The Three Things this Week are the concepts of Meliorism, Wicked Problems, and Confidence Intervals. I really like the ramifications of thinking through conservation issues as a Wicked Problem. And I realized that I am a complete and total Meliorist.

Meliorism
In studying the philosophy of deviance in leisure this word kept appearing: meliorism. I’d never heard of it before.
 
Meliorism: the belief that the world can be made better by human effort
 
I guess I never thought about Meliorism. I’ve had the Hobbesian discussions with people about whether people are inherently good or bad but I suppose I’ve always assumed that focused and directed human effort toward making the world better can, in fact, make the world better. I’ve never thought anything different. My assumption has always been that most people aren’t striving to actively make the world a better place but are instead just trying to survive (e.g. make money, feed their family, provide for basic needs) or trying to build their life in accordance to the values they believe in (e.g. being a member of their family, of their community, of their church, etc). I’ve always assumed that our problems of pollution, overpopulation, overexploitation, and habitat destruction (let alone all social ills of crime, homelessness, etc) are repercussions of poor management of the commons and our basic desires for survival and maintaining the status quo.
 
Additionally, I’ve always believed that there are people who try to meet those two basic desires while simultaneously choosing to direct their efforts toward betterment of the group. This can manifest itself as police officers, politicians, and priests or revolutionaries, social workers, and conservationists. Whether you feel you are helping the world or not is subjective and whether you actually are or not is difficult to quantify and dependent on your rubric. I’ve thought this way and apparently that is Meliorism. The opposite belief is that we can’t make the world better.
 
Existentialism, nihilism, apathy, anomie and cultural subjectivity all play into this idea a little bit but the belief that you cannot objectively make the world a better place is so odd to me. Existentialism and nihilism as philosophies just say that you are choosing your moral structure and defining your own meaning and purpose. Apathy and anomie intuit that you just don’t care. Even Zen or Taoist acceptance are exercises in accepting the world as it is but make no reference to an inability at betterment. The conscious belief that the world cannot be made better ignores these personal choices and extends beyond the idea of checking out. It is an idea that presupposes an objective standard of what better is that will never be met.
 
The best I can wrap my head around this is as a cultural entropy.  All cultural expression is loss. I don’t think this a great analogy but I can’t imagine a belief system that actively believes that something, anything anywhere is getting better. I guess I am a meliorist.
 
Wicked problems
This is a concept that I believe contains the environmental issues we have. A Wicked Problem is vastly more complex than a normal problem. A normal problem, even a difficult problem, has at least one solution, a set of standards and examples in which to compare it to, and can be clearly identified before attempting to solve it. How to get to the moon and finding the Higgs Boson are difficult problems. How do you protect wildlife and rare habitats is an especially difficult problem. How do you feed and provide basic and above-basic needs for 7 billion problem with limited resources is, I think, a very very difficult problem.
 
But, how do you feed and provide for the human population while simultaneously protecting non-human nature and ensuring a habitable global climate with the ability to still explore off-planet and sub-atomic levels? This is a wicked problem.
 
Here are the characteristics of a wicked problem:

1. The problem is not understood until after the formulation of a solution.
2. Wicked problems have no stopping rule.
3. Solutions to wicked problems are not right or wrong.
4. Every wicked problem is essentially novel and unique.
5. Every solution to a wicked problem is a 'one shot operation.'
6. Wicked problems have no given alternative solutions.

 
I’m reminded of the Kardashev Scale and Robert Wright’s Non-Zero in thinking about wicked problems. Kardashev says that we have three types of civilizations (type 1 uses the energy of the sun that hits the earth, 2 uses the actual energy of the sun, and 3 uses the energy of the galaxy) and that we are currently a Type .85. He says that transcending from a .99 to a 1.01 will the most difficult of all the transitions ever because it requires a change in every level of existence (how we think, how we consume, what we value, etc). Other theorists have said that this means this transition has the greatest opportunity for collapse. And this is what Wright says in Non-Zero. The more complex our society gets the better we become because we develop more and more answers that are Non-Zero, as in not a zero sum conclusion where one party wins and one party loses. When you have a non-zero sum conclusion both parties gain something. This is the idea of trade versus war. When you war, one party comes out ahead and the other does not but the whole population stays the same. When you trade, both parties get something and the whole population is that much further ahead. But, maintaining these non-zero sum relationships requires a lot of resources and as you grow larger and more successful the greater the opportunity for collapse.
 
