Marie Snyder: Teaching Critical Thinking, Part Nine

In part six of my conversation with Marie Snyder I wrote about the importance of group decision-making in the critical thinking process. In this instalment, we go back to this issue but from a different angle. Some of the biggest problems we find with how people reason is because they either suffer from motivated reasoning or outright lying.

Cartoon from xkcd, CopyLeft provision

Motivated reasoning is when one's objectivity gets overwhelmed by an emotional commitment to a specific group, ideology, religion, professional obligations, etc. Unfortunately, this is a very common failing among politicians who become extremely loyal to their political party, either because they are thoroughly indoctrinated into it's point of view, or, because they have built strong, personal connections to the party. Politics is much more about emotion and human connections than it is about facts, which means that politicians are probably worse than the statistical average when it comes to looking at a complex issue objectively. 

The difference between motivated reasoning and lying is whether or not the person arguing for something has the self-awareness to know that their arguments for a position are or are not reasonable. 

The system that Snyder introduces, Sortition, gets around this problem by randomly selecting members of the public to form a committee, instead of allowing politicians to select the members it wants to see on it. This means that the individual decision-makers get selected from a pool of people who aren't nearly as prone to either motivated reasoning or outright dishonesty---simply because they have a lot less "skin in the game".

Cloudwalking Owl · Sortition

Sortition has a long history and probably the example most people would think of is ancient Athens. But as I mentioned to Snyder, people shouldn't think that it has died out since then. Guelph had it's own experimentation with sortition in the late 20th and early 21st century.   

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The problem that the city faced was that scientists had found out that there was a build-up of pesticide residue in some of Guelph's stormwater detention ponds. These are the water bodies you sometimes see in subdivisions. They are engineered by the city to collect the rainwater that comes off things like roads, driveways, parking lots, roofs, etc. The problem is that these sorts of surfaces won't allow rain to seep into them. This means that if a sudden thunderstorm hits, they can create a mini-flash flood that can sweep into a stream or wetland. Not only does this sort of quick flood create erosion problems, the water itself is often a lot hotter than what's already in a stream or wetland---which will create a thermal shock that can kill wildlife. Moreover, it will often have pollution like oil that can poison aquatic life too. The common engineered solution is to dig a depression and channel this water to it. That way, when it rains the overheated, contaminated water can collect in a place where it can cool off, sediment can fall out of the water column, and, micro-organisms like algae can digest whatever chemicals (like fertilizer) are in it before it gets out into either a stream or the water table.

Google calls this a "stormwater detention pond", but there are subtle differences between these sort of things that have profound importance to civil engineers. For the purposes of this article, all you need to know is that it's an engineered low spot in a city that collects rain run off.

What had happened was when scientists looked into the water quality of these ponds they found that they had relatively high levels of certain pesticides, which was not a good thing. Moreover, when surveys were done of homeowners in the city, researchers found out that a surprisingly high amount of pesticides were being used on suburban properties---both by home owners and lawn care companies that serviced them. (I checked my memory by looking through a reprinted journal article that I found on-line:  Environmental Concentrations of Urban Pesticides.) Given the fact that almost all the pesticides that get applied to suburban yards were for cosmetic reasons instead of food production, reasonable people of all political persuasions decided that there needed to be some sort of law reducing their use.

The political problem was that if City Council decided to regulate or even ban the use of these pesticides, it ran the risk of facing a very strong backlash from both lawn care companies and home owners who had a strong emotional attachment to their lawns. 

The way it dodged this sticky trap was by creating a citizen committee using the principle of sortition. That way elected officials couldn't even be accused of selecting the wrong people to sit on the panel. It was formed by randomly selecting fifty Guelph citizens and asking them if they would take part in the process----only six people actually agreed to join, but that was enough.

In addition, six other expert consultants were added to the committee to help the members make sense of the technical issues: three were city staff members and three worked for a hired environmental consulting company. The result was a report that many considered a model of good public policy. (You can see the published report of the committee at this city on-line archive.) 

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Another example of sortition that readers should be aware of happened in 2006 and involved creating a Citizen's Assembly by randomly selecting one citizen per riding who were then tasked with looking at the evidence and suggesting what sort of system the province of Ontario should use in future elections. Again, the system worked extraordinarily well at sifting through all the information, listening to the experts, and, prepared a good proposal and creating created a document that explained it things very well. 

Unfortunately, I suspect that they did too good a job. It became obvious to me that when their report was published and during the run-up to the referendum, that the Liberal government got cold feet and decided to not fund anything more than a token education campaign. According to a Canada.com article, Elections Ontario only budgeted $6.8 million for this task. 

It's hard to find information about past Ontario elections on line, but what I did find says that the Progressive Conservative Party head office spent a little over $8.5 million in the 2018 election campaign. Please note, this figure only counts what the PC head office spent. What each individual candidate's local campaign spent is added on top of this. Just by way of a comparison, Mike Schreiner's successful local campaign in Guelph spent about $41,500. There are 124 Electoral Districts in Ontario and three major parties. Kathleen Wynn spent about $92,700, Doug Ford about $66,000, and, Andrea Horvath spent $110,500. 

