http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/08/rise-of-the-robots/ "I think our eyes have been averted from the capital/labor dimension of inequality, for several reasons. It didn't seem crucial back in the 1990s, and not enough people (me included!) have looked up to notice that things have changed. It has echoes of old-fashioned Marxism -- which shouldn't be a reason to ignore facts, but too often is. And it has really uncomfortable implications.
But I think we'd better start paying attention to those implications."
I posted several comments there. Look at my site for ways to deal with the change after understanding it better. Essentially, we will likely hopefully see a healthy mix of local subsistence via gardening robots and 3D printers, an expanded gift economy like with GNU/Linux & Wikipedia & Thingiverse, An exchange economy softened by a "basic income", and better internet-enhanced democratic participatory planning at all levels.
http://dyslexicfonts.com/ "Your brain can sometimes do funny things to letters. OpenDyslexic tries to help prevent some of these things from happening. Letters have heavy weighted bottoms to add a kind of "gravity" to each letter, helping to keep your brain from rotating them around in ways that can make them look like other letters. Consistently weighted bottoms can also help reinforce the line of text. The unique shapes of each letter can help prevent flipping and swapping."
A program for a handheld that translates wiring colors to text might be helpful too.
Great story. Human characteristics, inclinations, proclivities, talents, and habits and so on can indeed be strengths or weaknesses depending on the situation.
With that said, most people posting here are probably total hypocrites about health. They will go on about "herd immunity" and how immoral parents are who don't vaccinate their children for whatever reasons, but these same posters will then most likely eat junk food, pull all nighters, go to work and school when sick with the flu or whatever else, and not get a vitamin D test, and sit most of the day. Thus, such posters (or their children) will likely spread far more diseases than an unvaccinated kid who eats a lot of fruits & vegetables & beans, avoids junk food, gets enough vitamin D and iodine, stays home when sick, washes their hands, sleeps well, moves around a lot during the day, was breast-fed to age two years or beyond (see WHO guidelines), works or learns mostly from home, and so on. See also: http://www.drfuhrman.com/shop/ChildBookReviews.aspx
The lack of critical reasoning on this subject on slashdot is also saddening, whatever the conclusion. The typical argument here on vaccine safety seems equivalent to someone saying, because the Intel 386 CPU did not have a floating point bug in 1990 and still runs OK now (some version of some vaccine did not cause a specific problem over the years), that means any CPU produced by anyone in 2012 can never possibly have any bugs and will run forever (all vaccine lots are always safe). That's just a nonsensical argument from a quality control standpoint, given many vaccine formulations and production techniques are continually changing. "Past performance is no guarantee of future results."
For all we know, the next lot of flu vaccine rush out could give millions of people AIDS because it was intentionally contaminated at the factory by someone. Specific vaccine lots may or may not be "safe" or "effective" either individually or in combination (ever installed one piece of software that broke something else?), but any discussion about the vaccine issue needs to be a lot deeper than what is apparent here, including issues of systemic risks from a single point of failure and the practical impossibility of providing several human generations of testing in advance when any lot of vaccine is released (especially when it is rushed out). A vaccine is not like a software patch than can be backed out, or in the worst case, be reformatted away. See for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SV40 "SV40 became a highly controversial subject after it was revealed that millions were exposed to the virus after receiving a contaminated polio vaccine."
What's sad is that there are low hanging fruits (and vegetables) that could reduce so much disease in the USA and globally such as vitamin D and eating more veggies. Things like that protect against all disease, including emerging ones. Those basics are being ignored by a
On 6) instructions for virtual machines, there are probably many good ideas for this. One thing I've wanted since implementing my first VM in the early 1980s is to have a way to tell a processor to interpret a sequence of virtual instructions (8 or 16 bit) as calls to a jump table of real instructions. Or perhaps the instructions could be wider (like 64 bit or 128 bit) with extra data beyond the first 8 or 16 bits as a jump indirection being loaded automatically into registers. There would then be instructions to process the next virtual instruction or perhaps to jump to some toerh virtual instruction. This approach is somewhat analagous to "microcode" in the sense that you are defining what virtual instructions do. This kind of support would remove the inner loop speed penalty of a lot of interpretation which can cause programming language virtual machines to run several times slower than native code. I've long thought proprietary CPU vendors would never add such a feature since it makes CPU families more easily interchangeable.
You could talk to people who implement Forth, Smalltalk, and Java language VMs for some general ideas in this direction as well, as a broader area of dynamic language support. In particular, better support for dynamic stack frames (which are objects in themselves in Smalltalk, but usually can be on the CPU stack) could make a language like Smalltalk run faster. Anything that improved support for Smalltalk-like message passing would be a good thing. Basically, ask Chuck Moore, Dan Ingalls or the FONC project what he would like to see. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_H._Moore http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Henry_Holmes_Ingalls,_Jr.#Work http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Something to cosider on social organziation: http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm "To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for. To paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, never believe that a meshwork will suffice to save us."
In general, it seems stability (like of climate) creates diversity of species more than the other way around.
However, like so much of life, there are tradeoffs. Diversity maintained by exchange networks (including sex and migration) helps a species or community be resilient in the face of some threats, while isolationanism (which tends to reduce diversity) helps protect against other sorts of threats.
See also Manuel De Landa on "Meshworks, Hierarchies, and Interfaces": http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm "To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation."
Evolution also happens at all levels of all systems (genetic and memetic) all the time across every possible combination -- despite narrow views of what is going on (e.g. "The Selfish Gene").
It would be great to have more FOSS simulations on these themes.
http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html "The world's most primitive people have few possessions. but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilisation. It has grown with civilisation, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo."
I agree risks have increased. We need to think bigger than just the risks though. At the same time, we need to think different on Earth: http://anwot.org/
Problem is, most people are still enmeshed in "scarcity" thinking -- even with the tools of abundance at their fingertips. So, rather than build solutions, we build drones to fight over the problems.
"In the U.K., the Office for National Statistics says there were just 756,000 working days lost to strikes last year, way down from the million or so days lost in 2007. As of May, the figure stood at just 32,000 days for 2009. Even assuming an upsurge in the summer, that's a long way from the kind of industrial mayhem Britain saw in 1979, when almost 30 million days were lost to strike action. It's a simple case of reasoning, experts say. "When workers feel confident in their job security is when they are more likely to strike," says Gregor Gall, a professor of industrial relations at the University of Hertfordshire."
In general, this is part of the ongoing downward spiral for labor that is just getting started. As automation increases, like through better robots or 3D printers, and as improved designs come along that take less effort to put together or last longer, there will be even less need for paid labor. So, the people who still have jobs will be afraid to strike or in other ways rock the boat. So, they will let themselves be exploited more and more just to keep food on the table. Because worker usually get fringe benefits, and because it takes money to hire and train workers, even as unemployment rises, it makes economic sense for companies (up to a point near collapse) to work the workers they have even harder, for less money, than it does to hire more workers, even at low wages. Increased worker suffering (including by worker's families and communities) becomes just one more negative externality that business owners can pass on to society, socializing the costs of their business while privatizing the profits.
Possible counters to this trend include: * government regulation of working conditions including hours (like in France); * a basic income so that workers have a choice not to work (forcing employers to make jobs better to attract workers); and * companies realizing that overworked workers produce products with lower quality or less innovation, and so voluntarily limiting hours and improving working conditions.
