Thoughts after a talk by Michelle Dawson

Some thoughts, not yet expanded…

1. Autistic people have been shown to be more emotionally expressive than non-autistics, contrary to some stereotypes. In one experiment, they were also still less susceptible to a framing effect.

2. Seemingly narrow abilities can get one very far, e.g., spotting weird interpretations of results in papers; systematically cataloguing results. They are only “narrow” if judged that way.

3. Everyone needs to find their talents and spot and help cultivate talents in others. Autism is another more visible instance of this.

4. “Interventions” are often poor substitutes for mentoring relationships, which have been found to be so important in, e.g., apprenticeships, Oxbridge undergrad supervision, and PhD supervision elsewhere.

5. Opportunities to try things can be the best intervention.

6. Judgmental observation is a kind of interaction, as when you see something, a trait, behaviour, you assess to be negative, it’s difficult to avoid broadcasting your opinion, even if just in a brief facial expression. This affects the person you’ve just observed.

7. Verbal fluency is still over-emphasised in academia. Visuospatial processing, rapid categorisation, implicit learning – still computationally complex cognitive processes – are often undervalued.

8. Everyone has biases, e.g., results they want to be true, even those pointing out biases in others. That’s where debate and criticism from other folk who are less involved is crucial.

What I thought (in 2006) about examinations

What does it mean to understand something and how can you test that of others?

I expect much of it is mastery of language: using mathematical language the correct way; having experience of doing the calculational bits of maths efficiently — algebraic manipulation, etc; being able to use (and learn) the libraries of a programming language; being able to use and extract common patterns of programming — learning the semantics of loops, etc, is not enough (one of the failings of formalist approaches is emphasising this) pragmatics and idioms are also essential. I expect a lot of people get stuck in maths and programming because they insist on doing everything from first principles, to search for some non-existent meaning, when it’s essential to use analogy and to take advantage of examples and counterexamples (of code, of mathematics) wherever possible.

Here’s some stuff from Psychological Knowledge by Kusch (1999). This is in the depths of an argument about how folk-psychology (e.g. talk about beliefs, wants, desires, etc) is a social institution, but try twisting it a bit…

“To follow a practice is to be able to distinguish between right and wrong ways of going on; it is to be able to characterise actions as belonging to a given practice; it is to be able to argue with others over whether or not a given way of `going on’ is acceptable; it is to be able to sanction others if they fail to go on in the right sort of way; and it is to be able to self- adjust one’s own doing in the light of others’ feedback. [...] We would not normally say that a person possesses a concept unless the person understands the concept; and we would not normally say that the person understands the concept unless that person can engage in the sorts of activities that I have mentioned above as being involved in rule following.”

I think this is more than a written exam can test. Generally, questions in an exam are very close to questions given as examples, whereas real world problem solving can often involve spending time fighting with books, getting stuck for days, asking for help. People can do exceedingly well in exams without being able to argue convincingly for and against the techniques they’ve used. There’s no opportunity to test to see how well someone will interact and benefit from interaction with others — which is surely crucial for actual practice. I don’t mean in the fluffy “people skills” way that professional practice courses try to teach: I mean learning how to ask useful questions, understanding the relativity of premises and when to modify what you believe, reasoning credulously from what someone is saying before taking a skeptical stance, spotting rhetorical devices and ignoring them, and so on.

I liked this bit in the intro to Bridges from Classical to Nonmontonic Logic by David Makinson, on how to read the book:

“Do it pencil in hand; scribble in the margins. Take nothing on faith; check out the assertions; find errors (and communicate them to the author); pose questions.

“Notoriously, the best test of whether one has understood a definition is to be able to identify positive and negative examples. Nor has one understood a theorem very well if unable to apply it to straightforward cases and recognize some of its more immediate consequences. Without this one may have the illusion of understanding, but not the real thing.

“[...] As well as exercises, there are some problems. They are more demanding. In general they require more than checking positive and negative instances of a definition or straight applications with a couple of steps of argument. Their solutions may need perceptive guessing plus the ability to prove or disprove the guesses. Both the art of making good guesses and the ability to check them out are acquired skills, and grow with practice.”

Incidentally I think a lot of programming is the art of making good “guesses”, where a guess is probably the result of exposure to lots of examples, gaining lots of experience. Then solving the problem at hand is the skill of transforming the initial guess into something that works and justifying why it works.

