1,024 Matching Annotations
  1. Mar 2019
    1. “Whole language is not a program, package, set of materials, method, practice, or technique; rather, it is a perspective on language and learning that leads to the acceptance of certain strategies, methods, materials, and techniques.—Dorothy Watson, 1989.”

      Yesssssss

    1. headsets that monitor student concentration levels by reading and translating their brain signals in class.

      Bahahahahaaha

    2. an ancient Chinese chess game

      Wtf? Go is not "an ancient Chinese chess game" ... Try abstract strategy game, not some reference to a different game entirely that screams euro-centrism.

    3. “This student doesn’t like to answer questions in English class, so maybe his parents and teacher should do something.”

      And if they're bad questions?

    1. the items that had the most salience in the individual responses.

      Why standardize these things?

    2. This

      What is "This" here? I'm confused? Was it the development of the expectations themselves?

    3. I think I've entered a primarily doubting mindset with my annotations so far, in part because this kind of pedagogical maneuver is near and dear to my heart. For clarity's sake, it's worth saying here that I think this kind of practice does a lot to move the goalposts in the direction I want them moved.

    4. You’ll see that we put a lot of emphasis on our expectations for each other

      Students-for-instructor and instructor-for-students. To a lesser extent students-for-students? Sure, there's collegiality, and thoughtfulness, but I don't remember seeing much about mutual aid, for example.

    5. I wanted us to discuss and agree on expectations for grading,

      Seems like "agree" is a simple word that encompasses a huge amount of potential dynamics, decisions, processes, etc.

    6. for my first LO

      Singular my? What if students didn't share this particular one?

    7. and that we may identify other topics or issues that warrant exploration along the way.

      May?

    8. the requirements

      vs. "My Requirements"

    1. certified

      ????

    2. inability to settledifferences between people

      This seems like an important thing to voice.

    3. well thought-out responses

      More soup.

    4. I’

      Who's this "I"?

    5. making sure that it does not go offtopic.

      This seems much more complicated than it appears at first glance--there's plenty of room for reasonable disagreement about what's "on topic."

    6. We try reallyhard:
    7. Come to classpreparedto discuss topic through readings, research, etc

      Soup.

    8. Course Requirements Developed bythe Instructor:

      No course requirements developed by the students?

    9. Course Objectives Outlined bythe Instructor:

      The instructor still has a privileged place here.

    1. winning

      I don't like the "winning" framing.nIt evokes losing, and I don't want that metaphor to apply (and yet, how does it?).

    2. freedom

      Autonomy.

    3. in its proper place as an economic

      This is what my last annotation was pushing back against.

    4. “our desks were never meant to be our altars.”

      And yet, I want work to be a sacred space. I want it to be one among a myriad of co-equal sacred spaces in my life.

    5. as we see our deepest selves as inextricable from our jobs.

      "What do you do?" "No--I mean, what do you do for your job?"

    6. The crisis, in one way or another, is spiritual.

      In most ways?

    1. collective

      This reminds me of an essay I read recently in Disrupting the Digital Humanities on analysis of the appearance of words suggesting collaboration. ('Collective' was one of them.)

    2. Unintended negative outcomes

      How about the intended harms (turned externalities) like online gambling?

    3. Too much of the web is driven by perverse incentives

      As opposed to the good ones? Both are disempowering and manipulative.

    4. that wasn’t covered in ads

      This doesn't seem like a coincidence. Searching seems to be an attentional act, so whatever might distract from the process at the point of the query (rather than at delivery of results) seems likely to greatly detract from the utility of the service.

    5. a little

      Gonna disagree here--it was essentially similar. Similar in essence.

    6. able to go from one file to another directly with a mouse click

      For me, this is the central innovation of the web--one that functions as a network good. Cue Memex.

    7. WYSIWYG
    8. WAIS

      My guess is that this is an acronym for "Wide Area Information Service."

    1. rapidly

      What's rapid in this context?

    2. built

      Shaped?

      It seems like shaped, while permitting intention, doesn't require it in the same way that building something does. The Grand Canyon has been shaped, but in a very different way than, say, a sculpture.