This is where I believe we are. Globally, I think we are very near developing the necessary thought processes and technologies to transcend to a Type 1 Civilization through more and more Non-Zero sum solutions. But! Pushing us past that last hurdle is a Wicked Problem. This is the best I’ve been able to state the problem but I have left out so many aspects of humanity (i.e. cultural expression and the utilitarian values of non-consumption species) that I don’t think we fully understand our problem. Also, we wont be able to recognize what is right or wrong but only trajectories of appropriateness. Further, if we fail and sea levels rise 10 ft or 30-60% of the planet’s biodiversity is lost, then we cannot reverse that. That makes it a ‘one shot operation’ with no alternative solutions. We have figure this out as we go and every temporary solution we develop has novel problems that have to also be solved timely.
 
Developing the statistical probability that an alternative hypothesis is within the Confidence Interval you determine.

I learned this however I am angry at it because I have a test coming up and it is taking me too long to apply what I’ve learned. So, my revenge is to not dignify this concept with any more page space. ​

An interdisciplinary study requires engaging in sometimes contrasting studies. For example, statistics and qualitative research. Also, who knew that grad school would bring some enlightenment on my own life. Bring it on.

1. A "Life in Balance" versus "Moderation" in life
In our philosophy class this week the professor said she values the idea of balance in life. I immediately shrugged away and made a face like I sucked on a lemon. She caught that and during one of our breaks she and another student asked me why I responded the way I did to a life in balance. My response was that it sounds horrible and that every meaningful and life affirming thing I’ve done has been at the expense of something else in my life (attention to health, friends, family, rest, finances, etc). For example, one of the most life-affirming things I’ve done was create and build the company I had. To do this, I had no significant relationship, I was fairly unhealthy, and spent almost all of my time on my company and things related to my company. The satisfaction I received in life was related to that effort. With a little reflection, most other things in my life run that way: giving up that company to travel and explore, relationships, and then moving from everything familiar to get over to South Carolina for graduate school. But then I also search out activities that are more intense than a moderate life too: fighting, backcountry explorations, and even studying and reading. Maybe that’s just how I’m wired (needing higher ‘doses’ of a weird cocktail of serotonin/dopamine/adrenaline/epinephrine to stay motivated).
 
But then the professor drew some line on the whiteboard and said that I am talking about a disgust of ‘moderation’ not a ‘life in balance.’ Moderation is the even keel, the steady line. Life in Balance is equaling out the intensity with the downtime. Here is my interpretation of her graphic:

She went on to explain that Life Balance can be either line (the wavy or the zig zag) but Moderation can only be the wavy one. I like this dichotomy. I like how it distinguishes between two motivations. My only addition to it would be that everyone’s need for a peak or a trough, people’s respective need for rest or excitement, is subjective and independent to each person’s neurochemical needs. My serotonin baseline is obviously way higher than someone who can live a life in moderation contently.
 
 
2. Qualitative Research and specifically Pragmatism
I have an Independent Research course and right now we are focusing on Qualitative Research and what it is. The moment I was sold on it was when my advisor said “I think you’ll like this; I think you will be a Pragmatist Researcher.” After looking into the different types of Qualitative research methods and frameworks, she is 100% correct. Pragmatism research is defined as doing whatever necessary to answer the question. If you have to use Qualitative Research, use that. If you have to use interpretative and subjective reflections, use that. That’s what I’m interested in: I don’t care what method I’m using as long as I can effectively answer my questions of how and why humans and non-human wildlife and habitats should exist appropriately. If I need to learn a Marxist-Feminist approach because that answers the question/s best, bring it on.
 