What students think about discussions

Earlier this year in a class which depended a lot on discussion, I asked a bunch of students for some advice on making discussions work.  Here’s what they said:

What kinds of comments do people find useful?

• Comments which relate what you want to do to previously published work.
• Preferably with an added “OH there’s lots of work to do in that!” — and ideas for what.
• Preferably with a specific paper in mind, not generally suggesting that there must have been something done.
• “That’s a great/interesting idea!” — if it was.
• There will always be good and bad aspects to what people suggest: point these out and don’t lie.
• Good questions can be better than advice.
• General conversational skills stuff, like nodding, showing you’re interested, rephrasing what has been said to show that you’ve been listening, “go on… interesting idea…”

Typical unconstructive critical comments

• This has been done before — it’s all known.
• Nobody will be interested.
• Too specific or too complicated questions too early!
• Destroying a general idea by picking on one very specific problem

Coping with negative comments

• To someone who criticises: “How would you do it?”
• Shifting the burden of authority to elsewhere, e.g., to a published paper.
• If a group discussion, then try to engage the other (positive) group members.
• Be blunt!  (In cases of emergency.)  Sometimes diplomacy doesn’t work.
• Ask the critical person to come up with a counterargument to his or her own criticism (I like this idea — I wonder does it work!)
• “I appreciate your feedback…” “Hmmm there might be some truth in what you’re saying…” Try to compromise.

Unsuccessful strategies for coping

• Personal attacks
• Ignoring the person
• Giving up
• Getting into a shouting match
• “I don’t care what you have to say”

Direct action

“Proceeding with the belief that in every situation, every individual and group has the possibility of some direct action on some level of generality, we may discover much that has been unrecognised, and the importance of much that has been underrated. So politicalised is our thinking, so focused to the motions of governmental institutions, that the effects of direct efforts to modify one’s environment are unexplored. The habit of direct action is, perhaps, identical with the habit of being a free [person], prepared to live responsibly in a free society.”

David Wieck (1962), The Habit of Direct Action (quoted by Colin Ward, 1973)

Making Austria better

• Aktion kritischer SchülerInnen Salzburg
• gpa/djp – Jugendgewerkschaft
• Grüne & Alternative StudentInnen Salzburg
• Infoladen Salzburg
• Jusos Salzburg
• Sozialistische Links Partei
• VSStÖ Salzburg
• KJÖ
• Kommunistischer StudentInnen Verband Salzburg
• ÖH Salzburg

These folk organised the amazing anti-FPÖ demo in Salzburg on Thursday.  (Hat-tip for the list: this post.)

Dear FPÖ, ohne Freibier, habt ihr keine Chance—now empirically proved in Salzburg.

Kropotkin on philosophy

“… in what respect does the philosopher, who pursues science in order that he may pass life pleasantly to himself, differ from that drunkard there, who only seeks the immediate gratification that gin affords him? The philosopher has, past all question, chosen his enjoyment more wisely, since it affords him a pleasure far deeper and more lasting than that of the toper. But that is all! Both one and the other have the same selfish end in view, personal gratification.”

(From An Appeal to the Young by Peter Kropotkin)

Bit harsh, but is it true?

blunt-cut hair

He pressed a button. A wall of books opened, and I walked like a lamb into that bustling pleasure palace known as Flossie’s. Red flocked wallpaper and a Victorian decor set the tone. Pale, nervous girls with black-rimmed glasses and blunt-cut hair lolled around on sofas, riffling Penguin Classics provocatively. A blonde with a big smile winked at me, nodded toward a room upstairs, and said, “Wallace Stevens, eh?” But it wasn’t just intellectual experiences. They were peddling emotional ones, too. For fifty bucks, I learned, you could “relate without getting close.” For a hundred, a girl would lend you her Bartok records, have dinner, and then let you watch while she had an anxiety attack. For one-fifty, you could listen to FM radio with twins. For three bills, you got the works: A thin Jewish brunette would pretend to pick you up at the Museum of Modern Art, let you read her master’s, get you involved in a screaming quarrel at Elaine’s over Freud’s conception of women, and then fake a suicide of your choosing – the perfect evening, for some guys. Nice racket. Great town, New York.

From The Whore of Mensa by Woody Allen (Thanks Mike -> Tom)

Henri Frédéric Amiel's journal—a couple of quotes

(Wikipedia entry over here; translation of journal here.)

Stimulus oriented versus stimulus independent thought?

