"Your analysis, while lengthy, is riddled with inaccuracies and exaggerations."
Thanks for your comment, AC. I guess it is hard to summarize ten years of thinking on these things and reading tons of references in a short post, but you can find lots of detail in essays on my website: http://www.pdfernhout.net/
Even in this comment, I cited an academic and a reporter citing sources. That article on the UK being last and the US being second to last in child welfare (of industrialized countries) was based on a UN report from that time, so, while anyone can question such a report, that is not an accusation made up out of thin air.
You can stick your head in the sand, but that is a fact -- many kids in the USA are suffering in a variety of ways. Example:
"Record numbers go hungry in the US: Government report shows 50m people unable to put food on the table at some point last year: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/17/millions-hungry-households-us-report "More than a million children regularly go to bed hungry in the US, according to a government report that shows a startling increase in the number of families struggling to put food on the table. President Barack Obama, who pledged to eradicate childhood hunger, has described as "unsettling" the agriculture department survey, which says 50 million people in the US â" one in six of the population â" were unable to afford to buy sufficient food to stay healthy at some point last year, in large part because of escalating unemployment or poorly paid jobs. That is a rise of more than one-third on the year before and the highest number since the survey began in 1995...."
That said, sure, I have no doubt there are inaccuracies and exaggerations in what I have written in various places, which I would be happy to eventually correct if supplied with specific information. But it seems to me that you have supplied mostly generalizations (and also responded to points I did not raise, as I agree the USA still makes a lot, at least by dollar value), generalizations that ignore how the USA has systematically disrupted grassroots movements for democracy and social accountability in other countries. That is why so many people in so many countries are angry at US Americans, just for two example where the USA helped overthrow a democratically elected government, see Chile and Iran.
Has the USA also done some good things abroad? No doubt.
Is the USA multi-cultural in a lot of ways? Yes, to its credit.
Has the USA some big technical accomplishments, like the internet? Again, no doubt. Although other countries did have computer networks, like France's Minitel or Chile's Cybersyn -- the last being destroyed by the US fomented overthrow on the first 9/11 in 1973 -- that could have become like an internet someday. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn
Are US accomplishments commensurate with having a huge (genocidally) depopulated continent to work with and being the only major surviving industrial base after a World War (where it helped arm both sides?) and bringing in the best German/Nazi scientists both before and after the war? Well, that is subject to debate...
My understanding is that the USA would have collapsed a long time ago based on mismanagement had it not been so wealthy to begin with. And as I see it, both the USA and the USSR lost the Cold War; it is just taking the USA a bit longer to fall. I agree with you the large stockpiles of WMDs the USA has make its collapse very problematical for the world.
As I mentioned, I've tried to propose alternatives to collapse, but so far, without much success in implementation.
Anyway, I'd suggest there is a lot of exaggeration in what you have written. Where did I suggest the USA was "evil per
Collapse like the fashion industry?:-)
"The Fashion Industry's Piracy Paradox" http://www.publicknowledge.org/node/597 "The typical explanation for intellectual property law goes something like this: Creating new books, films, drugs, songs, etc. is expensive, but once the nifty new thing is produced, copying is cheap (or, in the case of copying done over the Internet, free). Unrestrained copying robs creators of the means to profit from their works -- the copyist can always outcompete the originator. So we need IP protections to make sure that the original author or inventor has control over copying. This way, authors and inventors will be properly motivated to create.
That's a sensible theory, but it doesn't always translate in the real world. Consider the fashion industry, a creative industry larger by far than the film, recorded music and book publishing industries. The logos and labels that adorn apparel and accessories are protected by trademark law. But the designs of the garments themselves - the cut of a sleeve, the fit of a bodice - are not. Copyright law does not cover most fashion designs because clothing is a "useful article", a class of items that falls in the jurisdiction of patents and not copyrights. But patent law is almost irrelevant to fashion designs, both because the patent standard of "novelty" cannot be met by most designs, and for the practical reason that the patent application process proceeds too slowly to be meaningful for most fashion designs, which live a brief commercial life and then disappear.
So current U.S. IP law does little to protect fashion designs, and yet the fashion industry is doing quite well, thank you. How can that be? Take a look again at the typical explanation for IP law that I set out in the first paragraph of this post. Anyone who shops - even us men - cannot help but notice that there is lots of copying (aka, "piracy") of fashion designs. And yet the stores are full of innovative new designs every season. We have a puzzle....
So what does this matter? Well, if the law prohibited fashion design copying, then the fashion industry would have a much harder time creating and responding to trends. U.S. copyright law prohibits not only verbatim copies, but also any work that is "substantially similar" to a preexisting copyrighted work. So if copyright law were extended to fashion designs, the unique innovation culture of the fashion world might come under intense legal scrutiny. Designers will give way to lawyers, as every season's new collection is carefully examined for potential legal liability. Young and unknown designers will be worst off, as they will not be able to afford the lawyers' fees that will be part of the new price of admission to the industry. And an industry that has been a thriving locus of both unbridled creativity and profit may suffer...."
So, let's talk about how can anyone make a sofwtare project or innovative hardware device when they have to learn about and negotiate 250,000 patents, any single one of which can lead to an injunction to stop production? It's just absurd.
A related satire I write from almost ten years ago that is sadly more true everyday: http://www.pdfernhout.net/microslaw.html "My fellow Americans. There has been some recent talk of free law by the General Public Lawyers (the GPL) who we all know hold un-American views. I speak to you today from the Oval Office in the White House to assure you how much better off you are now that all law is proprietary. The value of proprietary law should be obvious. Software is essentially just a form of law governing how computers operate, and all software and media content has long been privatized to great economic success. Economic analysts have proven conclusively that if we hadn't passed laws banning all f
"Getting rid of patents, at least in software, would free up vast amounts of resources."
That's the problem, isn't it. What would all the lawyers do for an income? Especially when many people have already passed the point of diminishing returns for more stuff?
Excessive bureaucracy is a from of "make work" to prop up a society that can not admit its socioeconomic model (based on an income-through-jobs link) is broken in an age of abundance from cheap technology (like from an Android-powered supercomputer in your pocket relative to a 1970s definition of supercomputer); see also this knol I put together on good and bad ways to deal with that: http://knol.google.com/k/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
"Next up: JKR on writing Harry Potter, where she "'created' something intangible, easily replicated, and quite literally out of nothing simply by typing some characters on a keyboard." And then had to file lawsuits to keep people from using characters w/o paying royalties."
Yeah, but she created it while on the "dole" (public assistance). What does that imply about funding for the arts? Or justifications for copyright?
"Torching cars and stealing TVs is not the solution. The shooting is just being used as an excuse by the rioters and the unhelpful people encouraging them."
But, the more a society is stretched to the breaking point by bad social policy, the more likely it will break into violence. Most humans can be civilized, but only while things are going at least not too terribly badly socially. The 9/11 attacks were also the product of social problems, although in that case, by frustrated young men from Saudi Arabia who blamed the USA for supporting who they saw as their local oppressors (ironically spun as "they hate us because we are free").
But, as far as the UK, from 2007, and I doubt it has gotten better with the global recession, consider this article (sadly, no longer directly at Adbusters): http://apolyton.net/showthread.php/167082-How-Britain-is-Eating-Its-Young http://web.archive.org/web/20071019031111/http://adbusters.org/the_magazine/71/Generation_Fcked_How_Britain_is_Eating_Its_Young.html "Around the nation, airtime was cleared for cathartic phone-ins, heated discussions, and a torrent of contributors that simply would not stop. As if sensing that many of the problems might in part stem from the government's unparalleled obsession with monitoring, measuring and homogenising the very children it once sought to cherish, many former Labour advisors suddenly sought to introduce daylight between their ideas and those of the heavily surveilled nanny state. Neil Lawson of the Labour think-tank Compass bleakly admitted: "Society is hollowing out, but not just in the rotting boroughs of south London. The middle classes are anxious too. Many are richer but few seem happier. Mental illness abounds. White-collar jobs are outsourced to India. Everyone looks for meaning in their lives -- but all they find is shopping."
