A couple comments. The first is that my former boss had a really good rule about, "We can disagree, we can be uncomfortable, we can take risks, but we must always be safe." Those instructions take some breaking down of the half-hour meeting type but for those in the know of the details, it was really great guidance.
Secondly, this:
"It is this indifference to engagement, which in our learning community of young people looks like a willingness to put aside big differences and find ways to navigate the space together to minimise conflict, which the feed and the algorithm can’t measure. It is the essence of human life."
When I worked at a movie theatre, the district managers always gave us these scripts to upsell customers to larger concessions or combos. They argued that every additional 25¢ we could get from each customer made a big difference in the long run.
True. But!
The time it took to try to upsell a customer slowed down the concession lines. And these were for going to see movies with strict start times. Think about it: the point of being at the theatre is to see the fucking movie! Concessions are nice, but not worth missing the movie you came for.
The point is that while we were trying to extract an extra 25¢ per customer, people lined up with $20 to spend would give up and catch their movie.
I told a district manager that, and his response was jaw-dropping: "we don't have any data to show that people are choosing not to buy concessions for that reason." No shit, because choosing NOT to buy a thing doesn't create a receipt at the register!
This gave me a theory I call "the null receipt hypothesis": a TON of business / economic decisions that human beings make, typically on the going without side, missed by the people studying those systems simply because they don't create a "0" entry, they just don't create an entry at all: a null entry. There is a very big difference between a spreadsheet with a zero in the cell, and a spreadsheet without the cell to fill.
That null can never be fully filled. The theatre could start counting people who get in line, then counting people who leave it, but that wouldn't grab the people who never bothered joining the line because of it's length even if they wanted to.
To the first point, your former boss sounds great. I am always surprised at the stories of excessive egos in the corporate meetings that my partner has amongst adults, and the ability for our children to move through them in a different way. Obviously children are quite ego-centric, but it seems that it is more an ego-centrism that is very present rather than one of an egoic identity and therefore they are able to be extremely rigid and yet also extremely flexible. It is this ability to be rigid (disagreement) but also flexible (keeping people safe) that is a skill worth cultivating.
To the second, I like this hypothesis. In the UK, we have a pervasive target culture in the public sector. My partner works in healthcare and there is a growing movement against the idea of targets as they prioritise the target at the expense of everything else. I think some people see that it leaves behind other important metrics, but the wisest recognise that it bends everything towards the target even the things that we haven't even worked out we need to measure yet. It's the same in education with emphasis on the ends at the expense of contemplating the means.
this story didn't quite make the cut, but last year we had a teenager who liked debating and so we set up a debate club and I created a jar of prompt debate topics. Mostly I found them on the internet but I threw in a few that I thought of myself. One was "is the pervasive use of headphones good or bad for society?". I suspected that the young people would all assume it was good, and they did, whilst I debated against headphone use. Their argument was essentially that it is beneficial for the individual, they didn't have to hear loud noises and could enjoy listening to what they liked. My argument that it was bad rested on the fact that intrusive noises are social information that builds a picture of the society that you live in. Hearing the loud noise of the child screaming might be frustrating but if you put your headphones on to drown it out you miss hearing the mother explain that he is teething and you can't therefore empathise. You miss the overheard phone call on the bus going in to town where someone is crying because they have been evicted and the angry phone call on the bus back home as someone else rants that they have also been evicted. You miss that they both got on and off in a certain part of town and you miss the opportunity to wonder if maybe there is a housing crisis building up there. All of these little interactions tune us into the society we live in, but if we just wander round blocking it all out we miss understanding the place we live in. Sadly my argument was considered not persuasive enough.
Interesting note about the headphones. I'd take it further and say it's dangerous to navigate through an environment without full faculty of your senses. Anything that cuts you off from or filters / squelches your perception (which is what noise cancelling headphones literally do) makes my miss the electric vehicle coming around the corner, the dude looking for a fight who will literally just shove you, an animal in distress that needs to be taken to safety, or whatever.
There's been this mysterious increase in car, pedestrian, and bicycle traffic accidents over the past decade despite in tandem increase of safety features. Governments, advocates, everyone concerned with road safety keep coming up with elaborate "Our society is fragmented and angry so it reflects in our traffic" twisty logic.
But the "mysterious increase" is no mystery. It flattened from year over year decrease while cellphones were being widely adopted, and switched to year over year increases the year the iPhone came out.
Our devices are literally killing us and people continue to think the issue is thinky feely social civic stuff. Oh wait. To your point: the devices are killing that too.
I should maybe clarify that our particular discussion was specifically about wearing headphones whilst sat on the bus. However, I have noticed recently a few people driving and biking with headphones in which does seem ludicrous. I just looked it up and at least in the UK there is no law that prohibits you from doing so, which I find baffling.
