Back to book blogging: The Philosophy of John Dewey

I'm reading a collection of essays by John Dewey.  About 2/3 of the volume is on philosophy, and largely out of my depth, so I've just skimmed those parts.  But now I'm at a 1931 essay titled "Science and Society."  The editor of the volume indicates that this essay deviates somewhat from Dewey's usual views on the nature of knowledge--he treats science as impersonal, objective knowledge, whereas usually he stressed the contextual nature of knowledge and learning.  That is actually unsurprising to me, because the second half of this essay reads as technocratic, and technocrats have a soft spot for the opportunities offered by objective knowledge.  Of course, he spends the first half of the essay urging would-be technocrats to be less smug (and good for that!) but Dewey was neither the first nor last technocrat to think that if they just rethought the project they could totes make it work.

He starts by noting that the societal changes wrought by technology had not actually changed human nature:

In its effect upon men's external habits, dominant interests, the conditions under which they work and associate, whether in the family, the factory, the state, or internationally, science is by far the most potent social factor in the modern world. It operates, however, through its undesigned effects rather than as a transforming influence of men's thoughts and purposes. This contrast between outer and inner operation is the great contradiction in our lives. Habits of thought and desire remain in substance what they were before the rise of science, while the conditions under which they take effect have been radically altered by science.

Maybe that's because technology isn't actually new to human beings.  Indeed, we control the planet precisely because we are the best tool-users on the planet.  So a technology-reliant existence isn't a new existence for humans, it's actually all that humans have known for at least a few tens of thousands of years.  We fought off predators by using spears rather than superior muscles and speed, we survived the ice age with fire and blankets rather than fur and insulating fat, and we acquired food with tools rather than claws.  And while I freely concede that the pace of technological change today is greater than in ancient times, when I read the classics I do not notice any substantial differences in human nature.  The Bible, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Greek philosophers, the scribes of ancient Egypt, they all show people who are remarkably similar to today's people.  The educated classes of today feel compelled to visibly celebrate diversity, but similarity is a much bigger fact of human existence.

Having just conceded that humans of 1931 are remarkably similar to those of the past, Dewey goes on to note that information technology has not transformed society:

No sooner do we begin to understand the meaning of one such change than another comes and displaces the former. Our minds are dulled by the sudden and repeated impacts. Externally, science through its applications is manufacturing the conditions of our institutions at such a speed that we are too bewildered to know what sort of civilization is in process of making.

Because of this confusion, we cannot even draw up a ledger account of social gains and losses due to the operation of science. But at least we know that the earlier optimism which thought that the advance of natural science was to dispel superstition, ignorance, and oppression, by placing reason on the throne, was unjustified. Some superstitions have given way, but the mechanical devices due to science have made it possible to spread new kinds of error and delusion among a larger multitude.

... 

The airplane binds men at a distance in closer bonds of intercourse and understanding, or it rains missiles of death upon hapless populations.

Honestly, this reads like an account of the hopes and subsequent disappointments among those who envisioned the internet as transforming society and freeing people.  Yes, the internet has enabled great things, and spread information to be used for good, but it has also been used for dull entertainment and malignant propaganda.  Let us remember that Wikileaks was originally founded as a site for undermining totalitarian regimes via the cleansing light of truth, but in 2016 it was used to advance the political machinations of a Russian dictator and his billionaire puppet.

Also, if we were to change the dated term "mechanical devices due to science" to "information technologies enabled by science" we would have something that any reader in 2017 would think is a critique of the internet.  It's been noted before that the rise of cinema was accompanied by predictions of the demise of universities (classes would be delivered on film reels), as was the rise of television.  It seems that every new information technology elicits the exact same cycle of euphoria and frustration.  All of this has happened before and will happen again.

Beyond information technology, Dewey's basic point is not so different from Kentaro Toyama's Law of Amplification: Technology doesn't so much level or transform human society as allow us to do what we were doing before only moreso.  The advantaged can derive more advantages from technology (though they can also fall if they don't keep up with competitors), the disadvantaged can be left behind in the new economy as they were in the old (though some can also discover a new path forward), people who seek to do good with technology can do more good with new technology, and people who seek to do ill with technology can do the same.