    3. asserting

      Monolithically? Most of what I seem to come across doesn't make a positive affirmation of this resemblance so much as participates in a series of metaphors that assumes it.

    4. contain

      I'd locate part of the problem here--brain/mind as container. It's also reasonable to resist that metaphor for a computer as well.

    5. a copy of Beethoven’s 5th Symphon

      They won't find a copy of it in a computer either. This seems to frame things in a way that overlooks the difference between an object and the schematics by which it can be reproduced. For single-musician compositions, there certainly is a set of information decodable to create a performance of those compositions. This requires a more expansive definition of information, perhaps, and a larger system. Computers can't reproduce music if they're not connected to speakers, for example, and a musician can't reproduce a piano composition without a piano.

    1. "That practice is essentially helping to rewire your brain to be able to make a different emotion [besides anger] much more easily," she says.

      The phrasing here is curious here--that emotions are something we make.

    2. This article also reminds me of psychodrama.

    3. wired
    4. avoidance

      Prevention?

    5. At first, these stories seemed to me a bit too scary for little children. And my knee-jerk reaction was to dismiss them.

      Mine too--somewhat.

    6. and adopt you out to another family,"

      Fear? I'm a bit uncomfortable with this as well.

    7. Now at some level, all moms and dads know they shouldn't yell at kids.

      Really? Why? I think this sidesteps some of the problem--beliefs that live in the minds of parents. If parents knew better, they would do better, axiomatically. At least, the kind of knowledge I'd say we should be concerned with.

    8. "Kids learn emotional regulation from us."

      "Getting Unhooked" article.

    9. Her own parenting style is so gentle that she doesn't even believe in giving a child a timeout for misbehaving.

      How about offering? I want to hear more about what they do in instance of children acting violently.

    10. Traditionally, the Inuit saw yelling at a small child as demeaning.

      Functional significance.

    11. ranked

      This doesn't seem quite right to me--it certainly gets at something, but these are qualitative differences, not qualitative ones, and not amenable to ranking.

  2. Feb 2019
    1. Of course, none of us is rude enough to text during class

      Labeling the behavior rude removes it--falsely--from the relational, tentative, interpretive, and places it in the category of fact.

    2. even in the meekest of us
      1. Yes.
      2. I don't know that sadism is my go-to label for this--maybe authoritarianism, which devalues others' experience/perspective and harms through the imposition of control?
    3. the celebration of cruelty, of teaching those kids a lesson.

      Shedding this light on that idiom is--well--illuminating.

    4. Students told me so.

      You did something right to be someone they were willing to tell.

    5. I do care. It matters to me a lot.

      Yes, and. Healthy attachment is healthy detachment.

    6. “You cannot pass a course you don’t attend.”

      Offering this as an objective fact doesn't quite seem right to me--if you believed differently as the instructor, then this would be false (is this a performative, linguistically speaking?). Maybe, instead: "I am unwilling to have you pass this course without attending it." That would give some more transparency around the source of the impossibility--your own pedagogical stance.

    7. It’s a little more strict than that because in practice I’ve found that I have limits

      Yes, this brings up J.D. Gill's The Misery of the Good Child.

    8. I need you to be in class for your own sake and for the sake of the class as a community

      Do you? This is where the attitudes I bring from working in the mental healthcare intersect most directly with my thoughts about education. (And, in a strange and opposite way, with some #MotSS stuff.) Do or should you need students to be in class? Is this stepping into Karpman's Drama Triangle?

    9. My attendance policy is now as loose as I’m currently comfortable making it.

      Framing this in terms of comfort--your personal affective experience--is throwing me a bit. It's the thoughts underneath that comfort/risk of discomfort that I think are relevant here.

    10. current policies

      Link follow? Check.

    11. the fact is, we used the idea of How Things Are In College to strike fear into our students.

      Aiming for Introjects

    12. My assumption that a college syllabus should be authoritarian and even perhaps cruel was not, then, an assumption based on my own experience of higher education, but was rather an assumption born of ideas I had received, absorbed, and not questioned — ideas from influences more disparate than my own experience.

      I don't know about this--I think the article on implied vs. explicit authority, and the use of an obscuring "we" suggests that things are more authoritarian than we might think at first glance. It's just a generally competently benevolent authoritarianism.