Let's be conservative with our calculations. Let's forget about the Green Party and just assume that there are two of major parties instead of three. (I suspect the average candidate spends less than a party leader. Moreover, in many Electoral Districts there are only two real contenders plus "also rans".) I'll use the Conservatives as the baseline $17 million for the head offices (ie: the Conservative head office times two), and, $16.4 million for local campaigns (ie: Doug Ford's campaign times 124 Electoral Districts times two parties). That comes to $33.4 million spent on promoting political party's messages---and that's what I suspect is an extremely conservative number! 

Given this context, $6.8 million to explain a complex change to our electoral system does seem like a small number. And indeed, according the article cited above, British Columbia spent twice as much as Ontario to do this.

Moreover, in a CBC article, one of the Assembly members, Arita Droog, complained that in a misguided attempt to be unbiased, the public education campaign that did exist didn't explain what sort of benefits would come from the proposed system. 

"It's so neutral, it's so unbiased, that it doesn't say anything … I understand their position that they want to be neutral and unbiased, but in doing so, they went beyond" providing useful information. [sic]

Indeed, if we can believe the above article, only two days before the General Election---which included the referendum---3 million voters didn't even know that there was a referendum on electoral reform. And that was 36% of the total!

To end the suspense, the referendum didn't pass and we still labour under the idiotic first-past-the-post system that we inherited from Great Britain.  😡 

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I think that the lessons we can learn from the above two examples illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of sortition. The system works well at assimilating complex information and coming up with good policy. It also allows elected officials the ability to avoid being personally attacked by extremely polarized members of the community. 

What it isn't able to do, however, is mobilize the citizenry to support whatever decisions it makes. This didn't matter much with regard to cosmetic pesticide use because there already was a very strong support for the ban in the community. But with regard to proportional representation most people hadn't thought much about the issue. It's something that requires a significant understanding of the electoral process---and most people simply don't know enough about that to see how it would be a profound improvement. 

Our old buddy the FUD campaign. Fair Use Provision.

We should also remember that electoral reform is something that the existing political parties don't generally like. That's because the parties who do well in the present system almost by definition like the present system because it gives them power. Conversely, the parties that do like proportionality tend to not have any power at all---because of the present system. 

Because of this fact, none of the mainstream parties were willing to devote any of their resources to encourage voters to vote "Yes". Moreover, the Liberal government---who I suspect were surprised how well the Citizens Assembly did---strangled the process by starving its ability to get the word out to the people. This left the door open for people opposed to mount local Fear Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) campaigns---which are generally successful in situations where great numbers of people know very little about a complex issue. 

Sortition's Achilles Heel in our political environment is the flip side of it's great attraction---it doesn't involve the creation of political parties. Unfortunately, our representative democracy can't function without political parties. But that's an article for another day. 

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It appears that our latest lock down is ending soon because our disease numbers seem to be declining. But we still have to be careful because the new Delta variant of Covid seems to be a lot more transmissible than the others. Moreover, it seems like the limited protection that one dose of the vaccines gives seems to be significantly lower with it too. So keep wearing your mask and get your shot---both the first and second one---when your number comes up.

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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

Marie Snyder: Teaching Critical Thinking, Part Eight

Marie Snyder, in a "no nonsense" pose. (Photo supplied by her. Image manipulated by Bill Hulet.) 

Cloudwalking Owl · Community Pushback

I'd wanted to get a primary source for the Texas Republican party resolution opposing critical thinking skills, but it seems to have been scrubbed from the Wayback Machine. So I'll have to settle with a secondary source. Here's the exact language (the last paragraph directly deals with critical thinking---but the three earlier ones might be of interest too): 

I'm not about to say that the sky is falling because some politicians in Texas voted for a dumb resolution during a policy convention. But I think it is important to understand that right from the very beginning of critical thinking various parts of the community have fought to suppress it. Indeed, the most famous of early critical thinkers---Socrates---was executed because he was supposedly corrupting the youth of Athens. 

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Talking about corrupting the youth----. 

Snyder makes the point that the most push back she gets is from students who complain that her reading assignments are just too darn hard. I don't think that in my time high school students were much better at working through difficult concepts. If there is any evidence of this, it is probably only because there was such brutal "sifting out" of the student body. This involved "the great cull" in grade nine when the students who were deemed "not high school material" were shunted off to special places where they learned to be barbers, hair stylists, brick layers, etc. The majority of the rest were put into the four year program with only a small minority entering the five year stream with the expectation they would head off to university. My limited understanding is that nothing like this sort of process currently happens at public schools. 

But having said that, there certainly are a lot of philosophers who demand a little more attention than the average teen is used to. Consider the following quotes I found from Immanuel Kant, who was someone I found very hard to understand when I was at university. If memory serves, his academic prose is turgid and boring as Hell. But having said that, his ideas are really worth thinking about. 

I do think, however, that we should be very concerned about whether or not we are creating a generation of people who have the attention span of a gnat. 

I'm a little concerned about this because my read of history says that in the past people seemed to have had a lot more toleration for what we would call "boring stuff" today. Take, for example, the difference between the front cover of the Globe and Mail newspaper in the early 20th versus 21st centuries.

Comparing these two front covers, it seems obvious to me that publishers and editors at The Globe and Mail definitely think that readers are a less willing to read dense stories and are instead much more addicted to "eye candy". 

