Benjamin Barber on Cities

The paramount aims of city-dwellers concern collecting garbage and collecting art rather than collecting votes or collecting foreign allies, the supply of water rather than the supply of arms, promoting cooperation rather than promoting exceptionalism, fostering education and culture rather than fostering national defense and patriotism.

Most of humanity now lives in cities, and cities worldwide connect with each other more readily than any other political entity. By expanding on that capability, Benjamin Barber suggests, “Cities can make themselves global guarantors of social justice and equality against the depredations of fractious states. And they can become, as the polis once was, new incubators of democracy, this time in a global form.”

(from The Long Now Foundation blurb about Barber’s upcoming talk)

On Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year

Take probabilistic thinking, which pervades not only science but also our most intimate decision-making processes. We base crucial life choices on statements that deny a place for us as individuals. To say that “overweight men are at increased risk of heart attack,” for instance, is to speak only for large numbers of men, never for any single man. How should I eat? the author asks. What should I do, based on my character, my desires, my history, my destiny? That is the question statistical analysis makes us oblivious to: “It is not in the nature of probabilistic claims that they can be disconfirmed by example. They can be confirmed or disconfirmed only probabilistically, by other statistical investigations conducted on other masses of subjects.” Taken to extremes, the author says, probabilistic thought obviates poetry and drama, literature and religion: “Can one imagine the Sphinx foretelling that Oedipus will probably kill his father and marry his mother? Can one imagine Jesus saying that he will probably come again?”

From a review on Slate

The masters of information have forgotten about poetry

The masters of information have forgotten about poetry, where words may have a meaning quite different from what the lexicon says, where the metaphoric spark is always one jump ahead of the decoding function, where another, unforeseen reading is always possible.

– J.M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year

Also:

Poets and artists live on frontiers. They have no feedback, only feedforward. They have no identities. They are probes.

– Marshall McLuhan

Also:

the verses of Kabir have four different senses; illusion, spirit, intellect, and the exoteric doctrine of the Vedas; but in this part of the world it is considered a ground for complaint if a man’s writings admit of more than one interpretation.

– Thoreau

via Roberto Greco

Test-taking at school

David Guterson, a high school teacher, and a homeschooling father of four, questions the validity of standard test-taking in school, which is meant to measure the quantity and quality of a student’s learning during a certain period of time. He writes:

I point to the results of an informal experiment I have conducted five time in a ten-year teaching career. In this experiment I give a test on Friday, an ordinary objective test (true-false, matching, fill-in-the-blank, multiple choice) preceded by a Thursday review session and a week full of reminders that this test is on Friday, don’t forget to reread this or that, to study these notes, to review this handout, to get plenty of rest, to see me if there are questions; I am furthermore explicit all week long about both the form of the test and its subject matter. In short I prepare them to meet the test in the time-honored tradition of high-school teachers.

Friday evenings I take their completed tests home. Over the weekend I grade them. On Monday, with no prior warning of any sort, I give them the same test and ask them to take it again. Monday evening I grade those, staple them to the Friday exam, and hand both back to students.

None–no one–has ever received an equal or higher grade on the test administered on Monday. Most in fact, receive a considerably lower grade, missing, often, twice as many questions on Monday as they missed on Friday.

As I had suspected. 🙂 Now, testing the ability to take tests has some value. It’s some indication of the willingness of a person to study and prepare. It’s some measure of short term memory, though not, obviously, long term memory. Guterson’s point is that learning is a mysterious process, difficult, if not impossible, to measure. And yet homeschoolers repeatedly test higher on these tests than children attending traditional school.

Pinwheel! In Private Beta

I’m happy we’re about to start inviting people into the thing we’ve been working on!! It’s called Pinwheel, and it’s a way to find and leave notes all around the world.

We’re opening it up in private beta on the web and mobile web. An iOS version is coming next. You can sign up to be a beta tester/contributor at Pinwheel.com. We’re starting to build the content and community in advance of the full native mobile version, which we anticipate will be the primary experience. We’ll start inviting people in batches next week. To answer the inevitable questions, a FAQ!

What IS it?

On Pinwheel you can find and leave notes all around the world. The notes can be public or private, shared with an individual, a group or everyone. They can be organized into sets, such as, say, the “Tales from the Road: KISS’s 1974 Hotter Than Hell Tour”, “Best Spots for Butterfly Hunting”, “Every place that you told me that you loved me, circa 2008” or “Find me a Nearby Toilet NOW”. You can follow people, places and sets. And in the future, you will get notifications on your phone from who and what you choose. Following sets is useful, because that friend of yours with the great taste in coffee shops may also have an unhealthy obsession with, say, 1970s glam metal band KISS, and frankly, in childhood you were traumatized by a photograph of Gene Simmons and don’t need to repeat that in your dotage. Here’s an example of what a note looks like. This is one of my notes from Grand Central Station:

We’re already seeing original and inventive types of notes. Ancestry, located poems, old postcards, found objects. But the most wonderful thing is receiving (and writing!) private notes. Here is a note I left for my friend Lauren:

But, that’s like…Flickr for Places!