Having noted the ways that science has enabled both good and evil, merely amplifying on human nature rather than transforming it, Dewey goes on to note a point that has my most enthusiastic agreement (though not his):

Shall we try to improve the hearts of men regard without to the new methods which science puts at our disposal? There are those, men in position in church and state, who urge this course. They trust to a transforming influence of a morals and religion which have not been affected by science to change human desire and purpose so that they will employ science and machine technology for beneficent social ends. The recent Encyclical of the Pope is a classic document in expression of a point of view which would rely wholly upon inner regeneration to protect society from the injurious uses to which science may be put. Quite apart from any ecclesiastical connection, there are many "intellectuals" who appeal to inner "spiritual" concepts, totally divorced from scientific intelligence, to effect the needed work.

Indeed, my own belief is that character matters in every age.  Dewey will go on to urge that we apply the methods of social science to solve the problems of human society.  However, the 20th century saw the formulation of theorems (e.g. Holmstrom's Theorem, Sen's Theorem) that demonstrated the limits of what can be accomplished via institutional designs.  There's no way to totally automate decision-making.  And central planning failed.  In my own job I am seeing more and more evidence that "best practices" only take you so far, and in the end you need to hire and retain people with character and values that drive them to do the job within a reasonable incentive structure; process only gets you so far.

Anyway, Dewey does name two areas where the application of science to social problems has been beneficial:  Insurance (where we use statistics to price and mitigate risk, so that people can take the risks that inevitably accompany attempts at great things) and the germ theory of disease/hygiene.  However, the first example involves something that people can choose to buy, and that can be priced without subjective value judgments, and the second ties quite closely to facts of the natural world.  Neither relies too much on the steering of behavior.

He goes on to consider education as an arena for the application of science to social problems.  Despite the exasperation I often display with educational fads, I actually have a lot of sympathy for the idea of applying science to educational problems.  However, I believe that the passions aroused by the cultural, ethical, and political dimensions of education often leak into educational studies, and people believe that their subjective choices about which question to ask shape the answers that they get and (more importantly) the ways in which those answers are applied.  For instance, it is only very recently that people looked at whether "reformed" physics classes were as good as "traditional" classes for improving student understanding of the topics and skills that get greater emphasis in "traditional" classes (since "reformed" classes often emphasis different aspects of the subject).  For decades, many researchers were emphasizing "conceptual understanding" over quantitative problem-solving, for a number of reasons.  I have argued before that this is in part because of the cultural baggage that gets attached to mathematical reasoning (at least in the US), but most of the people who study physics education in the US are natural scientists who have not done a lot of reading on American cultural history, so they are blind to their own assumptions.  It is interesting that the lead author in the study I linked here is a psychologist, not a physicist, and is probably better-trained at unpacking cultural baggage and accompanying assumptions than most physicists would be.

(Then again, Dewey was trained as a philosopher, a field that specializes in skewering assumptions since at least the days of Socrates, yet he also fell into the technocrats' trap.)

So, as far as my own views go, I'm a big fan of social science as science, but skeptical of social engineering.  It's the difference between pure and applied science.  As far as Dewey, I find it fascinating that he could start an essay by noting the ways in which the technological environment experienced by humans has failed to change thought and behavior, but then express great confidence that science can be used to shape social environments in such a way as to steer human behavior.  In that sense the essay falls flat.  On the other hand, I give him full marks for understanding the distinction between changes in the technological environment and changes in human nature.  He even managed to note ways in which the information technology of his era failed to live up to hype about transforming society.  Too bad he didn't carry that humility forward in thinking about social engineering.

Two Cultures Revisited: Knowledge is necessary but not sufficient

I read the 1963 follow-up to "The Two Cultures", titled "The Two Cultures: A Second Look."  He covers a number of points in response to the criticisms he'd received from his surprisingly widely-received lecture, and I have responses to two key aspects.