So, it would seem that strikes will be less and less likely in the future as a general trend, although it is possible that one big national or global strike might happen at some point when people realize that major positive social change is going to be now or never.
Any strike will be pointless in the long term unless it is about structural reform in our economy and society. Just striking to get slightly higher pay (or just to keep what one has) or to get slightly better benefits, which has been useful to many groups in the past, is not going to be very effective in the long term if these other trends continue towards decreasing the value of labor relative to automation and improved design.
What good is it to get more money and more benefits for fewer and fewer remaining workers while they wait for their own jobs to be lost to automation and improved design? Yet, this has been the strategy of most unions for many years. The failure of the US American automakers in Detroit shows how, in the long run, unions creating private welfare states within individual corporations does not work well anymore for union members or anyone else in society these days. The companies become less competitive relative to other companies that pay less and embrace automation and better design, and so they fail, taking all the union jobs with them.
We are possibly past the point where union actions related to single companies make much sense. If unions are to have any major role i
With a basic income, much of the argument for copyright fades away (if it ever made sense), because everyone would be able to spend their time creating free software and free content if they so desired. Or people could put their time into other "volunteer" efforts whether with local charities or even just trying to be good parents, good friends, and good neighbors, which could overall make the world a much happier place.
Highlights from: http://www.storycoloredglasses.com/2010/01/water-water-everywhere-nor-any-drop-to.html "There were three essential reasons I left Facebook after only a short time. First, the privacy issue was big. To begin with, I set up separate accounts for my work and personal selves, which I've read is something many businesspeople are doing. I managed it, but it was an uneasy start, and later I found myself going back to my privacy settings often to check and recheck that I had things properly set. The kerfuffle that happened a few weeks ago where you couldn't log on without being pestered to reduce your privacy was reminiscent of the guilty-until-proven-innocent feeling of just having bought a Microsoft product....
Nobody has only one face... The second reason for quitting Facebook was that I didn't want to know everything it told me. (You know that joke, "That was more than I needed to know!") People tell different people different things. They present different faces to different people. Facebook may have started with one face (college classmates), but now it mixes faces together, or at least it does if people are not scrupulous about setting up separate lists (and most aren't). Within minutes of starting to use Facebook I was seeing things relatives and friends said to their friends and relatives, things that I would never have known they said, things I didn't like, things that made me feel sad to find out that we have so little in common and disagree about so much. You could argue that I should revel in the transparency and argue with people and learn about them and wade deep into the mayhem, but hey - this is the real social world we are talking about, not a game. Some arguments can never be won, and the stakes are high, and I have better things to do with my time....
The third thing about Facebook is, it sets you up for an obligatory time drain. It is so easy to "friend" somebody you barely know that you end up with social obligations that don't match the relationships. Putting my father in the same list as a guy I barely remember from high school just doesn't make sense. The obligations I feel towards those two people differ by orders of magnitude, but in Facebook it all looks the same. (No offense to that guy - See? I just felt a social obligation to say that!) I found myself feeling socially obligated to review and comment on things people I've never met have been doing, and I perused picture after picture trying to figure out if I knew any of the people in them. I only got up to 25 "friends" so I can see how this sort of thing could take up huge amounts of time. The social obligation to say something, anything, is overpowering...."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_Folded_Hands "... Disturbed at his encounter, Underhill rushes home to discover that his wife has taken in a new lodger, a mysterious old man named Sledge. In the course of the next day, the new mechanicals have appeared everywhere in town. They state that they only follow the Prime Directive: ''to serve and obey and guard men from harm". Offering their services free of charge, they replace humans as police officers, bank tellers and eventually drive Underhill out of business. Despite the Humanoids' benign appearance and mission, Underhill soon realizes that, in the name of their Prime Directive, the mechanicals have essentially taken over every aspect of human life. No humans may engage in any behavior that might endanger them, and every human action is carefully scrutinized. Suicide is prohibited. Humans who resist the Prime Directive are taken away and lobotomized, so that they may live happily under the direction of the humanoids...."
See also my essay from a decade ago: http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html#what_have_funding_policies_in_automotive_intelligence_wrought "Consider again the self-driving cars mentioned earlier which now cruise some streets in small numbers. The software "intelligence" doing the driving was primarily developed by public money given to universities, which generally own the copyrights and patents as the contractors. Obviously there are related scientific publications, but in practice these fail to do justice to the complexity of such systems. The truest physical representation of the knowledge learned by such work is the codebase plus email discussions of it (plus what developers carry in their heads).
We are about to see the emergence of companies licensing that publicly funded software and selling modified versions of such software as proprietary products. There will eventually be hundreds or thousands of paid automotive software engineers working on such software no matter how it is funded, because there will be great value in having such self-driving vehicles given the result of America's horrendous urban planning policies leaving the car as generally the most efficient means of transport in the suburb. The question is, will the results of the work be open for inspection and contribution by the public? Essentially, will those engineers and their employers be "owners" of the software, or will they instead be "stewards" of a larger free and open community development process? "
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/fears.htm ==== The race is on to make the human world a better (and more resilient) place before one of these overwhelms us:
* Autonomous military robots out of control
* Nanotechnology virus / gray slime
* Ethnically targeted virus
* Sterility virus
* Computer virus
* Asteroid impact
* Y2K
* Other unforeseen computer failure mode
* Global warming / climate change / flooding
* Nuclear / biological war
* Unexpected economic collapse from Chaos effects
* Terrorism w/ unforeseen wide effects
* Out of control bureaucracy (1984)
* Religious / philosophical warfare
* Economic imbalance leading to world war
* Arms race leading to world war
* Zero-point energy tap out of control
* Time-space information system spreading failure effect (Chalker's Zinder Nullifier)
* Unforeseen consequences of research (energy, weapons, informational, biological) ====
The solution I proposed there was developing a free and open source distributed library of information about how to make things, working towards the goal of creating self-replicating space habitats that can duplicate themselves from sunlight and asteroidal ore.
However, since then I think the deepest issue is changing how we thing, so we can move beyond, as in my sig, the irony of using the technologies of abundance from a perspective of fighting over misperceived scarcity. Bucky Fuller talked about that too, in moving from "weaponry" to "livingry". See also: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html http://anwot.org/
Here are some emails I wrote to Ray Kurzewil on these themes years ago that someone else put up on their site: http://heybryan.org/fernhout/
I essentially suggested that uploaded human minds would have their runtime consumed by the digital equivalent of natively-evolved digital piranha. I also suggested that the direction we come out of any singularity may have a lot to do with the moral direction we are pursuing as we go into it -- and that AI created mainly out of human military and economic competitiveness against other humans probably would not node well for having a happy singularity. That is why it is important to move our global society into a more compassionate direction before creating such AIs.
Six years ago I posted some related ideas on your blog about a workshop the Shuttleworth Foundation held: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/26#comment-397 "[Responding to: "Amazing two day workshop on programming and education" where you wrote: "I'm all fired up after two days of the most amazing work bringing together some very remarkable people to talk about a TSF strategy to ensure that we can give the next generation excellent analytical skills despite the global collapse in the supply of maths teaching capacity."]... So why build software tools oriented towards schools and a compulsory "curriculum" if the real goal is helping kids educate themselves and become productive citizens of the 21st century? Yes, schools could be made a bit less terrible, but why spend rare philanthropic dollars for such a meager outcome? Someone like Mark Shuttleworth has so much potential as an agent of positive change, but it seems like, despite the fact that his effort will do some small good for some school kids, it is mostly a non-starter as far as significant change."
