Independence of spirit

We are back from our 10-day trip along the Alaskan Inside Passage – a wilderness of astounding beauty and magnificence. At one point on our small ship cruise we stopped at the little Alaskan outback settlement of Elfin Cove (summer population perhaps 100 or so, winter population last winter 12), and went in by inflatable boat to visit for a few hours. It made me think.

Elfin Cove got 24 feet of snow last winter. The whole settlement is connected by narrow wooden boardwalks, powered by its own little generator, pipes its water down from a local spring in the mountains, all maintained by the locals themselves – no municipal services, no government, no roads or cars, no doctor or hospital, a tiny little local store. Access is by boat or seaplane only, when weather allows. Mail comes in by seaplane once a week in good weather, perhaps once every two or three weeks in bad weather. Locals make their living largely by commercial fishing.

The locals seemed familiar to me – they looked exactly like our Iowa farmer neighbors I recall from my youth. Competent, sturdy, self-reliant, handy at fixing anything with whatever is at hand, able to improvise anything, able to roll with whatever nature throws at them. The clutter around the buildings looked exactly like my memory of our farm tool sheds – odds and ends of old machines, piles of lumber and piping, rolls of wire – never throw anything away because one might need it to fix something else someday.

The local who was our guide told us that her sons had learned commercial line fishing with their father when they were 10, and were in charge of the lines on one side of the boat (and therefore half of the family income) by the time they were 12. They were now in college, and doing well. Again it reminded me of my youth in Iowa when most children at 12 or 13, boys and girls alike, were able to plow or harrow a field, milk a cow, kill and dress a chicken, adjust the carburetor of a car or gasoline engine, and help fix the siding of a barn. (Those days may be past now that big agribusiness has largely replaced the small farm of my youth.)

The contrast with our comfortable urban life, and the sheltered upbringing of our urban children, was startling, and it reminded me again that nature and history both have a tendency to go through long easy, comfortable periods punctuated by difficult, demanding crises. In the easy periods, all sorts of new species emerge, most overspecialized for their environment. And in the crises most of these overspecialized species become extinct; only the strong, adaptable and self-reliant survive. When our next natural or historical crisis arrives – and it will eventually – I’m betting on these Alaskan outbackers – tempered and hardened by their rugged, independent lifestyle - to be among the survivors.

Our great country

Since Monday we have been driving north to Seattle, passing through Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Oregon and finally Washington State. It reminds me once again how beautiful, vast, and varied our nation is. It also reminds me what an extraordinary accomplishment is was for some 300,000 of our ancestors to travel the Oregon trail from Missouri to the West Coast over five or six months, most of them walking the whole way. It is the sort of epic journey not likely to be repeated until some of our descendants first seriously attempt to colonize other planets.

One wonders at the level of endurance, and the level of faith, such people displayed. It really is extraordinary what humans can do with enough motivation, or desperation.

>>> By the way, there won’t be any new posts for the next 10 days or so, while we are aboard ship in Alaska. I’m sure the huge floating malls that some people travel on have internet access, but our little 80 passenger ship doesn’t, for which I give profound thanks.

The bubble of illusion

The beginning of wisdom is to realize that none of us see the real world – we see a world heavily distorted by our experiences, our expectations, our biases, and by the fables and untruths that we have been taught by our families, peers, and culture. In fact, every one of us lives in a bubble of illusion. For some the illusion is further from reality than for others. True education (not what usually happens in schools) is the process of trying to see through our personal bubble of illusion and get, if even only for occasional brief moments, a truer picture of the real world.

It’s because of these illusions that two people can stand side by side and witness the same event, yet see (quite literally see) two different things. What they each see will be heavily biased by their experiences, their world views, and their own expectations.

It’s not a bad starting position to assume that everything one thinks one knows is probably incorrect, in detail if not wholly, and proceed to explore and question and examine from there.

In any battle, wish for opponents and competitors whose view of the world is more clouded by prejudice, dogma, and cultural fables than your own. It gives you a substantial advantage.