First, a number of critics were unclear on how, exactly, he was defining the two cultures, or whether he approved of the arrangement.  He tried to clarify that he drew a science/humanities line because he saw the "literary intellectuals" as the people who interact more with the wider society, since they write about people, but the scientists are communicating neither with the wider society nor with the intellectuals who speak to the wider society.  I think a lot has happened with science communication, science journalism, and science publicity in the last several decades, but I agree that the gap is still there.  What's interesting to me is the mechanism by which the National Science Foundation has tried to address this over the past two decades, pushing basic researchers to engage in public outreach via the Broader Impact criterion for funding.  While public outreach is laudable for those who have the time, interest, and talent, it is not in everyone's skill set and it is not necessarily the best use of everyone's time.  Nonetheless, as I have noted before, Broader Impact is consistent with many of America's democratic cultural notions, so here we are.  The implicit assumption is that direct engagement of scientists and the public is what matters at least as much as engagement between scientists and other intellectual classes.

Second, Snow conceded that some of his predictions about economic development had been too rosy, but he believed that what would ultimately improve the lives of billions around the world would be the spread of the Scientific Revolution.  On that I think he erred badly.  There are plenty of poor countries with universities that actually do a fine job in educating students in science; many of those countries produce a great many science graduates who get better test scores than Americans.  What holds those countries back, what stands between their populations and the fruits of modern science and medicine, is NOT a lack of scientific knowledge or appreciation.  Rather, it is failings of economic and political systems.  The problem is not that the classes of intellectuals who study people and make recommendations about human affairs don't understand the importance of science, but rather that they either fail to make good recommendations about human affairs or else fail to get the people in power to listen to good recommendations.  As Kentaro Toyama said in Geek Heresy, technology and the fruits of science are mere instruments, not conductors.  Technology can amplify advantage, and the lack of technology can amplify disadvantage, but the mere possession of technology does not improve a society.  Human efforts, human decisions about the use of technology, those are the things that improve a society.

There are plenty of good reasons to break down walls between the two cultures, plenty of ways in which science can inform the efforts of the general public, the policy-makers, and scholars of the humanities, but spreading the fruits of science may actually be the least of those.  The fruits of science are tremendously valuable, and tremendously beneficial.  They will be fairly distributed (by whatever your yardstick of fairness might be) in an economic and political system that efficiently and fairly distributes value and benefit (again, by your yardstick of fairness).  Scientific knowledge is a necessary condition but not a sufficient one.

Anyway, my book has several more lectures and essays by C. P. Snow.  Let's see what else he had to say.

Sisyphusian

This morning's Inside Higher Ed has an essay on the challenges of using higher ed as a path to class mobility and reduced economic inequality.  Most of what's argued in the essay is completely standard, e.g. rising college costs reduce the potential of higher ed to drive class mobility. On the other hand, an excellent point is made by Barbara Piper  in the comments:

The use of higher education to change social class standing in the post-WWII period was a historical anomaly; college (and education in general) had always been part of the reproduction of social class in the U.S. and elsewhere, not a part of any change in social class. The possibility that expanded opportunities for a college education have not produced quite the changes in social class standing that social engineers may have expected is not at all surprising, and might be one more example of the fallacy of assuming that education alone is the determinant of everything about an individual's life.

Indeed.  The US was not only the industrial leader of the world at the end of WWII, but was also the overwhelming industrial leader, because large portions of the world were devastated.  All sorts of things could work well for us then because we didn't face the economic competition that we now face.  Moreover, while educating the population has certainly played  its part in pushing America ahead of the rest of the world, when you educate everyone in the country then everyone benefits, which doesn't necessarily equalize people if they start from different points, and especially doesn't equalize people if the degree to which they are positioned to benefit depends on the advantages that they already have. The last point is related to Kentaro Toyama's basic argument in Geek Heresy.

Education is an important thing, but at some point you will reach a point of diminishing economic returns on educational expansion, and that's the sign that improving the economy will improve education more than improving education will improve the economy.

Advantage: Advantaged.

A few years ago the Obama administration announced that it was going to put out a "college scorecard" showing data that would help students evaluate colleges.  Supposedly this was Going To Change Everything.

