Egyptian Protest Simulation

For the record, the following was my attempt to simulate the current Egyptian protests. I tried this one afternoon after the class had watched a particularly stirring video of the protesters, and my intention was to give students with a simplified picture of what was going on and who was doing it. We’re not covering revolutions until next year, but the current events in Egypt are too important to ignore.

The Players

1. Hosni Mubarak

Hosni_Mubarak_ritratto — Hosni Mubarak. (Image by Presidenza della Repubblica via Wikimedia Commons)

Hosni Mubarak is the President of Egypt and autocrat for the last thirty years. I tried to match students, in a rough and ready way, to the personality/characteristics of the people and groups they were supposed to represent, so for Mubarak I picked someone who could think fast on their feet and would play the role to the end, not giving up easily to the demonstrators just because they (as I believe all my students are) are sympathetic to their cause.

2. The Secret Police (also pro-regime “protesters”)

egypt-id — This ID is of an undercover security officer who tried to start a fight, he was apprehended but not hurt, however, he said he was paid to come and start trouble. (via Al Jazerra English)

The student playing the secret police was given a weapon, a popsicle stick, with which he could attack the protesters, but was not powerful enough to “kill” anyone on its own. He had to follow the instruction of Mr. Mubarak. I chose one of my more kinetically oriented students for this role, and he spent a lot of time crawling under tables and harassing the protesters as they tried to make their signs.

I tried the simulation in class before the overnight battles where pro-Mubarak “protesters” attempted to take Tahrir Square, so I just briefed the student tasked with this job that he was the dreaded secret police. However, given that the anti-government protesters were able to beat of their attackers, and that police ID was found on captured attackers, I think the pro-government rioters can be lumped in with the secret police.

3. Barack Obama

Official_portrait_of_Barack_Obama — Barack Obama.

I chose my student whose major ambition is to be president for this role. He’s quite serious about it, and follows world politics, so could handle the tricky balance of deciding if to support a client who has provided stability (until now), as opposed to supporting the pro-democracy protesters, as his predilections would demand.

4. The Army

Egypt political crisis — Egyptian Army tanks in Tahrir Square in Cairo. (Image from Al Jazeera English)

This was another tricky role to play. The top brass tend to support the regime, while the enlisted soldiers and lower-level officers have shown support for the anti-government protesters. There was even a story of a lower level officer joining the protesters because his brother had been killed in the protests. The Army also has the tanks and power to decide things one way or the other if they so choose. They’re also well respected.

I gave the student playing the Army a simulated gun, but told him, in secret, that he only had three bullets, not enough to “kill” all the protesters.

5. The “People”

egypt-TV — The quiet majority. (Image from Al Jazeera English)

Despite all the people protesting in Tahrir Square, the vast majority of the population of Cairo are at home, worrying, watching things unfold on TV, trying to figure out what’s going on and what to do.

My quietest student got this job, one who could exhibit a lot of restraint, and be reluctant to do anything radical. They were instructed that their main role was to worry, but, if things got so bad that they had to take sides, whichever side they took would win. They were that powerful, but unaware or fearful of using that power.

6. Student Protesters

Despite the smile on the face of the student protester in the adjacent image, I instructed the student representing the young student protesters in Tahrir Square that those students were, at the core, angry and frustrated. They are educated so they know a bit of history and about politics. They know what things could be like, how things could be.

7&8. The Muslim Brotherhood

protest-egypt-02 — The Muslim Brotherhood.

I assigned two students to be the Muslim Brotherhood, given their relative size. They wrote their protest sign using Arabic characters since the Brotherhood, with all their charities, represent the poorer, less educated people (so they’re less likely to have English as a second language).

My students were told they were pious and work closely together, to represent the religious background of the Brotherhood and the discipline of the organization.

9. Middle Class Protesters

protest-egypt-03 — Middle class protester with young child.

