.

The Internet has already changed some of the ways in which information is handled. Blogs allow discussions to be recorded online and for anyone with access to a search engine to find these conversations and join in. Th e most well-known examples include Iraqi Salam Pax’s accounts of the US-led war, former Iranian Vice President Mohammad Ali Abtahi’s exclusive insight into the Islamic Republic’s government, and the highs and lows of the last US election campaign. Wikis are similar to blogs but the emphasis is on the collaborative editing of a single page. Wikipedia is perhaps the most successful example of this phenomenon with over a million high quality encyclo- paedic entries put online by many thousands of unpaid authors in under a year. It seems counter-intuitive that allowing anyone to edit any page will produce high quality content, but this is simply because we are accustomed to a more closed culture where elite groups act as guardians of knowledge. The Wikipedia project aims to make knowledge freely available for all; they have eight other projects that are building catalogues of free books, news and other media. Similarly, the Moving Image Archive is providing storage space for an impressive range of digital video and audio assets. Anyone with access to a computer and a phone line should be able to gain access to the world’s academic creations and to engage in the process of knowledge creation. The protest of the traditionalist is that this will lead to a reduction in quality. However, the assumption that the Internet cannot possibly be used to improve on the expensive and nepotistic peer review processes that are common today needs to be carefully scrutinised.

Here we can observe a parallel between the situation in Ancient Greece and contemporary society. New information technologies today are facing the same kind of obstacles in educational institutions that Plato described in the Phaedrus when he lets Socrates report Thamus’ objection to pen and paper. In classical Greece it was the public storytellers who feared for their reputations. Th e ancients held them in high acclaim; capturing their ac- counts on paper may have been sacrilegious and a threat to a prestigious and profi table trade. However, letters en- abled new approaches to scholarship, so that storytellers felt inclined to defend their trade with apocalyptic assertions about the fate of the minds of those who used these new approaches. With hindsight it is clear that the written word has not destroyed our memories or our ability to think and learn. All that was happening was an evolu- tion of what it means to construct and share knowledge.

The same evolution is happening today. Improved access to academic creations is a natural outcome of the use of digital technology. It is likely that we are simply waiting for some major institutions to take the lead and serve as the catalyst promoting a strong open-access publishing movement. Technology can be used to facilitate geographically diverse dialogue at a lower cost both financially and to the environment. Software can be used to modify rules of dialogue that counterbalance political forces within a community and lower the risks to con- tributors of speaking out of turn, for instance by giving people pseudonyms or allowing them to be anonymous. When using technology the communication can be enriched by adding digital creations such as a quotation from a paper, data from an experiment, a simulation, or a quote from a rare text that required search technology to find. Digital conversations do not need to be constrained by time, as is often the case with conferences, and participants can return to the thread of conversation after lengthy periods of refl ection. We may feel threatened by allowing computers to, in eff ect, take over the place of workshop organisers or facilitators; but computer soft- ware can make the rules of communication transparent, if only with a degree of reduction in spontaneity.

However, improved access to information, resources, edition cycles, and dialogue still does not constitute a revolution in our education systems. The real paradigm shift will come when we adopt modern technologies to transform the inti- mate relationship our minds have built up with the printed page. We need to move beyond the narrative structures of text, 2D static graphs and the occasional photograph to an entirely diff erent and more expressive medium.

From the moment when Alan Turing created the math- ematical foundations for digital technologies it became obvious that computers would aff ect our thinking in fundamental ways. Turing’s imitation game challenged researchers to create programmes that could fool a person into thinking they were communicating with another human being. Such enthusiasm for artificial intelligence has thankfully died down for the moment but it has been replaced by more pressing questions of how to optimise the way computers interact with our minds to support us when we are learning and solving problems. Cognitive sci- entists are working on models that describe the profound process of how our minds can perform with tools. Their research is showing how people work together using tools to solve problems. It is argued here that we engage in an iterative process of moving language unique to our minds (mentalese) to an external language (e.g. words and pictures), representing and re-representing knowledge until we give it a form that is meaningful to both ourselves and others. Although this sounds abstract it is happening everywhere all the time: just watch yourself next time you battle with an essay or solve an equation.