"The reason our children's lives are the worst among economically advanced countries is because we are a poor version of the USA," he said. "So the USA comes second from bottom and we follow behind. The age of neo-liberalism, even with the human face that New Labour has given it, cannot stem the tide of the social recession capitalism creates.""
Does not bode well for either the UK or the USA. And when the violence starts, things tend to just get worse for everyone, with more police, more fear, less comunity, and a downward spiral that is really expensive to recover from (like in Iraq after the civil war there that started after the US invasion).
I tried really hard to find other ways forward, and I found the conceptually, but implementing them against entrenched dogma is another thing.
"Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft" http://www.pdfernhout.net/media/FiveInterwovenEconomies.pdf http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY "This video presents a simplified education model about socioeconomics and technological change. It discusses five interwoven economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft) and how the balance will shift with cultural changes and technological changes. It suggests that things like a basic income, better planning, improved subsistence, and an expanded gift economy can compensate in part for an exchange economy that is having problems."
The use of the word "Theft" in the title there is not intended as advocacy -- it is more to point it out as what happens w
How do we decide in our society who gets to do one of the most important jobs, be a parent?
As for professional schools, see what happened 100 years ago, based on your reasoning: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexner_Report "One of the consequences of Flexner's advocacy of university-based medical education was that medical education became much more expensive, putting such education out of reach of all but upper-class white males. The small "proprietary" schools Flexner condemned, which were contended to be have been based in generations-old folk traditions rather than relatively recent western science, did admit African-Americans, women, and students of limited financial means. These students usually could not afford six to eight years of university education, and were often simply denied admission to medical schools affiliated with universities. While many such doctors continued to practice, they did so under proscribed circumstances and for less pay. It also made it more difficult for people of color, residents of rural areas, and for those of limited means generally to obtain medical care in any form."
That was the kind of "folk medicine" that was destroyed 100 years ago by an emphasis on bureaucratizing medicine and focusing on profit-maximizing interventions that treats and palliates instead of holistic thinking that prevents and cures.
Thanks, but no thanks.
People need feedback, but they don't need formal bureaucratic grades, which are more about social control than honest concerned feedback.
Alternatives are things like "unschooling".
Besides, much of modern medicine is quackery: http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/PCI_angioplasty_article.aspx "Interventional cardiology and cardiovascular surgery is basically a scam based on a misunderstanding of the nature of heart disease. Searching for and treating obstructive plaque does not address the areas of the coronary vascular tree most likely to rupture and cause heart attacks. If there was never another CABG or angioplasty performed or stent placed, patients with heart disease would be better off. Doctors would be forced to educate our citizens that their heart disease risk is determined by what they place on their forks. Millions of lives would be dramatically extended. To abandon the theory of stretching and cutting out areas with plaque would shut down interventional cardiology, nearly all cardiovascular surgery, and many suppliers of the biotechnology. In many cases, interventional cardiology is the major income generator to hospitals. The ending of this ill-conceived, out-dated and ineffective technology would dramatically downsize hospitals in the United States and free up over $100 billion annually in medical care costs. Besides being ineffective, interventional cardiology places the responsibility in the hands of the doctor and not the patients. When patients finally realize they must take control of their heart problems with aggressive dietary modifications (and when needed medications for temporary periods) we will essentially solve the health crisis in America.
The sad thing is surgical interventions and medications are the foundation of modern cardiology and both are relatively ineffective compared to nutritional excellence. My patients routinely reverse their heart disease, and no longer have vulnerable plaque or high blood pressure, so they do not need medical care, hospitals or cardiologists anymore. The problem is that in the real world cardiac patients are not even informed that heart disease is predictably reversed with nutritional excellence. They are not given the opportunity to choose and just corralled into these surgical interventions.
Trying to figure out how to pay for ineffective and expensive medicine by politicians will never be a real solution. People need to know they do not have to have heart
"Planting a tree: you'll plant way more trees if you pay (i.e. reward) people to do this. If me and a friend were planting trees, I'd damn-well compete with the bastard to make my tree better."
After that experience, will you work to secure the funding for more tree planting across the planet? Or will you move on to your next paying job?
And will you work together with your "friend" to refine you best practices for tree planting for the circumstances? Might you even sabotage his effort to look better?
Competition has a lot of costs in tasks that can be refined by thought and cooperation. For example, maybe together you could have built a GNU/Linux-based robotics platform that planted trees across the cosmos? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Running
Grades are as a problematical way to organize a 21st century society if you are concerned about its overall long-term health...
"There is no such thing as a "spirit"."
How do you know? Are you perhaps a physical creature on a spiritual journey, or a spiritual being on a physical journey, or are you something else entirely? Maybe somethings will forever be a mystery on this plane of existence...
Sadly: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8026807.stm "A car driver has crashed into crowds watching a Dutch royal parade, killing five people, in an attempted attack on the royal family, officials say."
The death toll might have been a lot higher if the person (who had lost a job and was about to be evicted, or something like that) had been targeting the crowd specifically and not the royal family.
Thanks for the tip, although I tend to feel that Atticus Finch is right, that in our society, "The easiest way to get shot is to carry a gun."
Or:
"Intrinsic/mutual security vs. extrinsic/unilateral" http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1783364&cid=33537044
"If you see my other reply, you'll see that all this military technology is ironic and, essentially, making us less secure in the 21st century because it is designed from the wrong paradigm of extrinsic unilateral security (not intrinsic mutual security). For example, having a loaded self-propelled Howitzer cannon in your suburban backyard does not make you safer from home intrusion in a small community (or cancer, heart disease, stroke, and diabetes, the real killers of most US Americans) -- it makes you seen as a nutcase and your neighbors start talking about how to deal with you and get rid of it in case it went off accidentally or kids took it for a "joyride". But if you insulate your house to keep it warm at low cost, use the savings to put solar panels of the roof to power a fridge full of cool beers for passers-by, and then grown an organic garden producing abundant veggies you share with your neighbors, then you are going to have a lot more security and health and prosperity for both yourself and your community for a lot less cost than buying and maintaining a Howitzer in your backyard." [Some typos fixed]
Are school grades helping to create such a secure society?
It's a joke with lot of truth to it. My undergrad adviser said he used this model sometimes (he's 90 or so now, so probably OK to mention this). He said he would essentially get a grant for work he had already (mostly) done, and then use much of the money to do the next thing. So, you are right, it's an interesting and sometimes successful model.
A much deeper problem is that the people good at looking good may not be the same people good at doing stuff. As someone suggested recently (forget where, maybe on slashdot) that is why so many mediocre films are produced. The best directors and writers may not be the best at convincing others to give them money to make films. This is in part a function of how many lesser skilled wannabees are around and how desirable the area is. The more mature a field is, perhaps the bigger the problem?
I think that was implied in another recent slashdot article that at first glance seemed to be about how the popularity of computer programming was insuring the unemployment of true geeks. Will a true geek, even one with decent social skills, get hired when hiring managers can find a lot of very appealing people who look even more on paper like true geeks than the true geeks, and they can't tell the difference, or at least, can't tell from the information they have to work with? This is also a problem in the "Seven Samurai", how does a farmer know what makes a good Samurai? And there are so many aspects to what makes people effective, even a focus on skills and experiences can be misleading.
