Thoughts on competence and education

Becoming competent:

“… the kind of technico-rational knowledge that contributes to competence consists of idiosyncratic combinations of up-to-date specialist, and usually tacit, knowledge. It cannot usually be specified in advance but is accumulated through feeling-guided adventures into the unknown. Failure to build up such pools of knowledge stems from an absence of the motivational disposition to do so and thus cannot be rectified by external compulsion.”

“… occupational competence depends, above all, on ‘the ability to deal with the swamp’.”

Formal education:

“… the so-called educational system mainly performs sociological functions, like controlling access to protected occupations and legitimising huge disparities in quality of life. These, in turn, have the effect of compelling most people, against their better judgement, to participate in the unethical activities of which modern society is so largely composed – the manufacture and marketing of junk foods, junk toys, junk education and junk research.”

Helping others become more competent:

“Effective parents, teachers and managers study their children’s, students’ or subordinates’ interests and incipient patterns of competence and create situations in which those concerned are able to exercise and develop competencies like initiative, creativity and the ability to understand and influence their organisations and society in the course of carrying out activities (ranging from putting people at ease to creating political turbulence) that they themselves care about. They also expose those concerned to appropriate role models, in person or in literature. These role models are unusual in that they portray the normally private patterns of thinking and feeling which contribute to effective behaviour. They demonstrate how to set out into the unknown, reflect upon what one finds, and take corrective action when necessary.”

—John Raven, CPD – What should we be developing?

Dawkins calls for official apology for Turing

“After the war, when Turing’s role was no longer top-secret, he should have been knighted and fêted as a saviour of his nation. Instead, this gentle, stammering, eccentric genius was destroyed, for a ‘crime’, committed in private, which harmed nobody.” — Richard Dawkins

(Hat-tip: Michelle)

UPDATE: pettition over here. (Thanks VS.)

Language and logic (updated)

Some careful philosophical discussion by Monti, Parsons, and Osherson (2009):

There may well be a “language of thought” (LOT) that underlies much of human cognition without LOT being structured like English or other natural languages. Even if tokens of LOT provide the semantic interpretations of English sentences, such tokens might also arise in the minds of aphasic individuals and even in other species and may not resemble the expressions found in natural language. Hence, qualifying logical deduction as an “extra-linguistic” mental capacity is not to deny that some sort of structured representation is engaged when humans perform such reasoning. On the other hand, it is possible that LOT (in humans) coincides with the ‘‘logical form’’ (LF) of natural language sentences, as studied by linguists. Indeed, LF (serving as the LOT) might be pervasive in the cortex, functioning well beyond the language circuit [...].

Levels of analysis again. Just because something “is” not linguistic doesn’t mean it “is” not linguistic.

This calls for a bit of elaboration! (Thanks Martin for the necessary poke.)  There could be languages—in a broad sense of the term—implemented all over the brain. Or, to put it another way, various neural processes, lifted up a level of abstraction or two, could be viewed linguistically. At the more formal end of cognitive science, I’m thinking here of the interesting work in the field of neuro-symbolic integration, where connectionist networks are related to various logics (which have a language).

I don’t think there is any language in the brain. It’s a bit too damp for that. There is evidence that bits of the brain support (at the personal-level of explanation) linguistic function: picking up people in bars and conferences, for instance. There must be linguistic-function-supporting bits in the brain somewhere; one question is how distributed they are. I would also argue that linguistic-like structures (the formal kind) can characterise (i.e., a theorist can use them to chacterise) many aspects of brain function, irrespective of whether that function is linguistic at the personal-level. If this is the case, and those cleverer than I think it is, then that suggests that the brain (at some level of abstraction) has properties related to those linguistic formalisms.

Reference

Monti, M. M.; Parsons, L. M. & Osherson, D. N. (2009). The boundaries of language and thought in deductive inference. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

Ben R. Slugoski on why he became a psychologist

When the desire to study psychology began:

“If my developmental psychology colleagues are right, I began formulating conceptions of human psychological states and processes at about the age of three.”