Well, the Chronicle of Higher Education has looked at early results, and it appears that the students who made the most use of this information are students from advantaged backgrounds.

The earnings data, however, did make a difference. (While there have been other efforts to measure postcollege income, this particular metric was new.) Colleges with higher-than-median earnings saw higher-than-expected growth in scores sent in the months after the September release, while those with lower-than-median earnings had lower-than-expected growth. The researchers estimate that for every 10-percent increase in earnings, the number of scores sent rose 2.4 percent.

But when the researchers dug deeper, they found that only some students had been swayed by the new earnings information. "The impact," they wrote, "is driven almost entirely by well-resourced high schools and students." When the researchers looked at parental education, the Scorecard’s impact was concentrated among students whose parents had at least some college. When they looked at race, it was concentrated among students who were white and Asian. And when they looked at school type, it was concentrated among those attending well-resourced public — and even more so, private — schools. 

"The subgroups of students expected to enter the college-search process with the most information and most cultural capital," the researchers wrote, "are exactly the students who responded most strongly to the Scorecard."

If you think about it, it makes sense:  The people who will make the greatest use of information will be those who are the most sophisticated at using information or have people to help them make sophisticated use of information, and those will mostly be students who are already pretty advantaged.  It's not so different from Kentaro Toyama's idea of a "Law of Amplification" in his book Geek Heresy.

But, rest assured dear reader, that the next set of metrics and information resources will Change Everything and totally level the playing field.  Mark my words.  It's coming.  None of this has happened before...or something.

Take note of this

A recent psychological experiment looked at whether people learn more in a lecture by taking notes on a laptop or taking notes on paper. So far I have only read a summary of the study (so all of the necessary caveats apply), but the full research article is available open access.  Apparently people who take notes on laptops try to transcribe as many details as possible, whereas people who take notes by hand record less information but pick out key points and summarize.  Moreover, it is usually easier to lay out information in tables and diagrams and whatnot by hand, and to draw arrows and whatnot by hand than on a laptop.  Maybe with the right software and a lot of experience you can do those things on a laptop, but otherwise doing it by hand wins.

Now, there's a debate to be had about whether it's better to do this on paper or on a tablet, but two things to note:
1) It's obvious that if the key advantage is that doing it by hand is both flexible and forces you to think then the difference between old-fashioned paper and a digital tablet is probably smaller.
2) Paper offers fewer distractions than a tablet.  You can't switch your paper between the writing app and email or Facebook or games or whatever.

In the bigger picture though, I find it fascinating that something as old-fashioned as writing things down might be a good way to learn.  We're always hearing that there's no problem in education that can't be solved by throwing more technology at it, so it's kind of funny to hear that pencil and paper still have their uses.  Most of the points from my blogging about Geek Heresy apply.

Also, there's an important implication here for the perennial debate about lectures (a topic that I have published on):  A lecture class is only as passive as the listener.  The person who merely sits there will usually learn little.  The person who tries to write down everything without sorting the information will learn more, but the person who learns the most will be the one who is thinking about what they're hearing and identifying the most important points and writing them down in some sort of structured list or table or diagram.  Of course, this places the responsibility for learning on the student, whereas the modern zeitgeist places the responsibility on the instructor, who must adopt whatever techniques are politically favored if they wish to escape blame.  Fascinatingly, the politically favored techniques generally require one to purchase technology from vendors.  Fancy that.

Geek Heresy thus far: Chapters 1-8

Not a lot of time now, but a few quick thoughts:
1) Chapters 1-5 explore the motives behind a lot of do-gooderism, and especially a desire for "packaged interventions." Everyone is looking for a "best practice" that is affordable, scalable, and can be implemented by idiots.  That's great if you're trying to open as many burger restaurants as possible, but not so great if your goal is to help people do smarter things and do them better.  There seems to be a desire to find an intervention that you can pay for once and them BOOM! World fixed!

2) This is the excuse of every person who fails to deliver, but it's also true: Many of the most important aspects of human behavior and human learning are not amenable to easy metrics.