A completely different issue is you may be hiring the wrong type of person, or the wrong person may be doing the hiring. For example, this presentation by David Eaves suggests that big open source projects need good facilitators at the core more than they need good coders: http://www.slideshare.net/david_a_eaves/community-management-presentation/
Still, coding skills in the case of open source may be important for a certain level of respect by the community. In general, we need better software tools for collaboration, as that presentation talks about (and thus the need for a social semantic desktop and good tools on it, including for stuff like Structured Dialogic Design and a variety of other methods for collective sensemaking and analysis and collaboration). http://www.globalagoras.org/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensemaking http://collaboration.wikia.com/wiki/Stigmergic_collaboration
The best "manager" I ever had in a commercial setting did not know how to code that well (although he could code enough to understand the problem area and contribute to it), but he was great at managing a team well.
Another option for running a program like this is to not have applications. Just find people doing the work you like and give them money.
Still, ultimately, the best security is going to emerge from a society with things like a "basic income" to live off of so the people who like resolving these issues have the time to do so, without imposing this problematical filtering process on it. That is what is depicted in James P. Hogan's "Voyage From Yesteryear" sci-fi novel. And it is backed up by research, like discussed here:
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us " http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
The best motivated work comes from taking money off the table, and people having a sense of purpose, developing a sense of mastery, and having a sense of ownership/influence over what is happening.
This is all why it is so how hard to give money away well, as discussed near the end to the Seven Laws of Money
"In early adolescence negative reinforcement becomes more effective."
Citations?
Also, more effective to what end? What sort of learning is made more effective? Learning how to be self-actualizing? Learning how to ask good questions? Learning how to focus on important social issues even when the bureacracy does not want to address them?
Contrast what you say with this research about motivation and performance on intellectual tasks:
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
I beleive Kohn was talking about all age levels there, including college.
"And as to (7): ok Alfie, name any area of life where the possibility of success and/or winning does *not* lead to cheating."
Self-improvement. Spirituality. Being a good friend. Planting a tree. Setting a good example. Upholding a sense of honor. Developing free and open source software.
See also:
"No contest: the case against competition" By Alfie Kohn http://books.google.com/books?id=bLudHIk3gsMC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_atb#v=onepage&q&f=false http://www.shareintl.org/archives/cooperation/co_nocontest.htm "Alfie Kohn... argues that competition is essentially detrimental to every important aspect of human experience; our relationships, self-esteem, enjoyment of leisure, and even productivity would all be improved if we were to break out of the pattern of relentless competition. Far from being idealistic speculation, his position is anchored in hundreds of research studies and careful analysis of the primary domains of competitive interaction. For those who see themselves assisting in a transition to a less competitive world, Kohn's book will be an invaluable resource."
Like in my other reply in this thread, to use your "Force" analogy (even though Taoism and Yin/Yang is more subtle and nuanced), *feedback* may have a light side and a dark side. Grades are the dark side. Sounds like the dark side may have seduced you by pretending to be the light side? Why did that professor need to put a grade on that paper in addition to the comments? You've spent probably almost two decades of your life being graded, and being told grades are important (by people whose salary you were paying, or who were paid on your behalf, when that money could have just gone directly to you and you could have learned on your own from peers, parents, neighbors, apprenticeships, and books, like people used to). Grades are a means of social control. Can't we do better than that, even if we need some control here or there?
Education has at least three aspects, in decreasing order of importance: * Personal growth in a variety of ways (including spiritual); * Learning what you need to know to be a good citizen participating in political life (including voting); * Preparation for doing specific useful vocational work.
Modern schooling has so degraded the notion of education that most people think it is mainly about the third item, and that is the example you drew from. There is also a fourth aspect in practice of schooling that has to do with obedience and conformity, which is actually what most school time is spent on, whatever the purported subject: http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
Did someone need to grade you on how you talked when you were a toddler for you to imporve? Does someone need to give you a grade on sex? Does someone need to give you a grade on your slashdot posts? Does someone need to give you a grade on being a good friend or neighbor? Yet you probably improve in all those areas the more you do them. The brain is like a muscle, the more you use it, the stronger it gets. You need *feedback* to improve, and that feedback can come in a variety of ways, but you don't need grades. Grades are a problematical form of feedback for the reasons listed, as well as because they tend to be so linear but performance is usually multi-factorial.
If I was a hiring manager, at least in the realm of software, I'd look at what projects a person has done (especially as hobbies) and talk to him or her about them. What relation does an "A" or even an "F" in a computer science class have to do with caring about crafting good software to solve important problems to meet society's unmet needs? Grades can say a lot about obedience, it's true. But even them, how much of a "yes" man or woman do you want your employees to be?
You do indirectly bring up the issue of certification, and for some things I'm not against it, as long as it certifies ability more than hoops jumped through and the certification process is decoupled from the instruction process (which it usually is not in schools). But even certification can be problematical, because who decides what makes a good Microsoft systems administrator say? Are the best Microsoft systems administrators the ones who say, "I never learned this stuff because you should switch to GNU/Linux or FreeBSD"?:-)
Thanks for the thoughful reply. I probably would have written much the same ten or so years ago, before reading Kohn and Gatto and Holt and others, and doing unschooling with my own kid. It's hard to break out of the mindset that school has spent so much time forming -- that we need schooling.
Something else related by Gatto:
"The Art of Driving" http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/1d.htm "Now come back to the present while I demonstrate that the identical trust placed in ordinary people two hundred years ago still survives where it suits managers of our economy to allow it. Consider the art of driving, which I learned at the age of eleven. Without everybody behind the wheel, our sort of economy would be impossible, so everybody is there, IQ notwithstanding. With less than thirty hours of combined training and experience, a hundred million people are allowed access to vehicular weapons more lethal than pistols or rifl
I wrote this up last month as a proposal abstract for an IARPA soliciation, but I have not sent it (someone who had been with the CIA and does public intelligence said it would be pointless essentially as the US intelligence community is so broken). Anyway, I though I'd post it here, as I've written it already, and it seems a shame to waste it, and because it is what I'd like to do maybe for this solicitation. Any constructive feedback would be appreciated. Maybe DARPA might be interested in it if not IARPA, given the structural problems in the US intelligence community it seeks to address and which are part of why the US cyber infrastructure is so at risk? Imagine global security researchers having a tool like this to work collectively for mutual benefit to maximize the intrinsic security of our cyber infrastructure. I know some people may say terrible things about any attempt to engage with the US security apparatus (not without some justification), but, beyond being motivated by running out of cash (in part by doing so much free stuff), I do think the issue is that we all need security -- the issue is how we go about getting it. This proposal attempts to shift the US security paradigm in a more intrinsic and mutual direction, which is more sustainable over the long term than a focus on extrinsic (guarded) or unilateral (dominance) security. Maybe others might find the general concept of shifting the security paradigm useful in their own proposals.
