Cumulative cultural evolution: Group think

Kat McGowan in Aeon:

We think of innovation this way: a lone genius applies massive computational power to a problem, and a flash of insight brings about a world-changing breakthrough. But that’s a myth. Most innovation is mundane, the product of lots of copying and a little bit of creativity.

The history of technology shows that advances happen largely through tinkering, when somebody recreates a good thing with a minor upgrade that makes it slightly better. These humble improvements accrue over generations, so that the Bronze Age straight pin becomes a toga fastener becomes a safety pin. Money begins as seashells, evolves into metal coins, diversifies as paper, and eventually becomes virtual as bitcoins and abstruse financial derivatives. In this way, technologies arise that no one person could possibly invent on his own. When Isaac Newton talked about standing on the shoulders of giants, he should have said that we are dwarves, standing atop a vast heap of dwarves.

Researchers dub this iterative process ‘cumulative cultural evolution’: just as organisms evolve via repeated small changes in genes that provide a survival advantage, each human generation makes small modifications to the technology and traditions it inherits.

Wearable cognition

James Kobielus at IBM:

OK, I've never been good with faces and names. I am quite nearsighted. And I am getting older. But this is ridiculous. Facebook is getting so good that I'd like to embed its smart, facial recognition software in my otherwise dumb, ordinary eyeglasses.

Wearable facial analytics? That sounds like a perfect application for Google Glass and other smart eyeglasses that rivals will almost certainly introduce in the future. The ideal scenario would be if the smart spectacles sported computer-vision capabilities, embedded the facial recognition feature and were able to whisper the mystery face's name into the wearer's ear via a Bluetooth connection. If the wearable discreetly revealed the approaching party's name a split second before they offered the wearer their hand, it would save many an awkward social situation.

Let's not trivialize the potential impact of such a feature. For people afflicted with various forms of dementia, facial recognition often becomes difficult if not downright impossible. Many Alzheimer's sufferers would still be able to live productive, dignified social lives if they could rely on high-tech memory prosthetics to fill in the situational blanks.

Pedagogical Styles 1: Coaching and Midwifery

In thinking about online teaching I decided to do a bit of thinking about teaching in general. I want to start with the one-on-one format of learning musical performance, whether vocal or instrumental. I’ll take a look at lectures later on.

But why consider music lessons at all, since they are so very different from the kinds of subjects most people would be teaching online? That’s a reason right there, because it is different. That difference may force us to think a bit differently about teaching. That’s one reason. Second, by its nature it has to be student-centered. Third, the martial arts have come up as a topic in the Connected Courses forum. Though I have no direct experience with the martial arts, they are, like music, about educating one’s body. Which brings me to my fourth reason. Though I have little experience in teaching music, I’ve had a good bit of experience learning music and, in consequence, have become a fairly skilled musician. I know that this stuff works.

When the music's over we'll take a quick look at Plato's notions of learning as recollection and teaching as midwifery.

* * * * *

Let’s start with a nine-minute video of vocal coaching:

I don’t really know the situation here. It feels a bit cultish to me – it’s under the auspices of something called Access Consciousness (yeah, I know, I could find out easily enough as Access Consciousness does have a website, but the video itself is adequate for my purposes) – and no doubt this particular segment was chosen for upload because it shows effective coaching.

We see a young girl, Aubrey, being coached by a middle-aged man, Gary Douglas. Even before he has her sing he repeats what sounds like a ‘mantra’ of formulaic encouragement he no doubt has used hundreds of times before with others. Then she sings – “I will survive” – and the coaching continues.

He asks her to think about what the song is about – sex and relationships. then he makes a suggestion that has to do with energy – BTW, watch his gestures throughout the session. What’s THAT, this energy? There is noticeable improvement when she sings again. Now he begins more focused work on her breath.