Old thinking

I’m amused as I watch governments and industries try to apply old thinking to new technologies. The politicians and the corporate upper management types just don’t get it, and so their attempts are so pathetic and ineffective.

Internet gambling is an example. Various local, state and federal government bodies want to ban gambling, or at least tax it. When gambling occurred in facilities within their jurisdiction, this was a manageable goal. Now that gambling can occur in cyberspace, with the server located halfway around the world in some other jurisdiction, it’s just about impossible to control it unless one is prepared to forbid anyone to use a computer terminal. But various government bodies still try.

The endless attempts to protect software, DVD movies, and CD music files are another example. The industries labor mightily to invent one complex protection system after another, yet most are circumvented within days of their release. The hackers are every bit as smart as the inventors of the protection systems, there are a lot more of them, they are highly motivated, and the internet lets them efficiently work together.

The problem is that all these groups are still stuck in old thinking. They haven’t yet adapted to the new world of instant, unfettered, worldwide communication. Piracy is certainly a problem, impacting their profits, but solving that problem will require rethinking the commercial process from the ground up to leverage the new technology, not trying to strap on copy protection systems at the end of the marketing chain to protect the old way of doing things.

When VCR recorders first came out, the major movie studios were terrified that such technology would destroy their business. In fact, far from destroying their business, VCR and DVD sales of movies eventually became a major source of profit for the studios, surpassing their profits from traditional movie theaters.

Some software companies are beginning to understand, and are beginning to offer low-cost web-based services rather than packaged software. This begins to make sense. Why should I pay $100-200 for a software package that I have to install, maintain, upgrade, and troubleshoot, and which I only use occasionally? If it were available, I’d much rather log on to a website when I occasionally need a particular service, and pay a few pennies to use it for the few moments I really need it. Not only is that more efficient for me, but that provides a far larger market for the seller, since many people won’t pay $100-200 for the software package, but are happy to pay a few pennies for the service.

Eventually, of course, the old timers will all retire, to be replaced by a generation that grew up with the internet and understands its potential. Until then, we can all be amused by the futile efforts of those politicians and corporate executives who simply can’t adjust their thinking to new circumstances.

Godwin’s first law

I posted Godwin’s second law a while ago (Be careful what you measure…), and promised to eventually post Godwin’s first law, so here it is:

Godwin’s first law – proposed by my father – is that people’s concern for an issue is always in inverse proportion to its distance from them in time and space. We worry more about what we will eat for lunch today than we do about the possibility of millions of deaths in a worldwide pandemic next year. We worry more about a single drive-by shooting in our own town than we do about hundreds of thousands of deaths in an ethnic cleansing on the other side of the world.

Perhaps that is why we are so reluctant to do what is necessary to reverse global warming. Perhaps that is why we are so slow to invest in important initiatives like mapping the large earth orbit crossing asteroids that might exterminate all life on our planet some day, or controlling the thousands of industrial chemicals that are leaking into our food supply causing human disease and abnormality.

Perhaps that is why it is so hard to find statesmen who can look beyond the immediate crises and choose wise policies for the long term.

What does the media really sell?

One of the prevalent myths in American culture is that the media – radio, TV, magazines and newspapers, and now some internet sites – exist to tell us the truth. Most of us know the media is biased, though we may disagree on which way it is biased, and yet still, in our heart of hearts, we continue to believe that the media “should” give us accurate information.

In fact, the media sell a product, just like any other profit-making company. The product they sell is “interesting” news. Not accurate news. Not important news. Just “interesting” news – news that will gain and hold readers for their advertisers, who after all are their source of income.

That means that what gets priority in the news system is sensational news, whether it is accurate or not: scandals, revelations, “inside scoops”, disasters, partisan political analyses that will resonate with this or that segment of the audience, intimate details of some celebrity’s life, and the like. Truly important news only gets reported if it also happens to be sensational enough to be “interesting” to the general population.

