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I was schooled in Adobe Lightroom, have been mystified by Daniel Dennett's Competence without Comprehension, and played with Prepared Learning. Prepared Learning (and Martin Seligman)  I was not planning in putting this rocktacular photo up but once I found it, how could I not? This is Dr. Martin Seligman in full 1970s kit. Anyway, we approached Martin Seligman again in one of my classes to look at positive psychology’s gifts. I’m pretty familiar with positive psychology through all the popular psychology books I’ve read over the past decade or so but it is a different world completely exploring the original works in actual journal articles. Reading Seligman’s articles is a different beast from reading his book Flourish. I love his book. His articles are bananas. I was looking up what he is known for and he did some pivotal work before he stumbled upon positive psychology. Apparently, he helped put together Prepared Learning. This is a wild concept where we are primed to make associations with fear or optimism or taste than other things. The best example is that we can learn to be afraid of snakes as children after only one negative stimuli or event but it might take a lot longer to be conditioned to be afraid of a Power Ranger doll. The idea is that natural environmental threats can flip the switch in our brain faster for a reproductive or general survival reason. The Power Ranger is new and novel and we don’t know how to respond. We have to tap into a cognition (which Kahneman says is very difficult and requires a lot of mental energy and focus to do – so we usually avoid doing so) to categorize the Power Ranger as dangerous, safe, or neutral. This makes a lot of sense intuitively – we evolved to be able to be cautious of snakes and spiders. I don’t know if it scales up but you can think of the cognitive dissonance apparent in why we allow guns, vehicles, and sugar with little to no regulation but have waged a massive genocide against wolves and sharks when the rate of injury and death from both is so unequal.
Competence without Comprehension Daniel Dennett came out with a new book called From Bacteria to Bach and Back and it is an ass-kicker. My favorite of his so far. Dennett is called one of the four horsemen. Along with Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris, Dennett uses his profound intelligence to explore and explain the mysteries of life. Sidenote: I just learned that there is a fifth member who was supposed to be at the same conference where all of these guys were speaking at and where the label was coined; her name is Ayaan Hirsi Ali and she is a Somali born Dutch-American. I digress: as a philosopher, Dennett’s talent is logical jiu jitsu. As a philosopher of science and neuroscience especially, he digs deep into the big questions of evolution, free will, determinism, consciousness, morality, and language with a technical expertise that is barely understandable by my feeble brain but fascinating nonetheless. I’m trying to make sense of his logic and am not fully there yet but one of his terms is Competence without Comprehension and I love it. It is a powerful shortcut to explain complex concepts. In looking this up, there is not an easy shorthand for it (which makes me think of a rad project) but I did find an awesome blog by a Dutch psychologist. Coert Visser started the blog called Progress-Focused Approach and I love his beliefs: http://www.progressfocused.com/p/some-things-i-believe-and-expect.html Regarding Competence without Comprehension, Visser pulls together the following statements on his site (http://www.progressfocused.com/search?q=+comprehension):
The other powerful example Dennett uses to discuss consciousness emerging from a system: he mentions CERN and how the thousands of scientists need not and indeed cannot explain the entirety of the project they work on yet each of them is creating new knowledge by their skillful and necessary contribution to the whole. Each scientist has extensive competence but only vague comprehension and yet the outcome is elegance. There is strength in this tool to explain systems theories, evolution through natural selection, and the feedback loops involved. Adobe Lightroom I’ve been using Lightroom to edit and collect my photos for two years now. It was recommended by Dave Pirazzi of Colorado Lagoon fame and I took his advice unquestioningly. It was brilliant advice. I am self-taught and youtube-taught. And while I knew I wasn’t using it to the full power and I didn’t understand what a lot of the toggle bars did, I was competent enough to create decent photos. Then I met a photographer Jeff Sarvis who asked me: “But did you know there is a right way to use it, an order in which you’re supposed to use Lightroom?” No, Mr. Sarvis, I did not. He was amazing enough to invite me over to his house for an afternoon and walk me through it. 3 hours and several pages of notes later I was exhausted. I had to eat 2 chocolate chip cookies and have a cup of mate to get my brain functioning again. He taught me so much about it and answered all the questions I didn’t even know I had. For the sake of simplicity I am going to note down the simple steps for a normal photo (not an HDR, a specific touch up, or graphic design project):
Genius. I started a whole new Catalog so I could start fresh with this new information. I am so excited.
