education, Meta Intelligence, Page 3

Looking Backwards and Forwards at the Same Time

Janus and Bi-Directional Smarts

The Roman god Janus looks backwards and forwards at the same time and learning to be somewhat Janus-like is very conducive in the metaintelligence (i.e., larger overview) quest.

There’s a useful French phrase, “reculer pour mieux sauter” which means like a high jumper, you have to take steps backwards to jump higher. In other words, learn to look bi-directionally at the world.

First look back, then forward.

Here’s a concrete example:

W. Arthur Lewis, the “father” of development economics, originally from the Caribbean, taught at Princeton. He won the Nobel in 1979 and wrote various classics such as Growth and Fluctuations, 1870-1913 (1978).

Lewis writes:

In this book we shall not be attempting to give formal or complete explanations of why fluctuations occurred. Like the captain of a ship navigating in stormy seas, we shall need to identify the waves, without needing an exhaustive theory of what causes waves.
When analyzing these fluctuations economists have identified four different cycles, distinguished by length of periodicity, each of which is named after the economist who first wrote about it:
the Kitchin (about three years)
the Juglar (about nine years)
the Kuznets (about twenty years)
the Kondratiev (about fifty years)
(W. Arthur Lewis, Growth and Fluctuations, 1870-1913, 1978, page 19)

Lewis gives us a quick overview of how we got to the era covered by his book:

“The essence of the industrial and agricultural revolutions in the first three quarters of the nineteenth century was in new ways of doing old things—of making iron, textiles and clothes, of growing cereals, and of transporting goods and services. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century the revolution added a new twist—that of making new commodities: telephones, gramophones, typewriters, cameras, automobiles and so on, a seemingly endless process whose twentieth century additions include aeroplanes, radios, refrigerators, washing machines and pleasure boats.”

(Growth and Fluctuations, 1870-1913, page 29)

Professor Norman Stone in his masterpiece on WWI calls this late nineteenth century explosion of material change and inventions the greatest fast quantum leap in world history in transforming the world.

If one reads these lines with a “Janus mind” we wonder, looking forward from the Lewis book and its era:

How does his catchy metaphor of waves in the ocean relate to fluctuations and cycles? When Ben Bernanke (Fed Chair) describes recent decades as “The Great Moderation” does he mean to imply that Lewis-type waves disappeared or got much smaller?
Can computers and mobile phones really match cars and planes in profundity of impact? Or is it only the tremendous spread of mobile or smartphones in the Global South that can?

In fact, the recent economic history classic, Robert Gordon’s The Rise and Fall of American Growth argues against the assumption of endless technical change as a growth accelerator or endless frontier:

In the century after the Civil War, an economic revolution improved the American standard of living in ways previously unimaginable. Electric lighting, indoor plumbing, home appliances, motor vehicles, air travel, air conditioning, and television transformed households and workplaces. With medical advances, life expectancy between 1870 and 1970 grew from 45 to 72 years. Weaving together a vivid narrative, historical anecdotes, and economic analysis, The Rise and Fall of American Growth provides an in-depth account of this momentous era. But has that era of unprecedented growth come to an end?

Gordon challenges the view that economic growth can or will continue unabated, and he demonstrates that the life-altering scale of innovations between 1870 and 1970 can’t be repeated. He contends that the nation’s productivity growth, which has already slowed to a crawl, will be further held back by the vexing headwinds of rising inequality, stagnating education, an aging population, and the rising debt of college students and the federal government. Gordon warns that the younger generation may be the first in American history that fails to exceed their parents’ standard of living, and that rather than depend on the great advances of the past, we must find new solutions to overcome the challenges facing us.

A critical voice in the debates over economic stagnation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth is at once a tribute to a century of radical change and a harbinger of tougher times to come.

Why does one not read of the four cycles mentioned by Lewis (i.e., Kitchin) and the rest listed above in today’s business and financial press? Has there been some great discontinuity?

If you apply a “Janus mind” to the past (described by Lewis) and our sense of the future (described by techno-pessimists like Gordon) you get a more thoughtful sense of “the human prospect.”