Have your thoughts changed any since then after trying educational reform the old-fashioned school-based way? See also for more background my 2007 essay which grew out of discussion on the Python edusig list related to your workshop and my trying to create some new free software in a constructivist and unschooling direction: http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html "Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change.... So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process."
"In the laboratory, Latour and Woolgar observed that a typical experiment produces only inconclusive data that is attributed to failure of the apparatus or experimental method, and that a large part of scientific training involves learning how to make the subjective decision of what data to keep and what data to throw out. To an untrained outsider, Latour and Woolgar argued the entire process resembles not an unbiased search for truth and accuracy but a mechanism for ignoring data that contradicts scientific orthodoxy."
"Textbooks present science as a noble search for truth, in which progress depends on questioning established ideas. But for many scientists, this is a cruel myth. They know from bitter experience that disagreeing with the dominant view is dangerous - especially when that view is backed by powerful interest groups. Call it suppression of intellectual dissent. The usual pattern is that someone does research or speaks out in a way that threatens a powerful interest group, typically a government, industry or professional body. As a result, representatives of that group attack the critic's ideas or the critic personally-by censoring writing, blocking publications, denying appointments or promotions, withdrawing research grants, taking legal actions, harassing, blacklisting, spreading rumors. (1)"
"Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this, not the least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict of interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same resources. This point seems to be another one of those relativistic anomalies, obvious to any outside observer, but invisible to those of us who are falling into the black hole. It would take impossibly high ethical standards for referees to avoid taking advantage of their privileged anonymity to advance their own interests, but as time goes on, more and more referees have their ethical standards eroded as a consequence of having themselves been victimized by unfair reviews when they were authors. Peer review is thus one among many examples of practices that were well suited to the time of exponential expansion, but will become increasingly dysfunctional in the difficult future we face. "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8_8773TUmA http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199112--02.htm http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/200111--02.htm http://www.chomsky.info/articles/200205--02.htm http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/200401--.htm "There are two ways to approach the study of terrorism. One may adopt a literal approach, taking the topic seriously, or a propagandistic approach, construing the concept of terrorism as a weapon to be exploited in the service of some system of power. In each case it is clear how to proceed. Pursuing the literal approach, we begin by determining what constitutes terrorism. We then seek instances of the phenomenon -- concentrating on the major examples, if we are serious -- and try to determine causes and remedies. The propagandistic approach dictates a different course. We begin with the thesis that terrorism is the responsibility of some officially designated enemy. We then designate terrorist acts as "terrorist" just in the cases where they can be attributed (whether plausibly or not) to the required source; otherwise they are to be ignored, suppressed, or termed "retaliation" or "self-defence."
It comes as no surprise that the propagandistic approach is adopted by governments generally, and by their instruments in totalitarian states. More interesting is the fact that the same is largely true of the media and scholarship in the Western industrial democracies, as has been documented in extensive detail.1 "We must recognize," Michael Stohl observes, "that by convention -- and it must be emphasized only by convention -- great power use and the threat of the use of force is normally described as coercive diplomacy and not as a form of terrorism," though it commonly involves "the threat and often the use of violence for what would be described as terroristic purposes were it not great powers who were pursuing the very same tactic."2 Only one qualification must be added: the term "great powers" must be restricted to favored states; in the Western conventions under discussion, the Soviet Union is granted no such rhetorical license, and indeed can be charged and convicted on the flimsiest of evidence....
There are many terrorist states in the world, but the United States is unusual in that it is officially committed to international terrorism, and on a scale that puts its rivals to shame...."
By that standard, there are a lot more twitter feeds the US government should be shutting down if it wants to shut down any feed that can remotely be construed as supporting "terrorism". That could begin with, if one accepts Chomsky's argument (and he is a professional linguist), some of the feeds put put by the US government. Where does it end? Freedom of speech is an ideal for a reason. How about a parallel twitter feed run by the US State Department that rebuts the Hamas feed point-by-point and tweet-by-tweet?
"Of course, you're going to have to take my word for it that this communication is not a fabrication, because I'm not handing over my gmail password."
Even if you supplied your gmail password, and I checked your account, a message could still be faked if you had a friend at Google or did funky things with email routing.:-) I'm not saying that message is fake -- it sounds completely like something an assistant of Gatto might say. (He even offered to help resolve a particular point or two.)
I'm just suggesting that a citation may not really "prove" anything if one is hardnosed about it. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority Or George Orwell: http://orwell.ru/library/articles/nose/english/e_nose "There is no use in multiplying examples. The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield."
What has happened in the USA is that ideas like compulsory schooling (and a variety of other things, like linking the right to consume to having a job) is starting to bump up again the solid reality of 21st century high technology and the 21st century and ideas spreading across the planet. Bullying growing as a problem in schools and so kids hiding their talents is just one example of many. I wrote my own essay on that a few years back: http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html
Anyway, just because one, or even several, of an author's points can't be substantiated, or are even completely wrong, does not necessarily invalidate a broader message. It depends on how central the specific points are to the overall argument. How many citations do you see in the essays of Mark Twain or the poems of Maya Angelou?
"I know this because I emailed him looking for a citation once, and his assistant returned my email and told me"
Citation please?:-) Or are anecdotes, like in Gattos' story, permissible as evidence in discussion?
Yes, in one of Gatto's books he says he wants readers to research this for themselves. See: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue8.htm "Despite its title, Underground History isn't a history proper, but a collection of materials toward a history, embedded in a personal essay analyzing why mass compulsion schooling is unreformable. The history I have unearthed is important to our understanding; it's a good start, I believe, but much remains undone. The burden of an essay is to reveal its author so candidly and thoroughly that the reader comes fully awake. You are about to spend twenty-five to thirty hours with the mind of a schoolteacher, but the relationship we should have isn't one of teacher to pupil but rather that of two people in conversation. I'll offer ideas and a theory to explain things and you bring your own experience to bear on the matters, supplementing and arguing where necessary. Read with this goal before you and I promise your money's worth. It isn't important whether we agree on every detail.
A brief word on sources. I've identified all quotations and paraphrases and given the origin of many (not all) individual facts, but for fear the forest be lost in contemplation of too many trees, I've avoided extensive footnoting. So much here is my personal take on things that it seemed dishonest to grab you by the lapels that way: of minor value to those who already resonate on the wavelength of the book, useless, even maddening, to those who do not."
What Gatto does have is a free online book that goes into depth into this based on his award-winning thirty years of experience teaching in the NYC public school system. Disagree with him and his perspspective and analysis perhaps, but at least he writes from a tremendous amount of first-hand experience.
One of the hard things about following Izzy Kalman's advice is that if you only "just don't give 'em the satisfaction" 90% of the time, the other 10% puts them on a random reinforcement schedule with is the most powerful form of reward. It has to be 100%. If so, then it is going to take care of 95% or so of bullying situations, I would guess. Also, Izzy Kalman talks about other ways that people can become less of a bully magnet through personal development (including learning to see someone else's point of view, even that of a "bully", a sort of Dale Carnegie aspect). And as he also say, nothing stops teasing 100%. It seems part of human nature to playfully tease. He only says his approach will get rid of much of the teasing, not all. He tries to stop the escalation of teasing into something serious. And he tries to uphold basic ideas of democracy like freedom of speech.