    1. Note that this is not a function of how much work the course entails nor the standard to which that work is being held. (The amount of reading and writing is meant to be consistent with a 200-level course, as is the grading standard.)

      Are 200 level courses all consistent?

    1. Additionally, I am actually quite skeptical of some of the trends in “gaming” higher education, that we must keep moving ourselves towards student interests to be engaging or engender learning.

      I don't think that's quite what "gaming" (gamification?) is--though I do acknowledge that they're related.

    1. The syllabus is our first, best opportunity to strike the right chord for an entire term.

      Again, if we make it so. This is why I'm fond of an ecological metaphor here--what else could fill that niche, or part of it? I'm imagining a letter of hopes and intentions (à la my experience in wilderness therapy), or a teaching philosophy.

    2. In other words, if our syllabus is full of requirements, rules, expectations, if we outline how we will be grading, how students will be evaluated, the specifics for how students should participate, we cannot expect that our attempts to be more flexible, to be personal, to relate to students will succeed later in the term. The syllabus is our chance to put that best foot forward (and outline expectations for the course).

      This is falling a bit flat for me. I'm not sure why since there's not too much I disagree with here.

    3. and how to get an A

      The woist part.

    4. just might

      (Can't help but.)

    5. effective

      Effective always begs a "for?" I can imagine the first option being more effective for a whole range of fors.

    6. These are our first words in a digital classroom.

      Only in a Jean-Luc Picard "Make it so" sense. We could give something else first.

  3. Jan 2019
    1. Strange to have thoughts about this in three places—my own physical and digital copies, and now this collective digital copy. There’s a feeling for me that I’m a cell in Charles Eisenstein’s “metahuman organism”—that my thoughts are implicated in some larger whole whose edges I can’t myself see. Especially here in the Hypothes.is annotations.

    2. How can improvisation occur online to reinforce learning?

      One thing that comes to mind is the agreement to do synchronous non-directed work. I can imagine some sort of agreement to do something relevant to the course and to communicate about it openly on a platform like Slack or Discord. This would require trust on the part of the instructor that the work was relevant, but would also perhaps cultivate the ability of students to offer their rationale for that same relevance. And you can always follow up with some process writing/discussion on how it went, what kinds of different contributions came out of the effort, how they brought value to the class community as a whole, etc.

    3. The techniques of on-ground learning do not translate well.

      I’ve only ever experienced the way the LMS inflects on-the-ground classrooms—and I still think it fails for most of the same reasons it might for fully-online classes.

    4. canons

      Canon-as playlist: sure canons exist. I’m tempted to want to deprive them of their power by making a profusion of playlists. I think one of the things the Internet does so well at (and sometimes even recommendation algorithms, as much as I dislike them at times) is helping us discover titles or lists of titles that might not be associated with pre-existing canons.

    5. just as the pedagogue will enter a room and rearrange the tables and chairs to suit his purpose,

      A number of times while a graduate student I arrived first to class and arranged tables in a way that would allow everybody to see all other faces in the room. What does it mean for students (or a single student, in my case) to be the one arranging? A number of times other students shifted table arrangements back to roughly what they had been before I arrived (they didn’t know they were undoing my changes).

    6. the ways learners have already adopted the patterns and habits of the learning within it, indicates that we are not ready to teach online

      This is the place where I wonder about—to speak metaphorically—the epigenetics of the technology. Could a group consisting of the demographic that attends, say, Digital Pedagogy Lab, occupy the LMS in a way that doesn’t trigger the faults? How much of what the technology is is encoded in or created by the psychology/outlook of the humans using it? What would it mean to focus on shifting the way we use technologies? And how far might that kind of approach not go?

    7. It may be teaching — in the same way that reading from a handout is teaching

      I feel trapped into doing a version of this in my current teaching position. This is both the cause of my departure and now a result of my departure (coming in a few weeks). What has to be true outside of the classroom to support true pedagogy? How much time given? What class size limits? Or if not those kinds of limitations, what else?

    8. The LMS largely erased mindfully aware teaching, and made excuses for unconscionable practice

      And perhaps unconscious practice. Which is similar to teaching that is neither mindful nor aware.