At one point he tells her to sing from her toes. What does that mean? Think about it for yourself. If you are going to sing from your toes, just what will you do that you didn’t already do? Whatever it is that she did – and we haven’t got a clue about it as no one asks her what that means – it worked. When she sang from her toes, her singing got better.

Trees basking in the sun

Mysteries of the 0.000001%: Mega Successful Entrepreneur Seeks Personal Assistant

Right now The New York Review of Books is running this ad in their classifieds:

RESEARCH ASSOCIATE/PERSONAL ASSISTANT—Highly intelligent, resourceful individuals with exceptional communication skills sought to undertake research projects and administrative tasks for a successful entrepreneur. We welcome applications from writers, musicians, artists, or others who may be pursuing other professional goals in the balance of their time. $90K–$110K to start (depending on qualifications). Résumé to: nyrgen@gmail.com.

Earlier in this millennium I came across a discussion of that ad in Working With Worlds. The discussion started in August of 2004 and is still going, at some 218 comments. I made this comment in February of 2009:

About two weeks ago I was looking at ads at The Chronicle of Higher Education and saw a dozen ads placed by DE Shaw. Some wanted specific skills, e.g. Windows administrator, but some were fishing for raw talent and had titles like: "Tired of Academica?" "Tired of Consulting?" and "Ideal Day Job." While the wording of these ads was very different from that old ad, the one under discussion here, the effective content was the same: we're looking for somewhat really really smart and talented regardless of background, but art, etc. is fine. So I sent in a resume and cover letter to DE Shaw and got an auto-reply saying that they'd contact me shortly if they wanted to pursue my candidacy. Two days later I got an email from someone in their Strategic Growth department (seems to be their name of HR) asking me to fill out the attached questionnaire (which wanted to know SAT scores, GPA, salary history, major, science & math classes, immigration status if applicable) and to submit a five to ten page writing sample. So I filled out the questionnaire, sent in a writing sample and waited. A few days ago I got an email from them saying there's no ideal fit, good luck, we'll keep your resume on file.

If you look up DE Shaw on Linkedin you'll see that they have done some hiring in the last six months, at senior and junior levels. Whether or not they've hired anyone through the spsfind ads, I don't know. But, judging from what's been posted in this thread, at least one person has gotten an interview through one of those ads. I can believe it's legit. Finding black swans in a white swan world is tough.

How many person-hours does DE Shaw devote to reading all those resumes?

How I Freaked the Secret Service and Lived to Tell About It

This story, like many stories, is at the confluence of many streams. The story itself is a simple one, but to appreciate the simplicity you need to know something about the contributing streams. So that’s where I’ll start. Forgive me if it takes awhile for even the hint of drama to show up.

* * * * *

The story takes place in Baltimore, Maryland, during the Summer or Fall of 1972 during the run-up to the Presidential election that year. I was working as an assistant in the Chaplain’s Office at The Johns Hopkins University. One stream is about the chaplain, Chester Wickwire, and his role in the Civil Rights movement. This stream explains how the chaplain happened to be at the event in question.

The event in question was a stop on the campaign trail – another stream. That explains the existence of the freaked out Secret Servicemen: they were accompanying Sargent Shriver, Democratic candidate for Vice President, who had a reputation as fine speaker. He was speaking before Baltimore’s Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance, an organization of black ministers who had been central to the Civil Rights movement in Baltimore. That made them central to getting out the black vote, which is why Shriver was speaking to them.

Wickwire had been deeply involved in the Civil Rights movement as well. In consequence, he was a member of the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance. That gets him to the meeting.

* * * * *

Now we’ve got to get me hooked up with Wickwire and give me something that would freak out a handful of Secret Serviceman. That’ll take some ‘splainin’.

Oh, the freak-out is easy enough. I stood up and blew a fanfare on my trumpet. It was loud, they weren’t expecting it, and they jerked to full tactical alert. As they should. That’s what you do when you’re a Secret Serviceman on detail, you get ready for action when you hear an unexpected loud noise.

