Thought Shrapnel

In her review of Daniel Koretz’s new book on testing in schools, Diane Ravitch reminds us of Campbell’s law:

In 1979, the psychologist Donald Campbell proposed an axiom. “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making,” he wrote, “the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”

Ravitch applies this to high-stakes testing in school, using a story from Soviet Russia to bring the point home:

The classic (and probably apocryphal) illustrations of Campbell’s law come from the Soviet Union. When workers were told that they must produce as many nails as possible, they produced vast quantities of tiny and useless nails. When told they would be evaluated by the weight of the nails, they produced enormous and useless nails. The lesson of Campbell’s law: Do not attach high stakes to evaluations, or both the measure and the outcome will become fraudulent.

High stakes testing in schools is pernicious, Ravitch writes:

The children from elite homes are convinced by their test scores that they deserve their high status; their scores demonstrate their superiority. And children of the poor learn early on that they rank poorly; their test scores confirm their lowly status.

Source: New Republic

Perversely, it might take something like the Trump administration to make Open Badges work at scale. Why? Because Republicans don’t trust Higher Education:

Is support for higher ed fragmenting along political lines? It is if you believe the recent Pew poll showing Republicans’ distrust of higher ed is growing relative to Democrats (on a nearly 2-to-1 margin) is not fake news... In any case, look for Trump’s Department of Education to push on the trend toward more “practical” vocational learning and not just apprenticeships. Higher Ed Act proposals this year may push to open up federal financial aid beyond the credit-hour.

Things, of course, are different in the US to the rest of the world. In Europe I think we've always had a different, and more positive, relationship to vocational education.

Source: Education Design Lab

Good advice in this article for people who (like me) are asked regularly whether someone can ‘pick your brain’.

If you decide you do want to give advice, do it on your terms. If they ask to meet for coffee and you don’t have time, send an email instead. If they ask a question that requires a novel-length answer, address one part of it, or send them some helpful links. Don’t fear being explicit that you didn’t have time to answer in full by saying something like: “Thank you for reaching out. Your question requires an answer that I unfortunately do not have time to fully address due to my work. However, you might find the following books/links/thinkers/YouTube videos helpful.”

Given I live in the back of beyond, most of my initial meetings are online, which makes life easier. I give people 30 minutes for free, and then that sometimes leads to them asking me to put together a proposal for them.

What I particularly like about this article is that it encourages readers to find ways to give back to their sector / profession:

Once you’ve created boundaries around when and where you’ll provide help on demand, you can begin looking for other, more expansive avenues for giving back. This can include devoting your time speaking on panels, at schools/universities, on podcasts, or at workshops for free if it’s a cause or audience that would benefit from your knowledge. Though beware of the requests that can often follow on from such engagements, and refer to the third step when answering them.

One thing that's not mentioned in this article that I've found can work is if you offer a 'critical friend' service. This is basically billing them for a day's work at your regular rate, from which they can draw down time for advice when they need it.

Source: Quartz at Work

I discovered ‘John Henry’, the pseudonymous author of this blog, after finding and sharing another post from him earlier this week. He makes a good point in this one about building a home online.

Digitally, I am living in a hotel. Rented space. I can't change the furniture, the furnishing are not mine, if I drink the water it costs me $6.00 per bottle.

It is peaceful in a sterilized, ephemeral way. The next day, I will be gone, and the cleaners will wipe any trace of my existence.

It’s hard to disagree with his metaphor of our life online feeling about as cosy as Eeyore’s house:

In 2002, a site called Myspace was launched, promising you your own space. It was a lie, and it failed. This was the Eeyore Era of home-building, and we haven't progressed much since then.

Source: Clutch of the Dead Hand

In a hugely surprising move, Facebook has found that marking an article as ‘disputed’ on a user’s news feed and putting a red flag next to it makes them want to click on it more. 🙄

The tech giant is doing this in response to academic research it conducted that shows the flags don't work, and they often have the reverse effect of making people want to click even more. Related articles give people more context about what's fake or not, according to Facebook.

The important thing is what comes next:

Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg says Facebook is a technology company that doesn't hire journalists. Without using editorial judgement to determine what's real and what's not, tackling fake news will forever be a technology experiment.

Until Facebook is forced to admit it's a media comoany, and is regulated as such, we'll continue to have these problems around technological solutionism.

Source: Axios

This is an incredible entry in the School of Life’s Book of Life:

The sickness of the good child is that they have no experience of other people being able to tolerate their badness. They have missed out a vital privilege accorded to the healthy child; that of being able to display envious, greedy, egomaniacal sides and yet be tolerated and loved nevertheless.