A diagram can be worth 10,000 words but an n-dimensional graph where the reader can manipulate parameters that change its form provides us with another order of expressiveness. Computer generated graphs have obvious utility in the sciences where morphology, distribution and time are fundamental to the global behaviour of a system, but graphics can serve all academic disciplines. Here at Oxford University, Denis Noble and his team are constructing a vast simulation of a virtual heart that can be used to model the causes of arrhythmias. Models of the heart have been created that can be used to predict what will happen to an individual’s heart before they receive some sort of intervention such as administration of a drug. Such graphical simulations reduce the cognitive load required to understand complex systems, as long as the semantics of the representation are well understood. If we have pictorial literacy then we will be able to learn more eff ectively because most systems share properties with these simulations: they are emergent, non-linear, often chaotic, and the global behaviour is the result of a large number of parallel processes interacting.

Our educational institutions need to equip learners with the skills and tools that enable them to become producers of these kinds of interactive simulations. Imagine an interdisciplinary team of researchers and learners collaborating to re-construct the life in a village off the North Eastern coast of North America in the18th century. The team gathers information to represent diff erent characters and the way they relate within their community. Key events are built into the simulation and problems built into a storyboard that allows people to explore the dimensions of the simulation in a game-like way. Such a project is underway at MIT where graphic designers, programmers, gamers, academics, and museum curators are collaborating to create a multiplayer simulation. Richard Dawkins has recently expressed a similar opinion about games when he mused: “[P]erhaps children should be given computer games to play with and familiarise them- selves with quantum mechanics.” Educational game research is a rapidly growing field and often highlights the relevance of motivation in designing learning material. It is important for teachers to be able to relate academic learning to the games that learners enjoy. It is patronising to assume that there is no relevance in the games that a popular culture selects – fun is not mindless. All games have properties that allow the players to engage in com- plex activities where the mind is exercised in ways that are directly transferable to academic pursuits. We need to adopt a diff erent understanding of the word ‘game’, or more words to capture the diff erent aspects of games.

Professor Seymour Papert of MIT, mathematician and seminal thinker on the way computers can change learning, says: “Instead of trying to make children love the math they hate, why not make a math they love.” Papert is asking us to think how technology can change the very nature of knowledge, the ways we represent and communicate our understanding. He is asking us not to revere ancient and medieval technologies and so settle into a relationship with our subjects that will be doomed to divorce us from real intellectual pursuit.

What causes apathy?

This is a good short sharp piece where Dave Meslin expresses succinctly why we should focus our attention on the external forces that drive us to apathy, rather than deride ourselves with guilt.

I latched onto this topic a couple of years ago after reading around the term 'passive aggressive':

Passive–aggressive behavior, a personality trait, is passive, sometimes obstructionist resistance to following through with expectations in interpersonal or occupational situations. It is a personality trait marked by a pervasive pattern of negative attitudes and passive, usually disavowed resistance in interpersonal or occupational situations.

It can manifest itself as learned helplessness, procrastination, stubbornness, resentment, sullenness, or deliberate/repeated failure to accomplish requested tasks for which one is (often explicitly) responsible.

[Taken from Wikipedia April 2011].

Combined with the idea put forward in The Corporation documentary (available free on YouTube).

We should think of groups/companies/organisations as having personalities. Just as it is difficult to describe the character of a person, it takes hard work to describe the personality of a corporation...but it is possible if we have access to the necessary information and take the time to write it down coherently. Just as people rely on personas to avoid judgement, so do businesses. The trouble is that large global corporations enact their psycho-pathologies on a massive scale where as individuals just piss a few people off on a daily basis.

I disagree with the general idea that public organisations should behave more like private ones in the way they communicate. There will be lessons to learn but of course we would want to avoid the spin and lies that private organisations don't flinch at as they pump their bullshit into the market. Public organisations will do well to adopt a confidence that equals the arrogance of the private companies we tolerate today.

I think Meslin puts some useful markers in the sand that help us envisage better organisations generally. I subscribe to the view that the best way to overcome disease is to act publicly and give up vanity and paranoia and accept the help that comes your way. The mean level of goodness in society will always improve if we let it.