The fact that it was only a fanfare also explains why I’ve lived to tell the story despite the fact that those Secret Servicemen experienced a moment of, shall we say, heightened awareness. As soon as they saw what was going on, they relaxed. Things were cool. The ministers smiled, laughed. Shriver shook my hand, as did Parren Mitchell, one of the founders of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Things were cool. We ate lunch. And then Shriver had his head handed to him by Homer Favor. Metaphorically speaking, of course. 

* * * * *

But, I forgot. I was going to tell you how I got hooked up with Wickwire and what the bleep I was doing with a trumpet at a luncheon where Baltimore’s Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance was being wooed by the man who would later become Arnold Schwarzenegger’s brother-in-law.

OK, me and Wickwire – another stream. He was chaplain at Johns Hopkins. I was a student there, first undergraduate, then graduate. When I drew number 12 in the Selective Service draft lottery it was obvious I was going to be drafted. So I became a conscientious objector. Wickwire helped me with that, first hooking me up with counseling, then calling in favors to get Congressman to write on my behalf (Parren Mitchell and Paul Sarbanes), and then offering a me a job I could perform as my alternative service.

So, I was doing this and that in the Chaplain’s Office. What about that trumpet? Sure, I was a trumpet player, had been one for years, but what was I doing with a trumpet at a meeting where the black ministers were being serenaded along with the founder of the Peace Corps?

And it wasn’t even my trumpet. It belonged to the Chaplain’s Office. But Wickwire bought it on my suggestion. He liked stagecraft as much as the next fellow, and that’s what the trumpet was about.

* * * * *

You need to understand that, while he was Chaplain at Johns Hopkins, he was also somewhat at odds with Hopkins – yet another stream. Hopkins was a top-shelf University and for many on staff that meant that it was had to be above the political fray, and certainly above the Civil Rights movement, which had inspired the Ku Klux Klan to burn a cross on the campus in the Spring of 1966. The KKK burned that cross because Wickwire had invited Bayard Rustin to speak on campus. He also ran a tutoring program that brought black students on campus where Hopkins students helped them with their studies.

This was not consistent with a certain vision of the University as a bastion of the search for truth. Mind you, though, at one time Milton Eisenhower, brother to Ike, had been President of the University. That’s hardly above it all.

One day the clock in the Gilman Hall tower went silent. Gilman Hall was the University’s oldest building and was symbolic of the university as a whole. The clock in the tower atop Gilman Hall rang the hours, and perhaps the quarter hours too. I don’t rightly remember. In particular it rang the noon hour.

When the Gilman Hall clock sounded noon, everyone on campus knew about it. When the clock went silent, well, how the bleep did you know where you were in the day when noon wasn’t being sounded?

I took that as an opportunity for a little fun and merriment, a little showmanship, and Wickwire agreed. I went down to Ted’s Music – a wonderful little hole in a basement off Calvert Street that sold use instruments – and purchased a post-horn for the Chaplain’s Office. Post-horns are those long slender trumpets used for trumpeting the start of a horse race.

The idea is that each noon I would go out on a small balcony on the second story of Levering Hall – where the Chaplain’s Office was located and next to Gilman Hall – and sound the noon hour. Thus the Chaplain’s Office was now picking up where the official university had failed. It got us story in the campus newspaper and was, of course, lots of fun.

 

Now that the Chaplain’s Office had this post-horn we used it on other occasions as well. One of my colleagues in the office made a nice felt banner which we hung from the horn. It was a red peace symbol on a white background with yellow tassels. When Wickwire gave a speech, I’d precede him with the post horn. I blew the post horn at the beginning of Sunday morning services.

And I decided that it would be fun to blow a fanfare to welcome Sargent Shriver to Baltimore. Wickwire loved the idea.

* * * * *

Now the streams are coming together – the one about Wickwire and the Civil Right movement, the one about the 1972 Presidential campaign, the one about me and Johns Hopkins and the chaplain, and I suppose we really ought to have a separate stream about me and trumpets, but we won’t, because this story is getting too damn long.