 !Three revolutionary things! Thought exercises, Gatekeepers, and Prefigurative politics
Thought Exercises For several years, I have had two books follow me around the world (not intelligently – they are fat and heavy books, not good for travelling with): Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett’s Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking. I honestly believe that if I was either smart enough to understand these books in full I could run the world. They are remarkable but I feel like I like I need to do a bottle of Adderall with mushrooms to make them make sense. They are dense and not easy but they do give you shortcuts to develop complexity. And, I am not good at creativity or complexity so these are especially hard for me. I realized that this semester my classes have been teaching me thought exercises as well – ones I hope I will remember to use in the future when confronting a challenging problem. The first two I wrote about earlier and involve developing a typology for looking at messy concepts along a spectrum and doing a compare/contrast analysis for looking at the similarities and differences of seemingly like things.The latest exercise was given to me by my advisor to teach me how to create a theme out of messy ideas that don’t fit any logical narrative. Here’s the equation: topic(s)->hybrid theme-> theme. When doing this you want to sketch out three binaries too: intellectual/ emotional, fact/feeling, and tangible/intangible. From here, the endgoal is to answer this question: “When someone hears about my [presentation/paper/whatever] on my topic, what I want them to understand is:” For example, my topic is Rare Species. I listed out all the things in accordance to the binaries and here is what I came up with: Rare Species are distinct, and usually local, genetic singularities that impact global biodiversity in not completely known ways and as a society we don’t fully understand why or how to value them. This may not seem bananas to anyone else but I have been working on rare species for over a decade and this is the best explanation of the problem I have ever developed. I would not have created this if not for the topic/theme exercise. Gatekeepers I have a class that is one of the oddest I’ve ever been involved in. Every Monday morning I meet with about 8 geniuses in wildlife and social science and a professor who was an advisor to the directors of big government agencies and the bloody president. He’s bananas and encourages us to think creatively and challenges our sense of authority. Paradoxically, he is authority and, being at the professional level he was at, was the authority for a lot science decisions in the country. He is aware of this and in his roles as editors of journals and board members of prestigious organizations, he explains that he is a Gatekeeper. The keeper of the gate…of? Well, power. This term is one used in social science research as well and I approached it in my own research when I was not allowed to progress until a Gatekeeper gave his blessing. So what is a Gatekeeper? According to this professor, a Gatekeeper does three things in regards to decisions of power, resources, etc: 1. Control which way something goes 2. Control the speed of the flow of something 3. Control promotion, laurels, awards, etc. An interesting part of being a Gatekeeper is that the flow of resources has to be less than the demand. If a lot of people want something and they have to go through one person, that person has a lot of power and is a big Gatekeeper What does this do? This 1)legitimizes the structure, and it 2) creates a lack of alternative routes. Lastly, my professor asked why do we have Gatekeepers? 1. Keep quality high 2. Establishes normalcy of science (in opposition to revolutionary science – in Kuhnian terms) 3. Concentrates power to a fewer people (this creates order) 4. Influences bias (it can tell you where biases are, where they aren’t or are acceptable to be, and where they shouldn’t be) Prefigurative politics Defined as an effort to live out the vision of a better world while seeking to change it, Prefigurative Politics is a completely new term to me but not at all a new idea. Morally and individually, it makes sense in a “practice what you preach” sort of way. Strategically and socially, it is far more nuanced. While struggling with concepts of egalitarian and peaceful structures both Lenin and Che justified a lot interim chaos and inequity. The conflict they experienced was whether the means would justify the ends and whether the lived hypocrisy could be understood by the broad brush of history. Social scientist Carl Boggs defined the term and explored it in his paper “Marxism, Prefigurative Communism, and the Problem of Worker’s Control.” The paper is heavy and full of powerful yet seemingly antiquated ideas of social structure. For example, I’m currently finishing both Harari’s new book Homo Deus and Rifkin’s Zero Marginal Cost Society and the integration of the economic social structure with 1970’s-era socialism makes no sense