A quick summary of what I understand to be Qualitative vs Quantitative research and simple definitions of various Quantitative methods:
Quantitative Research:
Quantitative Research: emphasize objective measurements and the statistical, mathematical, or numerical analysis of data collected through polls, questionnaires, and surveys, or by manipulating pre-existing statistical data using computational techniques.
 Qualitative Research: (textbook definition) a situated activity that locates the observer in the world. … They turn the world into a series of representations, including field notes, interviews, conversations, photographs, recordings, and memos to the self… Qualitative researchers study things in their natural settings, attempting to make sense of, or interpret, phenomena in terms of the meanings people bring to them.
PostPositivism: A single reality exists beyond ourselves, “out there”
Interpretitivism/Constructivism: Multiple realities are constructed through our lived experiences and interactions with others
Critical Theory: Reality is based on power and identity struggles
Deconstruction: Changing ways of thinking and bringing to the surface concealed hierarchies as well as dominations, oppositions, inconsistencies, and contradictions.
 
Pragmatism isn’t necessarily a type of research but rather more of a type of approach – use any of the above research type and more to help answer your question. Yes, I’m definitely a Pragmatist.
 
3. Critical Periphery – Top-Secret Design Strategies for Increasing Effectiveness of Presentations (How to give a good Powerpoint presentation)

Over 12 years, I’ve given about 50 public presentations. Like, proper presentations with audiences of 4 to 150 people, a projector, a whole slideshow, and the nice(ish) clothes that go with it. As an informal science and arts educator at museums, nature centers, and out in the wetlands I’ve lead, taught, or facilitated at least 700 talks. I have gone through trainings, orientations, and lectures about how to educate but most of what I have learned about proper presentations has come from failing miserably and from my ex-business partner. His art form is Microsoft Powerpoint and he is good at it. Yesterday, I got my first actual lesson in how to develop a proper and professional slideshow talk.
 
Dr. Bixler went through a highly entertaining “meta-presentation” (a presentation about how to give a presentation). Emphasizing an “emotional affectation test” Bixler highlighted that an audience is going to automatically and unconsciously rank and value the information you propose as “is this worth putting into my long-term memory?” Basically, if you haven’t got into people’s heads with your talk than you have failed. How do you get into people’s heads then?
 
You don’t get into people’s heads by telling them how smart you are and how great your information is. You don’t get into people’s heads by giving them a lecture about all the stuff you know and they would be better for if they knew it too.
 
You get in there through narrative devices: building anticipation, speaking to Universals (things we all share in common -birth, death, life, food, family, etc), circling back to constant themes in the talk (emphasizing the points regularly), and surprises of humor and/or wordplay. You get in their heads through non-verbal communication of physically moving on stage, giving pauses at appropriate times, and acting out what you’re saying. You get into people’s heads by treating the presentation as theater and like good theater you have the ability improve someone’s life during the activity and into their lived existence afterwards.
 
Bixler ended with something so poignant from a responsibility standpoint, something I hadn’t really considered in my own talks. He mentioned that there were 57 people in the class and he spoke for one hour. That means that he just used 57 productive hours of time in sharing his message. Imagine what can be accomplished in 57 hours. I had always thought about the size of my audience in regards to how many people I was getting my message across to. But now, speaking to the Pragmatist in me, this responsibility of utilizing our potentially productive hours well I will think of my audience and my message differently. 

​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 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.

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.

​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.