You said it, not me. Is it like Flickr for Places? Ish. Part of why making Pinwheel is so fun, is so exploding with possibility, is that a note, like a photo, can be a container for all kinds of things. It is the perfect social object. Stories, advice, jokes, diatribes, information, memories, facts, advertisements, love letters, grocery lists and manifestoes can all be put into a note. It is the perfectly constrained, perfectly open thing that you can make into what you want.

That sounds fantastic. But how are you going to make money?

Sponsored notes. You, the people you love, and businesses of all shapes and sizes will all be able to drop notes around the world, highlighted for all to open and see. Some examples. Our friend, Dinah Sanders, to promote her book Discardia, is leaving sponsored notes of places to recycle, places to stop and enjoy, places every good Discardian should know about. Our friend Alex Clark, a realtor with Zephyr Real Estate, is leaving sponsored notes of his properties for sale, things coming on the market, notable things in neighborhoods his clients should notice, and general area knowledge to promote his real estate business. Here’s a screen shot of one of Alex’s notes:

Who works on Pinwheel?

Seven brilliant people, and maybe you! We are hiring a iOS Developer, and Content Interns. Email us your resume and info at jobs@pinwheel.com if you’re interested. We’re proud to be funded by Redpoint, True, Betaworks, Founder Collective, SV Angel, Obvious Corp, and individual angels.

Where can we learn more?

Please follow us on Twitter: PinwheelHQ on Twitter.

Justice, and the Problem with the Bill of Rights

I am reading about the work of the late William J. Stuntz, a law professor at Harvard, who wrote about the criminal justice system, in The Caging of America (recommended!) and Stuntz looks for the reasons why we arrived at this impasse, finding it, ultimately, in the Constitution, particularly in the Bill of Rights. And I was hard struck by how right he was in what was wrong. The problem, as he sees it, is that the Bill of Rights is about process and procedure, rather than principles. Compare, he says, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen with our Bill of Rights — Bills 4-8 establish our judicial system, and are how we end up with more black men in prison than were slaves in 1850, and more than six million people under “correctional supervision”. Gopnik writes:

Instead of announcing general principles–no one should be accused of something that wasn’t a crime when he did it; cruel punishments are always wrong; the goal of justice is that justice be done–it talks procedurally. You can’t search someone without a reason; you can’t accuse him without allowing him to see the evidence, and so on. This emphasis, Stuntz think, has led to the current mess, where accused criminals get laboriously articulated protection against procedural errors and no protection at all against outrageous and obvious violations of simple justice….You can show a problem with your appointed defender, but it is much harder if there is merely enormous accumulated evidence that you weren’t guilty in the first place and the jury got it wrong.

I’d always been uneasy with Constitution-worship, particularly uneasy about the Bill of Rights, and certainly the justice system, but didn’t have the least idea why. This is why.

Notes from Monoculture

Monoculture

I usually put stickies in books I am reading, and then go back and reread the things I marked, and sometimes copy them here. These are notes from Monoculture: How one story is changing everything, by F.S. Michaels.