It also means that everything has to be packaged into bite sized pieces that can be grasped in a few moments by people who really don’t do much thinking. Complex issues (and most important issues are very complex indeed) get boiled down to a few simple one-liners and catchy phrases, and these then becomes the level at which most people think they understand the issue, and on the basis of which they may eventually vote. It’s a little frightening to think that much of this nation’s policy is set on the basis of such oversimplified on-liners, but that is in fact what happens.

So the next time you hear someone get upset about the unfair or inaccurate way the media has portrayed some event, remember that the media is doing exactly what they set out to do – catch and hold readers for their advertisers. They never set out to report the most important news, nor to report it accurately in all its complex detail. And if they did try to do that, they would probably lose most of their audience and hence their income.

The Myth of Science Literacy

In 1995 Morris Shamos, a professor emeritus of Physics and a past president of the New York Academy of Sciences, wrote a book called “The Myth of Scientific Literacy”. In it he examined the success educators have had over the past century in promoting scientific literacy (almost none), and the romantic and unrealistic myth that if only we spent enough money we could make every American scientifically literate, He also examined the question of how much scientific literacy we really need in our population.

Of course he has had to take a lot of criticism from the vested interests -- science educators, textbook publishers and the educational bureaucracy -- who don’t like to be reminded that despite all the money they spend, and despite the steady succession of educational fads and “new curriculum”, their results to date have been unimpressive. But as I suggested in an earlier post, it’s a myth that teachers really teach content anyway – good teachers impart a passion for their subjects and inspire self-confidence in their students, and then the students largely learn the content on their own.

Studies suggest that only something like 3-5% of Americans are scientifically literate, meaning that they really understand how the scientific process works. That means that most families include no one who is scientifically literate, and only about half the juries in the nation include at least one scientifically literate member (probably less, since lawyers tend to exclude such people if they can). It also means that politicians and their staffs are generally not scientifically literate, even as they make critical policy decisions that should be affected by scientific research. That probably explains the unfathomable stance some politicians have taken on matters such as global warming, stem cell research, food additives, genetically modified foods, and the like.

As I prepare to mentor my granddaughter in science, I find his arguments persuasive – at the middle school level it is far more important to teach how scientists reason, form theories, test those theories, reason from inference, etc, etc, than to cram the students with factoids they will forget within a year or two. It is far more important to teach an appreciation of science than to teach specific content. It is far more important to fan the student’s passion and wonder in science, and keep alive their interest in such knowledge, than to cram them with science vocabulary without a commensurate understanding of the scientific process.

In an increasingly technological world, it’s hard to see how we can keep functioning if such a small proportion of the population understands what is going on around them. On the other hand, civilizations have flourished on our world for thousands of years now with mostly clueless populations, so perhaps this really is nothing new.

All life is a matter of odds

I have bad news for those who want certainty in life. There is no certainty; all life is a matter of odds. One can do everything right – avoid smoking, exercise regularly, eat well, manage stress – and still get run down by a drunk driver or struck down by a fatal disease. One can do everything wrong – drink heavily, smoke like a chimney, hang around dangerous friends, overeat regularly – and still live to 100. But the odds strongly favor the person who does the right things.

So the strategy in life, as in football, is to try to improve one’s odds and hope for the best, but be prepared for the worst. Eat right and exercise regularly, but buy health insurance as well. Drive carefully and defensively, but wear a seat belt as well. Hope your company pension and social security will be there when you retire, but accumulate your own investments as well in case they aren’t.

Once one accepts that everything is a matter of odds, one’s strategies in life change. If one no longer believes in a sure thing, it becomes important to always be thinking about plan B and even plan C if things don’t go as one hopes. It also becomes important to continue improving the odds.

What has this to do with anything? I suggest that the problem we have in Iraq today comes ultimately from the belief of some in the current administration that Iraq was a “sure thing”, whether from simple ignorance of the history of that part of the world or from some religious belief that success was preordained. In reality it was a gamble, as is everything in life, and those who took the gamble didn’t pay enough attention to improving the odds, nor to having at hand a plan B and plan C if things didn’t go well, as in fact they haven’t.