After receiving a text from a close friend a couple months ago that said, "There's a name for my delusion: I'm an optimist!", I haven't been able to get that thought out of my head. For over a year now I have been trying to understand my own perspective and my own engagement with the world. There was a vague sense that I am a negative person but I always saw that as a strength of viewing the world rationally, logically, and skeptically. In addition to seeing it as a strength, I viewed it as a strategy: I built my successful business with this mindset, so it must work. So, why would anyone choose to be delusional? Why would anyone choose to see the world through rose-colored glasses for the sake of seeing the world through rose-colored glasses? And, most importantly to me the-business-owner-and-environmental-guy, wouldn't that perspective skew and disrupt how I engage with the very real and very scary stresses facing small business owners and the environmental situation at-large?

Like most answers to my questions, I turned to books. Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flourish by Martin Seligman, and Mindset by Carol Dweck were what I turned to. I came to them from finding their names repeated over and over in the following books I encountered over the past four months: How to Find Fulfilling Work by Roman Krznaric, How Children Succeed by Paul Tough, and Give and Take by Adam Grant. But it turns out that this same friend has been trying to get me to think about what all of these authors call Positive Psychology for a while. What has sold me is that through these works, all of them share that successful people are proven to be more optimistic. And here optimism doesn't mean ignoring the scary realities but rather embracing them and not overly worrying about them. In fact, many of the anecdotes I found are of people who have had the exact same stresses and worries as business owners and environmentalists as myself but still chose to be optimistic. The statistics are pretty great: happy and successful relationships are those where the partners view their significant other as having 5 positive qualities to every negative quality whether that is objectively true or not, more money, etc.

I like to think of these books sequentially, leading up to a whole narrative. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs lays the groundwork for the ability to self actualize or “flow” and flow allows us to “flourish” and choose to see the world in a “growth-mindset” way.

First Book: Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs prioritizes the important aspects of life and focuses health prior to intimacy and intimacy prior to objective engagement with reality for example. There are five stages of the Hierarchy of Needs:

1. Physiological
   
2. Safety
   
3. Love/Belonging
   
4. Esteem
   
5. Self-Actualization
   

Second Book: Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow:  Developing Flow is the most successful strategy to deny entropy and Flow is a ‘game’: a system of symbolic order that includes the following steps:

1. Flow activities have rules that require the learning of skills
   
2. Setting up goals
   
3. Providing feedback
   
4. Making control of self possible
   
5. Facilitating concentration and involvement by making the activity as distinct as possible from everyday existence. 
   

To understand the most appropriate response to achieve Flow easily: if you are bored, you have to increase your challenges; if you are anxious, you have to increase your skills. To live in a state of Flow, one needs to develop a Life Theme: goal-directed actions that provide shape and meaning to an individual’s life. In a life theme, whatever happens is either a step toward or away from that goal. The clear feedback will keep them involved with their actions. Even if one loses all their money or experiences a trauma, that person’s thoughts and actions will see that as worthwhile.

Third Book: Flourish by Martin Seligman is similar to Flow and a further exploration of Self-Actualization. More than that it (and this whole discussion) is Positive Psychology. To Flourish means having high positive emotion (admiration, joy, pride and gratitude) plus being high on any three of the following: 

• self-esteem 
  
• optimism 
  
• resilience 
  
• vitality
  
• self-determination 
  
• positive relationships
  
• achievement
  

Beyond that, Seligman goes on to explain spirituality (self-awareness, sense of agency, self-regulation, self-motivation, and social awareness), depression and 'icebergs' (Icebergs are deeply held beliefs that often lead to an out-of-kilter emotional reaction), and the social ramifications of when individual’s flourish (health, productivity and peace follow)

Fourth Book: Mindset by Carol Dweck. is a book that encapsulates the ideas of the previous three books. It focuses on the positive psychology research done by the others along with many more.  It basically takes the entire 200 pages of the book to explain how we can make decisions that are growth-oriented rather than fixed. The definitions are best described in the list below but the graphic does a decent job of explaining the difference as well.

Parents, teachers and coaches: to create a growth mindset in students, children this involves:

• Presenting skills as learnable
  
• Conveying that the organization values learning and perseverance, not just ready-made genius or talent
  
• Giving feedback in a way that promotes learning and future success
  
• Presenting managers as resources for learning