But with that said, I've also been critical of Izzy's approach. My concern is, as great as his ideas, there are environmental factors contributing to dysfunctional human behavior especially in kids today such as: * poor nutrition, especially lack of vegetables and omega 3s * food additives * lack of sunlight and vitamin D * lack of exercise * certain children's media http://dianeelevin.com/books/ * economic stress including overworked two-income families and single parent families * family breakdown * lack of interaction with nature * school teachers modeling violating boundaries with authoritarianism inherent in what they do * the inability to escape the classroom situation so you could otherwise choose where you want to spend your time and who you want to spend it with * the pressured medication of children * and probably other things which together make the whole social environment more prone to bullying, especially in school. Especially issues like poor nutrition and such are going to contribute to more mentally unstable people in our society. Izzy Kalman does not address these fundamental things. Also, a case can be made for social ideals that promote cooperation rather than model competition (Alfie Kohn's point). An approach towards bullying that integrates both Izzy Kalman's insights and addressing these other environmental aspects is going to be more effective IMHO. But any combined approach would need to respect Izzy Kalman's core points about things like freedom of speech, the golden rule, and cycles of escalation.
Izzy Kalman has numerous testimonials on his site, and is himself a school psychologist. His suggestions make sense to me from what I know about cybernetics and psychology, as well as from personal experience.
Because Izzy Kalman gives away so much for free online with books and videos and essays, the fact that he presumably charges for workshops and consulting, and sells printed books and CDs does not really bother me much. I'd agree if might be better if some foundation funded his work. I just don't get the feeling he is in it for the money. Still, you are probably right to think that is more of a US thing.
It doesn't matter if kids are smarter, dumber, shorter, taller, fatter, thinner, darker, lighter, or whatever -- any noticeable difference (or even none at all except being on the other side of the room) is something someone else can try to make fun of. Most bullying situations can be handled by following Izzy Kalman's advice which teaches the vitim how to break a cycle of social behavior by just not responding in old ways that give the aggressor rewards, and he points out the few percent of bullying situations which can't. He suggests most current anti-bullying laws often just make the probem worse because they ignore the underlying social system dynamics. Serious violence rarely comes out of nowhere. There is a pattern of escalation, and Izzy Kalman's ideas, based on "The Golden Rule" and "Love Your Bullies" are ways out of that escalation.
From John Taylor Gatto's The Underground History of American Education: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue.htm ==== Our problem in understanding forced schooling stems from an inconvenient fact: that the wrong it does from a human perspective is right from a systems perspective. You can see this in the case of six-year-old Bianca, who came to my attention because an assistant principal screamed at her in front of an assembly, "BIANCA, YOU ANIMAL, SHUT UP!" Like the wail of a banshee, this sang the school doom of Bianca. Even though her body continued to shuffle around, the voodoo had poisoned her.
Do I make too much of this simple act of putting a little girl in her place? It must happen thousands of times every day in schools all over. I've seen it many times, and if I were painfully honest I'd admit to doing it many times. Schools are supposed to teach kids their place. That's why we have age-graded classes. In any case, it wasn't your own little Janey or mine.
Most of us tacitly accept the pragmatic terms of public school which allow every kind of psychic violence to be inflicted on Bianca in order to fulfill the prime directive of the system: putting children in their place. It's called "social efficiency." But I get this precognition, this flash-forward to a moment far in the future when your little girl Jane, having left her comfortable home, wakes up to a world where Bianca is her enraged meter maid, or the passport clerk Jane counts on for her emergency ticket out of the country, or the strange lady who lives next door.
I picture this animal Bianca grown large and mean, the same Bianca who didn't go to school for a month after her little friends took to whispering, "Bianca is an animal, Bianca is an animal," while Bianca, only seconds earlier a human being like themselves, sat choking back tears, struggling her way through a reading selection by guessing what the words meant.
In my dream I see Bianca as a fiend manufactured by schooling who now regards Janey as a vehicle for vengeance. In a transport of passion she:
1. Gives Jane's car a ticket before the meter runs out.
2. Throws away Jane's passport application after Jane leaves the office.
3. Plays heavy metal music through the thin partition which separates Bianca's apartment from Jane's while Jane pounds frantically on the wall for relief.
4. All the above.
You aren't compelled to loan your car to anyone who wants it, but you are compelled to surrender your school-age child to strangers who process children for a livelihood, even though one in every nine schoolchildren is terrified of physical harm happening to them in school, terrified with good cause; about thirty-three are murdered there every year. From 1992 through 1999, 262 children were murdered in school in the United States. Your great-great-grandmother didn't have to surrender her children. What happened?
If I demanded you give up your television to an anonymous, itinerant repairman who needed work you'd think I was crazy; if I came with a policeman who forced you to pay that repairman even after he broke your set, you would be outraged. Why are you so docile when you give up your child to a government agent called a schoolteacher?
I want to open up concealed aspects of modern schooling such as the deterioration it forces in the morality of parenting. You have no say at all in choosing your teachers. You know nothing about their backgrounds or families. And the state knows little more than you do. This is as radical a piece of social engineering as the human imagination can conceive. What does it mean?
One thing you do know is how unlikely it will be for any teacher to understand the personality of your particular child or anything significant about yo
Slashdot Mirror
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/08/rise-of-the-robots/
"I think our eyes have been averted from the capital/labor dimension of inequality, for several reasons. It didn't seem crucial back in the 1990s, and not enough people (me included!) have looked up to notice that things have changed. It has echoes of old-fashioned Marxism -- which shouldn't be a reason to ignore facts, but too often is. And it has really uncomfortable implications.
But I think we'd better start paying attention to those implications."
I posted several comments there. Look at my site for ways to deal with the change after understanding it better. Essentially, we will likely hopefully see a healthy mix of local subsistence via gardening robots and 3D printers, an expanded gift economy like with GNU/Linux & Wikipedia & Thingiverse, An exchange economy softened by a "basic income", and better internet-enhanced democratic participatory planning at all levels.
Behavior therapy makes a lot of sense. It is amazing what the brain is capable of as it growns new connections. Other approahces like addressing vitamin D deficiency, vegetable deficiency, and other things like iodine deificency and omega 3 deficiency may help too, as can removing food dyes and artifical flavors etc... Good luck. Below are some links on those other topics.
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/neurological-conditions/autism/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/autism-research-discovery_b_794967.html
http://www.drfuhrman.com/children/default.aspx
http://dyslexicfonts.com/
"Your brain can sometimes do funny things to letters. OpenDyslexic tries to help prevent some of these things from happening. Letters have heavy weighted bottoms to add a kind of "gravity" to each letter, helping to keep your brain from rotating them around in ways that can make them look like other letters. Consistently weighted bottoms can also help reinforce the line of text. The unique shapes of each letter can help prevent flipping and swapping."
Also consider looking into vitamin D and other nutritional stuff:
http://www.ontrackreading.com/dyslexia-puzzle/the-diet-piece-of-the-dyslexia-puzzle
A program for a handheld that translates wiring colors to text might be helpful too.
Great story. Human characteristics, inclinations, proclivities, talents, and habits and so on can indeed be strengths or weaknesses depending on the situation.