  • “Government is instituted for the common good; for the protections, safety, prosperity and happiness of the people; and not for profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men.” –John Adams, 1776
  • p. 65 Re: Medicine and the growth of hospitals. At one time, few people used hospitals voluntarily because of the risk of infection; hospitals were more about charity than medical expertise and most were run by religious orders where nuns, doctors and nurses volunteered their time to care for the sick. You went to the hospital to die, or when you didn’t have family or friends to care for you. If you were sick, you were simply safer at home.
  • p. 93. Re: Art. “When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive presence, inevitably you think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgment of the gift you have been given, which is the life itself.” — Stanley Kunitz
  • p. 97. Government cultural policy in the arts came to be based on a Romantic ideal that the arts mattered and deserved public funds because art had a civilizing influence on us and contributed to our humanity. President John F. Kennedy said, “The life of the arts, far from being an interruption, a distraction in the life of a nation, is very close to the center of a nation’s purpose, and is a test of the quality of a nation’s civilization.”
  • p. 105. The Monoculture. As the monoculture aligns our experiences and expectations with the economic story, our life together becomes more at risk. Just as biodiversity embodies many forms of life and signals the health of our ecosystems, value diversity embodies many ways of life and signals the health of our social systems. When we lose value diversity, we lose our ability to express ourselves outside of the economic realm. We lose the “languages” we once spoke in distinct parts of our lives — the language of family and relationships, the language of the natural world, of art and spirituality, of health and education, of the public interest and the common good. We learn to substitute an economic language for all of it.
  • p. 107. Imagine two circles that overlap a bit. One circle represents your creativity, and the other represents the economic story’s world of markets. The area where the circles overlap represents creativity that is financially successful in the world of markets. The economic story says the circles should overlap as much as possible — that creativity is about producing something someone will buy. In actuality, the circles never completely overlap, and in an economic monoculture, the creativity that exists independently of the market is never considered to be worth pursuing.
  • p. 110. In a society grown rigid with ideology, Vaclav Havel said, you come to accept that you live according to that society’s values and assumptions. If you were to refuse to conform, there could be trouble. You could be isolated, alienated, reproached for being idealistic, or scorned for not being a team player. You know what it is you are supposed to do, and you do it, not least to show that you are doing it. You go along to get along, he said, and so you confirm to others that certain things in fact must be done. If you fail to act as you are expected to, others will view your behavior as abnormal, think you arrogant for believing you’re above the rules, or assume you’ve dropped out of society…In truth, Havel said, that story is not natural; there is an enormous gap between its aims and the aims of life. Whereas life moves toward plurality and diversity and the fulfillment of its own freedom, the system demands conformity, uniformity and discipline. The system, Havel said, “is a world of appearances trying to pass for reality.”
  • p. 113. Oscar Wilde: “The fatal errors of life are not due to man’s being unreasonable: an unreasonable moment may be one’s finest moment. They are due to man’s being logical. There is a wide difference.”
  • p. 113. When our higher-level needs are denied, we develop what psychologist Abraham Maslow called metapathologies: “sicknesses of the soul.”
  • p.116. As you begin to live aligned with your deepest values instead of solely economic ones, your actions from day to day can in time give birth to something more articulate and structured, something Havel called “the independent spiritual, social and political life of society.” …The independent life can take almost any form. You don’t automatically have to quit everything you’re doing and move to the country to transcend the monoculture.
  • p. 116. As time goes on, that independent life naturally begins to be organized in one way or another, heralding the development of what Havel called “parallel structures”. Parallel structures, he said, are about the daily human struggle to live in freedom, truth and dignity — an articulated expression of living within the truth of life.
  • p. 117. Parallel structures are not counter-cultural structures; they are parallel precisely because they emerge alongside the monoculture….Michaels then gives three examples of parallel structures in our society: the Slow Food movement, Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language, and Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication.

I asked my friends, "Is Minecraft a good game?"

Responses:

“If you’re the kind of person that likes to answer the question “What have you done today?” with the answer “I played video games” Minecraft is the game for you.”
“It’s like Geek Knitting”
“Yard work is like Minecraft plus exercise.”
“You know how there’s a Flickr group for ppl who make things out of Legos? And there’s ANOTHER group for people who organize the things they’ve made out of Legos, with their special shelves and displays and arrangements? Minecraft is for those people.”

Unconscious Schizophrenia in modern business leaders

Some interesting research is being done by Peter Pruzan in business ethics at the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark, which I read about in Monoculture, viz:

Management professor Peter Pruzan facilitated a workshop fot the executives of a company known for hierarchical control and an emphasis on shareholders, not stakeholders. Pruzan gave these executives, flown in from eight Western countries, a list of ‘values’ like success, love, professional competency, honesty, trust, wealth creativity and power, and asked them to reflect on which ones were most important in their personal lives. They were to discuss their selections in small groups and then list the group’s top five selections in small groups and then list the group’s top five personal values. Later that day, the executives were asked to reflect on the company’s most important values–not the ones officially promoted, but the implicit ones underlying decisions about hiring and firing employees, entering and leaving markets, advertising, lobbying, or negotiating with unions.

When the groups compared their lists of personal and corporate values, everyone realized that within each group the two sets of values were completely different. The executives’ personal values tended to include terms like ‘good health’, ‘honesty’, ‘beauty’, ‘love’, and ‘peace of mind’ and the organizational values included words like ‘success’, ‘power’, ‘competitiveness’, ‘efficiency’, and ‘productivity’. … the gap between a leader’s personal values and the values he or she promotes at work is so extreme, Pruzan said, that leaders have unconsciously developed a modern form of schizophrenia, threatening the health of both the leader and the organization.

Here’s a link to one of his papers: The Question of Organizational Consciousness: Can Organizations Have Values, Virtues and Visions?. Interesting.