3 Things I learned in Grad School This Week - Aug 27 2016

​In this balmy and thunderstormy late-August week Graduate School offered up new concepts, new terms, and new confusions. Considering my program is interdisciplinary these concepts are as schizophrenic as I am at the moment. 

First: Marcia's Identity Theory

First is Marcia’s Identity Theory. Almost as an aside in one of my courses, the professor drew an XY graph on the board and described a theory posited in the 1960’s describing how people identify themselves in accordance to the thing they are learning/playing with/engaging with. It describes a spiral of starting out excited about something but not knowing much about it. This excitement part is defined as “commitment” and the lack of knowledge is defined as “foreclosure” in relation to “exploration” (how little do you know compared to how much you know). As you go through the spiral you end up learning more but depending on how you respond to the various levels of challenge your commitment might fluctuate. This fluctuation occurs when the information you are learning challenges what you think you know about your topic, how hard it is to understand, or how little it corresponds to the thing about your topic that you are interested in. If you continue with the study and aren’t prohibitively challenged to the point of quitting then you will spiral through the stages toward more exploration (learning), back into higher commitment (once you are reinvigorated by what you’re learning and new connections you make), and to a new baseline level of foreclosure and commitment from which to work from. If you do ‘quit’ permanently, or more likely temporarily, you end up in the quadrant of moratorium. I would imagine that getting out of the moratorium requires a special level of grit and creativity (as discussed by Paul Tough in How Children Succeed).
 
Immediately, my first association of this theory is with Csikszentmihaly’s concept of Flow and Seligman’s Flourish. Luckily for me, the professor also made this connection and explained it terrifically.  In these concepts you find the sweet-spot of action between stress and interest to work in a state of Flow where you are accomplishing at a high level while also minimizing distracting noise (like children and bills…). Their argument is that the more time you can spend in flow the more contentment you will find with life due to your higher feeling of meaning, purpose, and hope in life. I would imagine this is because you feel like you have a greater sense of control over an aspect of your life that you value.

Second: Ecosystem Services

Ecosystem Services is the second concept that I stumbled across. This is huge to me because, if going off of Marcia’s concept above, this is the next iteration of exploration and opening up my foreclosure level with my study (and the reason I went back to grad school). After reading Neel’s text about managing longleaf pines and William Ginn’s book Investing In Nature I have come to realize that this idea has many names: Tending the Wild (from the book of that name), Ecosystem Based Management, Additionality, Working Landscapes, and Socio Ecological Systems Theory. Basically, all these terms invoke the idea of actively managing natural resources for their exploitation but with a conscientiousness that values the system, the ecology, the habitat, and the parts beyond just the marketable resource - both for their inherent sake and also as a literal investment into future (conscientious) exploitation. The idea boils down to an economic strategy as Neel states in his text: “…treat your forest like an annuity, harvesting a portion of your annual interest rather than all of it. You certainly do not want to spend all your capital. In fact, under the Stoddard Neel approach, we aim to put more money in the bank every year with timber growth than we take out for timber harvest.… Rather than maintaining a constant timber volume, we like to see our investments grow over time.” (169)
 
The reason I like the term Ecosystem Services is that it focuses on the result. However, I think one of the drawbacks of this interdisciplinary field is that it is hard to conceptualize and place into an easy box. This term or the other ones don’t do well toward that goal either. Maybe it’s too nuanced, maybe it is too much a capitalist fringe but it has proven successful as Ginn elaborates in his text and how Mark Tercek describes in his Nature’s Fortune. I will continue to focus on this niche of ecosystem services- or whatever I end up calling it- for the sake of developing reproducible models, adaptable methods, and serviceable techniques that can be applied to multiple habitats and their species facing overexploitation.

Three: Box Plots

​Lastly, in my statistics course I finally learned what those boxes with the lines coming out of them are. They are called boxplots and they help to interpret data to understand where the most typical data is (the median), the range of data and sample variance (where most of the data is), and the outliers. Outliers are just that: they lie outside of the normal data. They can also screw up all kinds of things because they are by definition anomalous. Outliers usually have special circumstances and beyond a Malcolm Gladwell interpretation, they mess it up for the middle parts. Understanding what’s in the box (where most of your data is) helps with understanding patterns, comparisons, and trends.
 
The reason I like this -beyond the fact that I will have to actually use it when I conduct my own research- is because it helps me travel the labyrinth that is Slow Thinking. Daniel Kahneman wrote in his book Thinking: Fast and Slow that humans have two modes of thinking: fast and slow. Fast thinking accounts for almost all our decisions and we are both really good at it and really bad (you can be both when you use it all the time). Fast thinking is based on our reactions, mostly emotionally. We’re good at it because on the whole we react well to stepping out of the way of the oncoming car or identifying when someone is pleased or angry with us. We are bad it when we choose the donuts for breakfast or make connections that just aren’t there (most racism, gender stereotypes, etc). We rely on fast thinking because that’s our default. Slow thinking however is what is required when understanding processes, probabilities, cognitive biases, and long-range outcomes. We are almost never good at Slow Thinking and it takes practice and discipline to even understand what is occurring. The big problem arises because we apply Fast Thinking to almost all things that require Slow Thinking. We end up stumbling ungracefully into poor decisions because our brains have never had to adapt to Slow Thinking models. These models seem to me to be the world of statistics. If I can work to train my brain into more Slow Thinking ways of understanding probabilities and processes I hope I will be able to recognize my own cognitive biases more accurately and more quickly.