The Norway Advantage

My 19-year old Norwegian niece ("Katja") just left town after visiting my family for four days. We had the opportunity to have several long conversations with her comparing Norway to the United States. I'm not going to suggest that Norway is perfect, but when you read the following list, it might make you wonder why the United States can't get its act together to be at least somewhat more like Norway. Here's what Norway offers to its citizens: - Single-payer healthcare ("The only requirement for receiving healthcare in Norway is that one be alive.") - Free schooling at the grade school and high school level. In fact free schooling at the university level as well. Competition can be fierce for getting into particular schools at the University level (my niece is keeping her fingers crossed that she gets into law school this fall), but anyone who can do the school work is allowed to go to school. - The average Norwegian has five weeks of vacation every year. - Generous maternity and paternity leave, with pay. Further, many businesses offer high-quality child care for their workers. The government offers subsidized child care. - A generous social security system

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Warning stickers for the use of the word “them”

"Language is the source of misunderstandings."

Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1900 - 1944)

As I read the news these days, I am struck by the great power that is exercised by categorizing groups of people into “us” and “them.” The use of the word “them” so often seems like such an innocent and natural thing to do, but look what happens when we divide people into “us” and “them.” We give the benefit of the doubt to those in the “us” group. We take better care of the “us” people. We tend to trust the “us” people, even when we don’t really know who they are. We are rude to those in the “them” group. We tend to not trust those outsiders. We instinctively twist their words to mean something other than what they say, often the opposite of what they meant. We exclude “them. Many of “us” feel hostility toward the “them” people, ranging from annoyance to things much more terrible. Many of “us” feel justified treating “them” people as though they were farm animals, or worse. Maybe this tendency comes from ancient biological roots. Regardless, we need to learn to see around our own corner--we could do so much better than we tend to do these days. And perhaps some might argue that it is not the choice of a word that divides us, but that the word choice merely recognizes pre-linguistic instincts. To the extent that this is true, it is my belief that the choice of the word "them" locks in such pre-linguistic tendencies, making them seem more stark, more real. This subtle early linguistic move of categorizing people into the “them” category has great power to harm, power of which we are usually not aware when we make that quick initial decision to place people into the outgroup category. The dangers sticking someone into the “outgroup” is well known to psychologists. On the streets, though, we make “us” versus “them” categorizations without much thought, and then down the road, sometimes way down the road, many of us pay a big price for our thoughtless choices to use such a powerful word. The choice of the word “them” is often careless and even thoughtless, but great evil can result. That’s the thing about the greatest evils of the world: the greatest evils don’t usually result from conscious intent or malice. Rather, they usually result from lack of thought, lack of conscious attention. I’ve written about these concerns before—for example, I once suggested that all humans should refer to themselves as “Africans,” an scientifically-justified categorization that might avoid much of the conflict we now see between non-existent “races” of people. And see here. I suspect that much of our social distress, “racial” and cultural, is a result of failing to use the word “them” with the care it deserves. Here’s what I interpret to be another recent example. Perhaps the word “them” should always come with some sort of warning sticker (I haven’t figured out the logistics, of course). The warning would go something like this:

Careless use of the word "them" often divides humanity into ingroups and outgroups, setting the stage for highly polarized conflict, which often escalates into violence. “Them” is a powerful work that should always be used with great care.

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Superorganisms take the limelight

In the Natural History's February 2009 article titled "Could an Ant Colony Read this Book," ecologist Robert Dunn tracks the long-term collaborative efforts of Edward O. Wilson and Bert Holldobler, leading up to their new book: The Superorganism. In their new book, Hölldobler and Wilson

. . . have breathed new life into a notion that intrigued scientists before World War I: that a colony of social insects is analogous to an individual. The concept of the superorganism—which compares a colony’s members to a body’s cells and sometimes its nest to the body’s skeleton—fell out of favor as research increasingly focused on the genes of individuals. Hölldobler and Wilson, building on new insights into the evolution and workings of insect societies, seek to bring it back. To them, “superorganism” is more than a metaphor; it is a unit in the hierarchy of biological organization, falling somewhere between an ecosystem and an individual. And, they argue, it is the most useful level of biological organization at which to examine how pieces are assembled to make a whole—be it an association of bacteria, a single creature, or a whole society—as well as to understand what holds all organisms together, even when the pieces struggle toward independent goals.