People seemed a lot more willing to listen to long political speeches in times past too. Consider the Lincoln/Douglas debates that were held in 1858. These were between the Republican and Democratic candidates to be the Illinois representative to the US Senate. The format consisted of one candidate opening up with an hour-long speech, followed by the other having an hour and a half speech, followed by a half hour response by the original speaker. There were seven different debates, with one candidate starting first half the time and the other the other half. 

Compare this with the first Trump/Biden debate, where the format supposedly consisted of six, fifteen minute segments. They were each supposed to answer questions put to them by the moderator and only had two minutes for response followed by thirteen minutes of "back and forth".

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My gut instinct about this change is that this has come about for a variety of reasons. First of all, the velocity of human life has increased dramatically. Secondly, we all have a lot more things fighting for our limited attention. Also, technology has dramatically increased our ability to add audio and visual elements to what used to be a pretty-much print-driven communications system. 

McLuhan, Wiki Media

I'd draw reader's attention specifically this last point. The famous philosopher of media, Marshall McLuhan, said that "the medium is the message". Social media neatly fits into this point of view. 

Twitter restricts the length of a post to one or two sentences and doesn't lend itself to back-and-forth conversations. That means that it has an inherent bias towards cliche, provocation, and, prejudice. Donald Trump loved it. 

Similarly, Instagram has a bias towards images. That's why if you look at the top "influencers" on that medium, they tend to not much more than celebrities posing like models. And like famous people posing to sell perfume, clothes, watches, etc, they charge fees for "product placement". 

The prognosis isn't entirely negative. The explosive growth in podcasts seems to have created a whole new industry that involves creating "deep dive" stories about abstruse subjects---Pushkin Industries comes to my mind. And the same thing can be said about You Tube channels---probably the Green Brothers' Crash Course series are the best example of this. There has also been an explosive growth in "long-form" news blogs, most notably the Vox media empire.

The problem is, however, not that individuals cannot find good stuff on line---it's that there is also lots of bad stuff too, and it's really popular. And, as this pandemic has pointed out, there are lots of situations where it isn't enough to just let the smart people do the right thing, the dumb ones have to do it too! And if you are teaching critical thinking to a room full of kids who spend a lot of time looking at models on Instagram or watching dumb videos on TikTok, it is inevitable you are going to get a lot of complaints that they just can't get Kant. 

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Another point I raised was whether or not the reason why Snyder isn't getting any more grief from parents about what she is teaching is whether the ones that might complain have simply removed themselves from the educational system. Here are a couple of graphs from the Fraser Institute that suggest that much more people are either sending their children to private schools (the Fraser Institute calls them "Independent"---I suspect for ideological reasons) or homeschooling than when I was a child. 

  

 

There's another wrinkle that needs to be understood. In 1985 the government fully-funded Catholic schools in Ontario. According to 2017 numbers from the Ontario Government, in grades Kindergarden to twelve, the numbers break down this way:

• Publicly funded, secular schools: 1,368,125
• Publicly funded, Catholic religious schools: 638,576
• Private schools of all types: 138,412
• Homeschooling: 8,565

Add together the students who go to a Catholic or private school, plus the ones who are homeschooled, and you get 785,553, or, 36% of the total student body. 

I don't think that it strains credibility to suggest that the small number of parents who would have given Marie Snyder grief could easily fit into that 36% of the population who have removed their children from the public school system. This might make the lives of both teachers and parents in the public system easier, but I think this might not bode well for the future of Ontario. There is a standardized curriculum for Catholic, private, and, home-schooled children, but I suspect that critical thinking is probably not really encouraged for many of them. If it was, I suspect it would cause a lot of drama for the people in charge because the kids might question the whole reason why they have been removed from the public, secular system in the first place. 

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I think that this is enough info for one week. Remember to keep on wearing your mask, keep your distance, and, get your vaccine. It may look like we are near the finish line---but don't forget that the Indian mutation is gaining on us fast! We still have to keep the pace up if we are going to miss having yet another COVID wave hit us. 

 

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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with! 

Marie Snyder: Teaching Critical Thinking, Part Seven

Marie Snyder, photo supplied by her.

In the last article I published on this subject,  I discussed how important group decision-making through a specific type of conversation (or "dialectic") is in making rational decisions. This is such an important issue that I want to "dig down" even deeper and talk about the importance of "community" to the quality of decisions we make.

I start the conversation by offering a quote from Wendell Berry, who's something of a spokesman for traditional rural values. The idea that we carry our history on our shoulders is something I know about.

Cloudwalking Owl · Community Filter Bubbles Thinking Outside The Box

I grew up on a small-holder (only 200 acres) farm that in many ways was partially based on subsistence agriculture. (That is, we raised or bartered for almost all our food and a great deal other things, like wood.) In that sort of world, your reputation was literally something you depended upon for your livelihood. This is such an important issue that I'm going to share three examples to illustrate it. 

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When I was quite young I remember looking out the window during the winter and seeing a group of Amish people with teams of horses and bobsleds going into our woodlot. I asked my dad what was going on. He informed me that many years ago he'd been very sick for a long part of one winter and some members of the Amish community had undertaken to do his barn chores in exchange for being able to harvest a "reasonable" amount of wood from our bush for as long as he lived. There was no contract protecting their rights to get the wood, and no detailed language to protect us from them destroying the bush by over-logging. 

