countering populism

by

I would say that populism is the first refuge of a scoundrel and a literate, engaged, and networked citizenry gives no such refuge. But education alone is not the answer to the constant outrage we are witnessing as many societies polarize on political lines. Even highly educated people can be bigots, racists, and misogynists. Society’s answer to populism is not a return to the old ways, nor an ironic post-modern shrug, but rather a new meta-modernity — multi-layered, relational, and global.

Slovakia’s president, Zuzana Caputova elected in March 2019, suggests a way out of the populist quagmire. The answer is to be calm, rational, and to embrace others, much like a universal mother.

Read more

filter success

by

Clay Shirky’s statement — “It’s not information overload, it’s filter failure” — is an oft-quoted line when discussing online sensemaking. I was discussing filters last week during an interview on personal knowledge mastery which will be used to inform a program we are developing for a client organization, a large global corporation. The interview reminded me that it’s time to refine my work on knowledge filters because times have changed since I first wrote up the work of Tim Kastelle and his five forms of filtering in 2011. I slightly revised these knowledge filters in 2018 and recently discussed the importance of trusted filters.

One current challenge with machine filters (heuristic & algorithmic) is that in most cases the end-user does not know what logic or code is driving them. One machine filter that many of us use is Google Translate, which you could say is either the result of the wisdom of crowds, or the blind leading the blind — you choose.

“The main issue is the mechanism used by Google Translate itself. It does not actually translate anything, but it scours the web for similar or identical translations performed in the past, constantly learning and building upon what it has learned. This might sound great, but this also means that any time you plug your word, phrase or paragraph, or upload a document into Google Translate, it then becomes public domain.” —Robert Gebhardt

Read more

change takes time and effort

by

The idea that generalists and soft skills are needed in the modern workplace seems to be hitting the mainstream of HR, L&D, etc. I have written about these for the past decade or more, and I think it’s necessary to clarify some of the discussion.

1. Wicked problems need neo-generalists

Neo-generalists defy common understanding. They cross boundaries, and some break them. They see patterns before others do. They go against hundreds of years of cultural programming. I doubt this is what most employers in large organizations are looking for. But neo-generalists are necessary today — “It is through the hybridization of and cross-pollination between such disciplines [science & humanities] that we will arrive at solutions for our wicked problems.” Hiring and developing generalists will not be enough.

2. A centuries old schism is not addressed overnight

E.O. Wilson, in The Origins of Creativity, envisages a third enlightenment that will bring us closer to seeing humanity as one common group, uniting fields of knowledge. But how many in the humanities have deep science skills, and vice versa?

“Scientists and scholars in the humanities, working together, will, I believe serve as the leaders of a new philosophy, one that blends the best and most relevant from these two branches of learning.”

Recombining the sciences and the humanities will take some time. In the meantime, cross-disciplinary teams may be more practical.

Read more

from training to learning

by

While social learning may be one of the currently hot new trends in the education and training fields, we have known for a while “why tried-and-true training methods don’t work anymore”, as discussed by Brigitte Jordan (1937-2016) in the mid-1990’s while working at the Institute for Research on Learning. Here are the highlights — From Training to Learning in the New Economy.

Read more

connecting the curious

by

Why do students often ask — will this be on the test? It’s because they have figured out the game called education. They are told what to study, what is important, and for how long. Each school year they play the game anew.

Why are some — a significant percentage — employees not motivated to work? They too have figured out the game. Venkatesh Rao, in The Gervais Principle describes this large base of most companies — the losers.

“The Losers are not social losers (as in the opposite of ‘cool’), but people who have struck bad bargains economically – giving up capitalist striving for steady paychecks. I am not making this connection up … The Losers like to feel good about their lives. They are the happiness seekers, rather than will-to-power players, and enter and exit reactively, in response to the meta-Darwinian trends in the economy. But they have no more loyalty to the firm than the Sociopaths. They do have a loyalty to individual people, and a commitment to finding fulfillment through work when they can, and coasting when they cannot.”

Read more

banking ideas

by

Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

@White_Owly — “Unconscious bias hangs out with plausible deniability. I’ve seen them together. They’ll deny it though.“

@EikeGS — “Today everything runs on bestseller lists. You rarely find good books there. But the less people can cook, the more cookbooks are sold.”

“Most executives, many scientists, and almost all business school graduates believe that if you analyze data, this will give you new ideas. Unfortunately, this belief is totally wrong. The mind can only see what it is prepared to see.” —Edward de Bono, via @hemppa

Read more

cracking the chambers

by

Thi Nguyen, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Utah Valley University describes two related but distinct phenomena of collective human behaviour — bubbles and chambers.