====
Title: "Twirlip: Towards a 21st Century Worldwide Public Intelligence Desktop Platform for Collaborative Sensemaking, Analysis, Risk Assessment, and Horizon Scanning"
Company: Kurtz-Fernhout Software Organizational form: Woman-owned small business (Cynthia F. Kurtz, CEO)
Prepared: July 12, 2011
Amount requested: US$297,000
Responding to: IARPA Incisive Analysis Office Wide Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) Solicitation Number: IARPA-BAA-10-08, especially these aspects: * Methods for measuring and improving human judgment and human reasoning * Understanding and managing massive, dynamic data * Effective analysis of massive, unreliable, and diverse data * Assessing relevancy of new data * Analysis of significant societal events * Estimation and communication of uncertainty and risk
Summary: As a legacy from the 20th century, there are currently broad institutional barriers in the US intelligence community that make it difficult for intelligence analysts to gain 21st century insights into 21st century issues using 21st century technology and 21st century public data sources. To address the need to move beyond those institutional barriers, we propose a proof-of-concept project called "Twirlip" as a free and open source software (GPL) Public Intelligence desktop platform for the general public. It would use Java/JVM desktop technologies and CouchDB as a backend relay server and indexed archive. It would be built around the idea of a social semantic desktop. The public can then use this system to process open source data to crowdsource sensemaking and analysis about global socioeconomic, technical, and geopolitical trends, with a special emphasis on understanding the likely global consequences of Moore's law. The global community can also expand this platform in various ways by adding new freely licensed modules. The US intelligence community can then build on this public software and public content in its own internal sensemaking and analysis. Supporting this system by IARPA may create both a strategic first mover advantage and a public relations advantage for the US intelligence community. Whether the software is of any use to the US intelligence community directly is not as important as whether the community gets new ideas from seeing what the public does with such tools or seeing how such tools are expanded.
Technical/Administrative contact: Paul D. Fernhout, CTO Kurtz-Fernhout Software... Website: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/
I skimmed through the solicitation. It has people paid on achieving milestones they set out in advance (and they say ideally for two month or four month working time frames). Essentially, they are insisting on a waterfall development model. That makes difficult any basic research and general creativity in exploring topic areas. I guess someone could get around that a bit by promising a report or something, but that is probably not what they are looking for.
In general it is a rule of thumb in some projects by competent people that those who do not promise delivery dates get done faster.:-)
It's not clear to me how streamlined this is relative to usual government proposals, other than a quicker approval turnaround and shorter project scopes. You still need to do a bunch of paperwork and planning.
For what I want to do, with a social semantic desktop that does some specific things for public sensemaking, where I've worked on related stuff for years, and made some related stuff like that before (for governments), there may be just enough potential for milestone definition for some proposal. I could see some other people might have projects they've long been wanting to do and worked on pieces of that they could try to fit into this too. But for most people, thinking of something new, it would not be easy to plan for those milestones if they were other than work for X hours, and the endeavor could be high risk for the proposer if they don't meet their milestone (they would presumably not get paid?). Anyway, I just skimmed it, so maybe I missed something.
I'd suggest DARPA might have more success if they just asked for resumes from talented people and small groups, said we will fund you to work wherever (home office) for three months on cool free and open source stuff in an area you propose and we find interesting related to security, and if you want more funding after that, we'll decide based on what you deliver in that time period. Call the program "DARPA Cyber-Security Fellows" or something like that.
From the reuters article: "Addressing a key issue for hackers doing government projects, they will be allowed to keep the commercial intellectual property rights while giving the Defense Department use of the project."
If slashdot allowed longer tittle I woudl have called it: "Social Semantic Desktop for Sensemaking on Threats AND OPPORTUNITIES"
We'll see if they like some variation on: http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/2846ca1b6bee64e1 "Summary: This note is essentially about how civilians could benefit by have access to the sorts of "sensemaking" tools the intelligence community (as well as corporations) aspire to have, in order to design more joyful, secure, and healthy civilian communities (including through creating a more sustainable and resilient open manufacturing infrastructure for such communities). It outlines why the intelligence community should consider funding the creation of such FOSS "dual use" intelligence applications as a way to reduce global tensions through increased local prosperity, health, and with intrinsic mutual security."
http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/fdtd-g.htm "... The preceding three results should be enough to cause any conscientious educator to rethink the practice of giving students grades. But as they say on late-night TV commercials, Wait -- there's more...."
Key points: 1. Grades tend to reduce students' interest in the learning itself. 2. Grades tend to reduce students' preference for challenging tasks. 3. Grades tend to reduce the quality of students' thinking. 4. Grades aren't valid, reliable, or objective. 5. Grades distort the curriculum. 6. Grades waste a lot of time that could be spent on learning. 7. Grades encourage cheating. 8. Grades spoil teachers' relationships with students. 9. Grades spoil students' relationships with each other.
"We have an extremely complex set of problems to resolve that we cannot fix without some form of cooperation between both sides."
Or we need to admit "both sides" are clueless and elect independent replacements.
That said, you make some great points about looking at the issues from multiple points of view.
Here is a presentation I put together on what I see as the deeper issues that transcend both mainstream US parties' platforms:
"Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft " http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY "This video presents a simplified education model about socioeconomics and technological change. It discusses five interwoven economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft) and how the balance will shift with cultural changes and technological changes. It suggests that things like a basic income, better planning, improved subsistence, and an expanded gift economy can compensate in part for an exchange economy that is having problems. The text for the presentation is here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/media/FiveInterwovenEconomies.pdf "
"the upside was just too much for a sane person to believe so I forgive me."
Good point.:-)
The same may be true right now about things like 3D printing (recent slashdot article on printing an airplane) or PV solar power (which GE predicts may be cheaper than fossil fuels by around 2015).
"power grids and organisms are two different, very different items."
Ture, but I guess I was not clear enough. Consumers of power are like the organisms; the grid is more like the ecosystem. What makes sense individually may be bad both collectively (as a less than global optimum) and also for the individuals (given that other smart individuals do the same thing, which leads to competition or in this case other instability in the system). So those who do the dumb thing may make out better or be better for the system, because there is less competition for what otherwise seems like a good deal to everyone. In general, this is an issue about local optimization by "smart" actors deciding based on local information vs. global optimization. It is part of the reason diversity has value.
It is also an example of both "market failure" and individual failure and probably has applications to financial markets as well. For example, if everyone thinks the same stock sector is undervalued, and starts buying in it, they may bid up the price for stocks there past what they are worth (but as everyone is buying, it becomes a bubble), whereas stock sectors that are not such a bargain might have been better choices for reliable value from dividends.
I voted for Cynthia McKinney, and before that Ralph Nader when he ran with the Green Party. There are alternatives. Your logic is the reason Obama has so appeased the right, thinking the left has nowhere to go.
But this is all nonsense as we need to move beyond money, and as long as we use money, we should have a basic income. My presentation on that: "Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft " http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
Ultimately, US Republicans are the worst socialists, because they privatize gains but socialize costs. A real socialist government, like most other industrialized countries have, would not do that. If the USA had not started out so rich decades ago, neoliberalism would have ground the US people into the dust long ago, like it has in other third world countries, and it seems to be doing now (with flat real wages for most people for thirty years, and rising precarity).
Slashdot Mirror
"Your analysis, while lengthy, is riddled with inaccuracies and exaggerations."
Thanks for your comment, AC. I guess it is hard to summarize ten years of thinking on these things and reading tons of references in a short post, but you can find lots of detail in essays on my website: http://www.pdfernhout.net/
Even in this comment, I cited an academic and a reporter citing sources. That article on the UK being last and the US being second to last in child welfare (of industrialized countries) was based on a UN report from that time, so, while anyone can question such a report, that is not an accusation made up out of thin air.
You can stick your head in the sand, but that is a fact -- many kids in the USA are suffering in a variety of ways. Example: ..."
