Modernizing content

The least costly path from point A to B depends on where both A and B are located. Does this sound like a useful fact in this age of rising gas prices?

Now imagine that A is the set of concepts and skills initially in hand and that B is the set of skills needed to address current challenges. If either the starting tools (A) or the skills needed (B) change, the best path to gaining the latter may also change.

Does that mean that in a world where both A and B continuously change, educators might want to be always looking for new ways to bridge the gap? In order to overcome the inertia associated with a more familiar path, does it also mean that content modernizers had better specify for which values of A and B an alternate path is taylored?

Example: Students familiar with the meaning of bits and bytes in everyday life might benefit from introductions to probability that use powers of two so as to build on that familiarity, for instance by thinking of probability as 1/2^#bits. Does this mean that methods to teach use of probabilities today might be simplified with examples that 50 years ago would have made things worse and not better?

Similar opposites

Math folk may tell you that exact opposites are often similar, especially when multiple dimensions are involved, since they differ by only a sign. For instance, taking the negative of an image does little to obscure the information it contains. Photographers who capture and store images on negatives will likely agree.

This is also true for idea codes: If someone says that you're exactly wrong, the implication is that you are asking the correct true-false questions but assigning the wrong answers. Taken literally this means that, except for a sign change, they see the world precisely as do you. This is one reason that those who see themselves as polar opposites often find themselves serving the same set of bad ideas.

Unfortunately our ideas about the world often differ from the world itself by a lot more than a change of sign. Thus for example when you hear talk about one person or idea being the exact opposite of another, your monoscale-thinking alarm should probably go off.

Acuity multiscale

One statement in favor of awareness on more than one scale is this old adage: Think globally, act locally.

Objective balance?

Wouldn't it be nice if folks with diverse perspectives could agree on integrative elements of an approach to regional policy, regardless of disagreements about how to weigh and accomplish those goals. What if this approach also: (i) puts the full range of issues on the table, (ii) outlines ways to objectively monitor progress toward those goals, (iii) helps explain past difficulties at coming to agreement, and (iv) has deep roots in more than one field of science and mathematics?

Layered-niche network models, that track correlations with respect to skin, family and culture, may be able to do all of these things. However, it will take critical input from all perspectives to put them to use. If you want to hear more, or better still to inform these approaches to your perspective, now is a good time to speak up.

Question etiquette

Is it a good idea to answer any question asked by the media? My answer to this question is no, since the idea-set that underlies the question may not be well chosen.

The above question IS hopefully worth answering. Ideas now travel the globe in very short times. Those who reinforce bad idea-sets by obediently manning any side of a weak or ill-posed question both: (i) help the bad idea propagate and (ii) falsely legitimize un-informed pursuits by those lined up on both sides of the question.

Do people ever make this mistake? It seems to me that among others, "stereotypers" (who cartoonify folks and often champion single-scale causes) and "progressives" (who attempt in sometimes muddled ways to address challenges on more than one scale) both make the mistake frequently. The latter often do it thereby aiding the former with their xenophobic labels, while the former often do it thereby aiding stereotypers against whom they discriminate.

What are some examples of this? I'll offer two. According to linguist George Lakoff, progressives often take the wrong side of a bad issue (like whether to set a date in advance for withdrawal from some conflict or election) instead of attacking the poor choice of question while offering a better one. This may require standing up to mono-scale cartoonifiers (including media reps) who claim that arguing against a bad question is beating around the bush. Such reframing of bad questions had thus better be done clearly and succinctly.

Another example involves possible responses to non-government violence against citizens. The strongest narrative may not involve "wars against terror by an axis of evil", especially if such phrases help groups with no (or poor) track record at governance to act like governing adversaries either militarily, or in their ability to bring order to the lives of everyday folk. Instead it might be better, for example, to ridicule those making the neolithic claim that "it's OK to treat others as subhuman" and to demonstrate that we can better help sustain folks' lives on multiple levels than can they.

Monkey missions

Depending on your point of view, you might think of the videogame Grand Theft Auto IV as EITHER a bad thing for kids OR as cutting-edge information technology. Regardless a comparison of "missions" in GTA4 to the primate activities illustrated by David Attenborough in the "Social Climbers" episode of BBC's Life of Mammals might convince you that the economic success of GTA relies on the creative placement of neolithic stereotypes (and projectile weapons) into a jungle rich in modern human structures and styles.

Before being hasty and turning up your nose up at such marketing strategies, you might want to consider the universal primate-appeal of other aspects of your behavior. From competitive social hierarchy, through family loyalties and play with friends, to the enthusiasm for a good meal, our communities are built on niche structures familiar from primate communities, as well as on commitment to loftier cultural and scientific goals.

One step toward moving beyond such strategies may be to recognize the legitimate basis for their appeal. That is, moving past our neolithic limitations may be helped by recognition that we have them to begin with.

Collaborative coding

Wiki collaboratives are one of various new and important processes that are evolving as I write this, on the back of emerging technology for electronic communcation. To see what I mean, create a user ID on Wikipedia and add pages of interest to your watch list so you can monitor developments and discussion about them from day to day.

The evolution of these processes is exciting (and problematic) because they could help to organically regulate the expression of idea codes, much as metazoan cells regulate the expression of molecule codes, by informing them to processes operating on multiple scales. There is still a long way to go on this, however, and each spare neuron that we can offer counts!