On the shift of study emphasis from English to Psychology:

“… there was no antidote to a few hours deconstructing Coleridge or Blake like working out the expected mean squares for a tricky experimental design (a rakish sex-life not otherwise being in the cards!). [...]

“[...] Erudite though my English professorss were, they were only vessels for conveying the brilliance of the ‘Greats’ and as such were never particularly good models for an aspiring player. What ultimately determined my allegiance to psychology was the brilliance personified in my psychology lecturers [...] the late Kenneth Burstein, old school rat-runner, unabashed liberal, and the person whom you would least want as a relationship counsellor [...]“

Teaching styles:

“It is probably worthy of note in these days of multimedia, dot point-driven instruction that my beacons were invariably Socratic minimalists for whom the take-home message was quite subsidiary to the intellectual journey (seemingly) constructed in situ. Thus, I recall Burstein leading us from eye-blink conditioning with rabbits to human divorce statistics via a little sociobiology, Koopman had the class reinvent the correlation coefficient, and Marcia … well, Marcia had us ruminating about the conditions and consequences of sleeping with ones’ clients.”

(From over here.)

The psychologists behind the torture

“They had never carried out a real interrogation, only mock sessions in the military training they had overseen. They had no relevant scholarship; their Ph.D. dissertations were on high blood pressure and family therapy. They had no language skills and no expertise on Al Qaeda.

“But they had psychology credentials and an intimate knowledge of a brutal treatment regimen used decades ago by Chinese Communists. For an administration eager to get tough on those who had killed 3,000 Americans, that was enough.”

From the NYT article on Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen.

I see little evidence that they used psychological research and a lot of evidence of just plain brutality.

Žižek, on Malabou, on the brain sciences

Any Hegel scholars around? Žižek (2006, pp. 208–209):

“Where, then,do we find traces of Hegelian themes in the new brain sciences? The three approaches to human intelligence—digital, computer-modeled; the neurobiological study of brain; the evolutionary approach—seem to form a kind of Hegelian triad: in the model of the human mind as a computing (data-processing) machine we get a purely formal symbolic machine; the biological brain studies proper focus on the “piece of meat,” the immediate material support of human intelligence, the organ in which “thought resides”; finally, the evolutionary approach analyzes the rise of human intelligence as part of a complex socio-biological process of interaction between humans and their environment within a shared life-world. Surprisingly, the most “reductionist” approach, that of the brain sciences, is the most dialectical, emphasizing the infinite plasticity of the brain.”

This is the beginning of an interesting (or at least confusing) section on relationships between society, brain, mind, free-will, and so on, and so forth. A reading group would be tremendously helpful. (Page 13 discusses fisting, if that acts as a motivator. Yes, I have just been scanning through for the important topics.)

Reference

Slavoj Žižek (2006). The Parallax View. The MIT Press.

“Autistic-like traits”

“There is evidence that the discrete boundaries imposed by DSM and ICD-10 are not always respected by the conditions described. For instance Gillberg (1983) wondered whether a ‘common biochemical disturbance’ may cause ASC in young males and anorexia nervosa in young girls, and recently evidence has been found of weak central coherence in anorexia (C. Lopez et al., 2008; Southgate, Tchanturia, & Treasure, In press). Depression is often comorbid with autism (e.g., Ghaziuddin, Ghaziuddin, & Greden, 2002). DSM warns clinicians not to confuse Schizophrenia and Asperger Disorder as aspects of the conditions are quite similar. Given this overlap between conditions, it is unavoidable for measures of ‘autistic’ traits to detect traits associated with conditions other than ASC. [...] There seems to be no shortage of continuums, overlapping and distinct, within and between typical and atypical development and clinical and non-clinical conditions of existence.”