according to these authors. They agree with Kevin Kelly in What Technology Wants that the society that adapts best is the one that can handle the newest, and inevitable, technology. In a paper looking at the politics of food of all things, we came across this term. Applied to a vegetarian, prefigurative politics is often high on the list of why the vegetarian became a vegetarian. How can they advocate for animal rights and still eat meat? How can they advocate for a healthy environment and still eat meat? They nailed it on the head for me at least (I wrote a whole long personal narrative but it is boring – basically, as an environmentalist I cannot reconcile behaviors of consumer capitalism, religion, or industrial meat eating with what I want for global society). But this is the example of the individual. The next step up from the individual is community and there are several examples including Food Not Bombs offering free meals, the Occupy movement setting up representative democracy, and Black Panthers providing armed security in Oakland in the 70s. The power of prefigurative politics, as I see it, is in modeling a future, in denying our risk aversion, or taking a test-run of what we want. I think it was the anarchists who advocated this. I remember reading Bakhunin in my undergrad and he championed the moral imperative – and, indeed, the lack of any other option – of this. The only challenge I would offer – and I have not read up on the intricacies at all in regards to prefigurative politics – is that there is an ‘emergence’ problem when dealing with feedback systems and large social structures. The end is greater than the sum of the parts and it is hard to scale up without hitting a tipping point where previous actions that worked don’t work anymore. I don’t know if prefigurative politics is necessary in creating a new social structure. You might be able to be a consumer capitalist to walk your way into developing a technologically-based global socialism. You might be able to maintain gender inequity while working to elect a woman or a trans person. Or, related to my work, maybe the answer to saving endangered species is giving them over to agribusiness, mass producing them, and eating them like we do the approximately 1.5 billion cows on the planet.
 This week I wrote a bunch of papers and took a mid-term (a non-statistics test in grad school? yes) so my access to completely new thoughts was limited. However, I did learn some things in new ways as I was forced to prove that I know some stuff. Below are my reflections on the 3 Purposes of a Social Scientist, People Can't be Trusted, and the Commons. Also, above is a picture of a Kermit the Frog glass frog discovered in Costa Rica: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/04/150421-glass-frog-kermit-discovery-animals-science-costa-rica/
3 Purposes of a Social Scientist I know the purpose of science (the systematic pursuit of knowledge), theory (the systematic explanation for the observations that relate to a particular aspect of life), and a hypothesis (a testable expectation about empirical reality that follows from a theory). These usually don’t follow the definitions that a non-scientist use. For example, when a non-scientist says they have a theory, they mean they have an idea. Along those lines, when someone says that Evolution is just a theory that tells me all I need to know about their knowledge of science. They think it is just an idea instead of a rigorous set of explanations that has never been proven wrong according to what it purports to speak to – adaptation by natural selection or genetic drift. A side-note: The Theory of Gravity and the Theory of the Standard Model (of subatomic particle physics) have also never been proven wrong either, only refined, but people have far less of an issue with these and, to me, they are way more insane and counter-intuitive (The sun has a pull on the Earth from millions of miles away with nothing connecting it? The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle says that you can measure something perfectly in a place but not at a time or at a time but not place?) Side Side-note: while some of the history has been verified, no aspect of the ontology, epistemology, or phenomenology of any religion has been proven true when held up to a systematic explanation of observations. I digress. These things I’ve known but I am new to what a social scientist is. I had to explain my knowledge of what a social scientist is on my midterm and came across the 3 Purposes of a Social Scientist. These are to 1) Explore (understand through feasibility analyses or developing methods), 2) Describe (through a demographic survey or the U.S. Census), or 3) Explain or Predict ( analyzing the factors of an event or behavior). This is fascinating to me. I’ve always concerned myself with the Explore aspect but have never consciously thought about the Explain or Predict aspect. The Explore part makes sense to me and I think I’ve assumed the Explain part or taken it for granted maybe. For example, Physics