    9. Not every teacher is a pedagogue. Pedagogy is a scholarship unto itself

      Apt for use as a mantra.

  4. Dec 2018
    1. The point is this: compared with planned organisational structures, emergent structures are inefficient at producing socially useful results.

      How would you ever evaluate this claim?

    2. The pressure to publish and demonstrate academic accomplishment comes from within.

      Again--introjection...

    3. Better to be an academic mediocrity, publishing occasionally in second-rate journals, than to be your colleagues’ archetype of academic failure.

      More ego-involvement. This isn't what drives the most powerful forms of achievement. This article is starting to strike me as uncharacteristically low quality for its publication.

    4. but they are like other workers in that they too are motivated by fear and greed.

      Sooooo you didn't mean what you said above?

    5. It’s the universal obsession of the scholarly profession.

      Disagree. And universalizing this claim seems downright harmful. Or potentially so.

    6. which is organised more by the market than by the state.

      What does this mean, practically speaking?

    7. Once launched into an academic career, faculty members find their scholarly efforts spurred on by more than a love of the work. We in academia are motivated by a lust for glory.

      This isn't the higher quality motivation I mentioned above, this is the introjected motivation of ego-involvement.

    8. They find that scholarship is a mode of work that is intrinsically satisfying. It’s more a vocation than a job.

      This seems lazy as far as claims go, and hard to falsify.

    9. One factor, of course, is that this population is highly self-selected.

      This is a cause, not an effect.

    10. Academic administrators – chairs, deans, presidents – just don’t have this kind of power over faculty. It’s why we refer to academic leadership as an exercise in herding cats. Deans can ask you to do something, but they really can’t make you do it.

      This feature of Higher Ed--what I'm guessing is a generally higher quality of motivation--is what might be drawing me there.

    11. Greed works by holding the prospect of pay increases and promotions in front of workers in order to encourage them to exhibit the work behaviours that will bring these rewards: Do it my way and you’ll get what’s yours.

      Is this greed? When isn't wanting more greedy?

    12. with its own way of motivatin

      I mean--not really. I'd say there's a pretty limited number of ways to motivate someone--e.g. external regulation, introjection, or value formation (autonomous forms). The specifics of these might be different, but that's something at the tactic level rather than the strategy level. And probably not particularly mystifying.

    1. Princeton’s 5.5 percent admissions rate isn’t an unfortunate side effect of the admissions system — it’s the point.

      Feature vs. Bug.

    2. Or we could go even further and take up the radical suggestion made by Princeton sociologist Dalton Conley: Turn the admissions process into a semi-lottery. Colleges could set minimum standards around factors like SAT scores and extracurriculars.

      Alfie Kohn would support this, I believe.

    3. Security through scale versus security by obscurity is a terrible trade–it leaves out data ownership concerns

      Security through obscurity captures a bunch of my thoughts about what kinds of safety are available in today's world.

    4. Janet concludes

      Is this article simply summary? If so, it's useful summary since I haven't encountered the ideas in their original.

    5. Exit Option Democracy is Not an Option, and Not Democracy

      Great section heading

    6. Data balkanization

      IC List

    7. First, we know from sociology that people need to have the right to behave differently in different settings (fundamental to Goffman and 60 years of sociology). For Google to create a single identity was also risky.

      I hadn't thought of this right as something that was in peril--which is also to say that I hadn't thought of it as a right at all.

    1. However, I can claim with confidence is

      Missing word.

    2. frivolous

      This seems like a break from the otherwise bland descriptions and technical language in this article--a much more value-laden term (at least appearingly so to me as a layperson). The whole article seems to fly in the realm of the abstract.

    1. Adopting a culture of patience, and rejecting the on-going culture of crisis.

      YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

    2. transparency, not accountability.

      I'd like to hear more about this thought.

    3. and are divorced from insurance and other so-called “benefits.”

      I'm curious about what you mean by this. I want to think you mean that teachers should have certain kinds of stability regardless of their job (e.g. health insurance, see bullet 2), enabling them to have a more empowered choice around whether to retain the job--as opposed to teaching so you keep your health insurance. This could just be my own thought, though.