An epistemic bubble is what happens when insiders aren’t exposed to people from the opposite side.
An echo chamber is what happens when insiders come to distrust everybody on the outside.

An epistemic bubble, for example, might form on one’s social media feed. When a person gets all their news and political arguments from Facebook and all their Facebook friends share their political views, they’re in an epistemic bubble. They hear arguments and evidence only from their side of the political spectrum. They’re never exposed to the other side’s views.

An echo chamber leads its members to distrust everybody on the outside of that chamber. And that means that an insider’s trust for other insiders can grow unchecked. —Big Think 2019-09-16

Nguyen believes that echo chambers are the real problem because members “are far more entrenched and far more resistant to outside voices than epistemic bubbles”. They do not trust people outside their chamber. These echo chambers can exist on all sides of any political spectrum. Nguyen concludes that, “To break somebody out of an echo chamber, you’d need to repair that broken trust”.

So what can be done?

Read more

we are dependent on human connection

by

What we do not know

Our networks are great places for serendipitous connections. But they are not safe places to have deeper conversations or to expose our points of view, I noted last year in coffee, communities, and condescension. The difference between an open social network (e.g. Twitter) and a private online community (e.g. Mattermost) is that the latter is often based on mutual trust. While community members may disagree, they respect each other. They are not shaming people in public, as happens frequently on Twitter with its loose social ties.

To make sense of our complex world and its often-veiled media sources, we need both open social networks and more closed communities of practice/interest. Sensemaking is an ongoing process and highly dependent on our human connections. Only collectively can we confront the post-truth machines of the network era.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect is the tendency of people who know less about a topic to think that they know more. This cognitive bias comes from people’s “inability to recognize their lack of ability”. The counter to this bias is metacognition — the ability to think about our own thinking processes — and is humanity’s secret weapon that too few of us use. Another counter is to connect to other people with diverging experiences and interests. The more diverse our social networks, the more diverse our thinking can be.

Read more

citizen-learners

by

Crooked Broker Capitalists

Dave Pollard (2007) showed that in a ‘crooked broker society’, an Exploiter oppresses a Desperate Supplier. This unbalanced relationship is reinforced by a Procurer who in turn gouges an Addicted Buyer. It’s the underlying nature of unregulated capitalism that drives us toward such a society. For example, Peter Thiel, a platform capitalist, wrote that, “If you want to create and capture lasting value, look to build a monopoly.”

In platform capitalism, workers (labour) are the desperate suppliers, exploited by the platform (e.g. Über, Amazon, Google, AirBNB) once it has a monopoly as the medium of exchange. Various middle-men then become the procurers, gouging not just customers but also public services paid by citizens.

In 1881 Henry Demarest Lloyd wrote that, “When monopolies succeed, the people fail …”, in his piece denouncing the practices of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. John Kenneth Galbraith warned of the dangers of blindly having faith in our corporate systems.

“The greater danger is in the subordination of belief to the needs of the modern industrial system … These are that technology is always good; that economic growth is always good; that firms must always expand; that consumption of goods is the principal source of happiness; that idleness is wicked; and that nothing should interfere with the priority we accord to technology, growth, and increased consumption.” —John Kenneth Galbraith (1967) The New Industrial State

Read more

systems thinking and training

by

Continued from — just checking the box

Boeing 737 MAX

I read an article in New Republic entitled Crash Course by Maureen Tkacic, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, which describes how “Boeing’s managerial revolution created the 737 MAX disaster” — resulting in plane crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia.

In the now infamous debacle of the Boeing 737 MAX, the company produced a plane outfitted with a half-assed bit of software programmed to override all pilot input and nosedive when a little vane on the side of the fuselage told it the nose was pitching up. The vane was also not terribly reliable, possibly due to assembly line lapses reported by a whistle-blower, and when the plane processed the bad data it received, it promptly dove into the sea.

In the article by Tkacic, all the blame is on Boeing.

The upshot was that Boeing had not only outfitted the MAX with a deadly piece of software; it had also taken the additional step of instructing pilots to respond to an erroneous activation of the software by literally attempting the impossible. MCAS alone had taken twelve minutes to down Lion Air 610; in the Ethiopian crash, the MCAS software, overridden by pilots hitting the cutout switches as per Boeing’s instructions, had cut that time line in half. Lemme had seen a lot of stupidity from his old employer over the years, but he found this whole mess “frankly stunning.”

When I shared this article on Twitter, Jim Hays referred me to another article in the New York Times by William Langewiesche, an experienced pilot and aviation journalist who has written technical reports on the flight characteristics of various airplanes. It is entitled — What really brought down the Boeing 737 Max?

Note: I am only comparing these two articles, not making my own uneducated investigation into this aircraft.

Read more