"Record numbers go hungry in the US: Government report shows 50m people unable to put food on the table at some point last year:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/17/millions-hungry-households-us-report
"More than a million children regularly go to bed hungry in the US, according to a government report that shows a startling increase in the number of families struggling to put food on the table. President Barack Obama, who pledged to eradicate childhood hunger, has described as "unsettling" the agriculture department survey, which says 50 million people in the US â" one in six of the population â" were unable to afford to buy sufficient food to stay healthy at some point last year, in large part because of escalating unemployment or poorly paid jobs. That is a rise of more than one-third on the year before and the highest number since the survey began in 1995.
That said, sure, I have no doubt there are inaccuracies and exaggerations in what I have written in various places, which I would be happy to eventually correct if supplied with specific information. But it seems to me that you have supplied mostly generalizations (and also responded to points I did not raise, as I agree the USA still makes a lot, at least by dollar value), generalizations that ignore how the USA has systematically disrupted grassroots movements for democracy and social accountability in other countries. That is why so many people in so many countries are angry at US Americans, just for two example where the USA helped overthrow a democratically elected government, see Chile and Iran.
Has the USA also done some good things abroad? No doubt.
Is the USA multi-cultural in a lot of ways? Yes, to its credit.
Has the USA some big technical accomplishments, like the internet? Again, no doubt. Although other countries did have computer networks, like France's Minitel or Chile's Cybersyn -- the last being destroyed by the US fomented overthrow on the first 9/11 in 1973 -- that could have become like an internet someday.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn
Are US accomplishments commensurate with having a huge (genocidally) depopulated continent to work with and being the only major surviving industrial base after a World War (where it helped arm both sides?) and bringing in the best German/Nazi scientists both before and after the war? Well, that is subject to debate...
My understanding is that the USA would have collapsed a long time ago based on mismanagement had it not been so wealthy to begin with. And as I see it, both the USA and the USSR lost the Cold War; it is just taking the USA a bit longer to fall. I agree with you the large stockpiles of WMDs the USA has make its collapse very problematical for the world.
As I mentioned, I've tried to propose alternatives to collapse, but so far, without much success in implementation.
Anyway, I'd suggest there is a lot of exaggeration in what you have written. Where did I suggest the USA was "evil per
Collapse like the fashion industry? :-) ... ..."
"The Fashion Industry's Piracy Paradox"
http://www.publicknowledge.org/node/597
"The typical explanation for intellectual property law goes something like this: Creating new books, films, drugs, songs, etc. is expensive, but once the nifty new thing is produced, copying is cheap (or, in the case of copying done over the Internet, free). Unrestrained copying robs creators of the means to profit from their works -- the copyist can always outcompete the originator. So we need IP protections to make sure that the original author or inventor has control over copying. This way, authors and inventors will be properly motivated to create.
That's a sensible theory, but it doesn't always translate in the real world. Consider the fashion industry, a creative industry larger by far than the film, recorded music and book publishing industries. The logos and labels that adorn apparel and accessories are protected by trademark law. But the designs of the garments themselves - the cut of a sleeve, the fit of a bodice - are not. Copyright law does not cover most fashion designs because clothing is a "useful article", a class of items that falls in the jurisdiction of patents and not copyrights. But patent law is almost irrelevant to fashion designs, both because the patent standard of "novelty" cannot be met by most designs, and for the practical reason that the patent application process proceeds too slowly to be meaningful for most fashion designs, which live a brief commercial life and then disappear.
So current U.S. IP law does little to protect fashion designs, and yet the fashion industry is doing quite well, thank you. How can that be? Take a look again at the typical explanation for IP law that I set out in the first paragraph of this post. Anyone who shops - even us men - cannot help but notice that there is lots of copying (aka, "piracy") of fashion designs. And yet the stores are full of innovative new designs every season. We have a puzzle.
So what does this matter? Well, if the law prohibited fashion design copying, then the fashion industry would have a much harder time creating and responding to trends. U.S. copyright law prohibits not only verbatim copies, but also any work that is "substantially similar" to a preexisting copyrighted work. So if copyright law were extended to fashion designs, the unique innovation culture of the fashion world might come under intense legal scrutiny. Designers will give way to lawyers, as every season's new collection is carefully examined for potential legal liability. Young and unknown designers will be worst off, as they will not be able to afford the lawyers' fees that will be part of the new price of admission to the industry. And an industry that has been a thriving locus of both unbridled creativity and profit may suffer.
So, let's talk about how can anyone make a sofwtare project or innovative hardware device when they have to learn about and negotiate 250,000 patents, any single one of which can lead to an injunction to stop production? It's just absurd.
A related satire I write from almost ten years ago that is sadly more true everyday:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/microslaw.html
"My fellow Americans. There has been some recent talk of free law by the General Public Lawyers (the GPL) who we all know hold un-American views. I speak to you today from the Oval Office in the White House to assure you how much better off you are now that all law is proprietary. The value of proprietary law should be obvious. Software is essentially just a form of law governing how computers operate, and all software and media content has long been privatized to great economic success. Economic analysts have proven conclusively that if we hadn't passed laws banning all f
"Getting rid of patents, at least in software, would free up vast amounts of resources."
That's the problem, isn't it. What would all the lawyers do for an income? Especially when many people have already passed the point of diminishing returns for more stuff?
Excessive bureaucracy is a from of "make work" to prop up a society that can not admit its socioeconomic model (based on an income-through-jobs link) is broken in an age of abundance from cheap technology (like from an Android-powered supercomputer in your pocket relative to a 1970s definition of supercomputer); see also this knol I put together on good and bad ways to deal with that:
http://knol.google.com/k/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
"Next up: JKR on writing Harry Potter, where she "'created' something intangible, easily replicated, and quite literally out of nothing simply by typing some characters on a keyboard." And then had to file lawsuits to keep people from using characters w/o paying royalties."
Yeah, but she created it while on the "dole" (public assistance). What does that imply about funding for the arts? Or justifications for copyright?
"Torching cars and stealing TVs is not the solution. The shooting is just being used as an excuse by the rioters and the unhelpful people encouraging them."
Much the same is said here:
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_nonviolence.html
But, the more a society is stretched to the breaking point by bad social policy, the more likely it will break into violence. Most humans can be civilized, but only while things are going at least not too terribly badly socially. The 9/11 attacks were also the product of social problems, although in that case, by frustrated young men from Saudi Arabia who blamed the USA for supporting who they saw as their local oppressors (ironically spun as "they hate us because we are free").
But, as far as the UK, from 2007, and I doubt it has gotten better with the global recession, consider this article (sadly, no longer directly at Adbusters):
http://apolyton.net/showthread.php/167082-How-Britain-is-Eating-Its-Young
http://web.archive.org/web/20071019031111/http://adbusters.org/the_magazine/71/Generation_Fcked_How_Britain_is_Eating_Its_Young.html
"Around the nation, airtime was cleared for cathartic phone-ins, heated discussions, and a torrent of contributors that simply would not stop. As if sensing that many of the problems might in part stem from the government's unparalleled obsession with monitoring, measuring and homogenising the very children it once sought to cherish, many former Labour advisors suddenly sought to introduce daylight between their ideas and those of the heavily surveilled nanny state. Neil Lawson of the Labour think-tank Compass bleakly admitted: "Society is hollowing out, but not just in the rotting boroughs of south London. The middle classes are anxious too. Many are richer but few seem happier. Mental illness abounds. White-collar jobs are outsourced to India. Everyone looks for meaning in their lives -- but all they find is shopping."
"The reason our children's lives are the worst among economically advanced countries is because we are a poor version of the USA," he said. "So the USA comes second from bottom and we follow behind. The age of neo-liberalism, even with the human face that New Labour has given it, cannot stem the tide of the social recession capitalism creates.""
