Changesurfer Radio interviews Sheril Kirschenbaum

A good break down on the problems of the current “value added” model on education. Even if you believe education should be a market, there is no reason to believe that an education market functions like a retail product market where this value added ideology was power.

ECONOMICS IS NOT NATURAL SCIENCE

In doing so, we become capable of imagining a marketplace based in something other than scarcity — a requirement if we’re ever going to find a way to employ an abundant energy supply. It’s not that we don’t have the technological means to source renewable energy; it’s that we don’t have a market concept capable of contending with abundance. As Buckminster Fuller would remind us: these are not problems of nature, they are problems of design.

If science can take on God, it should not fear the market. Both are, after all, creations of man.

We must stop perpetuating the fiction that existence itself is dictated by the immutable laws of economics. These so-called laws are, in actuality, the economic mechanisms of 13th Century monarchs. Some of us analyzing digital culture and its impact on business must reveal economics as the artificial construction it really is. Although it may be subjected to the scientific method and mathematical scrutiny, it is not a natural science; it is game theory, with a set of underlying assumptions that have little to do with anything resembling genetics, neurology, evolution, or natural systems.

The scientific tradition exposed the unpopular astronomical fact that the earth was not at the center of the universe. This stance challenged the social order, and its proponents were met with less than a welcoming reception. Today, science has a similar opportunity: to expose the fallacies underlying our economic model instead of producing short-term strategies for mitigating the effects of inventions and discoveries that threaten this inherited market hallucination.

The economic model has broken, for good. It’s time to stop pretending it describes our world.

I think it is important the author was claiming economics was not a “natural” science, but in truth, I think economics is useful in that it is sort of a hyper-focused form of psychology and sociology. In fact, most of the really interesting economic research I have seen done lately seems to have behavioral psychologists hanging around it. Not a “natural” science, but it is a descriptive scientific-like discipline (history isn’t a science either, although paleontology, archeology, and the myriad other elements that feed into it are. So you can have scientifically informed history, but there’s entirely too much that are merely narratives).

Teacher Beat talks about the recent report Data not really being as useful as people think for teachers.

In a brief released this morning by the Alliance for Excellent Education, the group says teachers are suffering from what some educators call the DRIP syndrome–data rich but information poor.

The brief says “while student data is becoming more abundant, not enough teachers have access to training, support, and the structures needed to use data effectively.”

The Alliance’s conference this morning on the topic was filled with something unusual at a Washington education conference: actual teachers and administrators!

Those from the ranks of the classroom were not only in the audience, but on the panel to help their fellow educators figure out how, where and when to use all these reams of information to do the much-vaunted “data-driven decision making” most superintendents will tell you is already going on in their schools.

One large barrier to schools using data effectively is the lack of training teachers and administrators have in creating and using good assessments, said Leslie W. Grant, a visiting assistant professor at The College of William & Mary in Virginia.

Grant recalled her own teacher preparation program, in which she said her professor told the class they would have to design an assessment for their lesson plan, but never taught them how.

There’s a lot of this in the education and sometimes it seems to run much deeper than that: sometimes assessments are not judged on actual validity to subject matter, just generalisability and repeatability.
Sometimes it is questionable whether a domain is really as telling. Sometimes states are compared on test scores in which entirely different segments of their population were encouraged or forced to take a test (SAT score comparisons are notorious for this).

Tons of data, but perhaps not a lot of real information or knowledge comes from it. When you hear a factoid about the education system, be skeptical of even valid numbers until you know the context for those numbers and what comparison actually is doing is known. Also don’t assume every bit of data collected is meaningful information towards a task.

So I often reference TED conference speaker videos here. I was recently listening and watching several old conferences and stumbled across this particular TED talk:

I thought the Aquatic Ape was pretty completely debunked, but hearing that Dan Dennet supported the theory, I thought maybe I was going to have to look into it more seriously. So within a few days, I heard Reality Check podcast COVER this particular talk. Then it directed me to this site.