There we are sitting in the basement of the church – just which one I don’t recall – me in my hippie clothes and long electrostatic hair and with the post horn. Oh, those ministers loved that post horn. They knew what I was going to do.

We got the word that Shriver had entered the building. I stood up, put the post horn to my mouth, and blew a mighty Joshua blast on the trumpet as Shriver’s party entered the room. Those Secret Servicemen jumped a foot into the air and a good time was had by all.

We finished lunch and it was time for the speaking. Shriver, of course, was the headliner. But Homer Favor preceded him on the bill.

Favor taught political science at Morgan State (“Teacher’s College” it was back then, now it’s “University”), a Baltimore HBCU known for its ferocious gospel choir. No more than 10 seconds or a half-minute in and I knew I was in the presence of a master orator. Favor may not have been a preacher, but he spoke like one. His speech had the cadence, the rhythm, the music, and the fire of a speech by Martin Luther King. He was that good.

I forget just what phrase he used as a refrain, but the burden was simple: When you’re in office, what’re you going to do for black people? I haven’t got the foggiest idea what Shriver was thinking during that speech. But I wouldn’t be surprised if sweat was rolling down his legs and pooling in his shoes. He had a reputation as a fine speaker, but as he soon showed, he wasn’t in Favor’s class.

When Favor was done speaking the show was, for all practical purposes, over. I remember nothing of Shriver’s speech. And George McGovern, who headed the Democratic ticker, lost the election.

Tricky Dick won.

Those were the days.

A castle by the sea

What, you ask, is this strange thing? Here's all I know:

The miniature castle is “about two feet tall and seven feet across” and was constructed in 1984 by Charles Simonds, a sculptor whose work is included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art and who is known for his miniature dwellings, which he installed in outdoor spaces throughout Manhattan.

Leon Yost, a documentary photographer who specializes in images of Jersey City, says, “Simonds lived in New York City and taught college in Newark. In the early 1970s he began constructing a series of hidden mythical worlds designed to be discovered only by chance. Simonds created three works for Liberty State Park, but this is the only one we can find. The other two are presumably lost among the reeds in the marshes. I think the New Jersey State Council on the Arts was probably involved in the original commissioning of the three works.”

Destination: SPACE!

NYTimes oped:

In recent years I have interviewed a wide array of people involved in the private space industry, including both pilots involved in the crash on Friday. Almost universally, they viewed themselves as pioneers at the dawn of an era of exploration whose apogee is beyond our generation’s imagination. Just as the Wright brothers did not have a precise image in mind of jumbo jetliners ferrying people around the world so routinely and so safely at more than 500 miles per hour that we have long since stopped considering it a miracle, we can’t really know where we’re headed in space.

New Savanna post, Child of the Space Age:

A bit over a decade ago I was working a trade show in Orlando, Florida. I decided to bag the last day and head over to Kennedy Space Center. After all I’d grown up watching satellite launches on TV and was curious about the place they had been staged from.

So I drove east through central Florida, which was much like a desert except that it had lots of plants. I arrived around noon. I parked the van wherever and walked past a parade of rockets on display and purchased a ticket for one of the standard tours. They took us through some launch pads, gantry towers, control rooms, and a Saturn V suspended from the ceiling of a long, low building. The physical scale was humbling, but it was more than that. Big is big – that Saturn was the length of a football field – but this earth and these buildings birthed journeys that took us to the Moon. That sacred energy was in this soil and these structures.

The Doctor is in...class

Though just where and how is a bit curious. The doctor I have in mind isn’t Lucy Van Pelt, but rather is, you know, The Doctor, of TV fame: Doctor Who. Starting in January of 2015 Prof. Anthony Rotolo of the Newhouse School at Syracuse University will be offering an online course on The Doctor and his time-traveling adventures.