“… I would argue in favour of defence of the label ‘autistic-like traits’ as merely shorthand for the class of traits which are of relevance to a study of ASC, so long as it is emphasised that there is overlap between conditions, for instance between ASC, psychosis, and anorexia. As more is known about the purer dimensions of importance, then it becomes easier to move instead towards discussion of these.”

(From here.)

Bentall on the “Kraepelinian paradigm”

Bentall, R. Madness explained: why we must reject the Kraepelinian paradigm and replace it with a `complaint-orientated’ approach to understanding mental illness. Medical Hypotheses, 2006, 66, 220-233:

“Instead of attempting to explain mythical diagnostic entities, we should try and explain the actual complaints that patients bring to the clinic, such as hallucinations, delusions, disordered communication and mania. This strategy assumes that, once these complaints have each been explained in turn, there will be no ’schizophrenia’ or ‘bipolar disorder’ leftover to account for.”

…

“a simple list of a patient’s complaints contains much more useful information than a Kraepelinian diagnosis, and takes less effort (because complaints have to be assessed in order to generate a diagnosis). In fact, cognitive-behaviour therapists have long argued that lists of this kind – the ‘problem list’ in the jargon of the approach – is the best starting point for clinical intervention… A complaint-orientated approach implies that treatments should be delivered according to patients’ needs.”

Profiles of intelligence

Johnson, W. & Bouchard, Jr., T. J. Sex Differences in Mental Abilities: g Masks the Dimensions on Which They Lie. Intelligence, 2007, 35, 23-39:

“… we have presented evidence supporting the idealized notion of general intelligence as a general-purpose mechanism that accesses a toolbox made up of components that vary from individual to individual. Though everyone clearly has most if not all of the same tools, individuals appear to differ not only in the skill with which they use their tools, but also in the specific tools they habitually use. For some of the more specific tools, it would appear that using one tool means failing to use another. [...] Performance on image rotation tasks is known to predict success in fields such as airplane piloting, engineering, physical sciences, and fine arts better than does general intelligence, and especially verbal ability. What has perhaps not been recognized is that inclusion of verbal ability in assessments used to recruit individuals to those fields may actually act to impair efforts to select those with the talents most relevant to the jobs in question.”

John Raven often quotes Spearman:

“Every normal man, woman and child is a genius at something … the problem is to identify at what … this must be a most difficult task because it occurs in only a minute proportion of circumstances … this cannot be done with any of the procedures in current use …”

(And Raven would still quite like to know how to fix psychometrics.)

"... we have presented evidence supporting the idealized notion of
general intelligence as a general-purpose mechanism that accesses a
toolbox made up of components that vary from individual to individual.
Though everyone clearly has most if not all of the same tools,
individuals appear to differ not only in the skill with which they use
their tools, but also in the specific tools they habitually use. For
some of the more specific tools, it would appear that using one tool
means failing to use another. [...] Performance on image rotation tasks
is known to predict success in fields such as airplane piloting,
engineering, physical sciences, and fine arts better than does general
intelligence, and especially verbal ability. What has perhaps not been
recognized is that inclusion of verbal ability in assessments used to
recruit individuals to those fields may actually act to impair efforts
to select those with the talents most relevant to the jobs in question."

Free books

From LogBlog:

Exciting developments! The Association of Symbolic Logic has made the now-out of print volumes in the Lecture Notes in Logic (vols. 1-12) and Perspectives in Mathematical Logic (vols. 1-12) open-access through Project Euclid. This includes classics like

• Shoenfield’s Recursion Theory,
• Lindström’s Aspects of Incompleteness in the LNL,
• Sacks’ Higher Recursion Theory,
• Hájek and Pudlák’s Metamathematics of First-order Arithmetic,
• Shelah’s Proper and Improper Forcing,
• Barwise’s Admissible Sets and Structures, and
• Barwise and Feferman’s Model-theoretic Logics in the PiML.