I know, and have know, plenty of people who are amazing exam-takers and are fantastic at doing what society expects of them. Unfortunately, that's not a great preparation for when life throws you curveballs.

At work, the good adult has problems too. As a child, they follow the rules; never make trouble and take care not to annoy anyone. But following the rules won’t get you very far in adult life. Almost everything that’s interesting, worth doing or important will meet with a degree of opposition. A brilliant idea will always disappoint certain people – and yet very much be worth holding on to. The good child is condemned to career mediocrity and sterile people-pleasing.

As a parent of two strong-willed and feisty children, there's plenty to ponder here.

Source: The Book of Life

Rafael Behr nails it when he says we live in an ‘outrage economy’:

Rage is contagious. It spreads from one sweaty digital crevice to the next, like a fungal infection. It itches like one too. When sitting at the keyboard, it is difficult to perceive wrongness without wanting to scratch it with a caustic retort. But that provides no sustained relief. One side’s scratch is the other side’s itch.

I'm just back from watching Star Wars: The Last Jedi. It's an incredible film with plenty of social commentary. The Rebel Alliance is outraged at what the First Order is doing, just as we're outraged with the order of our society, created by elites.

An outrage economy is lucrative only in an outraged society. Once stoked, the anger becomes self-sustaining, addictive. There is a physiological gratification in rage – a primitive adrenal response that overrides more sophisticated emotions. It can be perversely comforting. Politicised anger feels virtuous. It is the kick of moral purpose, but conveniently stripped of any obligation to consider nuance or alternative perspectives. Hatred of a proposition, or a party, removes interest in understanding why others like it. Self-righteous anger is an excuse not to even try to persuade. St Augustine’s invitation to “love the sinner, hate the sin” does not have much purchase on Twitter.

Perhaps we need to 'use the force' and come into a bit more balance, both individually and as a society. After all, more outrage just feeds the whole edifice from which the bad guys prosper.

Source: The Guardian

Howard Rheingold is one of the smartest and most colourful people I’ve ever met. One of his books, Net Smart, was very useful to me while writing my thesis, and I’ve followed his work for a while now.

That’s why I’m delighted that he’s commenting on our current predicament around the technology that connects our society. He’s suggesting some ways forward — including platform co-operatives.

Questions about the threats of technology often come down to the nature of capitalism: The microtargetted advertising that makes Facebook a conduit for hyperpersonalized propaganda is precisely what makes Facebook such a valuable medium for paid advertising — which is what returns profit to Facebook’s stockholders. So what can be done about that? Some argue that because communism failed, there is no alternative remedy. Yet we are seeing potential alternatives beginning to emerge: while platform cooperativism and profit-from-purpose businesses are relatively new, successful cooperative corporations have existed for more than a century. What other models can be added to this list? Can any central principles or points of leverage be inductively derived by examining these alternatives.

Source: Howard Rheingold

Part of what’s happened over the last 18 months can be attributed to us just getting used to having daily interactions with people around the world. I started doing that 20+ years ago as a teenager, so it’s difficult to imagine what that must be like if you haven’t grown up with the increasing power of connectivity.

Rick Webb points out that the view that we’d automatically be better, connected, might just be incorrect.

We are biological organisms with thousands of years of evolution geared towards villages of 100, 150 people. What on earth made us think that in the span of a single generation, after a couple generations in cities with lots of people around us but wherein we still didn’t actually know that many people, that we could suddenly jump to a global community? If you think about it, it’s insanity. Is there any evidence our brains and hearts can handle it? Has anyone studied it at all?

It’s quite possible that the premise is completely false. And I’m not sure we ever considered for a moment that it could be wrong.

Source: NewCo Shift

Almost everyone has one or more account with the following companies: Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. Between them they know more about you than your family and the state apparatus of your country, combined.

However, 2018 could be the year that changes all that, all thanks to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), as this article explains.

There is legitimate fear that GDPR will threaten the data-profiling gravy train. It’s a direct assault on the surveillance economy, enforced by government regulators and an army of class-action lawyers. “It will require such a rethinking of the way Facebook and Google work, I don’t know what they will do,” says Jonathan Taplin, author of Move Fast and Break Things, a book that’s critical of the platform economy. Companies could still serve ads, but they would not be able to use data to target someone’s specific preferences without their consent. “I saw a study that talked about the difference in value of an ad if platforms track information versus do not track,” says Reback. “If you just honor that, it would cut the value Google could charge for an ad by 80 percent.”

If it was any other industry, these monolithic companies would already have been broken up. However, they may be another, technical, way of restricting their dominance: forcing them to be interoperable so that users can move their data between platforms.

