bearing blog

bear – ing n 1 the manner in which one comports oneself; 2 the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~]; 4 pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation; 5 the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].

Post-secondary education questions: Fundamental principles drawn from Catholicism. The nature of vocation and the content of education.
_{(This post is part of the series on postsecondary education.)}

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There are some really great comments on the original post about post-secondary education. If you haven't been there yet, check it out and add your two cents.

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Yesterday and this morning I dug into the Catechism and two other Catholic documents: Gaudium et Spes (a Vatican II document "On the Church in the Modern World") and Familiaris Consortio (an exhortation by Pope John Paul II "On the Role of the Family in the Modern World"). The Catechism is, of course, a sort of handbook of Catholic doctrine, while the other two are basically practical application of Catholic faith to particularly modern problems.

I was seeking some guidelines to these questions:
1. What is the nature of the vocation that education must prepare us for?
2. What is the necessary content of education?
3. What are the responsibilities of parents toward their offspring?
4. What are the responsibilities of offspring toward their parents?
5. How do things change when children are emancipated?
I took copious notes all morning, with the intent of assembling my findings into neat bulleted lists. The point was not, by the way, to find the answers to the question of how parents should support postsecondary education — just to see if there existed some lines that should not be crossed, or duties that should not be neglected. (Gaudium et Spes says: "The Church guards the heritage of God's word and draws from it moral and religious principles without always having at hand the solution to particular problems" [GS33].)

Without further commentary, let's jump into this. If it gets too late, I'll hit "publish" and finish another time. Numbered citations labeled "CCC" come from the paragraph of the same number in the Catechism of the Catholic Church; those labeled GS, from Gaudium et Spes; those labeled FC, from Familiaris Consortio. I paraphrased quite freely.

What is the vocation that education must prepare us for?

The point of education is to enable the human being to live out his or her vocation, so it's sensible first to ask what this vocation is.

We can think of vocations on several levels. Our ultimate vocation is to heaven. "God put us in the world to know, to love, and to serve him, and so to come to paradise." [CCC1721]

But there's also the dyad of state-of-life vocations, marriage or celibacy: "Either vocation is, its in own proper form, an actuation of the most profound truth of man, of his being created in the image of God" [FC11]. Each requires a certain specific preparation.

And the vocations of men and women are different, implying some difference in their respective preparatory educations. The vocations are equal in rights and dignity. The documents stress that equality does not mean that women must renounce femininity or imitate the male role, and that femininity can and should be expressed in all activities, not just domestic ones [FC23].

Christians living in the world have a political vocation too [GS75]:
- to set an example of responsibility and service of the common good;
- to show the compatibility of authority with freedom, of personal initiative with social solidarity, and of unity's advantages with diversity's fruits;
- to recognize the legitimacy of different opinions about solutions;
- and to respect citizens who honestly defend their points of view.
Vocations of Christian work in the modern world, it seems, include [GS15]:
- by intellect to surpass the material universe, sharing in the light of the divine mind;
- to employ human talents, making progress in sciences, technology, and the arts;
- to observe data, but also to attain to reality itself as knowable, even if obscured;
- to acquire wisdom that "gently attracts…to a quest and love for what is true and good";
- to humanize the discoveries made by man;
- to assimilate the wisdom of the nations;
- to contemplate and appreciate the divine plan;
- to join with other men "in fidelity to conscience" "in the search for truth" and in the solution to human problems
- to care for truth and goodness, and to avoid habitual sin that obscures the light of conscience
More practically, the vocation of all men and women is "to provid[e] the substance of life for themselves and for their families," thereby "performing their activities in a way which appropriately benefits society…unfolding the Creator's work, consulting the advantages of [others], and are contributing by their personal industry to the realization in history of the divine plan." [GS 34]

(If I recall correctly, you could go to Laborem Exercens if you want to read more on human work and perhaps relate this to vocational preparation.)

To sum up, then, education must prepare the human being to support a family or community; to enter the responsibilities either of marriage or of celibacy; to choose good ways of serving the human community; to participate properly in civic life; to express authentic and unique masculinity or femininity; and to attain heaven. No small order, that.

What is the necessary content of education?

I think I'm particularly interested in teasing apart education within the family and self-education. That is, the education that parents owe their children, and the education that people have a duty to seek for themselves. Both are mentioned in the documents, but it isn't always clear where one starts and the other ends — in some cases the process must be begun by the parents and completed by the grown young person (or even continuing throughout life). I'll try to distill out the themes as I see them.

The "most basic element" of parental education is parental love. The task of education fulfills parental love, completing and perfecting the service of that love to life. "All concrete educational activity," in fact, gets its inspiration and guidance from parental love, and be enriched by love's "kindness, constancy, goodness, service, disinterestedness, and self-sacrifice." [FC36]

Education must put "subjects" in proper perspective: "We must learn that true happiness is not found in riches or well-being, in fame or power, in any science, technology, or art, but in God alone, the source of every good" [CCC1723] Education must "oppose the mentality which considers the human being not as a person but as a thing, as an object of trade, at the service of selfish interest and mere pleasure" [FC24]. In the family atmosphere of love, "children learn the correct order of things" [GS61]. "Parents should teach their children to subordinate the material and instinctual dimensions to interior and spiritual ones" [CCC2223]. Training must include "the correct attitude of freedom with regard to material goods… that man is more precious for what he is than for what he has" [FC37]

Education must integrate the person into solidarity and communal responsibilities. The family is a community, an initiation into life in society, "a complex of interpersonal relationships… through which each human person is introduced into the human family and into… the Church." [CCC2207, 2224; FC15] "The family should live in such a way that its members learn to care and take responsibility for the young, the old, the sick, the handicapped, and the poor" [CCC2208]. Education must develop "a sense of true justice, which … leads to respect for the personal dignity" of persons, and "a sense of true love, understood as sincere solicitude and disinterested service" [FC37].

