Bush on “the lesson of Viet Nam”
According to our president, here is the lesson about Iraq that America learned from Vietnam: "We'll succeed unless we quit." Keith Olbermann doesn't see it that way.
Sometimes I myth people
Sometimes we get it, sometimes we don’t. We’re only human, after all. In my life journey I have beliefs that sometimes conflict with observable reality. The issue, then, is whether to conform my beliefs to observable reality. Too often, I don’t. I assemble the facts and weigh them, often discarding compelling proofs that what I hold are mythical beliefs. But we all do this.
I will cite an example: my belief in the fundamental goodness of human beings.
I didn’t begin to drive until I was 40. I had lived in St. Louis 35 years before that and my friends either didn’t know or didn’t care that I didn’t drive (to be honest, I had occasionally operated a car but, only in emergency situations where my lack of skills was outweighed by other more pressing concerns). I also lived or spent time in Washington, D.C., New York City and Boston, where there’s real public transportation. But here in St. Louis I used public transit. Or I rode a bike, ran or walked, if traveling less than two miles. For most of that period I got around St. Louis (and the rest of the country) by hitchhiking. After high school, I hitched around the country and stayed in various places–I’d call home collect to let my family know I was alive. My most frequently traveled routes were between home and Colorado and home and Chicago.…
Onward Christian Soldier
I saw a bumper sticker the other day. “Caution: Christian On Board”
I thought, yeah, I’ll be careful. These days christians can be dangerous.
What follows may be a bit on the intolerant side, but I’m sometimes convinced our condemnation of intolerance makes us too unwilling to be simply impatient. We “tolerate” a lot of nonsense because we don’t want to be accused of intolerance.
Rumsfeld is gone now, and I’ve been thinking about unanswered questions, assumptions made on our behalf which led to a holy mess. I remember when Abu Ghraib broke. I’m thinking about the obscenities from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. People expressed shock, outrage. The president, Rumsfeld, the generals, they were all duly unhinged. They did not approve this. They did not order it or condone it. Congress has them answering questions now as to how such things could happen.
Frankly, the wrong questions were and are being asked. Senators wanted to know who to blame for either condoning it or for “allowing it to happen”–a phrase I find ludicrous in practical terms. It’s like the phrase you hear lawyers and legislators use, you know the one “You failed to do such and such.” Every time I hear that phrase I think “No he didn’t. He didn’t fail. To fail implies that at some point an attempt was made to do something. The attempt failed. He didn’t fail to tell the truth–he simply didn’t do it. He succeeded in not doing it. Failure was entirely part …
“Is our children Learning?”
This is not a comment on the verbal acuity of our esteemed leader. Rather a reference to a subject that has been bandied about in education circles for over a decade, yet doesn’t seem to be changing. The difference between mental regurgitation and learning.
Techno idiots, huh? Then we have our work cut out for us is a recent entry at ZDNet about teaching methods based on 1950’s standards being applied to Google-era kids. The problem is that anything students can be made to memorize is always a few keystrokes away, yet the education system is geared toward memorizing and old methods of looking things up. What graduates are often missing is the ability to parse information, to get reasonable sense from a pile of data.
This ties in neatly with the recent postings (one sample) about conspiracy theories. Schools are churning out experts in copying and pasting, but thinking skills are left behind.…
It’s not a conspiracy. It’s a coincidence
Jason’s post about conspiracies reminded me of several books that support Jason’s argument.
The first book is How We Know What Isn’t so: the Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life, by Thomas Gilovich (1991). Gilovich points to a number of experiments demonstrating that people strive to find order in the world where there is none. We don’t find random distributions easy to process. Rather, we allow our imaginations to run wild on randomness:
With hindsight it is always possible to spot the most anomalous features of the data and build a favorable statistical analysis around them. However, if properly trained scientist (or simply a wise person) avoids doing so because he or she recognizes that constructing a statistical analysis retrospectively capitalizes too much on chance and renders the analysis meaningless. . . . unfortunately, the intuitive assessments of the average person are not bound by these constraints.
Here’s another good example of people finding order where there isn’t, on Mars.
People are also “extraordinarily good at ad hoc explanations.” Our motives and fears ignite our imaginations:
…Once a person has misidentified a random pattern as a “real” phenomenon, it will not exist as a puzzling, isolated fact about the world. Rather, it is quickly explained and readily integrated into the person’s pre-existing theories and beliefs. These theories, furthermore, then serve to bias the person’s evaluation of new information in such a way that the initial belief becomes solidly entrenched. . . . people cling tenaciously to their beliefs in