All knowledge is limited

I was in a class last week being taught by an expert. He is a professor at the University of Texas, has worked in his field for over 35 years, and has written a seminal textbook on the subject. In the accompanying electronic material, there was a scanned version of his slides from 20 years ago...when they actually were slides. He knows his stuff.

Then in the middle of the day, he made a remarkable statement. He said, "I don't know why..." What was remarkable about this statement is I knew exactly why. I could have given a 15 minute lecture on why, except that it seemed so basic and fundamental a concept to me that it should simply be given and not need any explanation.

I realized that this expert, who knows more than I ever will about his field, is missing basic knowledge about something closely related. Knowledge that I have. Thinking about this has led me to three conclusions.

1. I know more than I give myself credit for.
2. What seems obvious to me is not necessarily obvious to all.
3. Others' knowledge will always far exceed my own in most areas.

These observations apply to all of us, not just me. It should give us a healthy dose of confidence and humility. Remember that your knowledge is limited, and so is everyone else's, so always remember to share freely and listen gratefully.

What good is learning?

I am currently listening to a Game Theory course from Open Yale during my commutes and enjoying it immensly. I had heard of Game Theory, but had no idea what it actually was until this course. At a little over half-way through 20+ hours of lecture, I can at least tell you what Game Theory generally means.

In addition to the general idea of Game Theory, I can also tell you right now what a Nash Equilibrium is, how to determine evolutionary stability, and the method for calculating the best mixed strategy response. Pretty cool, huh?

The trouble is, if you ask me about those things in 6 months, will I even have a clue what you are talking about? Maybe. More importantly, will I have made use of any of those concepts in my life? Probably not.

So why am I learning them now? For Game Theory to be relevant to life, I would need to do it a lot...far more than 20 hours of lecture, even if I was doing the homework. The same could be said of most of my college courses and most books I have read. The long-term impact of most seems to be small, at least counted in what facts I know and what skills I posess.

So why bother? Why learn at all? I can think of a few reasons, but the topic seems worthy of more thought and discussion than a simple blog post. Here is where I start:

• I like learning. New information is fun for me.
• Learning exercises my brain. When I run regularly, walking up stairs is easier. When I learn regularly, the thinking that I get paid for (i.e. work) is easier.
• Some learning is better than none. By flooding myself with 20 hours of Game Theory, I may retain 15 minutes. Getting those 15 minutes may be worth the 20 hours.
• Learning is a saturation process. Those 15 minutes cannot be obtained in less than 20 hours (or some such ratio). Learning requires a lot of input for a little to stick around.

What do you think? Why do you learn?

Underserved kids

Who loses out in institutional schooling?

1. Smart kids - please wait quietly for your classmates to finish. No, you may not go learn something else.
   
2. Dumb kids - once dumb, always dumb...welcome to the caste system.
   
3. Average kids - perfect. Sit quietly, do what you're told, and please don't disrupt the system.
   
4. Specialized kids - you can draw, but not add? Go to #2.
   
5. Active kids - if you can't learn by sitting still for 8 hours, we'll make sure you don't learn at all.
   
6. Slackers - welcome to an advanced course in how to game the system. Good luck making that work after you graduate.
   
7. Hoodlums - break a rule, go to detention; break a law, go to jail. Repeat.
   
8. Goodie-two-shoes - congratulations on learning to find your value in the approval of others.
   

What does testing test?

Standards are all the rage in school these days. By standards, naturally, we mean test scores. Weeks and months are taken up every year in every public school to prepare for, take, and recover from standardized tests. The results of the tests determine funding, rankings, college admissions and scholarship opportunities. The results of the tests are clearly very important. What about the meaning, though?

What does a test measure? Learning? Potential? Based on the use of the results, both of those seem to be true. Did you learn what the school sought to teach you this year? Do you have the potential to succeed at our university?

The truth is, the test measures nothing but the number of correct answers given to the questions on the test. Only by demonstrating or assuming a correlation between this and something else can the test measure that other thing.