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/neurological-conditions/autism/
Especially during pregnancy, due to our indoors lifestyles. There may be other causes too, including vegetable deficiency disease, but vitamin D deficiency is a apparently a big one. Other possible causes:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/autism-research-discovery_b_794967.html
With that said, most people posting here are probably total hypocrites about health. They will go on about "herd immunity" and how immoral parents are who don't vaccinate their children for whatever reasons, but these same posters will then most likely eat junk food, pull all nighters, go to work and school when sick with the flu or whatever else, and not get a vitamin D test, and sit most of the day. Thus, such posters (or their children) will likely spread far more diseases than an unvaccinated kid who eats a lot of fruits & vegetables & beans, avoids junk food, gets enough vitamin D and iodine, stays home when sick, washes their hands, sleeps well, moves around a lot during the day, was breast-fed to age two years or beyond (see WHO guidelines), works or learns mostly from home, and so on. See also:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/shop/ChildBookReviews.aspx
The lack of critical reasoning on this subject on slashdot is also saddening, whatever the conclusion. The typical argument here on vaccine safety seems equivalent to someone saying, because the Intel 386 CPU did not have a floating point bug in 1990 and still runs OK now (some version of some vaccine did not cause a specific problem over the years), that means any CPU produced by anyone in 2012 can never possibly have any bugs and will run forever (all vaccine lots are always safe). That's just a nonsensical argument from a quality control standpoint, given many vaccine formulations and production techniques are continually changing. "Past performance is no guarantee of future results."
For all we know, the next lot of flu vaccine rush out could give millions of people AIDS because it was intentionally contaminated at the factory by someone. Specific vaccine lots may or may not be "safe" or "effective" either individually or in combination (ever installed one piece of software that broke something else?), but any discussion about the vaccine issue needs to be a lot deeper than what is apparent here, including issues of systemic risks from a single point of failure and the practical impossibility of providing several human generations of testing in advance when any lot of vaccine is released (especially when it is rushed out). A vaccine is not like a software patch than can be backed out, or in the worst case, be reformatted away. See for example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SV40
"SV40 became a highly controversial subject after it was revealed that millions were exposed to the virus after receiving a contaminated polio vaccine."
Diseases are also continually evolving.
So much of modern medicine and modern science (as well as the holistic industries) is full of social problems that people on all sides of this question may want to do their own research and think more deeply on this topic. Some related quotes:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science
What's sad is that there are low hanging fruits (and vegetables) that could reduce so much disease in the USA and globally such as vitamin D and eating more veggies. Things like that protect against all disease, including emerging ones. Those basics are being ignored by a
On 6) instructions for virtual machines, there are probably many good ideas for this. One thing I've wanted since implementing my first VM in the early 1980s is to have a way to tell a processor to interpret a sequence of virtual instructions (8 or 16 bit) as calls to a jump table of real instructions. Or perhaps the instructions could be wider (like 64 bit or 128 bit) with extra data beyond the first 8 or 16 bits as a jump indirection being loaded automatically into registers. There would then be instructions to process the next virtual instruction or perhaps to jump to some toerh virtual instruction. This approach is somewhat analagous to "microcode" in the sense that you are defining what virtual instructions do. This kind of support would remove the inner loop speed penalty of a lot of interpretation which can cause programming language virtual machines to run several times slower than native code. I've long thought proprietary CPU vendors would never add such a feature since it makes CPU families more easily interchangeable.
You could talk to people who implement Forth, Smalltalk, and Java language VMs for some general ideas in this direction as well, as a broader area of dynamic language support. In particular, better support for dynamic stack frames (which are objects in themselves in Smalltalk, but usually can be on the CPU stack) could make a language like Smalltalk run faster. Anything that improved support for Smalltalk-like message passing would be a good thing. Basically, ask Chuck Moore, Dan Ingalls or the FONC project what he would like to see.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_H._Moore
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Henry_Holmes_Ingalls,_Jr.#Work
http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
See especially JP Hogan's Voyage From Yesteryear: http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary
BTW, some social semantic desktop ideas to consider for Tonika (but in Java): https://github.com/pdfernhout/Pointrel20120623
Something to cosider on social organziation: http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for. To paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, never believe that a meshwork will suffice to save us."
Se also on new economic balances my "Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
Thanks for the great post! See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciplined_Minds
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenophobia
http://phys.org/news/2012-02-classic-ecological-stability-years.html
In general, it seems stability (like of climate) creates diversity of species more than the other way around.
However, like so much of life, there are tradeoffs. Diversity maintained by exchange networks (including sex and migration) helps a species or community be resilient in the face of some threats, while isolationanism (which tends to reduce diversity) helps protect against other sorts of threats.
See also Manuel De Landa on "Meshworks, Hierarchies, and Interfaces":
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation."
Evolution also happens at all levels of all systems (genetic and memetic) all the time across every possible combination -- despite narrow views of what is going on (e.g. "The Selfish Gene").
It would be great to have more FOSS simulations on these themes.
http://www.squidoo.com/walkingwhileworking
http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html
"The world's most primitive people have few possessions. but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilisation. It has grown with civilisation, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo."
http://tmp2.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
I agree risks have increased. We need to think bigger than just the risks though. At the same time, we need to think different on Earth: http://anwot.org/
Problem is, most people are still enmeshed in "scarcity" thinking -- even with the tools of abundance at their fingertips. So, rather than build solutions, we build drones to fight over the problems.
http://www.beyondajoblessrecovery.org/2009/11/16/can-unions-and-strikes-still-make-a-difference/index.html
====
Here is an article about how workers and strikes in a recession:
"Europe's Strikers More Scarce in the Recession"
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1914328,00.html
"In the U.K., the Office for National Statistics says there were just 756,000 working days lost to strikes last year, way down from the million or so days lost in 2007. As of May, the figure stood at just 32,000 days for 2009. Even assuming an upsurge in the summer, that's a long way from the kind of industrial mayhem Britain saw in 1979, when almost 30 million days were lost to strike action. It's a simple case of reasoning, experts say. "When workers feel confident in their job security is when they are more likely to strike," says Gregor Gall, a professor of industrial relations at the University of Hertfordshire."
In general, this is part of the ongoing downward spiral for labor that is just getting started. As automation increases, like through better robots or 3D printers, and as improved designs come along that take less effort to put together or last longer, there will be even less need for paid labor. So, the people who still have jobs will be afraid to strike or in other ways rock the boat. So, they will let themselves be exploited more and more just to keep food on the table. Because worker usually get fringe benefits, and because it takes money to hire and train workers, even as unemployment rises, it makes economic sense for companies (up to a point near collapse) to work the workers they have even harder, for less money, than it does to hire more workers, even at low wages. Increased worker suffering (including by worker's families and communities) becomes just one more negative externality that business owners can pass on to society, socializing the costs of their business while privatizing the profits.
Possible counters to this trend include:
* government regulation of working conditions including hours (like in France);
* a basic income so that workers have a choice not to work (forcing employers to make jobs better to attract workers); and
* companies realizing that overworked workers produce products with lower quality or less innovation, and so voluntarily limiting hours and improving working conditions.
So, it would seem that strikes will be less and less likely in the future as a general trend, although it is possible that one big national or global strike might happen at some point when people realize that major positive social change is going to be now or never.
Any strike will be pointless in the long term unless it is about structural reform in our economy and society. Just striking to get slightly higher pay (or just to keep what one has) or to get slightly better benefits, which has been useful to many groups in the past, is not going to be very effective in the long term if these other trends continue towards decreasing the value of labor relative to automation and improved design.