According to Dunn (and Wilson and Holldobler), ants and other highly social creatures (such as termites, and honeybees) offer a rare opportunity to study the process by which individuals meld into an unified organism. Other examples include the early symbiosis of mitochondria with an early form of bacteria, plant cells ("which arose when a eukaryotic cell . . incorporated a photosynthetic bacterium") and multicellular creatures in general (e.g., human beings). In each of these examples, individuals gave up reproduction "either partially or completely, to work for their overbearing mother." Wilson and Holldobler point to group selection (and individual selection) as a key component of the evolution of highly social species. "In group-selection models, evolution favors the groups whose member cooperate more effectively, regardless of whether such cooperation helps a given individual (or that individual's kin) reproduce." The key to allowing this process is "communication and the division of labor." Apropos for a book that was five years in the making by Wilson and Holldobler.

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Another well-deserved attack on rationality

Why do we do the things we do? Why did you propose that woman, for instance? Or why did you accept a job offer from that man? The January 29, 2009 edition of Nature (available online only to subscribers) takes a look at this question in an article by Mark Buchanan titled "Secret Signals: Are People's Interactions Driven by a Primitive, Not Linguistic Type of Communication?" Scientists have determined that there is a second channel of human communication that (often) acts in parallel with our rational thinking and verbal communication. It's difficult to pin down power and scope of this non-linguistic ability, however. Recently, computer scientist Alex Pentland has started using wearable electronic devices in order to study our ability to communicate using non-linguistic behavior. It is Pentland's aim to try to assist organizations to make better use of their personnel based upon this ubiquitous and powerful hidden communication. Many people resist the idea that many of our choices are not determined by "conscious intentions and deliberate choices." It's time to stop resisting, however. For example, our behavior is highly determined by our social context rather than our innate "character." On this topic I've often recommended an excellent book titled The Person and the Situation, by Lee Ross and Richard Nisbett. See also, this earlier DI post titled "Laughing at not funny things, and the limits of introspection."

Continue ReadingAnother well-deserved attack on rationality

You too can be part of the Web 2.0 (if you’re willing to invest time and money on technology).

I was born in 1956, when ordinary people had far fewer opportunities to communicate their ideas to mass markets. For most of my adult life, there were only a few choices to get the word out. You could send out mass mailings or you could hit the telephones, dialing number after number. You could hang paper flyers on telephone poles and fences. You could knock on doors and talk to the folks house by house. Or you could stand on a soapbox and shout your ideas. These traditional “techniques” are still available and they are still sometimes quite effective, at least to those with hordes of volunteers at their service. The Internet, however, has opened up many additional possibilities for spreading your ideas far and wide. With that great power, however, comes serious responsibility to spend the time to obtain a working knowledge of the underlying technology. How many bloggers are out there now? At least 100 million. Being a proficient user of a word processor is only the first step. Putting your written work on your own website also requires you to understand at least the basic tools of blogging software. With those two steps, you might already be on a big slippery slope. Many people are perfectly happy blogging on a free site such as LiveJournal MSN's Spaces or Google's Blogger, or one of the many sites with low fees as long as your traffic is modest (e.g., Typepad). Choosing to place your blog with one of these simple on-line sites keeps things really easy. You needn't ever load any software or maintain the "backend" of your blog. In 2006, I suspected that I would want to take advantage of many modern day multi-media tools. That's why I chose to base my blog on WordPress. Going with WordPress allowed me to take advantage of numerous constantly evolving add-ons. I chose it because it kept my site flexible for using multimedia technology that, in return for its flexibility, can require a substantial investment in time. If you’re like me, you will thus develop a love/hate relationship to the flexible do-it-yourself blogging software and the many multi-media tools that allow you to feed your blog in sophisticated ways. You’ll become enthralled with the power these things give you to package your ideas. But you might also become frustrated when you see how much time it takes to learn to make proficient use of these tools. Here's an ironic twist: Since 2006, the free online sites now allow you to easily incorporate many kinds of images, sounds and video on blogs. Therefore, if you aren't exceedingly greedy for technology or traffic, you can now have it all. Yet you'll still need to decide how much multi-media to incorporate into your blog, even if it's free and simple. Therefore, much of this post applies to all of us who have decided to jump into the world of blogging.

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