Does not bode well for either the UK or the USA. And when the violence starts, things tend to just get worse for everyone, with more police, more fear, less comunity, and a downward spiral that is really expensive to recover from (like in Iraq after the civil war there that started after the US invasion).
I tried really hard to find other ways forward, and I found the conceptually, but implementing them against entrenched dogma is another thing.
"Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/media/FiveInterwovenEconomies.pdf
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
"This video presents a simplified education model about socioeconomics and technological change. It discusses five interwoven economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft) and how the balance will shift with cultural changes and technological changes. It suggests that things like a basic income, better planning, improved subsistence, and an expanded gift economy can compensate in part for an exchange economy that is having problems."
The use of the word "Theft" in the title there is not intended as advocacy -- it is more to point it out as what happens w
How do we decide in our society who gets to do one of the most important jobs, be a parent?
As for professional schools, see what happened 100 years ago, based on your reasoning:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexner_Report
"One of the consequences of Flexner's advocacy of university-based medical education was that medical education became much more expensive, putting such education out of reach of all but upper-class white males. The small "proprietary" schools Flexner condemned, which were contended to be have been based in generations-old folk traditions rather than relatively recent western science, did admit African-Americans, women, and students of limited financial means. These students usually could not afford six to eight years of university education, and were often simply denied admission to medical schools affiliated with universities. While many such doctors continued to practice, they did so under proscribed circumstances and for less pay. It also made it more difficult for people of color, residents of rural areas, and for those of limited means generally to obtain medical care in any form."
That was the kind of "folk medicine" that was destroyed 100 years ago by an emphasis on bureaucratizing medicine and focusing on profit-maximizing interventions that treats and palliates instead of holistic thinking that prevents and cures.
Thanks, but no thanks.
People need feedback, but they don't need formal bureaucratic grades, which are more about social control than honest concerned feedback.
Alternatives are things like "unschooling".
Besides, much of modern medicine is quackery:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/PCI_angioplasty_article.aspx
"Interventional cardiology and cardiovascular surgery is basically a scam based on a misunderstanding of the nature of heart disease. Searching for and treating obstructive plaque does not address the areas of the coronary vascular tree most likely to rupture and cause heart attacks. If there was never another CABG or angioplasty performed or stent placed, patients with heart disease would be better off. Doctors would be forced to educate our citizens that their heart disease risk is determined by what they place on their forks. Millions of lives would be dramatically extended. To abandon the theory of stretching and cutting out areas with plaque would shut down interventional cardiology, nearly all cardiovascular surgery, and many suppliers of the biotechnology. In many cases, interventional cardiology is the major income generator to hospitals. The ending of this ill-conceived, out-dated and ineffective technology would dramatically downsize hospitals in the United States and free up over $100 billion annually in medical care costs. Besides being ineffective, interventional cardiology places the responsibility in the hands of the doctor and not the patients. When patients finally realize they must take control of their heart problems with aggressive dietary modifications (and when needed medications for temporary periods) we will essentially solve the health crisis in America.
The sad thing is surgical interventions and medications are the foundation of modern cardiology and both are relatively ineffective compared to nutritional excellence. My patients routinely reverse their heart disease, and no longer have vulnerable plaque or high blood pressure, so they do not need medical care, hospitals or cardiologists anymore. The problem is that in the real world cardiac patients are not even informed that heart disease is predictably reversed with nutritional excellence. They are not given the opportunity to choose and just corralled into these surgical interventions.
Trying to figure out how to pay for ineffective and expensive medicine by politicians will never be a real solution. People need to know they do not have to have heart
"Planting a tree: you'll plant way more trees if you pay (i.e. reward) people to do this. If me and a friend were planting trees, I'd damn-well compete with the bastard to make my tree better."
But for how long? A lifetime without pay?
"The Man Who Planted Trees"
http://www.viddler.com/explore/Ms_Valerie/videos/240/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Planted_Trees
See also:
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
After that experience, will you work to secure the funding for more tree planting across the planet? Or will you move on to your next paying job?
And will you work together with your "friend" to refine you best practices for tree planting for the circumstances? Might you even sabotage his effort to look better?
Competition has a lot of costs in tasks that can be refined by thought and cooperation. For example, maybe together you could have built a GNU/Linux-based robotics platform that planted trees across the cosmos?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Running
Spoiler, but worth seeing if you already saw the movie:
"Silent Running Final Scene - Joan Baez (Rejoice in the Sun)"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ0JGjKYVdU
Grades are as a problematical way to organize a 21st century society if you are concerned about its overall long-term health...
"There is no such thing as a "spirit"."
How do you know? Are you perhaps a physical creature on a spiritual journey, or a spiritual being on a physical journey, or are you something else entirely? Maybe somethings will forever be a mystery on this plane of existence...
Sadly:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8026807.stm
"A car driver has crashed into crowds watching a Dutch royal parade, killing five people, in an attempted attack on the royal family, officials say."
The death toll might have been a lot higher if the person (who had lost a job and was about to be evicted, or something like that) had been targeting the crowd specifically and not the royal family.
Thanks for the tip, although I tend to feel that Atticus Finch is right, that in our society, "The easiest way to get shot is to carry a gun."
Although, I guess, that is changing, since the easiest way to get shot is probably now to have your robot carry your gun for you.
http://slashdot.org/story/06/11/14/0132216/Machine-Gun-Sentry-Robot-Unveiled
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/02/23/090223fa_fact_ratliff
Or:
"Intrinsic/mutual security vs. extrinsic/unilateral"
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1783364&cid=33537044
"If you see my other reply, you'll see that all this military technology is ironic and, essentially, making us less secure in the 21st century because it is designed from the wrong paradigm of extrinsic unilateral security (not intrinsic mutual security). For example, having a loaded self-propelled Howitzer cannon in your suburban backyard does not make you safer from home intrusion in a small community (or cancer, heart disease, stroke, and diabetes, the real killers of most US Americans) -- it makes you seen as a nutcase and your neighbors start talking about how to deal with you and get rid of it in case it went off accidentally or kids took it for a "joyride". But if you insulate your house to keep it warm at low cost, use the savings to put solar panels of the roof to power a fridge full of cool beers for passers-by, and then grown an organic garden producing abundant veggies you share with your neighbors, then you are going to have a lot more security and health and prosperity for both yourself and your community for a lot less cost than buying and maintaining a Howitzer in your backyard." [Some typos fixed]
Are school grades helping to create such a secure society?
:-)
It's a joke with lot of truth to it. My undergrad adviser said he used this model sometimes (he's 90 or so now, so probably OK to mention this). He said he would essentially get a grant for work he had already (mostly) done, and then use much of the money to do the next thing. So, you are right, it's an interesting and sometimes successful model.
A much deeper problem is that the people good at looking good may not be the same people good at doing stuff. As someone suggested recently (forget where, maybe on slashdot) that is why so many mediocre films are produced. The best directors and writers may not be the best at convincing others to give them money to make films. This is in part a function of how many lesser skilled wannabees are around and how desirable the area is. The more mature a field is, perhaps the bigger the problem?
I think that was implied in another recent slashdot article that at first glance seemed to be about how the popularity of computer programming was insuring the unemployment of true geeks. Will a true geek, even one with decent social skills, get hired when hiring managers can find a lot of very appealing people who look even more on paper like true geeks than the true geeks, and they can't tell the difference, or at least, can't tell from the information they have to work with? This is also a problem in the "Seven Samurai", how does a farmer know what makes a good Samurai? And there are so many aspects to what makes people effective, even a focus on skills and experiences can be misleading.