Another time my father sold an old tractor-pulley operated buzz-saw to a

A tractor pulley buzz saw. Image from a YouTube clip.

neighbour. The two of them dickered a bit over the price, but not the way people are used to hearing. I forget the details but it went something like this:

Dad: "You can have it for $25". 

Neighbour: "No, that's too cheap. How about $100?"

Dad: "Don't be silly. It's old, it doesn't owe me anything, and, it's just taking up space. It's best that someone who can use it gets it. How about $50?"

Neighbour: "I don't want to take advantage of your good nature. How about $60?"

Dad: "If you insist, OK." 

Finally, years later after I'd graduated from university I was desperate to find work (it was during that awful recession in the 1980s that was probably the hardest time to find work that has ever happened in my lifetime.) I ended up with a temporary gig picking apples. The farmer came out one day and offered me a full time job managing his farm. I was surprised. 

Myself: "But I don't know anything about fruit orchards."

Farmer: "That's OK. I can teach you whatever you need to learn."

Myself: "Then why me?"

Farmer: "I've seen that you're not afraid of hard work. And I've heard about your family---you have a very good reputation in the community. My son doesn't want the farm, but my grandson does. I need someone to run the place until he's old enough to take over."

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What's going on in these three interactions? Why would someone undertake a life-long commitment without a legal contract? Or sell something by trying to talk the buyer into paying less than he wants to? Or offer a job to someone that freely admits that they don't know anything about how to do it? I'd suggest that what was at play is the reputations that individuals carry "on their shoulders" within a closely knit community.

What's a community? That's a key point of what I'm getting at. When and where I was young, it was primarily a group of people living in the same geographic location who felt a sense of obligation towards each other. That's what the three examples above are all about. My father, the Amish wood cutters, and, the fellow buying the buzz saw were working out the details of social obligation. In both cases, each of the parties was getting "value for their money" in that they negotiated what each side considered a "fair exchange". But more importantly, because each side refused to "drive a hard bargain" or take advantage of the other person's weakness, they were keeping the bonds of community strong. That was because on some level---often totally unconscious---they all realized that they depended on the sense of community to support them during "hard times". 

With regard to the old farmer who offered to hire me to manage his farm, I suspect that what motivated him was an understanding---again perhaps unconscious---that I understood and was willing to participate in this sort of community supported social network. If he'd brought in someone from outside, there would be no way that this person would have understood the way people in that community did business.

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This sort of community networking didn't "just exist", it was enforced. People used gossip to share information about each other, and if someone tried to "opt out" by doing things like "driving a hard bargain" or by being a "freeloader", they paid a price. I first realized this when I bought my house and had to deal with Guelph trades people for the first time. Unfortunately, my experience as a home owner tells me that in our community there are a wide variety of people who work on homes---some of whom are incompetent and/or border-line criminals. Our experience on the farm was that you just hired the same guys as everyone else and you could trust them to do a good job for a fair price. I suspect the reason why is because if they ever got caught ripping someone off, their reputation would be shot and no one would never hire them again. 

This sort of informal punishment would---according to "hushed" stories told by my parents---sometimes get out of hand and take an ominous turn. During a polio epidemic brought on by an anti-vaxxer fundamentalist church, I heard about a cross being burnt on the front lawn of the Pastor's home. I also heard about a police constable who was rumoured to have assaulted a local teen. Supposedly, this led to an informal parade of motor cars with people in sheets and pillow cases urging him to resign and leave town---which he did. 

Please note that this village was absolutely lily-white except for the very odd First Nations family. There was absolutely no racism involved. (At least by then. There had been a very large community of escaped slaves in the 19th century---I often wonder about why they all left. Probably not entirely because of the climate. 😒 ) Having said that, it doesn't require a great deal of imagination to understand how this sort of thing can get wildly out of hand so these issues are much better handled by the legal authorities.

For better or worse, the city is much, much, much different. Guelph is big enough that trades people can be anonymous, which means that it really is up to you to figure out if you can trust someone. And if they do a bad job, they won't pay a price for doing so because there will always be some other people who haven't heard and are willing to "give them a go".

I couldn't find a solution to this problem until I discovered the Better Business Bureau's (BBB) tradesmen score card service. It is a formal system for creating the sort personal history that was served by gossip in my home town. If, for example, an electrician or plumber "pulls a fast one" on a customer, they can complain and them they get a bad rating (ie: from A+ to F). Moreover, if you look at the company name on the website you can see a "back and forth" between customers and business that you can use to get a feel for how seriously they treat complaints. 

This is a formal solution to the decline of community. It's something that has been used over and over again on the Web through things like Yelp and the ratings on businesses like Ebay.   

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The only real way to be able to learn "the metal" of a person is through learning about their personal history. This is what is known as "social capital". If someone has a good reputation in their community, they have a lot of it. If they have a bad reputation, then they are "socially bankrupt".  

Behavioural economists are very interested in this concept because they recognize how important it is to the entire economy. Just imagine how a whole range of businesses depend on trust to be able to function. If we couldn't be sure about restaurants, no one would ever try something new because they'd be afraid of food poisoning. I often buy things from the other side of the world---I'd never do that if I thought that there was a good chance that someone would just rip me off. Obviously, being able to trust strangers is incredibly important for global trade. 