Now, I didn’t think TED would allow the science journalist to do a strawman argument and quote others out of context, but apparently, they did. So, even when the authority or venue is generally trust-worthy, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t look deeper.

Steve Gibson publishes an interesting non-theistic sermon.

Here’s the a great episode of Reasonable Doubts about lying for Jesus in public policy.

You the the book on the Family has been out for over year, but its FINALLY getting attention. NPR did a story.

Ben Goldacre has a great post on the relationship between systemic review and myth making.

We’ll start with something funny: PZ Myers riding a dinosaur at the Creation Museum.

Neurophilosophy has some interesting thing to say on corvids.

Mike Trender says “What’s the Harm?” which is a run-down of Tim Farlay’s What’s the Harm Project.

Are Patients in Part to Blame When Doctors Miss the Diagnosis? Apparently, a combination of both.

Teacher Beat on Peer-Assistance and -Review: The Toledo Numbers controversary.

Everybody’s skeptical of something, and everyone I have ever met has accepted something on less than rational grounds. There are all sorts mental constructions that can cause on to forget preconceived notions generally blind use to the facts. Most skeptics focus on the obvious woo-woo topics or those cryptid or supernatural things that are, at best, lacking evidence and, at worse, denying evidence.

Yet there is other types of nonsense: mythologies, ideologies, teleologies, and other patterns of the mind that can be wrapped in the justifications and psuedo-scientific logic. Mike Treder at IEET discusses how they can overlap:

So, we have birtherism, creationism, singularitarianism, and climate science denialism. In each case, arguments are marshaled that seem to resemble scientific or legal reasoning but that end up as speculative assertions intended to support fanciful, ideological, or faith-based positions. No doubt some who subscribe to each of those schools of thought would object to being lumped in with the others; they’d loudly proclaim that while the other beliefs may be misguided, theirs is not. I’ve placed them together deliberately, though, because I think they reveal a pattern: a dangerous, insidious compartmentalization of rationality.

Standing up in the court of public opinion armed with fancy-looking charts and with quotes from “authorities,” the poseur assumes the role of a sophisticated deliberator, but the outside image is only a shell. Under the surface, deeper non-rational impulses drive them.

What is interesting is that Trender has to put a category of fellow transhumanists in to list. I would add objectivists, and some of the technocrats who I like. Anything that puts intuition on the same grounds as deductive knowledge WITHOUT drawing a clear line between the two can lead to having your ideology trump your reality.

I think Pinker is dramatically underplaying the scale of 20th violence, but he makes a great case that the rate of violence and the kind of violence has declined greatly even in recent history. However, I find these sorts of ideas to be dangerously teleological–they assume that because things ARE happening that they will CONTINUE to happen that way. I don’t think that such assumptions always bare out. Still, its good because most people talk about scale of violence and miss that the rate of violence has decreased greatly. Pinker has basically inverted the focus.

David Fraser commenting on Pinker’s argument on TED forums says,

In addition much of the poverty and “non-violent” death in the lake regions of East Africa among refugees is a by-product of the violence of armed militias as well as state forces. CAR is about to collapse into a failed state due to it. The death toll is not limited to those directly shot or blown up. One has to only walk among the displaced and the refugees to see that only some poverty is simply “aggression.” Southern Sudan, Darfur and other theaters are littered with civilian death as a by-product. One thinks also of the poverty of Zimbabwe and the tyranny that is inflicting death on its own population.

The Heidelberg Institute for International Conflict Research released a report on December 15, 2008. This year there are 9 wars and nearly 130 violent conflicts ranging from low intensity to high intensity. The single most powerful cause of these conflicts is ideological change.

It also seems like violence changes it form into less obvious types of conflict over time.

My first post for the Southern Skeptical Society’s blog is up. It talks about the what I feel is the ACLU mistaken tactic on “inclusive” movements as ways to drive secularization instead of restrictions. I also discuss Ed Buckner’s invocation at Cobb county.