In between the major street battles, when the protests swelled to their largest size, the middle class protesters came out. They have something to loose but want the best for their kids. Some of them brought their kids.

They’re educated and probably have a decent income. Although they’re not the loudest or most angry, these are the kind of people with the high per-capita incomes that you want for any new democracy to succeed.

10. Mohammed ElBaradei

Mohamed_ElBaradei — Mohamed ElBaradei (image from the IAEA).

ElBaradei is an interesting character in all the turmoil in Egypt. Westernized and liberal-minded, he’s spent a lot of time working for international organizations but has only focused on Egyptian politics in the last few years. As such, he doesn’t seem to have much of a grass-roots constituency.

I try to get my students to argue with me on the basis of logic rather than anything else, and I chose a student who’s rather good at it for this role. Protests, however, are driven more by logic than emotion. So when this student got frustrated and gave up after trying to organize the protesters, who they were all too busy making their signs, I thought added some unexpected verisimilitude to the simulation. (I had to prod them quite a bit to wrap up on the signmaking, otherwise we’d have gotten nothing else done for the rest of the day).

Missing

Putting all this together quickly did mean that I probably missed some major players, including, I suspect, the important role of the media.

Putting it all together

With the actors in place (and signs finally ready), my protesters marched on the square. The Army was caught in between the protesters and Mr. Mubarak. The “People” watched from the sidelines. Everyone had their say, from the perspective of their group, but I had to do a little coaching to keep them to their assigned tasks.

No one won in our simulation. It ended in a stalemate, because the only actor capable of bringing things to a conclusive end, the Army, could not decide which side to choose. Which is pretty much where Egypt has been for the last week. Until today.

Graphing discussion threads

wikipedia-threads — Graphic representation of the Wikipedia discussions about deleting articles. The image links to an interactive version of the graphic at http://notabilia.net .

Swings to the right are arguments for keeping the article, swings to the left are arguments to delete them. Moritz Stefaner and others’ website have created this wonderful graphic of Wikipedia’s discussion threads. They have lots more details and discussions on their website.

The scientific explanation of why adolescents know everything!

The central proposition in our argument is that incompetent individuals lack the metacognitive skills that enable them to tell how poorly they are performing, and as a result, they come to hold inflated views of their performance and ability…. the way to make incompetent individuals realize their own incompetence is to make them competent.
– Kruger and Dunning (1999): Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments (pdf)

If you don’t know what you’re doing, then it’s quite likely that you don’t know that you don’t know. Kruger and Dunning (1999) did a set of interesting studies to show this to be the case. It explains why people with the least information and knowledge about a subject may feel the most confident to opine about it.

It kind of explains why adolescents know everything. I know that I knew everything when I was 12, and ever since then I’ve been knowing less and less.

Of course there are the less typical teenagers who don’t express the same unaware overconfidence. They can be extremely competent at a particular thing (let’s call it a domain), like writing to take a purely random example, yet are extremely unconfident of their ability.

Well Kruger and Dunning (1999) have an explanation for that too. Competent people tend to think everyone else is competent too, so they tend too underestimate their ability relative to everyone else.

Teachers can easily fall into a similar trap, because we will often, quite unintentionally and unconsciously, assume students know more than they do. This is one of the reasons peer-teaching works so well. Students are more likely to know where their peers are coming from, and what they know to begin with.

The NY Times’ Errol Morris has a great interview with one of this study’s authors.

I’ll end with the most wonderful concluding remarks, which really put this whole study in perspective:

In sum, we present this article as an exploration into why people tend to hold overly optimistic and miscalibrated views about themselves. We propose that those with limited knowledge in a domain suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach mistaken conclusions and make regrettable errors, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Although we feel we have done a competent job in making a strong case for this analysis, studying it empirically, and drawing out relevant implications, our thesis leaves us with one haunting worry that we cannot vanquish. That worry is that this article may contain faulty logic, method- ological errors, or poor communication. Let us assure our readers that to the extent this article is imperfect, it is not a sin we have committed knowingly.
—Kruger and Dunning (1999)

Student blog update

Well, I’ve made sure that everyone who wants one has a blog, and I’m still finding that the girls are the ones who’re updating them while the boys are not.