As an analogy, take a classic mercury thermometer. It measures temperature, right? Wrong. It measures the volume of mercury in the tube. The only reason we can determine temperature is because thousands of experiments have been done to correlate volume with temperature, then the thermometer was calibrated with lines to allow the rest of us to read that correlation without going through the math.

Back to school testing. There are studies and correlations out there for testing. A lot of work has been done to validate some of them. At the same time, most of us never worry about that. We take test scores as absolute measures of something (usually learning) and make decisions based on that information.

I have not done the research to be able to speak about the validity of this test or another. I am not in a position to make policy or school board decisions. All I can do is caution all of us to think twice about how we are interpreting and using test results. We are all responsible for how our kids are educated, and it is rarely a good idea to blindly trust others with that task.

Crisis America

Can we have a problem anymore without it being a crisis? Recently I've read or heard about the following issues in America:

• The Water Crisis
• The Climate Crisis
  
• The Economic Crisis
• The Kids-in-Nature Crisis
• The Education Crisis
• The Health Care Crisis
• The Food Crisis
• The Energy Crisis

Are we really in this much trouble? Is everything about to collapse on us?

(Editors note: a crisis can be defined as "a condition of instability or danger, as in social, economic, political, or international affairs, leading to a decisive change" and does not necessarily imply a negative result. But still.)

I'm not sure. Maybe. Perhaps the world really is in that much trouble. Perhaps we only talk about the problems that are at crisis-level. Perhaps in the growing cacophony of media, the only way to get noticed is to convince people that your issue is a crisis issue (David's lawn care crisis, anyone?).

Unfortunately, when everything's a crisis, nothing's important. No one has enough time, energy, focus, or money to deal with more than a crisis or two at the same time. It is analogous to trying to fight a war on several fronts at once. Occasionally necessary, but rarely effective or a good idea. At best, we just worry a lot. At worst, we do nothing.

The problems are out there, though. Something needs to be done about most of them. Let's just pick a couple, though. If we are all individually focused and we stop blowing some things out of proportion, maybe The Crisis Crisis can be averted.

The Goose - good for the gander, too.

I'm into learning stuff. One big group of stuff I like to learn about is personal leadership/productivity/improvement, and there's no shortage of books out there feed that need. So many, in fact, that there's no way I can read them all, or even a small fraction of them. Which is why The Goose is so fantastic.

They read books, summarize them, extract key nuggets (Golden Eggs) and send you an email every Tuesday with the information nicely written up. Since a lot of books contain no more than one or two original, useful ideas (if that), this saves a whole lot of time.

Check them out. You'll be glad you did.

 

 

The Fifth Discipline (Peter Senge)

Nearly everything we do or experience is part of a system. It is the very rare circumstance where we can attribute cause and effect to independent entities. Yet we do it all the time.

"The Fed/housing bubble/Lehman Brothers caused the financial break-down."
"A public option will fix healthcare."
"I'm eating because I'm hungry."

All these statements have truth in them, but they are incomplete. They are incomplete because they leave out the system. They leave out the history, the other players, the unintended consequences, the emotions, and all the other subtle, critical influences.

The 5th discipline of Senge's title attempts to capture all that other stuff through "systems thinking." Everything is connected, and only by broadening our view to encompass the whole system will we ever understand what's really going on. If not, unintended consequences will reign supreme.

The other four disciplines, personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, and team learning, all feed into systems thinking, particularly as part of an organization. At one time, Shell excelled at this, but I'm no longer convinced it's part of the culture.

Although somewhat academic in style, the world today is too complex not to be moving toward thinking in terms of systems. If you're not doing it now, this classic is well worth reading.

Five things I learned in school

1. How to coast
   
2. How to take multiple choice tests
   
3. How to sleep upright
   
4. How to manipulate a system
   
5. How to submit to authority
   

*Format credit to Merlin Mann*

Five things school didn't teach me (and won't teach my kids)

1. Intrinsic motivation 
2. Contentment
   
3. Independence
4. Curiosity
5. Initiative
   

*Format credit to Merlin Mann*