A completely different issue is you may be hiring the wrong type of person, or the wrong person may be doing the hiring. For example, this presentation by David Eaves suggests that big open source projects need good facilitators at the core more than they need good coders:
http://www.slideshare.net/david_a_eaves/community-management-presentation/
Still, coding skills in the case of open source may be important for a certain level of respect by the community. In general, we need better software tools for collaboration, as that presentation talks about (and thus the need for a social semantic desktop and good tools on it, including for stuff like Structured Dialogic Design and a variety of other methods for collective sensemaking and analysis and collaboration).
http://www.globalagoras.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensemaking
http://collaboration.wikia.com/wiki/Stigmergic_collaboration
The best "manager" I ever had in a commercial setting did not know how to code that well (although he could code enough to understand the problem area and contribute to it), but he was great at managing a team well.
Another option for running a program like this is to not have applications. Just find people doing the work you like and give them money.
Still, ultimately, the best security is going to emerge from a society with things like a "basic income" to live off of so the people who like resolving these issues have the time to do so, without imposing this problematical filtering process on it. That is what is depicted in James P. Hogan's "Voyage From Yesteryear" sci-fi novel. And it is backed up by research, like discussed here:
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
The best motivated work comes from taking money off the table, and people having a sense of purpose, developing a sense of mastery, and having a sense of ownership/influence over what is happening.
This is all why it is so how hard to give money away well, as discussed near the end to the Seven Laws of Money
"In early adolescence negative reinforcement becomes more effective."
Citations?
Also, more effective to what end? What sort of learning is made more effective? Learning how to be self-actualizing? Learning how to ask good questions? Learning how to focus on important social issues even when the bureacracy does not want to address them?
Contrast what you say with this research about motivation and performance on intellectual tasks:
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
I beleive Kohn was talking about all age levels there, including college.
"And as to (7): ok Alfie, name any area of life where the possibility of success and/or winning does *not* lead to cheating."
Self-improvement. Spirituality. Being a good friend. Planting a tree. Setting a good example. Upholding a sense of honor. Developing free and open source software.
See also: ... argues that competition is essentially detrimental to every important aspect of human experience; our relationships, self-esteem, enjoyment of leisure, and even productivity would all be improved if we were to break out of the pattern of relentless competition. Far from being idealistic speculation, his position is anchored in hundreds of research studies and careful analysis of the primary domains of competitive interaction. For those who see themselves assisting in a transition to a less competitive world, Kohn's book will be an invaluable resource."
"No contest: the case against competition" By Alfie Kohn
http://books.google.com/books?id=bLudHIk3gsMC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_atb#v=onepage&q&f=false
http://www.shareintl.org/archives/cooperation/co_nocontest.htm
"Alfie Kohn
"just how does he intend to evaluate the student's progress, capability, and absorption of knowledge?"
By talking with the student? How do you evaluate other people around you? How do you tell them what you think of them when it matters?
"I found great pride and satisfaction in knowing I successfully solved all the (physics or math) problems on a test."
I found great pride in flunking an advanced physics course that was full of sycophants and people who refused to question dogma. :-)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
Like in my other reply in this thread, to use your "Force" analogy (even though Taoism and Yin/Yang is more subtle and nuanced), *feedback* may have a light side and a dark side. Grades are the dark side. Sounds like the dark side may have seduced you by pretending to be the light side? Why did that professor need to put a grade on that paper in addition to the comments? You've spent probably almost two decades of your life being graded, and being told grades are important (by people whose salary you were paying, or who were paid on your behalf, when that money could have just gone directly to you and you could have learned on your own from peers, parents, neighbors, apprenticeships, and books, like people used to). Grades are a means of social control. Can't we do better than that, even if we need some control here or there?
Education has at least three aspects, in decreasing order of importance:
* Personal growth in a variety of ways (including spiritual);
* Learning what you need to know to be a good citizen participating in political life (including voting);
* Preparation for doing specific useful vocational work.
Modern schooling has so degraded the notion of education that most people think it is mainly about the third item, and that is the example you drew from. There is also a fourth aspect in practice of schooling that has to do with obedience and conformity, which is actually what most school time is spent on, whatever the purported subject:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
Did someone need to grade you on how you talked when you were a toddler for you to imporve? Does someone need to give you a grade on sex? Does someone need to give you a grade on your slashdot posts? Does someone need to give you a grade on being a good friend or neighbor? Yet you probably improve in all those areas the more you do them. The brain is like a muscle, the more you use it, the stronger it gets. You need *feedback* to improve, and that feedback can come in a variety of ways, but you don't need grades. Grades are a problematical form of feedback for the reasons listed, as well as because they tend to be so linear but performance is usually multi-factorial.
If I was a hiring manager, at least in the realm of software, I'd look at what projects a person has done (especially as hobbies) and talk to him or her about them. What relation does an "A" or even an "F" in a computer science class have to do with caring about crafting good software to solve important problems to meet society's unmet needs? Grades can say a lot about obedience, it's true. But even them, how much of a "yes" man or woman do you want your employees to be?
You do indirectly bring up the issue of certification, and for some things I'm not against it, as long as it certifies ability more than hoops jumped through and the certification process is decoupled from the instruction process (which it usually is not in schools). But even certification can be problematical, because who decides what makes a good Microsoft systems administrator say? Are the best Microsoft systems administrators the ones who say, "I never learned this stuff because you should switch to GNU/Linux or FreeBSD"? :-)
Ideally though, we'd move beyond having hiring managers altogether:
http://idlenest.freehostia.com/mirror/www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
http://idlenest.freehostia.com/mirror/www.whywork.org/
Thanks for the thoughful reply. I probably would have written much the same ten or so years ago, before reading Kohn and Gatto and Holt and others, and doing unschooling with my own kid. It's hard to break out of the mindset that school has spent so much time forming -- that we need schooling.
Something else related by Gatto:
"The Art of Driving"
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/1d.htm
"Now come back to the present while I demonstrate that the identical trust placed in ordinary people two hundred years ago still survives where it suits managers of our economy to allow it. Consider the art of driving, which I learned at the age of eleven. Without everybody behind the wheel, our sort of economy would be impossible, so everybody is there, IQ notwithstanding. With less than thirty hours of combined training and experience, a hundred million people are allowed access to vehicular weapons more lethal than pistols or rifl
I wrote this up last month as a proposal abstract for an IARPA soliciation, but I have not sent it (someone who had been with the CIA and does public intelligence said it would be pointless essentially as the US intelligence community is so broken). Anyway, I though I'd post it here, as I've written it already, and it seems a shame to waste it, and because it is what I'd like to do maybe for this solicitation. Any constructive feedback would be appreciated. Maybe DARPA might be interested in it if not IARPA, given the structural problems in the US intelligence community it seeks to address and which are part of why the US cyber infrastructure is so at risk? Imagine global security researchers having a tool like this to work collectively for mutual benefit to maximize the intrinsic security of our cyber infrastructure. I know some people may say terrible things about any attempt to engage with the US security apparatus (not without some justification), but, beyond being motivated by running out of cash (in part by doing so much free stuff), I do think the issue is that we all need security -- the issue is how we go about getting it. This proposal attempts to shift the US security paradigm in a more intrinsic and mutual direction, which is more sustainable over the long term than a focus on extrinsic (guarded) or unilateral (dominance) security. Maybe others might find the general concept of shifting the security paradigm useful in their own proposals.