Science and Its Limits

The outstanding physics theoretician Max Tegmark of MIT tells the story of how Ernest Rutherford’s 1933 prediction about atomic energy (i.e., that is was “moonshine”)—was refuted before 24 hours had passed when Szilard (the Hungarian genius) realized that a nuclear chain reaction could be set in motion getting around Rutherford’s pessimistic prediction of only a few hours before:

“In London, where Southampton Row passes Russell Square, across from the British Museum in Bloomsbury, Leo Szilard waited irritably one gray Depression morning for the stoplight to change. A trace of rain had fallen during the night; Tuesday, September 12, 1933, dawned cool, humid and dull. Drizzling rain would begin again in early afternoon. When Szilard told the story later he never mentioned his destination that morning. He may have had none; he often walked to think. In any case another destination intervened. The stoplight changed to green. Szilard stepped off the curb. As he crossed the street time cracked open before him and he saw a way to the future, death into the world and all our woes, the shape of things to come…”
(Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb)

This Tegmark/Szilard “refutation” of Rutherford in our times reminds one of MIT’s AI pioneer, Prof. Marvin Minsky’s limitless and perhaps too rosy predictions for AI and human intelligence in the sixties and seventies.

A student pursuing education has to live with the paradox and puzzle that unpredicted surprises and leaps do occur in the world of science and they are astonishing. It is true at the same time, that the realm of science (i.e., “how” questions) cannot address “why” questions. The question “how was I born?” cannot replace “why was I born?”

Both of these questions have possible answers at various levels and are subject to hierarchies.

Steven Jay Gould, the late Harvard biologist, had a felicitous phrase, “separate magisteria” (i.e., separate realms or domains) to describe this gap between the pursuit of personal meaning (human quest) and the pursuit of (tentative) accuracy (scientific quest).

Education and the Problem of a Runaway World

There’s an educationally fertile footnote in the masterful history classic by Halévy, “Victorian Years” (Élie Halévy, History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century, Volume 4, Ernest Benn Ltd., London, 1970):

“…[people are] forgetting what all history is constantly proclaiming, that nothing human is fixed; that crowns, sceptres, dominions, institutions, establishments, and monopolies are ever changing, ever departing from their old seats, springing up anew in other places and leaving deserts where they formerly flourished. Tyre, Sidon, Carthage, Greece, Rome! all the departed nations of the world warn us of this, and still we remain unconscious that our time comes, it is coming, nay, is almost at the threshold.”
(“Victorian Years,” footnote for page 40)

The classic on change, Thomas Carlyle’s Past and Present (1843) was influenced by this “overview” of ephemerality in the long run.

A student should ponder these words and see “past and present” and oneself more clearly and more sagaciously.

Education must put this on the “intellectual plate” in front of each freshman everywhere.

The highlighted phrase above, “leaving deserts where they formerly flourished” is an eerie premonition of sorts, of global climate change in our time, and the insouciant attitude of the White House and the absolutely destructive “head in the sand” reactions by the “haves,” especially Washington.

The phrase “that nothing human is fixed” above reminds us of the Nietzsche/Foucault intuition on things.

Reviving Higher Education in India

from Brookings India, now the Centre for Social and Economic Progress, written by Shamika Ravi, Neelanjana Gupta & Puneeth Nagaraj

India has reached a gross enrollment ratio (GER) of 26.3% in higher education and is on the path to achieve its target of 30% by 2020. The higher education sector has rapidly expanded in the country since 2001, fueled by rising demand.

Despite the increased access to higher education, challenges remain. Low employability of graduates, poor-quality of teaching, faculty shortages, an over-regulated regime, lack of autonomy and investment in research and innovation plague the sector. The limited assessment and accreditation capacity of government bodies such as NAAC and NBA has also been a significant barrier in linking the performance of an institution with autonomy and funding decisions.

If India is serious about investing in human capital and curbing youth unemployment, it must tackle the problems plaguing the higher education sector. A new Brookings India report on Reviving Higher Education in India [archived PDF] by Shamika Ravi, Neelanjana Gupta, and Puneeth Nagaraj takes a wider view of the urgent reforms needed. The report takes a closer look at key aspects, including: enrollment, employment and quality; governance and accountability; funding with a focus on efficiency, transparency and affordability; research and innovation; and the regulatory system. As the government evaluates proposals to reform the University Grants Commission and implement the recently proposed Draft New Education Policy 2019, the report also offers concrete recommendations and suggestions that have the potential to shape this critical sector in the next few years.