    4. Here, however, is a list of where to start,

      No surprise that much of this overlaps with some of John Warner's recent writing.

    5. My skepticism lies in understanding that our solutions are too complex to be heard, too antithetical to ideologies that remain sacred to the media, the public, and political leadership.

      Yes. I think I'm here with you. The explanations I think I half-understand seem often too complicated for me, and I spend much more time than I think we can expect of any layperson.

  5. Nov 2018
    1. As I conceive of it, open is an ecosystem, made up of many related aspects.

      Yessssss.

    2. And a senior at a Baltimore, Maryland public high school launched a GoFundMe campaign and raised more than $80,000 to bring heat to her freezing school buildings.

      Horrible.

    3. In 2005, scholars and analysts in the United States and Canada were becoming increasingly concerned about the privatization of education, especially higher education.

      Good time to mention Samuel Abrams' Education and the Commercial Mindset?

    4. what is a public school?

      Metalinguistic negotiation--like from yesterday's Aeon article on Gender.

    5. and what they should look like.

      Don't forget the "for".

    1. Love that is as strong as credence 1 cannot move from 1 due to any reason, for it is unconditional and thus irresponsive to any conditions.

      Again, see above annotation. Maybe unconditional love could be responsive to changes in the credence of the belief in the adaptiveness of unconditional love.

    2. When there is no answer to the ‘why’ question other than love itself, when your love is not based on anything else, when it does not change according to anything, this is unconditional love.

      Disagree. See my previous annotation.

    3. as it was not built on the basis of information in the first place.

      This seems like an important sentence. Built on what, then? How about a meta-level belief that unconditional love (or positive regard) helps form well-adapted people? That belief might have a credence value of less than one, but so long as it remains close to 1, the credence of the unconditional love itself should remain at 1. Right?

    4. To act rationally is to act according to reason, and to act without reason is to act irrationally.

      Seems like an oversimplification.

    1. While other feminisms question the unequal value placed on femininity and masculinity, highlighting the resulting gender inequalities, the nonbinary movement questions why we insist on these categories at all.

      Maybe I'm quibbling, but this seems like a more radical position more in line with agender/gender apathy/apogender identities.

    2. Unlike womanhood or manhood, nonbinary identity is open to anyone and forced upon no one. It is radically anti-essentialist. It is opt-in only.

      The realm of the self-determined.

    1. I am suggesting that what stands between elephants and us is not necessarily limited intelligence, limited ability to report facts to one another, or limited ability to signal preferences. Rather, it might be a lack of ability to store records of reasons in the environment.

      Yesssss. This seems to capture an essential truth.

    2. Risk aversion is only one aspect of conservatism, but it’s a fundamental one.

      I think this is one of the ways in which I identify with conservatism--I'm risk averse more than many of my peers in many ways.

    3. and other delicious squashes.

      Will this be my favorite line in the piece?

    4. motivation

      Motivation coming up as a central theme of this article--and in the rest of my life again and again and again. (SDT)

    5. But before we get this decoding mission off the ground, we have no empirical basis to reject the hypothesis that elephants use language.

      Important stance--has relevance to current policy w/r/t elephants: Do more to protect them since it's better to assume personhood proactively than apply it reactively, after many more of them have been killed.

      Also, this brings up questions about just who would do the applying in this case.

    6. If elephant communication has syntax, and if this syntax relies on cross-channel modulation, we shouldn’t expect the rules of elephant grammar to map on to the syntactic categories of any human language. Elephants inhabit deeply different lifeworlds from humans, have different hierarchies of motivation, and make different perceptual discriminations.

      Perceptual discrimination seems to be a theme today (together with Chapter 14 from Pedagogies of Kindness and Respect).

    7. In the human symbol system, for example, two identically shaped arrows can mean ‘Turn!’ and ‘Don’t turn!’ if they’re modulated by a second code system in which green means ‘Go!’ and red means ‘Stop!’

      Great example.

    8. The existence of multiple means of communication is important, because syntax could be encoded in modulation across channels. That is, varying states in one channel (trunk vibrations) could introduce general but systematically related changes to the meanings of signals in another channel (say, trunk touches).