3) On page 161, Toyama makes an important point about the craze for "nudges" and (as Cass Sunstein calls it) "libertarian paternalism."  It's the idea that very small, minimally intrusive interventions can have huge effects if  you are smart about human psychology.  On one level it's unobjectionable:  If changing a couple of words on a form helps people make better choices, well, great.  But, on another level, I suspect that nudges are most powerful when people don't know they're being nudged, and if nudges became more common we'd get a response.

More importantly, and in keeping with the previous book that I blogged about, the whole theory of nudges is based on the idea that people are full of irrational little switches that are easy to flip because they don't perceive what's going on.  I'm not sure that that's as true as people think.

4) Finally, about the book itself:  The second half is more about anecdotes, but the anecdotes are used well.  Toyama doesn't try to say "See, here's this anecdote, where these people just did this one thing, and it was all great!"  It's much more "Here's an example of how success came down to a lot more than just pouring in the right technology and pre-packaged tools."  Nonetheless, a lot of it is stuff that right-thinking people have heard or read before, so I've been skimming.

45 pages in: So far I'm hearing everything that I want to hear

And I'm hearing it from somebody who is credentialed, who has worked for Microsoft, and who teaches in an information technology program, so it must be right!

Toyama's basic point about education is that while you can find really good and really bad anecdotes for anything, the schools that are likely to make the best use of digital technology probably also make really good use of chalk and desks and books, and the schools that are likely to realize the fewest benefits from digital technology probably also realize relatively few benefits from chalk and desks and books.  Likewise, in discussing the "Facebook Revolution" in Egypt, he notes that a lot of the participants didn't actually use Facebook to organize, and what really mattered was that there was an existing civil society whose members used a variety of tools.  In other Middle Eastern countries there was no "Arab Spring" because all of the Tweets and Facebook posts in the world cannot create a civil society overnight.  People problems are people problems.

In the realm of business, Toyama notes that digital records have done great things for inventory control at some companies, helping them become more efficient and profitable, while digital medical records have done little or nothing to control the spiral of US healthcare costs.  Problems of people, organizations, incentives, and economics existed long before there were computers, and some of those problems were managed better than others in the pre-digital era, just as in the digital era.

Of course, Toyama has a book to sell, so he can't just put that idea out there and say "So, yeah, I guess we're done here."  That doesn't get you sales and speaking invites.  He has to add a Big New Idea.  His Big New Idea (BNI, hereafter) is The Law of Amplification:  If somebody is already advantaged, or already has a good system in place, then wise use of technology will probably lead to even more success.  If somebody is already stressed or disadvantaged or working in a bad system, then without some very careful though, some hard work, and at least a little bit of luck the technology will at best do nothing and at worst be a boondoggle.  By the standard of BNIs it's relatively inoffensive and commonsensical.  My question is whether Toyama will start pointing to every single phenomenon under the sun as an example of the Law of Amplification.

Finally, I really like the example on page 45:  A company was having problems with a  low-performing regional office.  They decided to set up a sales database to fix it.  However, the person dispatched from corporate headquarters learned that sales staff were evaluated solely on the number of new clients that they signed, not on whether those clients paid their bills.  There was thus no incentive to get reliable clients, just numbers, and the sales staff acted accordingly.  The IT person told headquarters that there's no harm in a better database but the real problem is a sales staff with bad incentives.  Toyama summarized this example with:

In large organizations such as universities, governments, and corporations, one hand frequently doesn't know what the other hand is doing.  To break down silos, it's tempting to set up Web portals and internal social media sites, but the real issues are almost always those of management, internal politics, and even limited human attention.  Unless those social problems are dealt with, technology doesn't have a base to amplify.

Indeed.

Next book: Geek Heresy by Kentaro Toyama

The next book that I will blog is Geek Heresy by Kentaro Toyama, formerly of Microsoft Research and now at University of Michigan. It describes his disenchantment with boosterism for technology as the solution to all social ills, especially technology-enhanced schools. The book's attractions for me are obvious. The biggest danger is that it's a book that will probably tell me what I want to hear, written in an attention-getting short format with a lot of anecdotes.