The Saybrook Forum

Information is not like bread

It seems like we live in an age when politicians and “digerati” believe that universities can be replaced by Twitter – no harm done. 

That, suggest Stewart Brand, is because we think that new information is always better.  So what Aristotle thought 2000 years ago is always less relevant than what Ashton Kutcher tweeted five minutes ago. 

But there are other ways of thinking about information.  Here (with a hat tip to Atlantic Blogger Alexis Madrigal) is a passage from one of Brand’s books: 

Most of this book is Used Information. It is reprinted from various issues of The CoEvolution Quarterly, a California-based peculiar magazine. You can look at that news two ways. If you operate by the Bread Model of Information, it's terrible news. You've been gypped - stale information. On the other hand if you view information as something fundamentally different from bread, there's the possibility of good news. Having lived longer, the information here may be wiser, more co-evolved with the world. It may be more refined, having cycled complexly through the minds and responses of 40,000 CQ readers. And it's been through two editorial distillations; the less-than-wonderful and out-of-date may have been extracted.

The notion that there’s value in information that isn’t cutting edge is out of fashion in our world, but it may be crucial to understand in the digital age. 

Is your organization neurotic? Maybe it needs therapy.

Anybody who’s worked for an organization knows it can be … well … neurotic.

Organizations have tics, and blind spots, and habits, just like people do.  So maybe it’s not surprising, in fact it’s brilliant, to apply psychological processes to organizations. 

At the blog Rethinking Complexity, Jorge Taborga examines a Depth Psychology model of organizations, based on the work of Carl Jung.

“The organizational unconscious,” he writes, “is the unique array of ‘energies, contents and truths’ that operate beyond the conscious control of the organization.  It is the bridge between the conscious organization and the collective unconscious.  It provides the psychodynamic environment for these two forces to interplay.”

All of which is to say that organizations have complexes of which they’re not aware;  things that they channel their energies into, without realizing it, that might be neurotic or actively hurtful. 

Existentialism, psychoanalysis ... and the tragedy of life

An essay on The New Existentialists suggests why ideas like existentialism and psychoanalysis -- once mainstayes of Western culture -- suddenly fell out of favor.  

Existentialism and psychoanalysis both view human life as containing tragic elements and hard limits -- we are free, but we can't have everything we want.  According to Carlo Strenger, of Tel Aviv University:   “The tragic dimension (of life) is no longer popular in our culture that perpetuates the myth of ‘just-do-it,’ and repeats the mantra that happiness is a birthright.”

As long as our culture denies life's tragic elements, as long as our science refuses to acknowledge that there may be any limits to our eventual mastery over life (we'll eventually develope Artificial Intelligence ... we'll eventually understand how "mind" reduces to "brain chemicals" ... we'll eventually prolong human life indefinitely and download our consciousness and reach "the singularity" and all you have to do is click your ruby slippers together three times and believe ...) then philosophies that teach us how to live with and through the human condition - however true and useful - will seem out of touch with a culture of Hollywood endings.

Test score fiascos demonstrate, again, how much American education needs a humanistic mission

What’s that?  There was widespread cheating on standardized tests in the Atlanta school system? 

Surprise surprise …

It’s gotten to the point where you can reasonably expect:  if a school district or state doubles down on standardized testing, forces teachers and schools to be held accountable for student scores, and then announcing amazing gains, a major cheating scandal will follow like night and day.

Texas, Washington D.C., Atlanta … all of the “miracle”gains caused by overemphasis on standardized tests have been increases only in smoke and mirrors. 

So our emphasis on high stakes testing isn’t actually increasing student learning … and it’s causing what one analyst called “management by fear” in school systems.  That can’t be good for teachers or principles.

It’s worse for students.  As the Triple-Pundit blog noted, standardized testing actually impedes students’ ability to engage in systems thinking … exactly the kind of creative problem solving most valuable in the 21^st century. 

What are we doing?  Why would we constantly push an educational practice that creates climates of fear, encourage cheating, hurts creative systems thinking, and doesn’t even improve performance? 

Why do we do that?

What's college for in the 21st century?

In a recent essay for The New Yorker, Louis Menard recalls the first time a student ever asked him “Why did we have to read this book?”  It’s the more direct way of asking:  what is this education good for?