      Yeah. This is why this could be such a damn hard nut to crack.

    1. to step back at the end of each month and reflect a bit about the experience of writing regularly

      How very Peter Elbow of you.

    1. Reading Time: 5 minutes

      Does this come from a tool or is it an estimate made by hand based on word count?

    2. Individual scholars can resist this by actively seeking out obscure work by global South scholars.

      Any advice on the practicalities of this kind of effort? Obscurity by definition makes this hard.

  6. Oct 2018
    1. Reasoning in formal systems is my new name for what we call quantitative reasoning and use to mean Math, Statistics, or CS. I’ve chosen the different term because many common uses of the term quantitative reasoning focus primarily on statistical reasoning.

      I like your shift.

    2. Postscript: I would like to see more administrators develop statistical literacy

      Administrators needing a well-rounded liberal arts education?

    3. The folks who need more quantitative results could then hire a cadre of faculty to read those essays, identify representative examples [12], and assign categorical scores [14].

      This is a bit fraught. Maja Wilson has a nice little book called Rethinking Rubrics in Writing Assessment that has bearing on this suggestion. Though you're not suggesting rubrics themselves, I imagine these papers might defy easy categorization. Or I hope they would, if students are to have come to the complexity of thought I'd want them to have by the end of their time at Grinnell.

  7. Jul 2018
    1. Interestingly, the metaknowledge correction influenced the outcome only when the majority had less than about 70 per cent of the vote. A large majority was always right. This is a useful lesson for real-world disputes. A strong consensus is the closest proxy to truth that we have. The lone wolf who knows better than the misguided masses is much rarer than Hollywood movies would lead you to believe.

      Climate Science

    2. Likewise, you should beware of politicians who rail against rampant corruption; they doth protest too much. Truly innocent people are inclined to think the best of others.

      This doesn't seem entirely right.

  8. Apr 2018
    1. lending it is almost like giving your mind away.

      This seems like a really good reason to lend.

      To people you trust.

    2. I thought there might be some annotations here...

  9. Feb 2018
    1. By keeping software open ended and allowing learners to enter their own responses

      Is this the impoverished limit of your suggestion for solving this problem?

  10. Jan 2018
  11. Dec 2017
    1. The 20th-century Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin believed that the answer lay in dialogue. We need others in order to evaluate our own existence and construct a coherent self-image.

      Damnit. Something more to read. I'll bet there's some references to Bakhtin in SDT...

    2. Kitty Genovese,

      Bystander stuff.

    3. he experimental design of memory testing, for example, tends to proceed from the assumption that it’s possible to draw a sharp distinction between the self and the world. If memory simply lives inside the skull, then it’s perfectly acceptable to remove a person from her everyday environment and relationships, and to test her recall using flashcards or screens in the artificial confines of a lab.

      The Context Principle seems at play here.

    4. Yet the notion of a fluctuating and ambiguous self can be disconcerting.

      Sure does.

    1. It’s this kind of cognitive transformation model which underlies much of the deepest work on intelligence augmentation. Rather than outsourcing cognition, it’s about changing the operations and representations we use to think; it’s about changing the substrate of thought itself.

      Yesssssssssssss.

    2. Historically, lasting cognitive technologies have been invented only rarely. But modern computers are a meta-medium enabling the rapid invention of many new cognitive techologies.

      Um, yes.

    1. There are only three possible outcomes of this conflict: First, one or the other side prevails and imposes its will on the other; this is the outcome red America is now pursuing. Less dangerously, perhaps, the two halves of the county could go their separate ways; while red America frequently threatened to take this course under President Barack Obama, like it or not, red America depends upon blue America to pay its way; if there is a new secession, it will be those in blue this time, as we are already seeing. Red states likely will fight it. Finally, of course, a new synthesis might emerge that reunites the states. This is certainly possible. Unfortunately, at the moment, it appears highly unlikely.

      I agree with this analysis in large part.

    2. Trump and his supporters seem intent on exacerbating it, confident that with roughly half of the country behind them they have the power to do as they please and suppress the other half.

      I think it's unlikely that this power to suppress will manifest.