This is a small class, so we can’t have any statistical confidence in this observation, but for now at least, the trend continues.

I have also noticed that some of my bloggers are using their Personal World time to blog. I did not require this, or even suggest it, but I think this is great because they’re doing exactly the type of self-reflection that Personal World is intended to elicit.

Seeing Egypt in Ankh-Morpork

Egypt-barricades-front — Anti-government protesters guard their barricade at the Kasr al-Nil bridge entrance into the square. They erected a complicated defense wall, strung a heavy electrical cable around 10 meters in front of the wall, and scattered lines of debris another 10 meters ahead of that to break up any attacks. (Image and caption from Al Jazeera English)

Following the ongoing convulsions in the Egyptian streets, I’m becoming more and more impressed by the research and thought that Terry Pratchett must have put into his novel Night Watch.

Egypt-barricades-back — Anti-government protesters anticipating an attack man the barricade at the Kasr al-Nil bridge entrance into the square, where they had arranged complicated defense walls and stockpiled rocks to throw at pro-Mubarak men. (Image and caption from Al Jazeera English).

In typical Pratchett fashion, Night Watch has an amalgamation of influences, from fictional sources like Les Miserables, to historical events, like the Peterloo Massacre of 1819; however, the book follows a character immersed in the events that are remarkably parallel to what’s going on Egypt right now, especially with the Army trying to sit out events and things becoming somewhat medieval.

egypt-dibbler — A man sells koshari to anti-government protesters for three pounds a cup (around 50 cents) inside the barricade at the Kasr al-Nil bridge entrance into Tahrir. (Image and caption from Al Jazeera English).

This is the first time I’ve been able to follow a revolution so closely, and it’s largely thanks to the volumes of raw reports streaming across the twitterverse, blogosphere and media websites. Pratchett gives us the wonderful characters that highlight the inherent conflict in the revolution: the police with their conflicting allegiances; the secret police that have to be dealt with; the idealists whose high hopes are bound to be dashed on the rocky shoals of human nature; and even down to the men selling food to the protesters behind the barricades.

Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett — Night Watch

I think I’m going to have to add this book to our reading list for next year.

At the end of Night Watch, the protesters win, and barricades come down when the old dictator is deposed. However, he’s replaced by a new dictator, who turns out to be just as bad as his predecessor. To paraphrase Pratchett, they’re called revolutions because they go round and round.

egypt-campfires — In the center of the square, anti-government protesters sat around campfires and talked - as they have for the past nine nights of demonstrations. (Image and caption from Al Jazeera English - Feb 4th, 2011)

What is “Natural”?

Trans_Alaska_Pipeline_Denali_fault_shift — The Trans Alaska pipeline. The bend is due to the fact that it's sitting on a faultline. (Image via the USGS)

Back in 1991, Jay Anderson wrote and interesting article (free pdf) on how exactly to go about measuring “naturalness”.

After all, anywhere you go in this world, you’ll find it has been impacted by humans to some degree: agriculture in Brazil is affecting rainfall patterns in the remotest parts of the Amazon basin; and soot and anthropogenic chemicals gently, and subtly, contaminate the remotest Antarctic Ice Caps.

Anderson came up with three things to look at, but I think the two key are:

how much things would change if you removed people,
how many native species there are compared to how many their were in the past.

I think it’s important to try to at least better define what we mean by the word “natural” as we think about conserving the environment.

The World without Us - Alan Weisman — The World without Us by Alan Weisman

Anderson’s first point, about how much things would change if you removed the people, also brings to mind Alan Weisman’s book, The World without Us, which imagines what the world would look like if humans disappeared: what would happen to the cities and artifacts we leave behind?