Category: Citizenship

Character Amid the Ruins

People are made of flesh and blood and a miracle fibre called courage.

— Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960 (quote via The Quote Garden.)

The character of an individual, and even of a people, is best identified in periods of adversity. That was one of the things that came up when my students discussed ethics, morality and poverty. With all the talk of how the Japanese people are reacting to last week’s earthquake, with a relative lack of looting and criminality, it is worth visiting Jesse Walker’s article in Reason last year that really looked at how people really respond to disasters. It turns out, that from Haiti to New Orleans to San Fransisco in 1906, people are much more restrained and disciplined than we’re lead to imagine.

Walker reviews Rebecca Solnit’s book “A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster” which points out the “little utopias” that arise in disaster hit communities.

Walker also points out the incongruity between our expectations and actual observations:

It isn’t unusual for a TV reporter to get his facts wrong. It’s rarer for the images that accompany his dispatch to flagrantly contradict what he says. But on January 21, broadcasting in the aftermath of the earthquake that devastated Haiti, CNN correspondent Ivan Watson fretted about “chaotic crowds” as the camera showed people who were calm and patient. When Watson announced that we were watching a “chaotic scramble” onto a rescue ship, this was illustrated by a group of refugees carefully, methodically passing a baby onto the boat.

–Walker (2010): Disaster Utopianism on Reason.com

Moral Development in the Brain

If someone takes something of yours from your locker, does it matter if they intended to steal, or if they grabbed it by mistake because they thought it was their locker? We see there is a moral difference here, because people’s intentions and beliefs matter. An inadvertent mistake is one thing, but intentionally stealing is another.

We can see the difference, but typically, children under six do not. They see both things as just as bad, because they do not consider intentions.

The temporoparetial junctions. Image by the Database Center for Life Science, via Wikimedia Commons.

A recent study (Young et al., 2010) found the part of the brain that seems to be responsible for the consideration of intentions in moral judgment. This part of the brain, the right temporoparietal junction, develops between the ages of six and eleven.

I find this work fascinating because it implies that adolescents may still be developing the ability for deeper moral judgment when they get to middle school. It would help explain why they will sometimes make the argument that if the outcome did no harm then any transgression does not matter; taking something from someone’s locker is not that important if they get caught at it and have to return it.

Just like adolescents have to exercise our abstract thinking skills in order to fully develop and hone them, students probably need to practice and think about what morality means.

I think I’m going to have to figure out a framework for talking about morality for next cycle’s Personal World.

Note: Another interesting article on the role of the temporoparietal junction in meta-cognition.

The cynic’s guide to argument

This guide, from a longtime commenter on Megan McArdle’s blog, does an excellent, if cynical, job of explaining how to win an online argument. It includes:

  • Using allusions to make you look smarter (Wikipedia is a great resource for finding quick facts).
  • Treating stupid questions as if they are serious (this one could actually help the conversation).
  • Treating serious questions as though they’re stupid (great way to score points, but do not contribute to a good discussion).
  • Admitting any and all faults you are accused of (this diffuses the bottom two argument styles in Graham’s hierarchy: name-calling and ad-hominem attacks.)
  • Asking earnest questions instead of making arguments (which can be very useful in pointing out the complexities of a situation.)
  • Never pulling rank. Let your credibility (ethos) be based on what your argue, not on how much education/training/experience you have (credibility is important, and so is experience, but pulling rank tends to annoy people and that will loose you friends.)
  • Being brief (snappy one-liners may not have the depth of a well reasoned argument but are more likely to win friends).

Most of these techniques are appeals to the emotions (pathos). They can, and may sometimes need to, be used to support a good, well reasoned, argument (logos).

[B]efore some audiences not even the possession of the exactest knowledge will make it easy for what we say to produce conviction. – Aristotle in On Rhetoric

Be careful how you use these things, and watch out for them, because they don’t only occur online, you’ll see them often in any conversation.

How to disagree

Paul Graham's Hierarchy of Disagreement (image adapted from Wikipedia).

Faced with the rapidity at which anonymous conversations on the internet deteriorate, Paul Graham’s broken things down into six levels of argument. It starts with name-calling at the bottom and ends with the Refutation of the Central Point at the top.

This is a wonderful model. I especially like the diagram because it’s really easy to pick out which level your argument is on. I’m going to make a poster sized version of this and post it on the wall. And, there’ll be a lesson.

Montessori, cooperation and the Tragedy of the Commons

The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things.
— Whitehead (1948) via Hardin (1968)

One of the greatest challenges in designing a cooperative environment is dealing with the potential for free-riding and abuse of shared resources. When dinner needs to be made but one member of the group will not participate everyone suffers, even those who contribute fully. Often, someone else or the rest of the group will step up and do the job of the free-rider, who has then achieved their objective. But what is the appropriate consequence? The social opprobrium of their peers is enough for some, others though seem unfazed.

Overuse of resources is a similar problem, which economists refer to as the tragedy of the commons (Hardin, 1968). When the extra-large bag of M&M’s is full, everyone can grab as many as they desire and everyone is happy. When resources are scarce, however, everyone grabbing is a recipe for disaster. Scarce resources need to be rationed in a way that everyone views as fair. Yet the rational behavior of the individual is to try to maximize their utility by taking as many as they need, regardless of the desires of everyone else, and especially if they’re first in line and no-one else is counting.

Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all. … The individual benefits as an individual from his ability to deny the truth even though society as a whole, of which he is a part, suffers.
— Hardin (1968)

The market solution to the commons problems is to make them not commons. This is usually done by assigning property rights to the previously common resource and allowing the owners to trade. This puts a price on what was once a “free” resource. Of course the price was always there; someone or someones had to go without when the M&M’s ran out (resource depletion). Unfortunately this is particularly difficult when you dealing with a non-currency economy, though I’m sure it could be done.

Reading through Hardin’s original Tragedy of the Commons article it seem that if the embarrassment of violating social norms is insufficient incentive for temperance then some sort of mutually agreed form of coercion is necessary. Interestingly, Hardin was arguing for population control, but the point still stands.

We’re due to have the small groups discuss how the worked together over the last cycle so we’ll see how that goes, but I think we’ll have to discuss the issue of the commons as a whole group when we next have our discussion of classroom issues. I’d like to raise the point that what happens in the classroom is a microcosm of larger society and get in a little environmental economics at the same time.

Education can counteract the natural tendency to do the wrong thing, but the inexorable succession of generations requires that the basis for this knowledge be constantly refreshed.
— Hardin (1968)

FreeRice – donate food with your vocabulary skills

Donate rice by answering vocabulary questions.

The UN World Food Program (WFP) has the site FreeRice.com where for each vocabulary question you answer correctly it donates 10 grains of rice to the WFP. The site is quite ingenious, it uses the money generated by the banner adds at the bottom of the page to buy the rice. It was created by John Breen and donated to the WFP.

The site is going beyond vocabulary into other subjects such as geography (identify country capitals and countries), identifying chemical symbols, art, language and math (pre-algebra).

They also have a nice video of the rice being distributed to refugees from Myanmar sheltering in Bangladesh.