It was, apparently, the first time he’d ever thought of the question himself. 

He writes: 

I could see that this was not only a perfectly legitimate question; it was a very interesting question. The students were asking me to justify the return on investment in a college education. I just had never been called upon to think about this before. It wasn’t part of my training. We took the value of the business we were in for granted.

The answer, he decided, depends on what college is for – and nobody’s really sure of that, anymore, are they?

Does our "work self" need therapy too?

Anybody who's had to work for a living knows that we have a "work self" that is noticeably different from who we are outside of work. 

Maybe we're more guarded, or more serious;  maybe there are important parts of our lives we don't talk about. 

At Rethinking Complexity, Dennis Rebelo has an interesting post asking about the stories we tell ourselves about who we are at the office.  It's a great piece, work a read.  It also raises the question:  how do we integrate our work selves with who we are the rest of the time?  Do we like it's a seperate person?  Or a costuem?  Or a side of ourselves? 

How do we navigate our professional obligations while maintaining personal integrity?

If you have some thoughts or advice, leave them in the comments section below.

Neuroscience is starting to sound suspiciously like the 21st century's version of phrenology

You know a scientific field has turned into a scientific fad when it says it’s changed EVERYTHING. 

Real scientific breakthroughs of that scope don’t have to announce themselves.  Fake ones do, because evolutionary psychology never produced a lightbulb and “artificial intelligence” never built a car.  They certainly made advances, they contributed, but the wild claims that they would change everything about human society were the lonely mating call of scientists out on a limb.

If your ears are open, you can hear neurobiology making that same sound. 

In this month’s Atlantic, neuroscientist David Eagleman is crowing about the way his field is going to forever change the criminal justice system. Apparently it has proven … or is on the verge of proving … or probably will eventually prove … or could in theory at some point arguably argue … that there is no free will, only differences in biology. 

Eventually, at some point, probably, possibly, maybe … let’s hypothesize … this will have a huge impact on the way we assign blame in criminal cases.

The fact that it hasn’t done so yet is merely an accident of timing.  Science, Eagleman tells us, will come through:  We’ll get those flying cars eventually.  We always have. 

The trouble is that the case he builds is based on two premises – one of which is indisputably true, and one of which is horrifically wrong. 

Taking collaboration to the fourth dimension

We used to know what "collaboration" meant.  But in the 21st century we can collaborate "in person," or through chat, or video chat, or through email, or "waves," or 3D avatars in a virtual environment.

Are they all the same thing?  Or does the new technology for collaboration mean new kinds of collaboration? 

Organizational Systems PhD student Jan Spencer has looked at the issue, and has an answer.

Let us know what you think.  Has technology changed the way you work with others?  Is it for the better?

A widening gender gap -- for therapists

Is it too hard to find a male therapist? 

A recent article in the New York Times suggested that only one in five new Masters Degrees in therapy are awarded to men … and that this means patients who are seeking a male perspective, or are more comfortable confiding to a man, are out of luck. 

Says the times:

Some college psychology programs cannot even attract male applicants, much less students. And at many therapists’ conferences, attendees with salt-and-pepper beards wander the hallways as lonely as peaceniks at a gun fair.

The result, many therapists argue, is that the profession is at risk of losing its appeal for a large group of sufferers — most of them men — who would like to receive therapy but prefer to start with a male therapist.

Is this a real shift?  Or, more to the point, is it a real problem?

Bread or church? Where does civilization come from?

The story I got in high school is that agriculture was the magic potion that eventually turned “cave men” into “urban man.”  We got together and created a civilization because we wanted to eat. 

The needs of our new farms with their domesticated animals and seasonal crops kept pushing us to bigger and bigger feats of civilization:  the idea is that a culture evolves on its stomach.

But an article in National Geographic says maybe the high school text books got it wrong. It's not "food" - it's "spirituality."

The oldest human architectural structure ever discovered – over 11 thousand years old – turns out to be a temple -- and it turns out that our ancestors were building temples before they were making farms.  

At a time when human beings were living in nomadic tribes, they were also carving massive stone pillars to provide a better place to worship. 

Was it our sense of the sacred – and our need to relate to an awe-inspiring universe – that really inspired civilization?

According to National Geographic, many archeologists say the evidence suggests that’s the case.