“[...] respect in yourself the oscillations of feeling. They are your life and your nature [...]. Do not abandon yourself altogether either to instinct or to will. Instinct is a siren, will a despot. Be neither the slave of your impulses and sensations of the moment, nor of an abstract and general plan; be open to what life brings from within and without, and welcome the unforeseen; but give to your life unity, and bring the unforeseen within the lines of your plan. Let what is natural in you raise itself to the level of the spiritual, and let the spiritual become once more natural. Thus will your development be harmonious [...]“

Society

“[...] what we call “society” proceeds for the moment on the flattering illusory assumption that it is moving in an ethereal atmosphere and breathing the air of the gods. All vehemence, all natural expression, all real suffering, all careless familiarity, or any frank sign of passion, are startling and distasteful in this delicate milieu; they at once destroy the common work, the cloud palace, the magical architectural whole, which has been raised by the general consent and effort.”

Silly SCUNT

“Orwell famously suggested that language preceded thought, such that if the word ‘freedom’, for example, is removed from the dictionary, then the very idea of freedom will disappear with it be and be lost to humanity. A smart tyranny, he said, would remove words like justice, fairness, liberty and right from usage. But my thought occurred to me when I saw a graffito which took up a whole gable end wall in London the other day. It proclaimed, in great big strokes of white paint: “One nation under CCTV”. A good angry point – the American dictum ‘one nation under god’ sardonically replaced with a comment about Britain’s unenviable position as the Closed Circuit Television capital of the world. But … the satirical shout all but fails for one simple reason: CCTV is such a bland, clumsy, rhythmically null and phonically forgettable word, if you can call it a word, that the swipe lacks real punch. If one believed in conspiracy theories, you could almost call it genius that there is no more powerful word for the complex and frightening system of electronic surveillance that we lump into that weedy bundle of initials. For if CCTV was called … I don’t know …. something like SCUNT (Surveillance Camera Universal NeTwork, or whatever) then the acronyms might have passed into our language and its simple denotation would have taken on all the dark connotations which would allow “One nation under scunt” to have much more impact as a resistance slogan than “One nation under CCTV”. “Damn, I was scunted as I walked home,” “they’ve just erected a series of scunts in the street outside,” “Britain is the most scunted country in the world” … etc etc. Or maybe, just maybe, we should stick to the idea of initials and borrow a set that have already taken on the darkest possible connotations of evil and tyranny. Surveillance System. SS. ‘Britain’s SS is bigger than that of any other country.’ ‘The SS has taken over the UK’.”

(Stephen Fry, Don’t Mind Your Language, November 2008)

On the importance of procrastination

“I had been preparing myself (though I did not always realize it) from the day that I was born, preparing myself, wrote Harsnet (typed Goldberg), but always aware of the dangers of beginning too soon. For there is nothing worse, he wrote, than beginning too soon. It is much worse to begin too soon, he wrote, than not to begin at all. Much worse to begin too soon than to begin too late. Much worse to begin too soon and realize one has begun too soon than to begin too late and realize one has begun too late. Much worse to begin too soon and realize one is inadequately prepared then to begin too late and realize one is over-prepared. Much worse to begin too soon and reach the end too quickly, typed Goldberg, squinting at the manuscript before him, than to begin at the right time and discover one has nothing to begin. That is why, wrote Harsnet, I have been preparing myself for that moment for a long time, that is why I have cleared the decks and prepared the ground, because unless the decks are cleared and the ground prepared there is little hope is succeeding in what one has planned to do, little hope of achieving anything of lasting value, though lasting is a relative term and so is value and whatever it is one has planned to do is certain to be altered in the process, which does not of course mean, he wrote, that one can start anywhere at any time. It is just because whatever one has planned to do is bound to be altered in the process that it is important to start at the right moment, he wrote. It is just because whatever one has planned is bound to change as one proceeds that it is fatal to start too soon or too late, though it may be no less fatal, he wrote (and Goldberg typed), to start at the right time, for then there is no excuse, no excuse whatsoever. I have done with excuses, wrote Harsnet (typed Goldberg), I have done with excuses towards myself and towards others, that is the meaning of the right time, he wrote, that I have done with excuses, that I have used up all the excuses and reached the bottom of excuses, that I have wrung the neck of excuses, that I have settled the hash of excuses. To begin at the right time, he wrote, means to be done with the excuses once and for all. Excuses, wrote Goldberg in the margin of his typescript with a felt-tip pen, an end to excuses…”

From The Big Glass by Josipovici