is a prediction science but Ecology is not (yet). I can tell you that if I drop a heavy object, it will fall to the ground. However, if I remove a species of tree from a forest or a previously non-invasive non-native species to a habitat, I cannot tell you what will happen – there are a lot variables and stochastic events. Ecology is attempting to become a prediction science and I think it gets there by the Explore part. I’m trying to understand the relationship of the three parts and I’m thinking that a certain level of Explore is needed to get you to an Explain. With Social Science, I cannot tell you how people are going to behave (for some of the same reasons that apply to Ecology) but I can analyze what happens after an event. Maybe enough Exploring gets us to Explaining. Maybe it’s like weather prediction: within certain and small timeframe I can tell you with a percentage of certainty what will happen. I don’t know. Consumers (People) Can’t Be Trusted In my Behavior class we’re reading Consumer.ology by Philip Graves. The book is great. The entire book, in my mind, can be summed up by the Henry Ford quote: If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would’ve said a faster horse. People don’t know what they want, they don’t know they don’t know what they want, they think they know what they want, they get angry when they don’t get what they think they want, when they get what they think they want they get sad, and people can be manipulated to be happy with something they didn’t think they wanted. They want a faster horse but the automobile is ubiquitous and I only see horses in wealthy people’s hands. There are a lot of sociobiological (or evolutionary psychology) reasons for this and they include our cognitive dissonances and theories of mind. We need to believe that we are consciously driving the vehicle that is our body and mind otherwise we go a little insane. We need to believe that our reasons for doing things are our own (and not, say, our friend’s reasons or society’s). We need to believe that when confronted with a series of options we will pick the one that is best according to the information that we have and we will not be swayed by simple things like a smaller left-handed number ($19.99 vs $20.00 – mental number line bias) or choosing the middle of three options (extremeness aversion) or an option only because we’ve heard of it before (the idea of priming) or an option because the last seconds of our time with it were better than the rest (people rated colonoscopies as not unpleasant simply because someone was nice to them at the end of it rather than the beginning – this is peak-end theory). Humans don’t know why they want the things they want but they are very adamant that they do know. Don’t trust humans. The Commons The idea of the commons is basically what my entire life is focused around studying and has been since I was 20. Hardin re-utilized the term Commons in his paper in the 60s and popularized the term “Tragedy of the Commons. Hardin explains the Tragedy thusly: “Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.” I’ve known this Tragedy and Hardin’s paper for a while but have never been forced to look at it closely or develop my own ideas. I submitted a paper this week that created a typology of the commons. I stuck with the physical environment for the purposes of explaining how we manage some commons (fresh water) and how we exploit others (biodiversity). I didn’t wade into the murky waters of cultural commons such as Information (the internet) or shared space (AirBnB, Couchsurfing) but I did write that our global society is shifting what we envision as the commons. I had to do a fair amount of research into opposing ideas (the Law Professor Rose’s Comedy of the Commons), ways to use the new commons (Paul Hawken’s Ecology of Commerce), and new ways to think about commons (Rifkin’s Zero Marginal Cost Society). I’ve got this idea that our society is almost at a sustainable and wealth-generating point. As a meliorist, an optimist, and a humanist I do believe that our society is the best that has ever occurred on the planet according to every metric (compared to previous societies). I also believe that the problems we have are big, getting bigger, and will become world-killer problems. But I also believe that we will either solve them and live in an unprecedented age where disease and want are dissolved for all or we will fail and continue to live not very different from our bronze-age ancestors (the lived experience for almost 2 billion of us right now anyway). These ideas come from David Deutsch’s Beginning of Infinity, Wright’s NonZero, Pinker’s Better Angels of our Nature, Kaku’s Physics of the Future, Kardashev’s 3 Types of Civilizations, and other writers (EO Wilson, Harari, and Carroll, mostly). To get to this place requires a shift in thinking about what are our commons, how we engage with the planet’s 9 Boundaries (Stockholm Resilience Center), and how we understand our axiology.
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