I read about the Enstitute: Learning By Doing in Forbes. This may not replace MIT, just yet, but I love seeing these upstart experiments to offer something different from the traditional seminar model of education.
I think this kind of stuff should start around 5th or 6th grade, maybe sooner.
I picked this up from the swissmiss blog.
In my previous post, I mentioned that some bands experimented with sounds that people didn’t like. The video is a good example of an experiment someone tried that didn’t catch on.
But, I love the guy’s confidence. Don’t go to bars. Skip. You’ll meet enough people in one day to last you a month.
Let me know how that works out for you.
While listening to my Genius Metal mix recently, I noticed that I most of the songs were at least 10, 20 or more years old.
I may not be up with the scene. Bands may be turning out new metal hits all the time and I’m not aware of it. But, neither are many others. New Metal seems to have sunk to a sub culture status.
When I was younger, I use to wonder why the genres of music that my parents listened to when they were kids had become relics of the past to be played museum-like Oldies stations. Their Rock’n'Roll didn’t sound like my Rock’n'Roll.
But, it occurred to me last week that the same evolutionary forces I described to explain business success, stagnation and even bands that put out one hit wonders may also operate on the scales of musical genres.
Early bands experimented with the sound of metal, people liked it, more bands followed to fill that growing demand. At the same time bands experimented with many other sounds too, people didn’t like those and those bands either served a small following, went away or changed. Their sounds didn’t expand into genres.
Eventually, metal bands created a body of music that made up the Heavy Metal genre and at some point that genre was generating income to make a lot of folks comfortable and reduce the desire and incentives to continue to experiment to push new material into genre.
Much like how Oldies were largely a relic in my childhood, Heavy Metal is pretty much a relic today. Heavy Metal is like a mature business, a past success that becomes the life blood of a bureaucrat.
A moderate/liberal, but mostly uninterested in politics, friend of mine recently told me that he may not vote for Obama next week.
Why?
I’ve worked with this friend for years.
One thing I influenced him on over the years was the idea of emergent order. I pointed out that success stories are often a matter of random luck and the best way to ensure a company’s success is to try as many of the happenstance of random luck as possible.
We saw it over and over at our business. Many things that seemed like they should have worked, didn’t. Some things that seemed like they shouldn’t have worked, did. Many of those things were discovered by accident.
I pointed out to him that centralized management and politically powerful constituent groups in the organization stifled the emergent order that is evolutionary, random, experimental discovery. Stifling that process led to lackluster results — unless the company happened to be very lucky.
My friend said health care was the issue that made him reconsider his presidential vote. Obamacare is a centralized system that will stifle discovery and innovation. It doesn’t allow us to experiment with plans B, C, D, etc. if Plan A doesn’t seem to be working. It only allows for us to keep tweaking Plan A — which puts us on the same path as a mature company that can only manage to tweak its core products, rather discover new ones.
My friend has seen Plan A not pan out enough times that he thought Romney’s approach of letting the states experiment seemed to make more sense.
I don’t know if he will follow through, but it’s good to know that I’ve at least caused him to think about it.
In “the old days” it seems like if you seemed able-bodied, you were expected to find something to do that was worthwhile. There was no dignity for burdening your fellow-man. There were plenty who were not able-bodied that needed our help, after all.
Somewhere along the line, that able-bodied test has morphed into any plausible excuse that you found yourself in an unfortunate position through no-fault-of-your-own, even if by most accounts you could have done a great deal to, at least, prepare for that inevitability.
All of us get in a bind now and then and can use some help, but once we ‘systematized’ that help, we removed the helpers from the helped and created a bureaucracy to administer in between the two. We changed the incentives.
Before the helpers would give friendly advice to those they helped to prevent them from needing help again. They provided gentle nudges and signals to the helped that planning was their responsibility. Perhaps you could have saved more? Maybe you don’t need to drive two Tahoes? Often, the helped was grateful enough for the help and being steered in the right direction, that they would come back and do the same for others. It was a virtuous feedback loop.
But, when we systematized it, we made it so that the helpers could just get by putting the right bumper sticker on their car. They voted for the right people. The people who will take a lot from the wealthy to help those who need it. All they need to do is demonstrate their choice to the rest of us and no more thought is needed.
The helped no longer needed to face the gentle nudges, signals and advice from the helpers.