China has a real problem with this, because generations of Communist control has taught ordinary citizens the many players they cannot trust: party officials, businesses in bed with these officials, the courts, the police, and, just about every other aspect of society. The government understands how much this harms both the economy and Chinese culture. In response, they have come up with a strangely Orwellian "solution". (Don't forget, they are still the Communist Party of China. 😏 )

The Social Credit System still seems to be in beta testing, but bye-and-large it operates like our credit score system---only with added criteria. This includes things like how quickly people pay their bills including taxes, whether they jerk around businesses by doing things like booking reservations without showing up, and, whether they are bad neighbours (things like eating on transit, not sorting their trash, etc.) If, on the other hand, someone does good things like donating blood, helping out with charities, etc, they can get positive scores added to their balance. 

There are consequences to this sort of thing. People with low scores can find themselves denied tickets on trains and airplanes, spaces in educational facilities, denied jobs, etc. In contrast, people with high scores receive the opposite---they can go to the head of the line for medical services, good jobs, nice apartments, discounts on consumer goods, etc. 

I doubt if the Chinese model is going to work very well. I certainly wouldn't recommend this specific system. But it is interesting that even a repressive, authoritarian regime like China's can see the need for some way of building social capital. (I suspect that this is an out-growth of traditional Confucian philosophy---but that's another story.)

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Let's get back to Marie Snyder and her high-school students. The reason why I'm raising this issue is because rational decisions require a certain degree of trust in the particular individual you are talking with. That's because when we work together in a group to work through problems and make decisions we need to have some understanding of how much we can trust what another person is saying. 

For example, consider the case of people who "confabulate". I suspect we all know people who do this---I certainly do. These are folks who make up all sorts of crazy-ass nonsense but talk as if they know for an absolute fact that this stuff is true. 

The point of this scene from the once popular sit-com Cheers is that the character Cliff (the fellow in the letter carrier uniform) is such a notorious confabulator that he can be relied upon to come up with some sort of nonsense no matter what the question. That has obviously been the basis of a bet between Norm (the guy sitting next to Cliff) and Coach (the bartender).

If communities have to make a collective decision and people like Cliff are part of the process (which, unfortunately, they usually are), it is tremendously important for people to be able to identify them so they can ignore what they have to say. That is why, for example, we award people credentials so strangers can get an idea of whether or not someone really does know what they are talking about. It is also why I have always opposed the idea that people in large national and provincial organizations should directly vote for it's leadership. It's simply impossible to form a useful opinion about someone based on a leaflet, website, or, few lines in an email.

And it is also the reason why social media has become such a "dumpster fire". The sad fact of the matter is that it is filled with Cliffs who spout all sorts of nonsense and there is no real mechanism in place to help the general public identify them so they can be safely ignored. 

We really shouldn't just accept that "this is just the way it is". We have the BBB's tradesmen report card system. We also have trades licenses. We have credentials that let us know whether or not the guy designing a vaccine has a Phd in the relevant field, and, those two letters "MD" or "RN" after the names of the people giving me the shot. Engineers wear the ring. The list goes on and on. (For example, I can add "MA" after my name---for what that's worth.) And we know that print and broadcast media used to have rules that stopped them from being able to tell bold-faced lies. Why can't we come up with some sort of similar regulations that will police the Web and stop the spread of dangerous nonsense from it? 

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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

Marie Snyder: Teaching Critical Thinking, Part Six

 

In this part of my conversation with Marie Snyder I "zero in" on what I consider an extremely important issue. 

Cloudwalking Owl · Group Decision Making

I raised the issue of group decision-making because it is very closely entwined with critical thinking. I think it's important to emphasize this point because I don't think many people really understand it. One of the key issues that was identified by the ancient Greek philosophers was the importance of dialectic to the emergence of Truth. And that's just the label people use to identify a specific type of conversation between two or more people. It's key elements are: that people seek to find the Truth instead of seeking to "win", and, they do so by restricting themselves to only following the specific rules of deduction and induction. (Deduction is using logic to carefully parse-out the implications of things you already know---think math. And Induction is using specific rules to know what you can and cannot infer from physical evidence---think the scientific method.)  

A lot of people have recently been really upset about the way the medical health officers around the world have seemed to change their minds about things like whether or not ordinary citizens should wear masks and whether or not a specific vaccine is safe to use. These folks are distressed because they don't have any exposure to how science works and expect the same sort of definitive statements of "fact" that they probably heard in Sunday school as a kid. 

Every single piece of scientific knowledge and technology that we rely upon is the result of a conversation (or dialectic) between a group of experts who discussed a variety of issues on a given topic and came to a consensus about what was really happening. And in the case of the current pandemic, what people saw in the news were bits and pieces of this conversation (or dialectic) before a consensus had been reached. That's why it looks like Dr. Tam "flip-flopped" on the issue of masks and whether or not the AstraZeneca vaccine is safe enough to use. She was just following the conversation (dialectic) among the scientific community and making choices based on her particular read of the best available current evidence---before consensus had been achieved. 

This is why teaching group decision-making is so important to critical thinking---it's integral to making any rational sense of the world around us.