Education must pass along human culture, but teach how to discriminate between good and bad influences. In the family atmosphere of love, the developing adolescents learn "proper forms of human culture" [GS61]. "Parents should teach children to avoid the compromising and degrading influences which threaten human societies" [CCC2224].

Education in the home must teach virtue. This "requires an apprenticeship in self-denial, sound judgment, and self-mastery–the preconditions of all true freedom" [CCC2223]

Parents must teach their children to pray and worship and to make use of the sacraments. "Family catechesis precedes, accompanies, and enriches other forms of instruction in the faith" [CCC2226]. Parents must pray with their children, read the word of God to them, and introduce them through Christian initiation into the Body of Christ [FC39]. They have the responsibility of introducing children to personal dialogue with God, and should teach children to know God, to worship, and to love their neighbor [FC60]. Parents announce the Gospel to their children [FC2].

Education is the development of the right use of reason and the right use of freedom [CCC2228]; conscience, a judgment of reason [CCC1778], enables one to assume responsibility for the acts performed [CCC1781]. Thus parents must begin the formation of the child's conscience: The education of the conscience "from the earliest years" "awakens the child to the knowledge and practice of the interior law" [CCC1784]. But the development of conscience is a lifelong process. The person must be "sufficiently present to himself in order to hear and follow the voice of his conscience," so the person has to have cultivated a skill of interiority: reflection, self-examination, introspection [CCC1779] A formed conscience "enjoins" the person "to do good and to avoid evil"; "judges particular choices, approving…good and denouncing…evil"; "bears witness to the authority of truth in reference to" God; "welcomes the commandments" [CCC1777].

Education prepares for vocation. "Children should be so educated that as adults they can follow their vocation… with a mature sense of responsibility and can choose their state of life; if they marry, they can thereby establish their family in favorable moral, social, and economic conditions" [GS52] "The family must educate the children for life in such a way that each one may fully perform his or her role according to the vocation received from God" [FC53]. Education helps to discern vocation [FC2]. Education must help the person understand "the meaning of work in the Christian life… the fundamental bond betweeen work and the family." Work is originally in the home and originally to the purpose of rearing children, and that has not changed. Education must "make it clear that all people, in every area, are working with equal rights and responsibilities," and eliminate at the root "discrimination between the different types of work and professions" [FC23]. "Clear recognition must be given to the value of [young women's] maternal and family role, by comparison with all other public roles and all other professions" and to the principle that "these roles and professions should be harmoniously combined" [FC23].

Education should include sexuality education in the context of self-giving: a clear and delicate education, aimed "firmly at a training… that is truly and fully personal; for sexuality is an enrichment of the whole person…and it manifests its inmost meaning in leading the person to the gift of self in love" [FC37]. Every effort must be made to render knowledge about licit means of family planning accessible …to all young adults before marriage, through clear, timely, and serious instruction and education given by married couples, doctors, and experts. Knowledge must then lead to education in self-control; hence the absolute necessity for permanent education in the virtue of chastity. Chastity signifies spiritual energy capable of defending love from the perils of selfishness and aggressiveness, and able to advance it towards its full realization. [FC33] "Special attention and care" must be given to "education in virginity or celibacy as the supreme form of that self-giving" [FC37]. Education must include "a knowledge of and respect for the moral norms" for "responsible personal growth in human sexuality."

Education also includes remote and proximate preparation for marriage and basic home economics: "Remote preparation begins in early childhood, in training which leads children to discover themselves as being endowed with a rich and complex psychology and with a particular personality with its own strengths and weaknesses… when esteem for all authentic human values is instilled… for the control and right use of one's inclinations, for th manner of regarding and meeting people of the opposite sex…, also necessary is solid spiritual and catechetical formation that will show that marriage is a true vocation and mission, without excluding the possibility… of priestly or religious life." Proximate preparation "involves a more specific preparation for the sacraments… [and] a preparation for life as a couple… This preparation will present marriage as an interpersonal relationship of a man and a woman that has to be continually developed…." It includes the nature of "conjugal sexuality and responsible parenthood, with the essential medical and biological knowledge connected with it." "It will also acquaint those cocerned with correct methods for the education of children, and will assist them in gainig the basic requisites for well-ordered family life, such as stable work, sufficient financial resources, sensible administration, notions of housekeeping" [FC66]

Part of education is in the proper use of leisure. Leisure is properly used "to relax, to fortify the health of soul and body through spontaneous study and activity, through tourism which refines man's character and enriches him with understanding of others, through sports activity which helps to preserve equilibrium of spirit even in the community, and to establish fraternal relations among men of all conditions, nations, and races" [GS61]

Education in the proper use of media and social communication: Parents must "train the conscience of their children to express calm and objective judgments which will guide them in the choice or rejection of programs available" [FC76]

Most of that had to do with the kinds of educational preparation one could receive in the home. A few notes seemed to be about self-education. One might assume that education in the home, here, prepares one to prepare oneself:

If the vocation is to a lay profession or to secular politics, education must prepare them to gain expertise in it while retaining perspective. Laymen should "keep the laws proper to each discipline, and labor to equip themselves with a genuine expertise in their various fields" [GS43] . Although people's skills and knowledge are becoming more specialized, "it remains each man's duty to retain an understanding of the whole human person in which the values of intellect, will, conscience, and fraternity are preeminent" [GS61]. "Great care must be taken about civic and political formation… Those who are suited or can become suited should prepare themselves for the … very noble art of politics, and shold seek to practice this art without regard for their own interests or for material advantages" [GS75]

More on this topic next time, when I take on the mutual and reciprocal responsibilities of children and parents, and how these change as the children grow into adulthood. UPDATED: I continue here.
Aug 20, 2012

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9 comments on Post-secondary education questions: Fundamental principles drawn from Catholicism. The nature of vocation and the content of education.
I Am Making A Book, by my daughter when she was 5.