Read the full report [archived PDF].

Education and Wittgenstein “Language Games”

It is instructive for a student to get a grip on the whole question of “language games” à la Wittgenstein, who says that these “games” (i.e., ambiguities) are central to thinking in general and thinking about philosophy in particular.

Let’s make up our own example and step back from the meaning of the preposition “in.”

The comb is in my back pocket has nothing to do with the “in” of “he’s in a good mood” or “he’s in a hurry” or “he’s in a jam or pickle” or “he’s in trouble.” Furthermore, in modern deterministic neuroscience language, a good mood is a footnote to brain and blood chemicals so that means that a good mood is in you via chemicals and not you in it.

Does the word “jam” here mean difficulty or somehow the condiment called jam? You don’t know and can never without more information (i.e., meaningful context).

Imagine we take a time machine and are standing in front of the home of Charles Dickens in London in his time say in the 1840s. They say he’s working on a new novel called Oliver Twist.

Someone says: a novel by Dickens is a kind of “fictional universe.” Shall we say that because Dickens is in his home (at home) in London (though in London is itself confusing since London as a city is not like a pocket to a comb or wallet) his fictional universe is “in” the universe which might be a multiverse according to current cosmological speculations? That’s not what we mean. The fictional universe of Dickens is a shared cultural abstraction involving his stories, characters, people absorbing his tales, his mind and our mind, books and discussions. A fictional universe is as “weird” as the other universe. The preposition “in” does not begin to capture what’s going on which is socio-cultural and not “physicalistic.”

We begin to intuit that everyday language which we use and handle as the most obvious thing in the world in constant use, is completely confusing once you look at it more clearly.

Einstein’s friend at Princeton, Kurt Gödel, looked into language as a logical phenomenon and concluded that it’s entirely puzzling that two people could actually speak and understand one another given the ambiguities and open-endedness of language.

A language-game (German: Sprachspiel) is a philosophical concept developed by Ludwig Wittgenstein, referring to simple examples of language use and the actions into which the language is woven. Wittgenstein argued that a word or even a sentence has meaning only as a result of the “rule” of the “game” being played. Depending on the context, for example, the utterance “Water!” could be an order, the answer to a question, or some other form of communication.

In his work, Philosophical Investigations (1953), Ludwig Wittgenstein regularly referred to the concept of language-games. Wittgenstein rejected the idea that language is somehow separate and corresponding to reality, and he argued that concepts do not need clarity for meaning. Wittgenstein used the term “language-game” to designate forms of language simpler than the entirety of a language itself, “consisting of language and the actions into which it is woven” and connected by family resemblance (German: Familienähnlichkeit).

The concept was intended “to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or a form of life,” which gives language its meaning.

Wittgenstein develops this discussion of games into the key notion of a “language-game.”

G ö del saw that language has deep built-in ambiguities which were as puzzling as math and logic ones:

Gödel’s (died in 1978) incompleteness theorems are two theorems of mathematical logic that demonstrate the inherent limitations of every formal axiomatic system capable of modeling basic arithmetic. These results, published by Kurt Gödel in 1931, are important both in mathematical logic and in the philosophy of mathematics.

Take any simple sentence: say, “men now count.”

Without a human context of meaning, how would you ever decide if this means count in the sense of numeracy (one apple, two apples, etc.) or something entirely from another domain (i.e. males got the vote in a certain country and now “count” in that sense).

When you say, “count me in” or count me out,” how does that make any sense without idiomatic language exposure?

If you look at all the meanings of “count” in the dictionary and how many set phrases or idioms involve the word “count,” you will immediately get the sense that without a human “life-world” (to use a Husserl phrase), you could never be sure of any message or sentence at all involving such a fecund word.

One task of real education is to put these difficulties on the student’s plate and not avoid them.

Linguistics as such is not what’s at issue but rather a “meta-intelligent” sense of language, written or spoken as highly mysterious with or without the research into vocal cords, language genes (FOXP2, say) or auditory science and the study of palates or glottal stops and fricatives, grammars and syntax.

Seeing this promotes deep education (i.e., where understanding touches holism in an enchanting way).