This point was understood at the very start of the philosophy tradition. Plato recorded the conversations between Socrates and others in the form of dialogues. These record the back-and-forth between two or more people on an issue. One person makes an assertion and another makes a response. In the case of Socrates, he often offers a series of questions that help resolve an ambiguous point. And in the case of looking at that, we often begin to see important issues that had been missed in the previous conversation.

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It isn't easy to teach this sort of thing. I would suspect that the overwhelming majority of people cannot do it themselves, which would make teaching it to children very difficult indeed. One of the key issues can be illustrated with the following cartoon. 

I got this image from a terrible website titled "City Raven", which probably got it somewhere else---but had no original citation. If it's yours, tell me.

One thing I see in the above scenario is that there seems to be some sort of bond of mutual trust or respect between the two people---like a therapist and patient. From my experience, this is a very rare thing in normal human interactions. I've found that if I try to initiate a dialectic with another person I often quickly get attacked for being "picky", "nosy", or, "refusing to listen to my feelings" long before I would be able to get the other person to see that her problems are a result of bad choices in the rest of her day. 

Moreover, there is a real time commitment necessary for this process. Most conversations nowadays aren't like that. Instead, people generally just want to "chit chat" for a few moments in a totally random, free-flowing way. And, if someone is "venting" about an issue, they generally don't want to spend much time or mental effort trying to understand what is going on.

That's because to be able to have a real conversation, there has to first be a commitment to the process by the people involved. And there are many different ways to sabotage that commitment. To really learn how to do dialectic well requires a lot of practice and a deep understanding of what is going on when we do it. That's why anyone who uses dialectic as a researcher---scientists, philosophers, and, other types of academics---generally spent years and years learning before they become experts in their fields. So, teaching the process to children is a very ambitious project. 

That's not to say that it is impossible, just that it is not a trivial thing to do. It also means that you can't do it simply by assigning group projects to kids without making any effort to teach them how to work well in groups.

As Snyder says, there has been a decision made in modern education that says "learning how to work in groups is important", but the hidden, unspoken second part of it is "but not important enough to actually be taught or graded". It's like our educational system decided that it is important to teach children how to swim---but does so by throwing them into the deep end of a pool and expecting them to figure it out for themselves.

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Luckily there are smart people who have worked for years trying to figure exactly how you can teach children how to use dialectic to solve collective problems. I found a couple examples from YouTube, and rather than try to explain the process I think it would be better to share them with you.

The first one comes from Australia and shows what we would call a high or junior-high school class. 

Notice how the class tries to limit the conversation by handing around a ball and only allowing people speak when they are holding it. That's an example of the sort of process structure that a teacher needs to teach children to follow if the conversation is going to not degenerate into a shouting match. Consider it to be something on the line of Robert's Rules of Order, or, the Parliamentary rules that the Speaker enforces. 

Here's another example from South Africa, only this one involves younger children. 

Notice how the teacher works hard to teach the children a process that will allow them to work together to collectively learn. This is a totally different system than the way I was taught---which involved learning how to copy the teacher and regurgitate the lesson at will. In contrast, the one in the video prepares children for the way people really learn in the real world---which involves ambiguity, back-and-forth conversations with people who have a different point of view, and, making sense of seemingly conflicting pieces of information through a collective effort. I would suspect that if a child is taught using the system shown above, as an adult he or she wouldn't be surprised or off-put when the Chief Public Health Advisor seems to contradict herself because she adapts her policy to the latest available information.

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I think that this is enough information to assimilate for this week. Take care of yourself, wear a mask, socially distance (if you can) and remember to get the shot---(if you can). It won't be long before life starts to get towards whatever our new normal will look like.  

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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with.

Marie Snyder: Teaching Critical Thinking, Part Five

 

Marie Snyder standing in a field. Image supplied by her, cropped by Bill Hulet

This is another article where I use a short conversation with Marie Snyder to raise a few issues that I think are tremendously important.

Cloudwalking Owl · Competition In School

I asked about competition because one of the least known of all open secrets is the fact that a surprising number of people who go to school to get specific skills that they can use to get a good job end up not working in their field of study. Take a look at the following graphic from the American Congressional Budget Office that shows where STEM (Science Technology Engineering Math) graduates end up working.

Public Domain Image (click on it for a better quality version)

Yeah, that's right. More than three quarters of graduates from STEM programs don't end up working in their field. That means that all the hyper-anxiety and resulting competitiveness that builds up in children and parents is pretty much misplaced. 

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I became aware of this when I graduated with an undergraduate degree in 1981. The 1980s recession hit Ontario like a sledgehammer and it was tough finding a job. I went back to my home town---Woodstock---for Yule that year and the local beer hall was giving out free Turkey dinners. I went with a bunch of friends from high school. Of the bunch around the table, only two of us had jobs: myself (a philosophy grad) and one other guy who was a fine artist. Everyone else---who had all taken "serious" job-related courses---was out of work. This included people who had studied heavy-design diesel mechanics, engineering, etc, courses. As one person said "I never had any fun at all while at college and I still don't have a job!"