    3. This amounts to governments across America waging economic war against a fellow government, not in the traditional battle for jobs and economic competitiveness but in retaliation for policies of which they don't approve.

      I hadn't characterized it with these labels before, and I think they fit.

    4. some of red America talked about taking the country back through "Second Amendment remedies" or seceding. The main difference now is that blue America may actually do the latter. In fact, it's already in the process of doing so, with the climate controversy the biggest catalyst yet. Well over 100 of the nation's mayors, as well as the governors of nine states, have announced that they intend not only to comply with the goals of the Paris agreement – which any jurisdiction (or, for that matter, individual) can do – but also to band together with scores of universities and even private corporations to form a new coalition of "non-national actors," in the words of Michael Bloomberg, asking the United Nations to be treated on a par with, well, real countries on future climate progress.

      Yup.

    1. The difference between the actual government and the parallel one? The former has an army. But in the long term, can a government, and its army, hold territory where it has lost large swaths of the population? As people increasingly find the means to unite and construct self-governing mechanisms outside of "government," can they actually opt-out of governments that don't represent them? That's a proposition that Venezuelans will be testing in coming weeks.

      Yeah, this is a question I've had for a long time. The answer seems too convoluted to offer anything useful in broad strokes, and it does seem that a broad-spectrum opt-out could be possible/powerful.

  12. Oct 2017
    1. Only a living planet could display such mineralogical fecundity.

      Does this constitute a search filter for extraterrestrial life?

    2. I wonder whether any novel minerals are forming in landfills, where there are novel and chaotic combinations of materials.

    1. love for her enemies

      Enemies in what sense?

    2. As uninvited guests and visitors to this part of the world, we have claimed our new home on lands stolen from indigenous peoples.

      Not quite. This presupposes ownership on the part of those indigenous peoples, which seems inaccurate/participates in a particular worldview.

    3. Furthermore, most social justice 101 articles I see online are prescriptive checklists.

      Not process-oriented, outcome-oriented (hence checking something off)?

    4. This seems to be raising the issue in part addressed by that blog post I read on privilege from a few days ago.

    1. This is super important and interesting. It might tip me into going to Safari, too.

    1. It’s a one-off negotiation judged by a single metric – price.

      "Judged by" is operative here. Perhaps it shouldn't be.

  13. Sep 2017
    1. For his part, the literacy expert Frank Smith recommended bringing a second adult into the classroom, someone whose views diverge from the teacher’s — and who can challenge those views without engaging in a debate.

      Yup. This is coming up in class w/ my mentor teacher and I.

    1. The defiance and demand of the marginalized or disempowered is inherently defensive in nature whereas the defiance and demand of the powerful is inherently aggressive and menacing.

      Super well-put.

    1. Disruptive innovation as the explanation for how change happens has been subject to little serious criticism, partly because it’s headlong, while critical inquiry is unhurried; partly because disrupters ridicule doubters by charging them with fogyism, as if to criticize a theory of change were identical to decrying change; and partly because, in its modern usage, innovation is the idea of progress jammed into a criticism-proof jack-in-the-box.

      Something like Google seems to both confirm and question this theory, following much of this ideology, yet even that is enabled/hindered by the larger historical context of anti-trust laws and enforcement that hasn't as of yet resulted in a breakup of Alphabet, Inc.

    2. Beginning in the eighteenth century, as the intellectual historian Dorothy Ross once pointed out, theories of history became secular; then they started something new—historicism, the idea “that all events in historical time can be explained by prior events in historical time.”

      Which is just the idea of causation, right? Nothing complicated here?

  14. Aug 2017
    1. We have to learn what’s urgent, and what’s important, and that sometimes they do not coincide.

      This seems like an idea that's explained well in Scarcity.

    2. The only coherent parallel we have is the replacement of feudalism by capitalism – and thanks to the work of epidemiologists, geneticists and data analysts, we know a lot more about that transition than we did 50 years ago when it was “owned” by social science.

      Tell me more about this.

    3. Once you understand that information is physical, and that software is a machine, and that storage, bandwidth and processing power are collapsing in price at exponential rates, the value of Marx’s thinking becomes clear. We are surrounded by machines that cost nothing and could, if we wanted them to, last forever.