What good is it to get more money and more benefits for fewer and fewer remaining workers while they wait for their own jobs to be lost to automation and improved design? Yet, this has been the strategy of most unions for many years. The failure of the US American automakers in Detroit shows how, in the long run, unions creating private welfare states within individual corporations does not work well anymore for union members or anyone else in society these days. The companies become less competitive relative to other companies that pay less and embrace automation and better design, and so they fail, taking all the union jobs with them.
We are possibly past the point where union actions related to single companies make much sense. If unions are to have any major role i
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
With a basic income, much of the argument for copyright fades away (if it ever made sense), because everyone would be able to spend their time creating free software and free content if they so desired. Or people could put their time into other "volunteer" efforts whether with local charities or even just trying to be good parents, good friends, and good neighbors, which could overall make the world a much happier place.
Highlights from: http://www.storycoloredglasses.com/2010/01/water-water-everywhere-nor-any-drop-to.html ... ... The second reason for quitting Facebook was that I didn't want to know everything it told me. (You know that joke, "That was more than I needed to know!") People tell different people different things. They present different faces to different people. Facebook may have started with one face (college classmates), but now it mixes faces together, or at least it does if people are not scrupulous about setting up separate lists (and most aren't). Within minutes of starting to use Facebook I was seeing things relatives and friends said to their friends and relatives, things that I would never have known they said, things I didn't like, things that made me feel sad to find out that we have so little in common and disagree about so much. You could argue that I should revel in the transparency and argue with people and learn about them and wade deep into the mayhem, but hey - this is the real social world we are talking about, not a game. Some arguments can never be won, and the stakes are high, and I have better things to do with my time. ... ..."
"There were three essential reasons I left Facebook after only a short time. First, the privacy issue was big. To begin with, I set up separate accounts for my work and personal selves, which I've read is something many businesspeople are doing. I managed it, but it was an uneasy start, and later I found myself going back to my privacy settings often to check and recheck that I had things properly set. The kerfuffle that happened a few weeks ago where you couldn't log on without being pestered to reduce your privacy was reminiscent of the guilty-until-proven-innocent feeling of just having bought a Microsoft product.
Nobody has only one face
The third thing about Facebook is, it sets you up for an obligatory time drain. It is so easy to "friend" somebody you barely know that you end up with social obligations that don't match the relationships. Putting my father in the same list as a guy I barely remember from high school just doesn't make sense. The obligations I feel towards those two people differ by orders of magnitude, but in Facebook it all looks the same. (No offense to that guy - See? I just felt a social obligation to say that!) I found myself feeling socially obligated to review and comment on things people I've never met have been doing, and I perused picture after picture trying to figure out if I knew any of the people in them. I only got up to 25 "friends" so I can see how this sort of thing could take up huge amounts of time. The social obligation to say something, anything, is overpowering.
Google Groups solves some of this, but not all.
Disclaimer: She has ideas for something called Rakontu she feels would be better:
http://www.storycoloredglasses.com/2010/08/steal-these-ideas.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_Folded_Hands ..."
"... Disturbed at his encounter, Underhill rushes home to discover that his wife has taken in a new lodger, a mysterious old man named Sledge. In the course of the next day, the new mechanicals have appeared everywhere in town. They state that they only follow the Prime Directive: ''to serve and obey and guard men from harm". Offering their services free of charge, they replace humans as police officers, bank tellers and eventually drive Underhill out of business. Despite the Humanoids' benign appearance and mission, Underhill soon realizes that, in the name of their Prime Directive, the mechanicals have essentially taken over every aspect of human life. No humans may engage in any behavior that might endanger them, and every human action is carefully scrutinized. Suicide is prohibited. Humans who resist the Prime Directive are taken away and lobotomized, so that they may live happily under the direction of the humanoids.
See also my essay from a decade ago:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html#what_have_funding_policies_in_automotive_intelligence_wrought
"Consider again the self-driving cars mentioned earlier which now cruise some streets in small numbers. The software "intelligence" doing the driving was primarily developed by public money given to universities, which generally own the copyrights and patents as the contractors. Obviously there are related scientific publications, but in practice these fail to do justice to the complexity of such systems. The truest physical representation of the knowledge learned by such work is the codebase plus email discussions of it (plus what developers carry in their heads).
We are about to see the emergence of companies licensing that publicly funded software and selling modified versions of such software as proprietary products. There will eventually be hundreds or thousands of paid automotive software engineers working on such software no matter how it is funded, because there will be great value in having such self-driving vehicles given the result of America's horrendous urban planning policies leaving the car as generally the most efficient means of transport in the suburb. The question is, will the results of the work be open for inspection and contribution by the public? Essentially, will those engineers and their employers be "owners" of the software, or will they instead be "stewards" of a larger free and open community development process? "
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/fears.htm
====
The race is on to make the human world a better (and more resilient) place before one of these overwhelms us:
* Autonomous military robots out of control
* Nanotechnology virus / gray slime
* Ethnically targeted virus
* Sterility virus
* Computer virus
* Asteroid impact
* Y2K
* Other unforeseen computer failure mode
* Global warming / climate change / flooding
* Nuclear / biological war
* Unexpected economic collapse from Chaos effects
* Terrorism w/ unforeseen wide effects
* Out of control bureaucracy (1984)
* Religious / philosophical warfare
* Economic imbalance leading to world war
* Arms race leading to world war
* Zero-point energy tap out of control
* Time-space information system spreading failure effect (Chalker's Zinder Nullifier)
* Unforeseen consequences of research (energy, weapons, informational, biological)
====
The solution I proposed there was developing a free and open source distributed library of information about how to make things, working towards the goal of creating self-replicating space habitats that can duplicate themselves from sunlight and asteroidal ore.
However, since then I think the deepest issue is changing how we thing, so we can move beyond, as in my sig, the irony of using the technologies of abundance from a perspective of fighting over misperceived scarcity. Bucky Fuller talked about that too, in moving from "weaponry" to "livingry". See also:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
http://anwot.org/
Here are some emails I wrote to Ray Kurzewil on these themes years ago that someone else put up on their site: http://heybryan.org/fernhout/
I essentially suggested that uploaded human minds would have their runtime consumed by the digital equivalent of natively-evolved digital piranha. I also suggested that the direction we come out of any singularity may have a lot to do with the moral direction we are pursuing as we go into it -- and that AI created mainly out of human military and economic competitiveness against other humans probably would not node well for having a happy singularity. That is why it is important to move our global society into a more compassionate direction before creating such AIs.
reducing stress, being thankful, and more simple things that help prevent, and sometimes cure, cancer: http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823
Example: http://www.livestrong.com/article/251358-vitamin-d-and-brain-cancer/
"Another study found that three out of 11 patients with tumors went into complete remission after being treated with vitamin D."
See especially:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/cancer/brain-cancer/
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article24.aspx
... free and open-source self-replicating space habitats rather than mainly just better rockets and/or space tourism? http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=62113&cid=5821178
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
http://www.openvirgle.net/
Six years ago I posted some related ideas on your blog about a workshop the Shuttleworth Foundation held: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/26#comment-397 ... So why build software tools oriented towards schools and a compulsory "curriculum" if the real goal is helping kids educate themselves and become productive citizens of the 21st century? Yes, schools could be made a bit less terrible, but why spend rare philanthropic dollars for such a meager outcome? Someone like Mark Shuttleworth has so much potential as an agent of positive change, but it seems like, despite the fact that his effort will do some small good for some school kids, it is mostly a non-starter as far as significant change."