Portability would break one of the most powerful dynamics cementing Big Tech dominance: the network effect. People want to use the social media site their friends use, forcing startups to swim against a huge tide. Competition is not a click away, as Google’s Larry Page once said; the costs of switching are too high. But if you could use a competing social media site with the confidence that you’ll reach all your friends, suddenly the Facebook lock gets jimmied open. This offers the opportunity for competition on the quality and usability of the service rather than the presence of friends.

Source: The American Prospect

I like the notion put forward by Susan Wu in this article — although Maslow’s framework was actually based on co-operation, so re-thinking it as a dynamic hierarchy may be all that’s required:

Perhaps it's time for an updated version of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, one that underscores what’s essential not just for individuals to flourish, but for the greater good of society. Startups and management executives universally invoke this theory as an accepted canon for framing the human problems they’re trying to solve.

The problem is that Maslow’s framework pertains to individual, not societal, well-being. The reality is that individual needs cannot be met without the social cohesion of belonging, connectedness, and symbiotic networks. A revised design focused on a thriving civilization would have at its root empathy and ethics, and acknowledge that if inequality continues to grow at its current pace, societal well-being becomes impossible to achieve.

Source: WIRED

This is a great post, giving an overview of lots of projects focusing on the decentralisation of technology we use everyday, as well as that which underpins it:

It's becoming gradually clearer that the Facebook-Google-Amazon dominated internet (what André Staltz calls the Trinet) is weighing down society, our economy, and our political system. From US congressional hearings in November over Russian social media influence, to increasing macroeconomic concern about productivity and technology monopolization, to bubbling user dissatisfaction with digital walled gardens, forces are brewing to make 2018 a breakout year for contenders looking to shape the Web in the service of human values, opposed to the values of the increasingly attention-grubby advertising industry.

Source: Clutch of the Dead Hand

Photo: NASA

I cannot believe this is happening in my country as we prepare to enter 2018. Food banks and developments like these are born of political choice, not economic necessity.

As reported in The Independent earlier this month, food poverty in Britain is contributing to an increase in Victorian illnesses like rickets and stunted growth in children.

More than 60 per cent of paediatricians believe food insecurity contributed to the ill health among children they treat, according to a 2017 survey by the Royal College of Paediatricians and Child Health.

Dr George Grimble, a medical scientist at University College London, said food poverty was “disastrous” for a child’s development, resulting in nutritional deficits, obesity and squandered potential.

Source: The Independent

My kids, who are ten and six years of age respectively, blatantly don’t believe in Father Christmas. After leaving out a mince pie and glass of whisky last night, they asked this morning whether I’d enjoyed it!

As a church-going family, it’s never been a huge deal as to whether Santa Claus is literally real. Christmas isn’t really about a guy in a red suit furtively climbing down an impossible number of chimneys.

What to tell your children, and when to admit that Father Christmas doesn’t really exist, is still awkward, however. Although there’s a twinkle in my eye when I talk to them about ‘him’, I still haven’t admitted that it’s really me filling the up the stockings at the end of their bed each year.

In this article, Maria Popova quotes the cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead, who read her own children stories about Santa Claus legends from many different countries. The difference between ‘literal’ and ‘poetic’ truth is an important one. Especially this year. And particularly at Christmas.

Disillusionment about the existence of a mythical and wholly implausible Santa Claus has come to be a synonym for many kinds of disillusionment with what parents have told children about birth and death and sex and the glory of their ancestors. Instead, learning about Santa Claus can help give children a sense of the difference between a “fact” — something you can take a picture of or make a tape recording of, something all those present can agree exists — and poetic truth, in which man’s feelings about the universe or his fellow men is expressed in a symbol.

Source: Brain Pickings

There’s a perpetual joke in open source circles that next year will be ‘the year of Linux on the desktop’. GNU/Linux, of course, is an operating system that comes in a range of ‘distributions’ (I use Ubuntu and Elementary OS on a range of devices).

In this article, the author outlines 10 reasons that Linux isn’t used by more people. I think he’s spot-on:

1. Fragmented market
2. Lack of special applications
3. Lack of big name applications
4. Lack of API and ABI stability
5. Apple resurgence
6. Microsoft aggressive response
7. Piracy
8. Red Hat mostly stayed away
9. Canonical business model not working out
10. Original device manufacturer support

That being said, I'm all-in on Linux now. I can't imagine going back to the vendor lock-in provided by macOS, Windows, or Chrome OS.