I am making a Book

Not a Book about Fish

or a Book about Monsters

But it is a Book about Me

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Why I don't know

Why, I don't know,

It couldn't be about Fish or Monsters

The First thing I Like is

Stuffed Animals

That's the First

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I also like

Birds in the Trees

That's one too

Why I don't know

Why it is that I like

Two girls playing in the Grass

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My room is Nice

Pink sheets

And pink Blankets

And fuzzy Blankets

That are pink and Fuzzy

We like Music

and Things Like That

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We have Chairs and Sofas

That is a Story about My Family

The end

Aug 20, 2012

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2 comments on I Am Making A Book, by my daughter when she was 5.
Postsecondary education, a series.
I managed to carve out some time to myself this morning. Expect a post later on postsecondary education, the followup to this post (check out the comments there if you haven't yet, and please add some).

This is me thinking out loud about something I haven't figured out yet, and I hope it will turn into a long-ish series.

In the first followup post, which you should see later today (UPDATE: Here for part 1 and here for part 2, and here for part 3), I'm going to dig into relevant Catholic teaching to see what limits and requirements it sets on the responsibilities between parents and their children growing to emancipation. Not because I expect to find all the answers there, but because I expect to find some absolutes that helpfully constrain the myriad possible solutions.

After that I will probably write about what "emancipation" means — whether it is abrupt or gradual, how you know when it has started or when it has begun, and the significance of legal emancipation as defined by statute and custom.

Then I'll see if there are any more useful general principles out there, perhaps drawn from empirical observations or other philosophies. After that we'll look at applications in specific economic situations.

This post will be updated and serve as an index to posts in the series.

UPDATED LIST:
Stay tuned.
Aug 20, 2012

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3 comments on Postsecondary education, a series.
Past, present, future in the Canticle of Zechariah.

I try, imperfectly, to pray at least some of the Divine Office every week. It suits me, and it doesn’t, and that is probably good for me. I like the parts that change from day to day; I get tired of the parts that are the same day after day. I usually speed through the Invitatory at a quick mumble, unless it has been a few days since I have managed to pick up the breviary, and then it is like a cool drink of water. I don’t mind the Canticle of Mary, because I don’t get to Evening Prayer as often as I would like. I get very tired of the Canticle of Zechariah.

Jen Fulwiler at Conversion Diary once assembled a stable of bloggers to post about the Our Father, one word at a time, a series which turned out pretty well, if I do say so myself (I hammered out a meditation on “Earth” in about twenty minutes, and I rather like it). More recently another blogger, Sarah Reinhard, did the same thing for the Hail Mary.

These meditations are useful because they breathe a little new life into a prayer that we have all said so many times that it risks becoming empty, wasted, like exhausted soil. I am not the one to do this, at least not right now, but maybe those of us who pray the Divine Office could use a little of that for the 95th Psalm and the Canticle of Zechariah. Every day is just a little too often for me to keep getting something new out of these (and YES I have already noted the irony implicit in the 95th Psalm being about the stubborn Israelites complaining about the same old same old every day for forty years and their hearts going astray and all that).

Anyway, the last time I opened the breviary to the Canticle of Zechariah I did notice something somewhat new to me, so I thought I would share. Here is the text as it appears in the LOTH:

Blessed be the Lord,The God of Israel; He has come to His people and set them free.

He has raised up for us a mighty Saviour, born of the house of His servant David.

Through His holy prophets He promised of old that He would save us from our enemies, from the hands of all who hate us.

He promised to show mercy to our fathers and to remember His holy Covenant.

This was the oath He swore to our father Abraham:

To set us free from the hands of our enemies, free to worship Him without fear, holy and righteous in His sight all the days of our life.

You, my child, shall be called the prophet of the Most High, for you will go before the Lord to prepare His way, to give his people knowledge of salvation by the forgiveness of their sins.

In the tender compassion of our Lord the dawn from on high shall break upon us, to shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the way of peace.

Glory to the Father,and to the Son,and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever, Amen.

This time, the structure of the canticle stood out to me, the way it speaks of past, present, and future. Check it out:

Present: this has to do with the stuff that is happening in the moment that Zechariah speaks.

He has come to His people and set them free.

He has raised up for us a mighty Saviour, born of the house of His servant David.

The Savior is still in utero at the moment, but the setting free has already begun.

Past: This has to do with the whole history of Israel, which is characterized here entirely as a promise by God to Israel (although you will note that the Covenant, which took two to tango, is mentioned, it is entirely in the context of mercy):

Through His holy prophets He promised of old that He would save us from our enemies, from the hands of all who hate us.

He promised to show mercy to our fathers and to remember His holy Covenant.

This was the oath He swore to our father Abraham:

To set us free from the hands of our enemies, free to worship Him without fear, holy and righteous in His sight all the days of our life.

Look at those promises: to save Israel from its enemies, from all who hate it; to show mercy — at the same time as He remembers the covenant in which they made promises that they would keep only imperfectly. Also to set Israel free “to worship Him without fear,” which could be characterized a couple of ways: it could mean that they are free from persecution from those enemies, so that it isn’t dangerous to openly worship the God of Israel; or it could mean that even if there is persecution, that they can worship without “fear” of the persecution, perhaps firm in the knowledge that those enemies can destroy body but not soul, can strike at the nation but will not exterminate it; or it could mean that somehow they can worship God without fearing God. One or all of those is linked with a promise that the people will be “holy and righteous in his sight.”

Future: This is the part that has not yet come to pass, and remains indefinite, as Zechariah moves from revelation of the present and rumination about the past to prophesying of the future. It is in two pieces.

You, my child, shall be called the prophet of the Most High, for you will go before the Lord to prepare His way, to give his people knowledge of salvation by the forgiveness of their sins.

In the tender compassion of our God the dawn from on high shall break upon us, to shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the way of peace.