Essay 105: The Captive Mind Book and Intellectual Danger

The Captive Mind, by Polish poet Czesław Miłosz, is a classic work in the domain of “mental freedom” and resistance to propaganda and every kind of brainwashing. Every nation state is to some extent a “lie factory” and a “deception machine.” A person has to “fend off” this manipulative or ideological power grab.

This very handbook of mini-essays, “Meta Intelligence,” is itself partly a defense of the non-captive mind, in the tradition of the Miłosz book. On the other hand, there’s a danger here “on the other side” since there’s a “free floating intellectual” temptation to take a sneering attitude towards all belief systems and to look down on the average person. There are dangers on all sides of this “non-captivity” of the mind. By embracing globalized and cosmopolitan education and by looking for knowledge connections in lectures, fields, universities, we look for a mental stance which is non-captive but not dismissive of believers. The French have a saying for this sense of intellectual superiority, “de haut en bas,” talking from “high to low,” from top to bottom.

Our purpose is to promote educational understanding, re-enchantment and “homemade” exercises in holism and not to promote superiority attitudes. Herman Melville’s Ishmael, the only survivor in Moby-Dick is tolerant and cosmopolitan and not exclusionary or monomaniacal like Ahab or Starbuck. Ishmael’s receptivity to things is a good model for such improved education, whether by life, whaling ships, academe.

The Captive Mind (Polish: Zniewolony umysł) is a 1953 work of nonfiction by Polish writer, poet, academic and Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz.

It was first published in English translation by Secker and Warburg in 1953. The work was written soon after the author’s defection from Stalinist Poland in 1951. While writing The Captive Mind, Miłosz drew upon his experiences as an illegal author during the Nazi Occupation and of being a member of the ruling class of the postwar People’s Republic of Poland. The book attempts to explain the allure of Stalinism to intellectuals, the thought processes of those who believe in it, and the existence of both dissent and collaboration within the post-war Soviet Bloc. Miłosz describes the book as having been written “under great inner conflict.”

Czesław Miłosz was a Polish-American poet, prose writer, translator, and diplomat. Regarded as one of the great poets of the twentieth century, he won the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Born: June 30, 1911, Šeteniai, Lithuania
Died: August 14, 2004, Kraków, Poland
Awards: Nobel Prize in Literature

Essay 95: Education and “Then and Now” Thinking

Ben Shalom Bernanke was Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System from February 1, 2006, to January 31, 2014.

In many interviews in financial and economic periodicals, he blurts out the fact that his guide in the years surrounding the Great Recession of 2008, in his decisions by the advice of Walter Bagehot of the Economist of London whose main book is called Lombard Street [Project Gutenberg ebook] from 1873:

Lombard Street is known for its analysis of the Bank of England’s response to the Overend-Gurney crisis. Bagehot’s advice (sometimes referred to as “Bagehot’s dictum”) for the lender of last resort during a credit crunch may be summarized by as follows:

Lend freely.
At a high rate of interest.
On good banking securities.

(Nonetheless, other economists emphasize that many of these ideas were spelled out earlier by Henry Thornton’s book The Paper Credit of Great Britain [archived PDF].)

Bagehot’s dictum has been summarized by as follows: “To avert panic, central banks should lend early and freely (i.e., without limit), to solvent firms, against good collateral, and at ‘high rates’.”

In Bagehot’s own words (Lombard Street [Project Gutenberg ebook], Chapter 7, paragraphs 57–58), lending by the central bank in order to stop a banking panic should follow two rules:

First. That these loans should only be made at a very high rate of interest. This will operate as a heavy fine on unreasonable timidity, and will prevent the greatest number of applications by persons who do not require it. The rate should be raised early in the panic, so that the fine may be paid early; that no one may borrow out of idle precaution without paying well for it; that the Banking reserve may be protected as far as possible.
Secondly. That at this rate these advances should be made on all good banking securities, and as largely as the public ask for them. The reason is plain. The object is to stay alarm, and nothing therefore should be done to cause alarm. But the way to cause alarm is to refuse some one who has good security to offer… No advances indeed need be made by which the Bank will ultimately lose. The amount of bad business in commercial countries is an infinitesimally small fraction of the whole business… The great majority, the majority to be protected, are the ‘sound’ people, the people who have good security to offer. If it is known that the Bank of England is freely advancing on what in ordinary times is reckoned a good security—on what is then commonly pledged and easily convertible—the alarm of the solvent merchants and bankers will be stayed. But if securities, really good and usually convertible, are refused by the Bank, the alarm will not abate, the other loans made will fail in obtaining their end, and the panic will become worse and worse.