Just confirmed my registration for @WhoClass & am very excited about it! Any other non-students out there who will be joining me? #whoclass

— morgan narkiewicz (@narkiewicz) November 3, 2014

The course involves live Monday night public lectures at Syracuse which will be recorded and made available online along with “15 weekly modules in which students will conduct home screenings, complete assigned readings and contribute written analysis, among other activities. The contact hours and rigor of the course, if completed in earnest, will be equivalent to a 400-500-level college course.”

How dynamic is word meaning?

3:AM Magazine interviews philosopher Peter Ludlow:

3:AM: In your forthcoming book Living Words: Meaning Underdetermination and the Dynamic Lexicon you’re interested in how elements of meaning that can change radically on a conversation-by-conversation basis. Meanings are dynamic. This is not how language is traditionally thought about is it. To see how different your view is could you say something about the view your arguments challenge?

PL: ... The traditional view is that languages are fairly stable objects that we learn with varying degrees of success and that we then deploy for expressing thoughts and performing certain tasks (by giving orders, instructions, etc). Sometimes the traditional view uses the metaphor of language as a widely shared common currency that agents use to communicate, with individuals words being the common coins of the realm. These common coins are supposed to be more or less fixed; as Locke argued, even Augustus, though he ruled the world, was unable to coin new Latin words.

On my view we are coining new terms all the time – if only for a limited run – and more importantly we are also working together modulating word meanings so as to build microlanguages. These are possibly one-off languages that we construct based on communicative needs. So there is no language that is given to us or that is stable. Languages are things we are constantly building and modifying.

3:AM: I guess the traditional view accommodates some degrees of flex. You’re arguing for a flex that destroys that position though aren’t you?

PL: Yes that’s right. Many people believe that language is context sensitive and somewhat dynamic but I think that even Wittgensteinians failed to appreciate the full nature of the context sensitivity. I argue that word meanings are radically dynamic and that a large part of the conversations we enter into involve the modulations of word meaning. So, to use an example from the linguist Chris Barker, when I say “Smith is tall” I may not be making a claim about the world or even trying to do something in the world, but rather I am trying to modulate the meaning of ‘tall’. If I fix Smith as a safe case of a tall person I’ve possibly broadened the meaning or at least firmed it up for us.

Graffiti: Then and Now 2

October 25, 2006:

October 7, 2014:

There's not a great deal of change up on the bridges, which support an abandoned railroad track. You can see some, but not multiple layers like on the more visible and accessible wall surfaces. There has, however, been a great deal of change on the supporting stanchions.

Taking notes, and making money from them – as old as the lecture and as new as the laptop

The New York Times, always a trendsetter, dontcha' know, has an interesting article on commercial none-taking; taking notes in a college course and selling them. In a way, this is in a long tradition. From the opening of the Wikipedia article on lectures:

The practice in the medieval university was for the instructor to read from an original source to a class of students who took notes on the lecture. The reading from original sources evolved into the reading of glosses on an original and then more generally to lecture notes. Throughout much of history, the diffusion of knowledge via handwritten lecture notes was an essential element of academic life.

Even in the twentieth century the lecture notes taken by students, or prepared by a scholar for a lecture, have sometimes achieved wide circulation (see, for example, the genesis of Ferdinand de Saussure's Cours de linguistique générale).

The opening of the NYTimes piece starts with Laura Gayle, a sophomore at Florida State:

Since last fall, when she uploaded her macroeconomics notes onto Flashnotes.com to pay for a birthday gift for her mother, Ms. Gayle has sold more than 500 copies of the study guides that she’s put together for her courses, made over $3,285 and tapped into a growing, if controversial, online marketplace.

In describing her approach, Ms. Gayle, a human resources major with a 3.8 grade-point average, sounds aggressive in the best way. “I sit in the front row center for every single class, whether I am selling notes or not,” she says. “For me it is a matter of paying attention, being detail-oriented and,” if something is unclear, “taking the initiative to go out and find the answer.” Her study guides are rated five stars by users.