      Yessssssss.

    4. push commercial forces into areas of data production that were non-commercial before

      This is the point of Sacred Economics

    1. I could be persuaded otherwise, but I believe that a networked computer is indeed a greater distraction than a pencil.

      It's not a matter of what it is or isn't, it's a matter of potential. A computer in the classroom, at its best, has the power to bring a lot more learning into the experience than a pencil does.

    1. Entertaining these present-future fictions only distracts from the imperative deconstruction of our present ones. Liberals are the glitch, and once you realize it, everything falls into order.

      This smacks of naieveté to me. Righteous anger, too.

    2. The promise of a false world appeals to these liberals because they occupy societal enclaves without material stakes, a pleasant fiction whose stability depends not on meaningful forms of artistic expression or civic engagement, but on the operational smoothness of award shows or the flakiness of croissants in the 16th arrondissement.

      Hating on the French--such a long-celebrated American Pass-time.

    3. “Did the Oscars Just Prove That We Are Living in a Computer Simulation?”

      Yeah. This is pretty dumb.

    4. So far, the aliens that developed the simulation of this world have rigged the game in their favor.

      Narrow view.

    5. one that steals thought and energy away from addressing materialist concerns such as wealth distribution, affordable-housing shortages, and access to basic needs like clean water.

      Zero-sum thinking?

    6. It lends an air of seriousness to yet another pointless debate

      Would it be, though? The reason Bostrom cares about it is because he sees it as belonging under the umbrella of existential risks--what if we're turned off? That doesn't seem pointless.

    7. offering superiority and certainty to those who feel devalued in uncertain times

      Goodness, I hope not. It seems a really lazy hypothesis to hang your certainty hat on. While I find aspects of it compelling and hard to discount, I don't give it any measure of authoritativeness.

    8. but its underlying appeal belongs to the realm of basement conspiracy theories.

      Wait, why?

  15. Jul 2017
    1. If there is no attention for long periods of time the Clock uses the energy captured by changes in the temperature between day and night on the mountain top above to power its time-keeping apparatus.

      !!!

    2. This is the world’s slowest computer.

      Ambitious claim?

    3. Each time the chimes ring, it’s a melody the Clock has never played before.

      This is a really cool idea.

    4. Kevin Kelly

      Of course he's involved in this...

    1. Aeon Magazine

      Excellent organization.

    2. We are not separate from our environment, from our universe.

      Myth of the Separate Self. See Charles Eisenstein.

    3. is moreover literally species suicide

      See Daniel Quinn's Law of Life.

    4. Our disrespect is damaging to all things

      Yes, and.

    5. There is so little difference between people of different races, genders, religions, nations in terms of the spectrum of existence that we are, really, all one within a standard deviation.

      *a small fraction of a standard deviation.

    6. I accept that, though, not as a digital concept, but an analog concept.

      I'm not quite clear what is meant by this distinction.

      Edit: I think he's referring more to non-binary. This seems more like the quasi-arbitrary distinctions drawn in the field of evolution, with specific regard to speciation.

      Edit 2: This also seems related to quanta.

    1. It'snotthatstudentsdon't"get"Kafka'shumorbutthatwe'vetaughtthemtoseehumorassomethingyouget-thesamewaywe'vetaughtthemthataselfissomethingyoujusthave.

      Metaphors I Live By

    1. Air-conditioning can help but will ultimately only add to the carbon problem

      Thus a local solution contributes to a global worsening of the problem.

    1. I don’t have de-escalation training. I’m the one being held at gunpoint. I’m the one thinking my life could end if he panics. Yet, I’m the one who must remain calm. The legal system is asking untrained civilians to de-escalate panicky cops.

      This is the crux of this article for me.

    1. Looking as if she were alive.

      This has a near refrain near the end of the poem, and seems to strongly imply that she's dead.

    2. The rhyme scheme is downplayed by the enjambment. The reading recorded by Molina is a good representation of this, although it may reflect more modern reading practices. Also, I think it's quite good as far as recorded poetry is concerned.

    3. Notice Neptune, though, Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity, Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!

      The audio recording trails off here, which seems to contradict the exclamation mark.