What I learned from this was something that should be obvious to everyone, but isn't. Training more people for a specific job doesn't create new positions for them to fill---it just increases the competition for those few jobs that already exist. This isn't to say that an education isn't important. As one business owner once explained to me. It doesn't matter what the field was, the fact someone was self-motivated to the point where they dragged themselves out of bed to go to lectures, was able to get essays and reports done on time, and, who did enough studying to pass the exams---shows that a kid has the bare minimum necessary to do lots of jobs. (The person I'm referring to ran a landscaping company but still tried to hire grads for the above reasons. He has a degree too.)

That means that any sort of post-secondary diploma is fast becoming the "base line" that gets people past the "first sort" of job applications. As Marie says, post-secondary fills the same function that having a high school diploma did when we were young. 

Having said that, I think that probably the most important job skill that any young person can learn at any time is how to be "entrepreneurial". And, paradoxically, this seems to require exactly the opposite attitude from people who are trying to fashion themselves into a vocational "key" in the hope that they will fit into a specific employment "lock" when they graduate. That's because there really isn't any way for anyone to accurately predict what the world will look like when they get their degree or diploma. 

Let me give you another example. 

I had a friend once who had sought to get a really good trades job so he'd studied a very "cutting edge" technology at the college level. It gave him the ability to work numerically-controlled, precision machine tools. When he got the credentials he got a job---at the only factory in the province that actually used the machines he was trained on. It was owned by the Armed Forces and made weapons. He was making good money, but unfortunately he became a pacifist and was more and more upset about making things designed to kill people. But he knew he couldn't get a good job anywhere else. This meant that even though the game plan had "worked" for him, it didn't allow him the flexibility necessary to make a living in tune with his evolving belief system. (Luckily, he had married a teacher and the two of them decided it made sense for him to quit his job and stay at home to raise their two young daughters.)  

This is an example of the problem with training for one particular type of skilled job. It "locks you in" to that particular field and if it goes through significant changes, you end up being like a sailor in port with no ships to sail on.

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A lot of work goes into writing these stories. I don't really know how they fit into the world of "journalism", but I do think that they deal with important issues that you will rarely see discussed. If you agree and you can afford it, why not subscribe? Patreon and Pay Pal make it easy to do. 

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The problem with treating university as the "first rung" on the job searching ladder is that not everyone has it in them to go to college or university. If we forced these institutions to take everyone who applies, the result would a degradation of the entire system because it would mean that the administration would have to put more and more resources into remedial help instead of rewarding excellence.

This leads back to that important truth hiding in plain sight that I mentioned before. A country cannot educate itself into full employment. If it were possible, then Canada would have attained zero unemployment long ago. That's because we have the highest percentage of college and university grads of any country in the world. According to the 2016 census:

In 2016, more than half (54.0%) of Canadians aged 25 to 64 had either college or university qualifications, up from 48.3% in 2006. Canada continues to rank first among the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries in the proportion of college and university graduates.

This is why Snyder raises the issue of a Guaranteed Annual Income (GAI). In a world where automation is getting rid of those lower tier jobs that used to provide employment for the kids who dropped out of school or only had a high school diploma, it offers a "safety net". It also helps people who have some sort of entrepreneurial idea. 

We already have something of a limited GAI in the form of the federal Canada Child Benefit (CCB), which ensures that each parent in Canada receives enough money to hopefully keep the entire family from falling into dire poverty. A few years back I hired a young man to trim some trees on my property. When we were working out the bill, he mentioned to me that the CCB had been absolutely crucial to him being able to get his business off the ground. If it hadn't been there, he said he thinks he'd have had to call it quits and get a job doing something else---just to provide for his young family. 

He was able to use the CCB because he had children. But if he hadn't, there wouldn't have been anything similar to help him "bridge the hard times" during his start up. That's where it would actually help add a few more points to the percentage of people gainfully employed. But having said that, it isn't a "magic bullet" that will eliminate all unemployment. Some people simply won't be able to "thrive" in our modern world. And automation is grinding away at the total number of jobs. Making our workforce even more highly educated simply won't put food on the table or pay the rent---that's why we need a GAI, among other things (like a rational housing policy).    

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This leads me to Snyder's last point in the above clip. There's a foundational fear among a lot of Canadians that is fuelling a competitive drive among parents, who then pass this on to their children. The idea is that if children don't "get to the head of the pack" early on, their chances of becoming successful in life will only diminish as they get older. This sort of general fearfulness is corrosive to society and discourages the solidarity that is essential to getting out of the collective hole that we are already in and digging deeper every day.

The problem is that there are "islands of stability" in the behaviour of groups. That is, certain behaviours can be self-perpetuating, and lack of trust can be one of them. If people don't trust themselves or others, they start to make decisions based on that lack of trust that only reinforces other people's lack of trust. This causes these others to do things that then reinforces the lack of trust in the first person. And as a result, things start to "lock up" in society. 

Economists understand this problem with regard to consumer demand. That's why governments all over the world have been showering borrowed money on their citizenry. This is because advisors have been telling them that if they don't do this the destruction of savings will traumatize consumers and keep them from spending even after they get their jobs back---just like the great depression convinced many of our grandparents and great grandparents to be very careful with money until the end of their lives. 