Here we have the very specific prophecy aimed at the infant John the Baptist, followed by something further on. Note that “the dawn from on high shall break upon us” is presented as a future event, while the raising up of the Savior is presented as something that has just happened now — so I am inclined to think that the breaking of the dawn does not represent the birth of Christ, but something else. The proclamation of the kingdom of God — the central of the five Mysteries of Light — seems to fit.

These three parts of the prayer — past, present, future — are bracketed by, shall we say, two timeless bits. The introduction is eternal:

Blessed be the Lord,The God of Israel;

…and the conclusion, which isn’t part of what Zechariah said, of course, but we add it to the end of all the canticles, is, er, also concerned with past, present, and future, reminding us that the whole shebang is eternally the doing of the Three-in-One:

Glory to the Father,and to the Son,and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever, Amen.

I am not sure why the overall structure jumped out at me just then, but it did, and I rather appreciate the canticle a bit more now. It seems a coherent whole: less a prayer to be mumbled through, and more a piece of poetry. Something composed.

Aug 18, 2012

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3 comments on Past, present, future in the Canticle of Zechariah.
Post-secondary education questions.

I don’t know if I mentioned it or not, but this week we started back to school.

I always have to work hard the first couple of weeks to help set the new schedule into stone, so I have clung to the self-discipline of not sitting down and blogging when I should be waking up the children and getting them started.

All this is to say: I have several posts queued up in my head, but haven’t written them yet, and I hope to get to one this weekend, maybe Saturday afternoon or evening.

But I want to get one started, and I thought I would start with the discussion part.

The first one I want to write is about post-high school education (call it “college” if you want, and I will here to be concise, but I mean for it to be broader than that, encompassing trade schools, apprenticeships, certain military options that include training, community colleges, and the like). Questions for readers to get the ball rolling:

Do you anticipate that your kids will graduate into a significantly different economic paradigm, when it comes to paying-for-school, from the one you entered? Will the best advice for them be different than was the best advice for you and your peers?

Are you closer to the “parents should pay for their offspring’s college” end of the spectrum or the “eighteen-year-olds are adults and they should be responsible for their own post secondary education” end of the spectrum? Is that different from your parents’ view? If so, why do you think your view is different?

What is parents’ responsibility when it comes to educating their children? What kind of financial or other assistance do parents owe their grown or nearly-grown offspring and is there an age when it needs to stop and the offspring should be “launched?”

How would you feel about having one or more of your offspring living with you the entire time they were in college? Would they have to compensate you in some way for you to be okay with that?

If you yourself are a college graduate, how attached are you to the idea that your kids should go to college at all? To the idea that they should attend college full time immediately after high school graduation?

Student loans: good idea, bad idea, necessary evil, or “it depends?”

Mark and I have been doing a lot of talking about this lately, because we feel we should have at least a rough idea of our options by the time our oldest starts 9th grade, and that is only two years away. Take the next couple of days to throw some comments out here, and then I will start writing.

Aug 17, 2012

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26 comments on Post-secondary education questions.
Unintended consequences.

One of the, shall we say, interdisciplinary topics I can really geek out about is unintended consequences.

I first got interested in it with respect to engineering. I like disasters. No, I don't really mean that I like disasters, but they fascinate me. I'm always grumpy with news coverage of bridges falling down and malfunctioning airplanes, because the news coverage always stops after it's done with all the human interest stories, and there's never a big fanfare when the NTSB comes out with their final report and explains why and how it all happened.

Sometimes the cause of things falling down is a fairly uncomplicated error, triggered by the sudden application of unusual circumstances (like the 35W bridge collapse here in Minneapolis — an underdesigned set of parts failed 30 years into the bridge's life during a massive resurfacing project which altered the loads on the bridge) or a perfect storm of errors (like the Gimli Glider story from 1983 that I linked to just a few days ago). But I am particularly interested in bad things that result from good intentions: unintended consequences.

(Actually, the Gimli Glider story is a bit of an example of that: the accident would not have happened had Canada not decided to convert to the metric system, which (one assumes) was a well-intentioned policy change.)

I have a good book on the topic of unintended engineering consequences somewhere here at home. It's called Why Things Bite Back, which is all about technological fixes that create bigger problems than the ones they were intended to solve. There are also a few examples among the case studies of failures in Henry Petroski's To Engineer is Human.

But I'm also interested in unintended consequences in law and policy, and unintended consequences in social engineering. What put me in mind of these today was a post at the Volokh Conspiracy about the abuse of privacy law:

New Hampshire is one of about a dozen “all party consent” states. The federal government and most states are “one party consent” jurisdictions, where recording is legal if one participant agrees to it. … Recently, though, these laws have mainly protected the police, who’ve used the laws to arrest bystanders for making cell phone videos of police conduct.

Judging from the outrage such arrests have sparked, it’s safe to say that protecting police from public scrutiny is an unintended consequence of this privacy law. (As I’ve pointed out recently, that is not the only unintended consequence of all-party consent laws. They’re also bad for computer security. In most states, I can hire someone to screen incoming messages for malware, and as long as I consent to the monitoring there’s no legal problem. In all-party consent states, though, there’s a real risk that I need the consent of the malware sender before someone can screen his incoming message.)

…Privacy laws are largely efforts to regulate technology. Some new technology comes along, and we don’t like some of the changes it is likely to bring. The privacy campaigners tell us that we can keep the good parts of the technology and ban the bad. So we adopt a new privacy law based on some principle that sounds good to us at the time.

All-party consent laws, for example, responded to cheap taping equipment by adopting the principle that both parties should agree before their conversation is recorded. It sounded good at the time; after all, wouldn’t any other rule encourage treachery? Then, gradually, cheap recording technology spread, and it became easier and easier to violate the law. After a while, the principle that sounded so good a decade or two earlier began to seem a little artificial. Our internal privacy expectations had changed, but the law hadn’t.