It seems this is a growing marketplace, though some professors "bar their students from buying or selling notes." For one thing, there are pesky IP issues:

Hoboken Halloween Parade

Same old same old: Welcome to the New Mediocrity

While a new world awaits, the old one just vamps 'till ready.

Vanessa Friedman, Mired in Mediocrity, The New York Times:

WELCOME to the “new mediocre.” It’s not quite the New Look, or the New Deal, but it is the new normal.

At least according to Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, who coined the term a few weeks ago.

She was referring to the global economy, of course, which she thought could use a jolt lest it “muddle along with subpar growth,” but her words, uttered during a relatively small-scale speech at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, have had an impact far beyond the school’s borders and the world of economists (though said economists were very het up about it), reaching into the Twitterverse.

The fashionistas?

The answer to the endless debate we in the industry have over why big fashion groups would rather buy an old brand name than back a fresh one? The new mediocre.

Given that the underlying principle of fashion is to identify that ephemeral state of culture and society known as the zeitgeist and reflect it back at the world in sartorial form, this would suggest that what has been happening in fashion, and the explanation for it, actually reflects a broader reality. And indeed, once you start thinking along new mediocre lines, you see it everywhere.

And now for the big question:

"How did we get here?"

To use the terminology of cultural ranks that David Hays and I developed some decades ago, our world is still dominated by rank 3 institutions with their roots in 19th Century (and earlier) Europe and North America. Rank 4 technology, ideas, and even institutions are all over the place, but they live in the shadow of rank 3. It's time for a cultural turn-over, where rankle 3 gives way to rank 4 (and rank 5 emerges into the shadow regions). Such turnovers, such gestalt switches, are delicate and difficult maneuvers.

ADHD Explained?

Richard Friedman in the NYTimes:

Recent neuroscience research shows that people with A.D.H.D. are actually hard-wired for novelty-seeking — a trait that had, until relatively recently, a distinct evolutionary advantage. Compared with the rest of us, they have sluggish and underfed brain reward circuits, so much of everyday life feels routine and understimulating.

To compensate, they are drawn to new and exciting experiences and get famously impatient and restless with the regimented structure that characterizes our modern world. In short, people with A.D.H.D. may not have a disease, so much as a set of behavioral traits that don’t match the expectations of our contemporary culture.

From the standpoint of teachers, parents and the world at large, the problem with people with A.D.H.D. looks like a lack of focus and attention and impulsive behavior. But if you have the “illness,” the real problem is that, to your brain, the world that you live in essentially feels not very interesting.

What's up in the brain and what to do?

These findings suggest that people with A.D.H.D are walking around with reward circuits that are less sensitive at baseline than those of the rest of us. Having a sluggish reward circuit makes normally interesting activities seem dull and would explain, in part, why people with A.D.H.D. find repetitive and routine tasks unrewarding and even painfully boring.

Psychostimulants like Adderall and Ritalin help by blocking the transport of dopamine back into neurons, thus increasing its level in the brain.

Another patient of mine, a 28-year-old man, was having a lot of trouble at his desk job in an advertising firm. Having to sit at a desk for long hours and focus his attention on one task was nearly impossible. He would multitask, listening to music and texting, while “working” to prevent activities from becoming routine.

Eventually he quit his job and threw himself into a start-up company, which has him on the road in constantly changing environments. He is much happier and — little surprise — has lost his symptoms of A.D.H.D.

So,  change your  environment to one that's challenging and unpredictable and you're good to go. As for school:

I think another social factor that, in part, may be driving the “epidemic” of A.D.H.D. has gone unnoticed: the increasingly stark contrast between the regimented and demanding school environment and the highly stimulating digital world, where young people spend their time outside school. Digital life, with its vivid gaming and exciting social media, is a world of immediate gratification where practically any desire or fantasy can be realized in the blink of an eye.