We have to ask ourselves: how is it possible that advice from 1873 (i.e., Bagehot’s Lombard Street [Project Gutenberg ebook] crisis-management for that time) can be applicable in 2008?

Does this confirm the off-handed comment in This Time is Different by Ken Rogoff of Harvard that there must be true-but-opaque deep rhythms in history including financial history? Otherwise advice would be useless due to the passage of time and useful patterns would not be discernible.

In fact, Lawrence Summers at Treasury “deluged” Mexico and Latin America with loans to avert an earlier banking crisis following Bagehot’s advice. The logic is that investors must sense that Mexico, etc. will be bailed out at all costs. The idea is to avert a “downward spiral of confidence” by means of visible massive interventions.

Education should always ponder these “then and now” puzzles as part of a beneficial “argument without end.”

Essay 82: Scientism and Its Discontents: Movie About Hawking

Scientism is the view that science is truth and the rest is false, idiotic, or childish.

There’s a wonderful scene in the 2014 movie, The Theory of Everything (Eddie Redmayne plays Hawking) where the young Hawking is courting his wife to be at an evening party and he represents the quest for the theory of everything, hence the name of the movie.

His girlfriend expresses doubts about this and speaks a few words from the William Butler Yeats (died in 1939) poem “The Song of the Happy Shepherd” [full text]:

“Seek, then,
No learning from the starry men,
Who follow with the optic glass
The whirling ways of stars that pass —”

The poet (and Hawking’s fiancee in the film) are suspicious of the science-and-nothing-else cosmologists and astronomers “who follow with the optic glass the whirling ways of stars that pass.”

William Butler Yeats (13 June, 1865–28 January, 1939) was an Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. A pillar of the Irish literary establishment, he helped to found the Abbey Theatre, and in his later years served two terms as a Senator of the Irish Free State.

Yeats says in his works, “Education is not the filling of a pail, but rather the lighting of a fire.”

Our desire to “re-enchant” education might cause us to modify this Yeats aphorism slightly, “Education is not merely the filling of a pail, but rather the lighting of a fire.”

Essay 18: What Is Education?

Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) was a Danish thinker at the highest level, a kind of Danish Pascal.

In his Fear and Trembling essay, he asks:

“What is education? I should suppose that education was the curriculum one had to run through in order to catch up with oneself, and he who will not pass through this curriculum is helped very little by the fact that he was born in the most enlightened age.”

(Kierkegaard, “Fear and Trembling”, Problemata, Doubleday Anchor Books, 1954, page 57)

Education at its deepest level is understood here as a process of “catching up with oneself.”

Every student who ever lived and who will ever live is both a student (which is a social role) and a person (an existential task).

Education, if profound, would “put on the table” both modes of going through life and then assign the “homework” of “circumnavigating” a life and an education and hold them together in one’s mind. Catching up with oneself is the effort to fight off and climb out of “lostness.”

Lostness is depicted in such classic American films from 1999 as Magnolia and American Beauty.

One can be lost in a city, in life, or in the cosmos. (Walker Percy’s novel, Lost in the Cosmos, is an exploration of this.)

In the “brutal sociology” of American life and society, there are “winners and losers.” (Remember the scene in the American classic movie, The Hustler, where Paul Newman (“Fast Eddie”) calls George C. Scott (“Bert”) a “loser.”

Catching up with oneself involves the fending off of this brutal American cultural bullying and help the person/student hold on to one’s self and know how to use an education to help in this. Thus, catching up this way achieves and protects one’s self-possession.

The reader may remember the movie classic A Man for all Seasons, in which there’s a scene very relevant to this where “Thomas More” played by Paul Scofield, reminds “Richard Rich,” (the relentless amoral opportunist) that self-possession is the highest good and if one loses that, one loses everything of value. He, “Thomas More,” describes it as a bit of water in your hand that falls on the ground and can’t ever be recovered.

Catching up with yourself is education’s help in keeping a grip on this “water in your hand.”