Inevitably, violations of the law proliferated, to the point where the violations didn’t feel like wrongdoing.

When law-breaking is widespread and unapologetic, the authorities can pick and choose whom they prosecute. Is it any surprise that they choose to prosecute people who inconvenience the authorities? Or that the laws end up being used to bolster the status quo? …[H]aving laws on the books that are widely violated because they no longer fit our actual sense of right and wrong practically invites abuse by those in power.

The point of having laws is to punish, stigmatize, and prevent behavior that is widely accepted to be wrong, and to do so fairly. Once a law is technically broken by lots of people, it is eventually only used by the powerful and privileged to punish people who threaten them. If that isn't an unintended consequence I don't know what is.

It occurred to me I could use an "unintended consequences" category, so I'm creating one.

Aug 14, 2012

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1 comment on Unintended consequences.
Why and how to question authority.
Those bumper stickers that say "Question Authority" — have you seen them?

Once I saw a bumper sticker that said, "Who are you to tell me to question authority?"

I have always liked that one, partly because it's snarky, and partly because its snark derives from pointing out that the Question Authority folks are oblivious to the fact that, in asserting a standard of behavior, they don't so much undermine the notion of authority as set themselves up as an alternative authority.

Kaydee at Engineering Ethics Blog has a good meditation on the purpose of authority structures, and how to question authorities without questioning authority.

He focuses on the authority structure of licensed architects and engineers, who receive their authority from a licensing board, who in turn receive authorization from the government… and if you are a U. S. Constitutional fan, you know that the government in turn receives its authority from the consent of the governed:

There are those who view all authority with suspicion, and for some reason they seem especially widespread in New England, where “Question Authority” bumper stickers are almost as common as license plates; at least they were when I lived there in the 1990s.  The question I’d like to ask today is, can you be a good engineer and question authority too?   That is, is it consistent to be simultaneously an ethical engineer, and to maintain a fundamentally skeptical and judgmental attitude toward all authorities?

…Normally we think of a person in authority as having power to decide important matters.  This is the facet of authority that first comes to mind when I think about authority with respect to engineering.  In an architectural firm, for example, only certain licensed architects and engineers are authorized to sign off on blueprints (or whatever the electronic equivalent is these days). But using the word “authorized” in that way brings up a second aspect of authority.

Authorities don’t just get up one day and declare themselves authorities.  They have to be authorized.  In the case of licensed engineers, the state board in charge of licensing engineers authorizes the engineer to sign off on designs.  So authorities must receive their authority from, well, other authorities.  And authorities, as Austin points out, are ultimately other persons.  Even when we cite a licensing board or a book as an authority, we really refer to the person or people behind these intermediate entities.  So you can’t have authority without speaking of authorities, that is, persons who have authority.

That raises the structural question of where authority ultimately comes from….

Authorities must be questioned from time to time, because anyone can discover a problem that must be corrected or have an insight that must travel up the chain in order to be acted upon. But we have a responsibility to do so in a way that preserves the existing authority structure — which, after all, was put in place for a reason:

[N]ow and then, you may find that your authorities, whoever they are, have made an error, ranging from a mistake in a textbook to an order to falsify test records for an engineering project.  It will then be your role to deal respectfully but truthfully with the error in a way that preserves the overall authority structure, but moves the organization toward the freedom for human flourishing that [is] the ultimate purpose of all authority.

I noted that one feature of a healthy and effective authority structure is the existence of a clear and well-accepted procedure by which information moves up the chain of command, so to speak. It's especially important that the procedure be well-defined when the information has the potential to contradict the "authorities" or even to embarrass them, and it's even more important when human life may be at stake. Think emergency rooms, combat theaters, and cockpits.

Wikipedia has an interesting article on one such system of communication: CRM, for Cockpit (or Crew) Resource Management. (Sometimes the same thing is called Bridge Resource Management or Maritime Resource Management.)
CRM aims to foster a climate or culture where the freedom to respectfully question authority is encouraged.

… It recognizes that a discrepancy between what is happening and what should be happening is often the first indicator that an error is occurring. This is a delicate subject for many organizations, especially ones with traditional hierarchies, so appropriate communication techniques must be taught to supervisors and their subordinates, so that supervisors understand that the questioning of authority need not be threatening, and subordinates understand the correct way to question orders.

Cockpit voice recordings of various air disasters tragically reveal first officers and flight engineers attempting to bring critical information to the captain's attention in an indirect and ineffective way. By the time the captain understood what was being said, it was too late to avert the disaster. A CRM expert named Todd Bishop developed a five-step assertive statement process that encompasses inquiry and advocacy steps:

Opening or attention getter - Address the individual. "Hey Chief," or "Captain Smith," or "Bob," or whatever name or title will get the person's attention.

State your concern - Express your analysis of the situation in a direct manner while owning your emotions about it. "I'm concerned that we may not have enough fuel to fly around this storm system," or "I'm worried that the roof might collapse."

State the problem as you see it - "We're only showing 40 minutes of fuel left," or "This building has a lightweight steel truss roof, and we may have fire extension into the roof structure."

State a solution - "Let's divert to another airport and refuel," or "I think we should pull some tiles and take a look with the thermal imaging camera before we commit crews inside."

Obtain agreement (or buy-in) - "Does that sound good to you, Captain?"

These are often difficult skills to master, as they may require significant changes in personal habits, interpersonal dynamics, and organizational culture.
Maybe the bumper sticker should read: Question Authorities, Intelligently.
Aug 13, 2012

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1 comment on Why and how to question authority.
“How not to be a creeper” and assorted followup discussion.

If you are at all interested in male-female interaction culture of both the positive and negative variety, how to deal with social awkwardness of both the neurotypical and the Asperger’s varieties, how to teach social rules to young people, scifi convention or geek culture, and the like: I would like to direct your attention to a rich and engaging discussion thread at Whatever, the blog of scifi author John Scalzi. (This isn’t just about scifi conventions, so bear with me.)