Source: Christian F.K. Schaller

Shane Parrish from Farnam Street has written an ‘annual letter’ to his audience, much like his hero Warren Buffett. I particularly liked this section:

The people you spend time with shape who you are. As Goethe said, “tell me with whom you consort and I will tell you who you are.” But Goethe didn’t know about the internet. It’s not just the people you spend your time with in person who shape you; the people you spend time with online shape you as well.

Tell me what you read on a regular basis and I will tell you what you likely think. Creepy? Think again. Facebook already knows more about you than your partner does. They know the words that resonate with you. They know how to frame things to get you to click. And they know the thousands of people who look at the same things online that you do.

When you’re reading something online, you’re spending time with someone. These people determine our standards, our defaults, and often our happiness.

Every year, I make a point of reflecting on how I’ve been spending my time. I ask myself who I’m spending my time with and what I’m reading, online and offline. The thread of these questions comes back to a common core: Is where I’m spending my time consistent with who I want to be?

Source: Farnam Street Blog

The image I’ve chosen for this post came via social.coop rather than the article cited, but it does indicate where non-inherited wealth comes from. This wealth is then often used for investment or speculation that then becomes unearned income.

I like the way that the author frames things in terms of how much people retain, rather than how much they earn:

Note that this is a slightly different point than the usual ones made about rich people. For example, it is sometimes claimed that CEOs get paid too much, or that the super-wealthy do not pay enough in taxes. My claim has nothing to do with either of these debates. You can hold my position and simultaneously believe that CEOs should get paid however much a company decides to pay them, and that taxes are a tyrannical form of legalized theft. What I am arguing about is not the question of how much people should be given, but the morality of their retaining it after it is given to them.

Also, I like the idea of a 'maximum moral income':

We can define something like a “maximum moral income” beyond which it’s obviously inexcusable not to give away all of your money. It might be 5o thousand. Call it 100, though. Per person. With an additional 50 allowed per child. This means two parents with a child can still earn $250,000! That’s so much money. And you can keep it. But everyone who earns anything beyond it is obligated to give the excess away in its entirety. The refusal to do so means intentionally allowing others to suffer, a statement which is true regardless of whether you “earned” or “deserved” the income you were originally given. (Personally, I think the maximum moral income is probably much lower, but let’s just set it here so that everyone can agree on it. I do tend to think that moral requirements should be attainable in practice, and a $30k threshold would actually require people experience some deprivation whereas a $100k threshold indisputably still leaves you with an incredibly comfortable lifestyle better than almost any other had by anyone in history.)

Source: Current Affairs

This article, originally given as a lecture, focuses on the worrying fact that we no longer seem to know how to disagree with one another any more. I’ve certainly witnessed this with the ‘hive mind’ on social networks, who are outraged if anyone so much as questions what keyboard warriors see as sacred tenets. 

In other words, to disagree well you must first understand well. You have to read deeply, listen carefully, watch closely. You need to grant your adversary moral respect; give him the intellectual benefit of doubt; have sympathy for his motives and participate empathically with his line of reasoning. And you need to allow for the possibility that you might yet be persuaded of what he has to say.

I subscribe to the view that we should have strong opinions, weakly held. In other words, we shouldnl be neither embarrassed nor reticent to say what we think, but we should be ready to change our mind. This is why the EU 'right to be forgotten' legislation is so important. We grow up, emotionally, physically, and intellectually.

There’s no one answer. What’s clear is that the mis-education begins early. I was raised on the old-fashioned view that sticks and stones could break my bones but words would never hurt me. But today there’s a belief that since words can cause stress, and stress can have physiological effects, stressful words are tantamount to a form of violence. This is the age of protected feelings purchased at the cost of permanent infantilization.

Source: The New York Times

The author of this article works in finance and describes himself as “whatever the opposite of a futurist is”. He does, however, make some decent points, even though he may be a little short-sighted:

In the end, the advantages of the existing human and software systems surrounding transactions — from verifying identity with a driver’s license to calling and clarifying the statements made in a credit disputed transaction to automatically billing your credit card for a newspaper subscription — outweigh the purported benefits, as well as hidden costs, of irrevocable, automated execution. Blockchain enthusiasts often act as if the hard part is getting money from A to B or keeping a record of what happened. In each case, moving money and recording the transaction is actually the cheap, easy, highly-automated part of a much more complex system.

Source: hackernoon

In our house, on the (very) rare occasions we’re watching live television that includes advert breaks, I mute the sound and do a humourous voice-over…

With more homes than ever becoming ‘Netflix Only’ homes, we wanted to see how many hours of commercials kids in these homes are being spared. We were able to determine that kids in ‘Netflix Only’ homes are saved from just over 230 hours of commercials a year when compared to traditional television viewership homes.

Source: Exstreamist