Unfortunately, there has been such a huge over-emphasis on individualism in our lifetimes that modern governments seem to have totally lost any idea that our nations need a collective sense of solidarity if we are going to be able to thrive as individuals. I suspect that a large part of this has come from two very different sources. First, during the 1960s there was a tremendous "cultural revolution" that came about because of people in my generation rebelling against the intense social conservatism that our parents manifested---probably because of their experiences in the Great Depression and World War II. More recently, the Neo-Liberal Consensus that emerged during the Reagan/Thatcher years has convinced an entire generation of politicians that the marketplace is the only decision-making body that should have any influence on human life.

Here's an excerpt from a World War Two army training video that shows how it is possible to make an excellent argument for the need to co-operate instead of compete if we are going to make any progress as a nation. I just wish that the people in Ottawa and Queen's Park had some similar inkling of how important this issue can be in a properly functioning society.

 

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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

Marie Snyder: Teaching Critical Thinking, Part One

This week I start a series on how one goes about helping youngsters develop one of the most important skills a human being can have: the ability to tell the difference between fact and nonsense. There is an academic discipline that makes studies this process, philosophy. But unfortunately, most people don't have a great deal of respect for this subject---and given the current state of the world, that really shouldn't come as any great surprise. This week I begin a conversation with a high-school teacher who has been instrumental in getting local school boards teaching philosophy to teens.

Cloudwalking Owl · Who Is Marie Snyder

One of the things I've learned from writing this blog is how important newspapers can be for creating a written record of the day. When I wanted to find out how the Carnegie library was built and torn-down in Guelph all I had for information were microfilms of the "Guelph Mercury". Without a local news source recording the facts in at least a little detail, future generations will have nothing to go on. That is part of the job of the "Guelph-Back-Grounder". These articles preserve part of our local history---and the people who are making it, like Marie Snyder. I back everything up on the Internet Archives "Wayback Machine" in the hope that this will preserve significant fractions of our history. If you think this is as important as I do, why not subscribe? It's easy to do with Patreon and Pay Pal.

Cloudwalking Owl · Can People Be Taught How To Think Critically

Pay attention to the point Snyder is making where she talks about how labourious it is to a teach critical thinking. 

 

 

When uncle Fester starts unloading about how he's heard the Rothschilds were behind a Jewish plot that involved space-born laser devices setting last year's California wildfires, we need to remember that it is simply impossible to come up with an argument that will change his mind. That's because the problem isn't the argument he is putting forward, it's the way his mind operates. Teaching children philosophy is not just stuffing facts in their minds, it's about helping them learn how to use their brain to its full potential.

As for the ranking of newspapers and journals, I've mentioned NewsGuard in the past, but I think it might be useful for readers to see what you get when you subscribe to the service. I have the app as an extension in my Thunderbird web browser and when I click on the notorious Breitbart News Network, the little shield on my Thunderbird app turns red and a white exclamation mark pops up on it. When I click on the icon, I get a short synopsis that looks a bit like this. (I couldn't get a screen shot of the pop-up window, but this is pretty much the same thing---only it comes from another part of the message.) 

This is just the synopsis. If you choose to learn more, there is a very long "deep dig" that goes with the ranking that describes things like who owns it, what it's history has been for publishing fake or misleading news stories, and, a lot of hypertext links that allow the interested reader to learn a lot more if so inclined.

If someone throws around a reference to a scientific journal, most people don't really know what to do. There are, however, as Ms. Snyder says, ranking services that allow people to "separate the wheat from the chaff".

There are several of these, but one of the most used is the SCImago Journal Rank (SJR). It creates a rank based on the number of times a given article gets cited as a reference in other articles. The naive reader might think that a "popularity contest" is a weak reed to lean upon, but contrary to the myth perpetuated by countless bad science fiction books and movies, science doesn't advance because of isolated individuals "proving" something in their basement or garage. Instead, it's a collective activity where various institutions with groups of employees share information around the world and collectively piece-together a picture of the world that slowly becomes clearer and clearer. A large part of this process comes by publishing journal articles that allow all the relevant experts to pool their expertise. In effect, science is a consensus-building exercise and the SJR tracks how much a specific article (and the journal that publishes it) fits into the emerging consensus. 

Here's a screenshot of one particular listing for an academic philosophy journal, Noûs. (Click on the picture to get a better image.)

I'd suggest readers pay particular attention to the second set of graphs. That's because it compares the "Total Citations" to "Self-Citations". This is an important thing to understand, because some fake journals try to "spoof" the ranking systems by doing a lot of "self-citations". That is, if your article/journal is ranked according to how often they get cited by another article/journal, it might be possible for a big publisher to "juice the ranking" by just inserting a lot of unnecessary citations. 

 

No one expects the general public to be able to navigate the nuances of an academic ranking system. The NewsGuard system is something that might be more generally used. (I have the app because a local business pays for it in lieu of a subscription to the Back-Grounder.) But the really important thing is for the general public to learn to be a little more humble about their ability to understand what is going on when someone throws a reference to a scientific article into some post on social media. If you don't know how, or don't have the time, the rational thing to do is just tend to follow with the recognized experts are saying instead of someone who says they have "scientific proof" that Jewish space lasers set the California forest fires.

 

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There's a lot to digest in the above, so I'm going stop here and come back to the conversation next week. Until then, wear your mask, keep your distance, try to get along with the people you live with, and, remember that the epidemic will end soon.

 

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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with.