The scifi/geek-con blogosphere has been buzzing somewhat about a perceived culture at conventions in which unwelcome sexual advances and other “creepiness” have perhaps been overly tolerated (I am qualifying with “perceived” and “perhaps” only because I am not a con-goer and cannot give a first-hand opinion of the scene). In response to an emailed query, “Any tips on how not to be a creeper?” Scalzi wrote a post entitled “An Incomplete Guide to Not Creeping,” in which he suggested ten rules for interacting with people — in general, not just at cons — in order not to inadvertently transgress other people’s personal boundaries. Here is a sampler from the middle of the pack:

4. Acknowledge that other people do not exist just for your amusement/interest/desire/use. Yes, I know. You know that. But oddly enough, there’s a difference between knowing it, and actually believing it — or understanding what it means in a larger social context. People go to conventions and social gatherings to meet other people, but not necessarily (or even remotely likely) for the purpose of meeting you. The woman who is wearing a steampunky corset to a convention is almost certainly wearing it in part to enjoy being seen in it and to have people enjoy seeing her in it — but she’s also almost certainly not wearing it for you. You are not the person she has been waiting for, the reason she’s there, or the purpose for her attendance. When you act like you are, or that she has (or should have) nothing else to do than be the object of your amusement/interest/desire/use, the likelihood that you will come across a complete creeper rises exponentially. It’s not an insult for someone else not to want to play that role for you. It’s not what they’re there for.

So those are some overarching things to incorporate into your thinking. Here are some practical things.

5. Don’t touch. Seriously, man. You’re not eight, with the need to run your fingers over everything, nor do you lack voluntary control of your muscles. Keep your hands, arms, legs and everything else to yourself. This is not actually difficult. Here’s an idea: That person you want to touch? Put them in charge of the whole touch experience. That is, let them initiate any physical contact and let them set the pace of that contact when or if they do — and accept that that there’s a very excellent chance no touch is forthcoming. Do that when you meet them for the first time. Do that after you’ve met them 25 times. Do it just as a general rule. Also, friendly tip: If you do touch someone and they say “don’t touch me,” or otherwise make it clear that touching was not something you should have done, the correct response is: “I apologize. I am sorry I made you uncomfortable.” Then back the hell off, possibly to the next state over.

6. Give them space. Hey: Hold your arm straight out in front of your body. Where your fingertips are? That’s a nice minimum distance for someone you’re meeting or don’t know particularly well (it’s also not a bad distance for people you do know). Getting inside that space generally makes people uncomfortable, and why make people uncomfortable? That’s creepy. Also creepy: Sneaking up behind people and getting in close to them, or otherwise getting into their personal space without them being aware of it. If you’re in a crowded room and you need to scrunch in, back up when the option becomes available; don’t take it as an opportunity to linger inside that personal zone. Speaking of which:

Go check it out, it is worth reading, and almost certainly worth showing to your teenagers.

Anyway, the post sprouted a very long and interesting discussion, which Mr. Scalzi has carefully moderated (meaning, he deleted egregious trolls and off-point material), so that pretty much the whole thread is worth reading — note, this does NOT mean that I endorse every opinion expressed in the thread, just that the remaining discussion, while heated, is mainly respectful and thoughtful. Warning: the discussion may be triggering, as a few people describe past unpleasant experiences.

One of the sub-discussions that I found particularly interesting had to do with people making excuses for individuals who, in their mind, simply lacked the social skills to avoid being “mistaken” for a sexually aggressive creepy person. (Most of these alluded to or mentioned Asperger’s syndrome, but others cited cultural differences as the cause.) There ensued a fairly lively debate about the agency of socially impaired individuals. I think the strongest voices came from people who live with and love someone who is so impaired, and who argued that in fact they still need to be held to the same standards of behavior as everyone else, because they are capable of doing so as long as they understand it is necessary.

Another good sub-thread had to do with the responsibility of assertive people (particularly men) to intervene, either as a bystander or especially when the creeper is one of their friends.

Scalzi followed it up with a “Tangential Personal Note” in which he described a personal experience struggling with the temptation to be a creep:

On the flip side of this, I noted that the rules I noted yesterday are ones that I use myself when I try not to come across as a creeper to people I’m meeting. I didn’t use a specific example of a time where I was concerned about being considered a weird, creepy dude because although I did have a story that applied, I hadn’t cleared it with the other person involved. But now she’s cleared it, and now I’ll use it.

Back in 2006, at Readercon(!) I was wandering around the dealer’s room when I saw John Joseph Adams talking to a woman I didn’t know. I knew JJA very casually, so I went up to say hello. The woman he was speaking to was the art director of Shimmer Magazine and her name was Mary Robinette Kowal. JJA introduced the two of us, and Mary and I started chatting and within about five minutes I was aware that I was really intensely attracted to her, in a way that actually kind of spooked me and which I was sure was immediately and clearly obvious, and possibly immediately and obviously creepy.

So here’s what I did…

He goes into detail describing his conscious behavior intended to avoid making the woman uncomfortable, and then explains:

…I mention this for two purposes. One, to make the point that I think the guidelines I set out work (or at least work for me). Two, to make the point that saying that only certain types of men — ugly ones, aspie ones, socially sheltered ones, ones who aren’t going to pay attention to someone offering advice — have the potential to be creepers is kind of stupid. Hi there, I’m generally considered to be socialized, neurotypical and a decent guy. And oh my I had quite the potential to be a creeping assbag on Mary, among others. But I haven’t been, because I’m responsible for my own actions and I realize no one deserves to be creeped on by me even when the reptile portions of my brain are howling TAKE HER TAKE HER TAKE HER NOW. At the end of the day, as regards being a creepy assbag, it’s not about who you are, it’s about what you do.