A couple comments. The first is that my former boss had a really good rule about, "We can disagree, we can be uncomfortable, we can take risks, but we must always be safe." Those instructions take some breaking down of the half-hour meeting type but for those in the know of the details, it was really great guidance.
Secondly, this:
"It is this indifference to engagement, which in our learning community of young people looks like a willingness to put aside big differences and find ways to navigate the space together to minimise conflict, which the feed and the algorithm can’t measure. It is the essence of human life."
When I worked at a movie theatre, the district managers always gave us these scripts to upsell customers to larger concessions or combos. They argued that every additional 25¢ we could get from each customer made a big difference in the long run.
True. But!
The time it took to try to upsell a customer slowed down the concession lines. And these were for going to see movies with strict start times. Think about it: the point of being at the theatre is to see the fucking movie! Concessions are nice, but not worth missing the movie you came for.
The point is that while we were trying to extract an extra 25¢ per customer, people lined up with $20 to spend would give up and catch their movie.
I told a district manager that, and his response was jaw-dropping: "we don't have any data to show that people are choosing not to buy concessions for that reason." No shit, because choosing NOT to buy a thing doesn't create a receipt at the register!
This gave me a theory I call "the null receipt hypothesis": a TON of business / economic decisions that human beings make, typically on the going without side, missed by the people studying those systems simply because they don't create a "0" entry, they just don't create an entry at all: a null entry. There is a very big difference between a spreadsheet with a zero in the cell, and a spreadsheet without the cell to fill.
That null can never be fully filled. The theatre could start counting people who get in line, then counting people who leave it, but that wouldn't grab the people who never bothered joining the line because of it's length even if they wanted to.
Thus, "engagement" data must always be suspect.
"
To the first point, your former boss sounds great. I am always surprised at the stories of excessive egos in the corporate meetings that my partner has amongst adults, and the ability for our children to move through them in a different way. Obviously children are quite ego-centric, but it seems that it is more an ego-centrism that is very present rather than one of an egoic identity and therefore they are able to be extremely rigid and yet also extremely flexible. It is this ability to be rigid (disagreement) but also flexible (keeping people safe) that is a skill worth cultivating.
To the second, I like this hypothesis. In the UK, we have a pervasive target culture in the public sector. My partner works in healthcare and there is a growing movement against the idea of targets as they prioritise the target at the expense of everything else. I think some people see that it leaves behind other important metrics, but the wisest recognise that it bends everything towards the target even the things that we haven't even worked out we need to measure yet. It's the same in education with emphasis on the ends at the expense of contemplating the means.
this story didn't quite make the cut, but last year we had a teenager who liked debating and so we set up a debate club and I created a jar of prompt debate topics. Mostly I found them on the internet but I threw in a few that I thought of myself. One was "is the pervasive use of headphones good or bad for society?". I suspected that the young people would all assume it was good, and they did, whilst I debated against headphone use. Their argument was essentially that it is beneficial for the individual, they didn't have to hear loud noises and could enjoy listening to what they liked. My argument that it was bad rested on the fact that intrusive noises are social information that builds a picture of the society that you live in. Hearing the loud noise of the child screaming might be frustrating but if you put your headphones on to drown it out you miss hearing the mother explain that he is teething and you can't therefore empathise. You miss the overheard phone call on the bus going in to town where someone is crying because they have been evicted and the angry phone call on the bus back home as someone else rants that they have also been evicted. You miss that they both got on and off in a certain part of town and you miss the opportunity to wonder if maybe there is a housing crisis building up there. All of these little interactions tune us into the society we live in, but if we just wander round blocking it all out we miss understanding the place we live in. Sadly my argument was considered not persuasive enough.
Interesting note about the headphones. I'd take it further and say it's dangerous to navigate through an environment without full faculty of your senses. Anything that cuts you off from or filters / squelches your perception (which is what noise cancelling headphones literally do) makes my miss the electric vehicle coming around the corner, the dude looking for a fight who will literally just shove you, an animal in distress that needs to be taken to safety, or whatever.
There's been this mysterious increase in car, pedestrian, and bicycle traffic accidents over the past decade despite in tandem increase of safety features. Governments, advocates, everyone concerned with road safety keep coming up with elaborate "Our society is fragmented and angry so it reflects in our traffic" twisty logic.
But the "mysterious increase" is no mystery. It flattened from year over year decrease while cellphones were being widely adopted, and switched to year over year increases the year the iPhone came out.
Our devices are literally killing us and people continue to think the issue is thinky feely social civic stuff. Oh wait. To your point: the devices are killing that too.
I should maybe clarify that our particular discussion was specifically about wearing headphones whilst sat on the bus. However, I have noticed recently a few people driving and biking with headphones in which does seem ludicrous. I just looked it up and at least in the UK there is no law that prohibits you from doing so, which I find baffling.