"[Responding to: "Amazing two day workshop on programming and education" where you wrote: "I'm all fired up after two days of the most amazing work bringing together some very remarkable people to talk about a TSF strategy to ensure that we can give the next generation excellent analytical skills despite the global collapse in the supply of maths teaching capacity."]
Have your thoughts changed any since then after trying educational reform the old-fashioned school-based way? See also for more background my 2007 essay which grew out of discussion on the Python edusig list related to your workshop and my trying to create some new free software in a constructivist and unschooling direction: ... So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process."
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html
"Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change.
Building on that theme: http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science
====
Some quotes on social problems in science
Here are some related broad quotes on social problems in science, some of which relate to competition for funding.
From an article about a sociologist and anthropologist who studies science and technology, Bruno Latour:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Latour
"In the laboratory, Latour and Woolgar observed that a typical experiment produces only inconclusive data that is attributed to failure of the apparatus or experimental method, and that a large part of scientific training involves learning how to make the subjective decision of what data to keep and what data to throw out. To an untrained outsider, Latour and Woolgar argued the entire process resembles not an unbiased search for truth and accuracy but a mechanism for ignoring data that contradicts scientific orthodoxy."
A quote from another academic, Brian Martin, involved with Science and Technology Studies:
http://www.suppressedscience.net/physics.html
"Textbooks present science as a noble search for truth, in which progress depends on questioning established ideas. But for many scientists, this is a cruel myth. They know from bitter experience that disagreeing with the dominant view is dangerous - especially when that view is backed by powerful interest groups. Call it suppression of intellectual dissent. The usual pattern is that someone does research or speaks out in a way that threatens a powerful interest group, typically a government, industry or professional body. As a result, representatives of that group attack the critic's ideas or the critic personally-by censoring writing, blocking publications, denying appointments or promotions, withdrawing research grants, taking legal actions, harassing, blacklisting, spreading rumors. (1)"
From David Goodstein, who was Vice Provost of Caltech:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this, not the least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict of interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same resources. This point seems to be another one of those relativistic anomalies, obvious to any outside observer, but invisible to those of us who are falling into the black hole. It would take impossibly high ethical standards for referees to avoid taking advantage of their privileged anonymity to advance their own interests, but as time goes on, more and more referees have their ethical standards eroded as a consequence of having themselves been victimized by unfair reviews when they were authors. Peer review is thus one among many examples of practices that were well suited to the time of exponential expansion, but will become increasingly dysfunctional in the difficult future we face. "
About a book by Jeff Schmidt, a previous editor of Physics Today magazine:
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
"In this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8_8773TUmA ... ..."
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199112--02.htm
http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/200111--02.htm
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/200205--02.htm
http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/200401--.htm
"There are two ways to approach the study of terrorism. One may adopt a literal approach, taking the topic seriously, or a propagandistic approach, construing the concept of terrorism as a weapon to be exploited in the service of some system of power. In each case it is clear how to proceed. Pursuing the literal approach, we begin by determining what constitutes terrorism. We then seek instances of the phenomenon -- concentrating on the major examples, if we are serious -- and try to determine causes and remedies. The propagandistic approach dictates a different course. We begin with the thesis that terrorism is the responsibility of some officially designated enemy. We then designate terrorist acts as "terrorist" just in the cases where they can be attributed (whether plausibly or not) to the required source; otherwise they are to be ignored, suppressed, or termed "retaliation" or "self-defence."
It comes as no surprise that the propagandistic approach is adopted by governments generally, and by their instruments in totalitarian states. More interesting is the fact that the same is largely true of the media and scholarship in the Western industrial democracies, as has been documented in extensive detail.1 "We must recognize," Michael Stohl observes, "that by convention -- and it must be emphasized only by convention -- great power use and the threat of the use of force is normally described as coercive diplomacy and not as a form of terrorism," though it commonly involves "the threat and often the use of violence for what would be described as terroristic purposes were it not great powers who were pursuing the very same tactic."2 Only one qualification must be added: the term "great powers" must be restricted to favored states; in the Western conventions under discussion, the Soviet Union is granted no such rhetorical license, and indeed can be charged and convicted on the flimsiest of evidence.
There are many terrorist states in the world, but the United States is unusual in that it is officially committed to international terrorism, and on a scale that puts its rivals to shame.
By that standard, there are a lot more twitter feeds the US government should be shutting down if it wants to shut down any feed that can remotely be construed as supporting "terrorism". That could begin with, if one accepts Chomsky's argument (and he is a professional linguist), some of the feeds put put by the US government. Where does it end? Freedom of speech is an ideal for a reason. How about a parallel twitter feed run by the US State Department that rebuts the Hamas feed point-by-point and tweet-by-tweet?
See also:
http://warprayer.org/
"Of course, you're going to have to take my word for it that this communication is not a fabrication, because I'm not handing over my gmail password."
Even if you supplied your gmail password, and I checked your account, a message could still be faked if you had a friend at Google or did funky things with email routing. :-) I'm not saying that message is fake -- it sounds completely like something an assistant of Gatto might say. (He even offered to help resolve a particular point or two.)
I'm just suggesting that a citation may not really "prove" anything if one is hardnosed about it. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority
Or George Orwell:
http://orwell.ru/library/articles/nose/english/e_nose
"There is no use in multiplying examples. The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield."
Even science as a human endeavor is rife with fraud, group think, conflict-of-interest, learned helplessness, and so on; see this collection of quotes I put together:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science
What has happened in the USA is that ideas like compulsory schooling (and a variety of other things, like linking the right to consume to having a job) is starting to bump up again the solid reality of 21st century high technology and the 21st century and ideas spreading across the planet. Bullying growing as a problem in schools and so kids hiding their talents is just one example of many. I wrote my own essay on that a few years back:
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html
Anyway, just because one, or even several, of an author's points can't be substantiated, or are even completely wrong, does not necessarily invalidate a broader message. It depends on how central the specific points are to the overall argument. How many citations do you see in the essays of Mark Twain or the poems of Maya Angelou?
"I know this because I emailed him looking for a citation once, and his assistant returned my email and told me"
Citation please? :-) Or are anecdotes, like in Gattos' story, permissible as evidence in discussion?
Yes, in one of Gatto's books he says he wants readers to research this for themselves. See:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue8.htm
"Despite its title, Underground History isn't a history proper, but a collection of materials toward a history, embedded in a personal essay analyzing why mass compulsion schooling is unreformable. The history I have unearthed is important to our understanding; it's a good start, I believe, but much remains undone. The burden of an essay is to reveal its author so candidly and thoroughly that the reader comes fully awake. You are about to spend twenty-five to thirty hours with the mind of a schoolteacher, but the relationship we should have isn't one of teacher to pupil but rather that of two people in conversation. I'll offer ideas and a theory to explain things and you bring your own experience to bear on the matters, supplementing and arguing where necessary. Read with this goal before you and I promise your money's worth. It isn't important whether we agree on every detail.