Since Scalzi was married at the time, and says (in the comments) that he immediately came home and described the events to his wife, there’s plenty of food for thought there about marriage and trust as well as about — for want of a better term — deliberate nondouchebaggery. The comments there are highly recommended as well.

What do you think about the posts? Is Scalzi’s guide a good start? What tips would make it less “incomplete?”

Aug 11, 2012

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4 comments on “How not to be a creeper” and assorted followup discussion.
The invisible hand.

Some time ago I quit the treadmill and started running around the indoor track that circles the upper half of the basketball court at the Y.

I’m not sure why I suddenly got so tired of the treadmill. Maybe because it is impossible to escape the television completely. Maybe it was the demoralizing effect of the digits slowly ticking away the miles or time elapsed; I found myself always wishing I’d brought a sticky-note to cover up my progress. Maybe it was all the people around that I couldn’t quite tune out. Or maybe it was the view through the window — not a bad view, of a residential cross-street — but a view that rarely changed, except for the snow cover giving way to foliage and later taking over again. Or perhaps, after having a taste of running outside, around the lakes, I just couldn’t stand running in place anymore, and running around a bare room seemed like an improvement.

At first I took my iPod with me, and had five different running playlists cued up all ready to go. But after a while I stopped taking that, too. I don’t want to hear music; I want to hear my footfalls, so I can work on correcting them. I want to hear my own breathing and feel the goosebumps from the air-conditioned chill give way to warmth, flushing, sweat. I think I am tired of trying to distract myself from the running. I am trying to be fully present in it instead, to feel the aching muscles, to force my mind to deal with the urge to stop instead of just wishing it away and pretending it isn’t there.

Sometimes i have no choice but to think about running. But occasionally I get a surprising pay off.

This evening I was running laps and using my swimming lap counter — it’s a one-button, finger-ring style — to check my speed on each lap. In the previous two weeks I had swum 5 times, but not gone for a run at all, and I was feeling rusty — and the times showed it. Each lap around the gym is 1/18 of a mile, and my training pace on a treadmill is around 9:50, so I like to see times between 30 and 33 seconds. I was seeing 35–37-second laps. Not so good.

As I chugged along, endlessly circling, I thought back to the running clinic I attended in December 2010, the one where I learned forefoot running. I tried to remember what I learned from watching the before-and-after videos of myself. One of the form corrections that comes along with the switch from a heel strike to a forefoot or midfoot strike is in lean — runners with a heel strike tend to lean back as they run, while runs with a forefoot strike tend to be straight-backed or lean forward. The more you lean forward when you have a forefoot strike, the faster you tend to go. It doesn’t work that way with a heel strike.

If you have never learned forefoot running (sometimes called the pose method), here is something you can try to give you an idea of how the leaning thing works. Stand up, either barefoot or in running shoes. If you are indoors face a direction that gives you enough room to take several steps without tripping over something or walking into a wall. Now start jogging gently in place. If you are a fairly normal person, you will find that you naturally choose a forefoot-strike to do this: the first part of your foot to touch the ground is somewhere in the front half of your foot. Your heel might come down and “kiss” the ground at the end of its descent, or it might not. But you are certainly not hitting the ground with your heel and using your heel to absorb the impact of your weight coming down on the floor, the way you do when you walk, or the way many people do when they run in cushiony running shoes.

Still jogging? Okay, here is the second part of the demonstration. While you’re jogging in place, lean your body slightly forward. What happened?

What happened to me, when the instructor in my running clinic taught me to do this, is that I rocketed forward — running a few steps (before hitting the wall) with a natural forefoot strike. You don’t have to work to bring your legs far forward of your body and to push against the ground; you just have to let gravity pull you down and allow your legs to prevent you from tipping all the way over. It is a very natural and instinctive motion.

Although It does take reprogramming and practice to adopt forefoot striking as a training stride, that short demonstration gets across how leaning forward is related to speed. The more you lean, the faster you go. I you lean so far that your legs can’t keep up, you fall, of course, so it isn’t a magic formula or anything. You still need to be strong and move your legs fast. But it is kind of a form check.

As I remembered this, I noticed that as I ran around the gym, I tended to focus my eyes on the wall across from me. The track is a rounded-off rectangle, so I’d be staring at the telephone pole through the window… then turn and stare at the water fountain… then turn and stare at the church steeple through the oth window… then the banner with donors’ names… then the telephone pole again.

I tried keeping my neck and back aligned and tipping my body ever so slightly forward. Now I was focusing on the floor a few yards ahead of my toes. I concentrated on that moving point, dancing away from me along the seam in the flooring, and ran one lap, and checked my lap counter: 30 seconds.

Really? I checked it again: 30. I ran another lap: 31. And another: 29. I almost couldn’t believe it. Before this, it had taken real effort to push myself to go faster, if I wanted to see lap times consistently under 34 seconds. This didn’t feel more tiring at all. I just had to remember to tip ever so slightly forward.

As I circled around and around, though, it did start to wear on me mentally. I found that if I stopped concentrating on the slight forward lean, it went away. I really had to keep it front and center in my attention, carefully hold it, so it would not slip. After a while I started to feel as if there was an invisible hand between my shoulder blades, pressing slightly but firmly, and always just at the threshold of knocking me off balance. I found that if I vividly imagined that there really was a hand pressing me, it was easier to maintain my pace.

It wasn’t that I actually had the sensation of a physical pressure on my back in that spot. It was more that I started to feel irritated by it. After awhile I wanted to turn around and snap, “WILL you STOP pushing me?!” to the owner of the invisible hand invading my personal space.

But of course there was no one but me, running all by myself in the upper half of the gym, my peripheral vision only occasionally interrupted by a lone basketball rebounding off the backboards just below the track.