====
Title: "Twirlip: Towards a 21st Century Worldwide Public Intelligence Desktop Platform for Collaborative Sensemaking, Analysis, Risk Assessment, and Horizon Scanning"
Company: Kurtz-Fernhout Software
Organizational form: Woman-owned small business (Cynthia F. Kurtz, CEO)
Prepared: July 12, 2011
Amount requested: US$297,000
Responding to: IARPA Incisive Analysis Office Wide Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) Solicitation Number: IARPA-BAA-10-08, especially these aspects:
* Methods for measuring and improving human judgment and human reasoning
* Understanding and managing massive, dynamic data
* Effective analysis of massive, unreliable, and diverse data
* Assessing relevancy of new data
* Analysis of significant societal events
* Estimation and communication of uncertainty and risk
Summary: As a legacy from the 20th century, there are currently broad institutional barriers in the US intelligence community that make it difficult for intelligence analysts to gain 21st century insights into 21st century issues using 21st century technology and 21st century public data sources. To address the need to move beyond those institutional barriers, we propose a proof-of-concept project called "Twirlip" as a free and open source software (GPL) Public Intelligence desktop platform for the general public. It would use Java/JVM desktop technologies and CouchDB as a backend relay server and indexed archive. It would be built around the idea of a social semantic desktop. The public can then use this system to process open source data to crowdsource sensemaking and analysis about global socioeconomic, technical, and geopolitical trends, with a special emphasis on understanding the likely global consequences of Moore's law. The global community can also expand this platform in various ways by adding new freely licensed modules. The US intelligence community can then build on this public software and public content in its own internal sensemaking and analysis. Supporting this system by IARPA may create both a strategic first mover advantage and a public relations advantage for the US intelligence community. Whether the software is of any use to the US intelligence community directly is not as important as whether the community gets new ideas from seeing what the public does with such tools or seeing how such tools are expanded.
Technical/Administrative contact: ...
Paul D. Fernhout, CTO
Kurtz-Fernhout Software
Website: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/
I skimmed through the solicitation. It has people paid on achieving milestones they set out in advance (and they say ideally for two month or four month working time frames). Essentially, they are insisting on a waterfall development model. That makes difficult any basic research and general creativity in exploring topic areas. I guess someone could get around that a bit by promising a report or something, but that is probably not what they are looking for.
In general it is a rule of thumb in some projects by competent people that those who do not promise delivery dates get done faster. :-)
It's not clear to me how streamlined this is relative to usual government proposals, other than a quicker approval turnaround and shorter project scopes. You still need to do a bunch of paperwork and planning.
For what I want to do, with a social semantic desktop that does some specific things for public sensemaking, where I've worked on related stuff for years, and made some related stuff like that before (for governments), there may be just enough potential for milestone definition for some proposal. I could see some other people might have projects they've long been wanting to do and worked on pieces of that they could try to fit into this too. But for most people, thinking of something new, it would not be easy to plan for those milestones if they were other than work for X hours, and the endeavor could be high risk for the proposer if they don't meet their milestone (they would presumably not get paid?). Anyway, I just skimmed it, so maybe I missed something.
I'd suggest DARPA might have more success if they just asked for resumes from talented people and small groups, said we will fund you to work wherever (home office) for three months on cool free and open source stuff in an area you propose and we find interesting related to security, and if you want more funding after that, we'll decide based on what you deliver in that time period. Call the program "DARPA Cyber-Security Fellows" or something like that.
I'd be curious what other have to say on that.
From the reuters article: "Addressing a key issue for hackers doing government projects, they will be allowed to keep the commercial intellectual property rights while giving the Defense Department use of the project."
I see where to apply, a link in one of the articles:
https://www.fbo.gov/?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=406db188e0e1935a806c143a5603eb48&tab=core&_cview=0
If slashdot allowed longer tittle I woudl have called it: "Social Semantic Desktop for Sensemaking on Threats AND OPPORTUNITIES"
We'll see if they like some variation on:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/2846ca1b6bee64e1
"Summary: This note is essentially about how civilians could benefit by have access to the sorts of "sensemaking" tools the intelligence community (as well as corporations) aspire to have, in order to design more joyful, secure, and healthy civilian communities (including through creating a more sustainable and resilient open manufacturing infrastructure for such communities). It outlines why the intelligence community should consider funding the creation of such FOSS "dual use" intelligence applications as a way to reduce global tensions through increased local prosperity, health, and with intrinsic mutual security."
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
At least I could spin it that way... :-)
And have:
"The need for FOSS intelligence tools for sensemaking etc."
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/2846ca1b6bee64e1
Where do I apply? :-)
http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/fdtd-g.htm ..."
"... The preceding three results should be enough to cause any conscientious educator to rethink the practice of giving students grades. But as they say on late-night TV commercials, Wait -- there's more.
Key points:
1. Grades tend to reduce students' interest in the learning itself.
2. Grades tend to reduce students' preference for challenging tasks.
3. Grades tend to reduce the quality of students' thinking.
4. Grades aren't valid, reliable, or objective.
5. Grades distort the curriculum.
6. Grades waste a lot of time that could be spent on learning.
7. Grades encourage cheating.
8. Grades spoil teachers' relationships with students.
9. Grades spoil students' relationships with each other.
"We have an extremely complex set of problems to resolve that we cannot fix without some form of cooperation between both sides."
Or we need to admit "both sides" are clueless and elect independent replacements.
That said, you make some great points about looking at the issues from multiple points of view.
Here is a presentation I put together on what I see as the deeper issues that transcend both mainstream US parties' platforms:
"Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
"This video presents a simplified education model about socioeconomics and technological change. It discusses five interwoven economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft) and how the balance will shift with cultural changes and technological changes. It suggests that things like a basic income, better planning, improved subsistence, and an expanded gift economy can compensate in part for an exchange economy that is having problems. The text for the presentation is here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/media/FiveInterwovenEconomies.pdf "
"the upside was just too much for a sane person to believe so I forgive me."
Good point. :-)
The same may be true right now about things like 3D printing (recent slashdot article on printing an airplane) or PV solar power (which GE predicts may be cheaper than fossil fuels by around 2015).
"power grids and organisms are two different, very different items."
Ture, but I guess I was not clear enough. Consumers of power are like the organisms; the grid is more like the ecosystem. What makes sense individually may be bad both collectively (as a less than global optimum) and also for the individuals (given that other smart individuals do the same thing, which leads to competition or in this case other instability in the system). So those who do the dumb thing may make out better or be better for the system, because there is less competition for what otherwise seems like a good deal to everyone. In general, this is an issue about local optimization by "smart" actors deciding based on local information vs. global optimization. It is part of the reason diversity has value.
It is also an example of both "market failure" and individual failure and probably has applications to financial markets as well. For example, if everyone thinks the same stock sector is undervalued, and starts buying in it, they may bid up the price for stocks there past what they are worth (but as everyone is buying, it becomes a bubble), whereas stock sectors that are not such a bargain might have been better choices for reliable value from dividends.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
http://www.pdfernhout.net/sunrise-sustainable-technology-ventures.html
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
At least I tried to get the ideas out there. But great minds think alike, so it may well be independent invention. :-)
Good luck to the new merger. Too bad it is not centered aroun free and open source software for the CAD side.
I voted for Cynthia McKinney, and before that Ralph Nader when he ran with the Green Party. There are alternatives. Your logic is the reason Obama has so appeased the right, thinking the left has nowhere to go.
But this is all nonsense as we need to move beyond money, and as long as we use money, we should have a basic income. My presentation on that:
"Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
Ultimately, US Republicans are the worst socialists, because they privatize gains but socialize costs. A real socialist government, like most other industrialized countries have, would not do that. If the USA had not started out so rich decades ago, neoliberalism would have ground the US people into the dust long ago, like it has in other third world countries, and it seems to be doing now (with flat real wages for most people for thirty years, and rising precarity).