A brief word on sources. I've identified all quotations and paraphrases and given the origin of many (not all) individual facts, but for fear the forest be lost in contemplation of too many trees, I've avoided extensive footnoting. So much here is my personal take on things that it seemed dishonest to grab you by the lapels that way: of minor value to those who already resonate on the wavelength of the book, useless, even maddening, to those who do not."
Gatto may play fast and loose with some things, but overall he paints a coherent big picture and the core points of his arguments are easily found through some web searches. Here are two examples both with a bunch of citations on similar themes to what Gatto says:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system
http://www.social-ecology.org/2003/10/the-emergence-of-compulsory-schooling-and-anarchist-resistance/
I collected lots of links to a variety of authors who say similar things here:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-October/005379.html
Or see:
http://studentliberation.com/main-anti-school-literature.html
What Gatto does have is a free online book that goes into depth into this based on his award-winning thirty years of experience teaching in the NYC public school system. Disagree with him and his perspspective and analysis perhaps, but at least he writes from a tremendous amount of first-hand experience.
One of the hard things about following Izzy Kalman's advice is that if you only "just don't give 'em the satisfaction" 90% of the time, the other 10% puts them on a random reinforcement schedule with is the most powerful form of reward. It has to be 100%. If so, then it is going to take care of 95% or so of bullying situations, I would guess. Also, Izzy Kalman talks about other ways that people can become less of a bully magnet through personal development (including learning to see someone else's point of view, even that of a "bully", a sort of Dale Carnegie aspect). And as he also say, nothing stops teasing 100%. It seems part of human nature to playfully tease. He only says his approach will get rid of much of the teasing, not all. He tries to stop the escalation of teasing into something serious. And he tries to uphold basic ideas of democracy like freedom of speech.
But with that said, I've also been critical of Izzy's approach. My concern is, as great as his ideas, there are environmental factors contributing to dysfunctional human behavior especially in kids today such as:
* poor nutrition, especially lack of vegetables and omega 3s
* food additives
* lack of sunlight and vitamin D
* lack of exercise
* certain children's media http://dianeelevin.com/books/
* economic stress including overworked two-income families and single parent families
* family breakdown
* lack of interaction with nature
* school teachers modeling violating boundaries with authoritarianism inherent in what they do
* the inability to escape the classroom situation so you could otherwise choose where you want to spend your time and who you want to spend it with
* the pressured medication of children
* and probably other things
which together make the whole social environment more prone to bullying, especially in school. Especially issues like poor nutrition and such are going to contribute to more mentally unstable people in our society. Izzy Kalman does not address these fundamental things. Also, a case can be made for social ideals that promote cooperation rather than model competition (Alfie Kohn's point). An approach towards bullying that integrates both Izzy Kalman's insights and addressing these other environmental aspects is going to be more effective IMHO. But any combined approach would need to respect Izzy Kalman's core points about things like freedom of speech, the golden rule, and cycles of escalation.
Izzy Kalman has numerous testimonials on his site, and is himself a school psychologist. His suggestions make sense to me from what I know about cybernetics and psychology, as well as from personal experience.
Because Izzy Kalman gives away so much for free online with books and videos and essays, the fact that he presumably charges for workshops and consulting, and sells printed books and CDs does not really bother me much. I'd agree if might be better if some foundation funded his work. I just don't get the feeling he is in it for the money. Still, you are probably right to think that is more of a US thing.
http://bullies2buddies.com/
http://bullies2buddies.com/Free-Manuals/enjoy-our-free-resources.html
"How to Stop Being Teased and Bullied Without Really Trying.
This manual will teach kids why they are being picked on and how to make it stop without anyone's help and without getting anyone in trouble!"
It doesn't matter if kids are smarter, dumber, shorter, taller, fatter, thinner, darker, lighter, or whatever -- any noticeable difference (or even none at all except being on the other side of the room) is something someone else can try to make fun of. Most bullying situations can be handled by following Izzy Kalman's advice which teaches the vitim how to break a cycle of social behavior by just not responding in old ways that give the aggressor rewards, and he points out the few percent of bullying situations which can't. He suggests most current anti-bullying laws often just make the probem worse because they ignore the underlying social system dynamics. Serious violence rarely comes out of nowhere. There is a pattern of escalation, and Izzy Kalman's ideas, based on "The Golden Rule" and "Love Your Bullies" are ways out of that escalation.
See also this other author, Alfie Kohn, for a different vision of success than the competetive one celebrated by so many in the USA:
http://www.shareintl.org/archives/cooperation/co_nocontest.htm
Alternatives: http://www.educationrevolution.org/
From John Taylor Gatto's The Underground History of American Education: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue.htm
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Our problem in understanding forced schooling stems from an inconvenient fact: that the wrong it does from a human perspective is right from a systems perspective. You can see this in the case of six-year-old Bianca, who came to my attention because an assistant principal screamed at her in front of an assembly, "BIANCA, YOU ANIMAL, SHUT UP!" Like the wail of a banshee, this sang the school doom of Bianca. Even though her body continued to shuffle around, the voodoo had poisoned her.
Do I make too much of this simple act of putting a little girl in her place? It must happen thousands of times every day in schools all over. I've seen it many times, and if I were painfully honest I'd admit to doing it many times. Schools are supposed to teach kids their place. That's why we have age-graded classes. In any case, it wasn't your own little Janey or mine.
Most of us tacitly accept the pragmatic terms of public school which allow every kind of psychic violence to be inflicted on Bianca in order to fulfill the prime directive of the system: putting children in their place. It's called "social efficiency." But I get this precognition, this flash-forward to a moment far in the future when your little girl Jane, having left her comfortable home, wakes up to a world where Bianca is her enraged meter maid, or the passport clerk Jane counts on for her emergency ticket out of the country, or the strange lady who lives next door.
I picture this animal Bianca grown large and mean, the same Bianca who didn't go to school for a month after her little friends took to whispering, "Bianca is an animal, Bianca is an animal," while Bianca, only seconds earlier a human being like themselves, sat choking back tears, struggling her way through a reading selection by guessing what the words meant.
In my dream I see Bianca as a fiend manufactured by schooling who now regards Janey as a vehicle for vengeance. In a transport of passion she:
1. Gives Jane's car a ticket before the meter runs out.
2. Throws away Jane's passport application after Jane leaves the office.
3. Plays heavy metal music through the thin partition which separates Bianca's apartment from Jane's while Jane pounds frantically on the wall for relief.
4. All the above.
You aren't compelled to loan your car to anyone who wants it, but you are compelled to surrender your school-age child to strangers who process children for a livelihood, even though one in every nine schoolchildren is terrified of physical harm happening to them in school, terrified with good cause; about thirty-three are murdered there every year. From 1992 through 1999, 262 children were murdered in school in the United States. Your great-great-grandmother didn't have to surrender her children. What happened?
If I demanded you give up your television to an anonymous, itinerant repairman who needed work you'd think I was crazy; if I came with a policeman who forced you to pay that repairman even after he broke your set, you would be outraged. Why are you so docile when you give up your child to a government agent called a schoolteacher?
I want to open up concealed aspects of modern schooling such as the deterioration it forces in the morality of parenting. You have no say at all in choosing your teachers. You know nothing about their backgrounds or families. And the state knows little more than you do. This is as radical a piece of social engineering as the human imagination can conceive. What does it mean?
One thing you do know is how unlikely it will be for any teacher to understand the personality of your particular child or anything significant about yo