I discovered something today. It is possible to make a gain in training that cannot be taken away even by weeks of inactivity. This is something I learned with my brain, you know, from information I picked up back in my running clinic. I think I will remember it: tip a little forward, gain a little efficient speed. It can be hard to keep all the different form tweaks active in mind at the same time, of course; practice can move that kind of skill out of the brain and into the muscles. But still, the understanding remains, and can’t be lost — if I take pains to write about it, that is.

____________

(disclaimer: do not switch abruptly from heel striking to forefoot running without doing some research to avoid injury, and consider working with a personal trainer. I do not think the lean-forward tip will work for runners who use a heel-striking stride instead of a forefoot-striking stride.)

Aug 9, 2012

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2 comments on The invisible hand.
Beer for beginners, part V: Fruity stuff and saison.

(part I, part II, part III, part IV)

Before I get into this, I need to tell you that my drinking has spiralled out of control. Which is to say that I am, in fact, already breaking into the cases of Belgian witbier (aka bière blanche, if you’re dealing with the Frenchy sort of Belgium), which is the next thing I want to write about, and I am even starting to attack the oatmeal stout, which is, like, three styles ahead. And I am just now sitting down to write about the Belgian fruited lambic and saison. And I still have one bottle of raspberry lambic in my basement.

Also, I recently discovered gin and tonic. Seriously losing focus here, and I am pretty sure it is not because my eyes are crossing.

So let me just knock this bit out, and then I can get on with the witbier in peace.

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Belgian saison is where my opinions and the opinions of Garrett Oliver, author of The Brewmaster’s Table, part company. He is really into them. They are “one of the world’s most refreshing and enigmatic beer styles,” “light, brisk, refreshing, and sustaining,” “some of Belgium’s most exciting beers,” “truly glorious and endlessly interesting,” and “[w]ith food… beyond versatile… virtually invincible.”

The style is interesting in that they are traditional farmhouse ales, unfiltered and artisanal, and varying from bottle to bottle. As Belgian beers are wont to do, they carry flavors of spices and citrus peel. They often are sold in Champagne-style bottles complete with cork — so they might be a fun alternative to expensive French bubbly for your next celebration.

But I don’t know — our bottle of Saison Dupont failed to impress either me or Mark. Maybe I just got a bad bottle, or maybe I didn’t match it well, or maybe Mr. Oliver just set up my expectations too high. I just remember finding it kind of boring, and it wasn’t cheap either. The people at Beer Advocate like it fine, so maybe I should give it another chance. I almost feel embarrassed saying that I didn’t like the stuff, at least not at the $11 price point.

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Fortunately for my perception of Belgium, the next bottle we tried was also from Belgium and not boring in the least. It left me wondering aloud, “This? This counts as a beer? Impossible!”

What left me so incredulous was Brouwerij Lindemans Framboise. This is a sweet fruited lambic beer. Lambics are not always fruited, by the way; they are a traditional style that is fermented with wild yeast and bacteria, sort of like old-fashioned sourdough bread. I don’t know what they taste like, I still haven’t had any plain lambic yet. I have not seen any in the beer store.

But I did see the Lindemans Framboise, and carried it home along with some kriek. The fruited lambics get a secondary fermentation on cherries or raspberries — sometimes whole fruit, sometimes purée or juice. Oliver writes, “The result was a stronger, transformed beverage that sat squarely on the border between wine and beer.”

We poured the framboise into champagne flutes and admired its beautiful rosy color. It tasted jammy and sweet and tart at the same time. It tasted kind of crazy, to be frank. Soda-pop, with an alcoholic kick.

I think I would rather have it than almost any dessert wine that I can afford to buy regularly (I have had luxurious ports and eisweins and muscats and the like, sure, but I think of them as special-occasion wines, not something to keep always on hand). The book says it goes well with cheesecake, and I had managed to procure some for the occasion — indeed it did. On another occasion we tried the kriek. It was also fruity, tart and sweet.

I would recommend trying one of these to anyone. They are just so over-the-top — and they don’t taste very much like beer. They taste more like sweet bubbly fruity wine. I don’t want to think too much about whether it proves that I don’t know much about beer, that I liked this frothy sweet stuff. I bet it isn’t for everyone. But you won’t know until you try it.

I still have one bottle left to try, of an American kriek — Wisconsin brewery New Glarus’s Wisconsin Belgian Red, which proclaims that each 750 mL bottle contains one pound of Montmorency cherries. I am waiting for an evening in which we can kill a bottle without regretting it in the morning.

Aug 9, 2012

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No comments on Beer for beginners, part V: Fruity stuff and saison.
The Amish population.

Do you think of the Amish as leading an “endangered” lifestyle? Maybe it’s that we associate them with being old-fashioned, so to speak, but I confess that when I have considered them — whether when teaching my kids about the impact of Wisconsin v. Yoder or buying preserves from a farm stand — it has been with a sort of wistfulness. Surely they won’t be able to hold out forever against the encroachment of the wider world around them.

Not so: in fact the Amish are one of the fastest-growing religious groups in the country, according to an Ohio State University census:

The study, released July 27 at the annual meeting of the Rural Sociological Society, suggests a new community sprouting every three and a half weeks.

Nearly 250,000 Amish live in the U.S. and Canada, and the population is expected to exceed 1 million around 2050.

The growth may not be visible outside Amish country, but the rural settlements definitely see the boom.

“This place has grown,” said Daniel Miller, 52, who has spent his life on an Amish settlement here. “It’s because all of the kids.”

…The Amish double their population about every 22 years, said Joseph Donnermeyer, the Ohio State professor who led the census project as part of the recent 2010 U.S. Religion Census.

Interesting, no?

Aug 9, 2012

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4 comments on The Amish population.
Anosmia.

I loved this short film about anosmia — lack of a sense of smell — at the NYT website.

It almost brought me to tears, actually! What did you think, if you watched it?

Aug 8, 2012

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1 comment on Anosmia.