And, the bureaucracy responds to incentives. The folks in it want to perpetuate their jobs. One way to do this is to work really hard to remove any stigma with being helped. I wonder how many people would take unemployment if there was even a minimal 10 hour per week work requirement attached to it.
I went for a jog last Monday evening, after dark. In my neighborhood, the acceptable practice is to put trash and recycling bins out the morning of trash pickup. It’s somewhat taboo to get this task out-of-the-way the night before, with a few exceptions.
When it gets hot, the trucks run early to avoid the heat. Better get your trash out the night before or risk missing the pickup. Normal pickup is mid morning to late afternoon.
Our pickup day is Tuesday, so weeks with Monday holidays like Memorial Day and Labor Day are always fun. Nobody knows for sure to wait until Wednesday, so some put them out Tuesday morning and let them sit for a day. Count on it being windy enough on these days to blow a couple lids to the recycling bins open and scatter loose newspapers and past homework assignments across the neighborhood.
I noticed while jogging at about 9 pm, I was running down a street about a half mile from the house and almost all bins were already out to the curb. I was thinking to myself, what kind of neighborhood is this, anyway? With breakdowns in social order this close to my home, I might need to think about moving soon. Is this a precursor to rising crime? I’ve noticed more hipsters around. They probably think this is cool.
On the way to work the next morning, early, I passed the same street and glanced over to shake my head in disgust at this haven for thugs.
Oh.
I also noticed the trash truck making its way down the street. I realized it was my trash day too. While my neighbors and I are accustomed to the later pickup, these folks must be near the first on our same trash route for the day.
Social order restored! These folks weren’t bucking the norm. They just had a different norm that was shaped by their order on the route. They didn’t want to risk missing their alarm and be left with stinky trash sitting around for another week. That’s why they put their bins to the curb the night before. They’re still responsible homeowners after all.
Many folks write about the threats to traditional education from things like online education. I would like to see this type of thing play a major role in defining its next wave (HT: Carpe Diem).
Here’s more on ‘this type of thing’ from the linked article:
This is not some kind of dorm, but a “hacker hostel.” It’s one of several in the Bay Area that offer short- or long-term stays for aspiring tech entrepreneurs on the bottom rung of the Silicon Valley ladder, those who haven’t yet achieved Facebook-level riches. These establishments put a twist on the long tradition of communal housing for tech types by turning it into a commercial enterprise.
The San Francisco hostel is part of a minichain of three bunk-bed-stuffed residences under the same management, all places where young programmers, designers and scientists can work, eat and sleep.
These are not so different from crowded apartments that cater to immigrants. But many tenants are here not so much for the cheap rent — $40 a night — as for the camaraderie and idea-swapping. And potential tenants are screened to make sure they will contribute to the mix. Justin Carden, a 29-year-old software engineer who is staying in another hostel, in Menlo Park, while working on a biotech start-up, talks about the place as if it were Stanford.
“The intellectual stimulation you get from being here is unparalleled,” Mr. Carden said. “If you’re wanting to do something to change the world and make it a fundamentally better place, you need to be around the right people.”
I’d also like to see businesses get in on these sorts of things. I often joke that established companies desperately looking for their next big thing hope to skip over the experimentation, discovery, pilot and organic growth phases of the business and get to the mature phase, usually in a few months. That plan usually fails.
Sponsoring some hacker hostels, and things like it, just might help businesses create an experimentation and discovery breeding ground. And it would cost a fraction of one of their idea-to-national-product failures.
Things like it would be similar types of breeding grounds for non-tech startups.
Just a paragraph later from the previous quote, Manzi writes:
These deep commonalities across activities such as science, markets, common law, and representative democracy at least indicate the plausibility of a common underlying structure. Each is a noncoercive system for human social organizations to increase material well-being in the face of a complex environment.
They are all methods for obtaining and exploiting practical knowledge through action, and all commingle abstract knowledge and action to various degrees; hence, so-called tacit knowledge. If the environment were simple–if determining the course of action were obvious and relatively static across time–then the complexity and waste of a scientific/market/judicial/democratic process of discovery would not be justified, and central authority would more efficiently impose a common answer.
Later, Manzi reminds us that we should be humble about our knowledge, even if we have what we think are foolproof models to help us predict what might happen (p. 67):
By (unverifiable) tradition, a Roman general who received a triumphant parade upon returning from a conquest had a slave stand just behind his shoulder, whispering over and over again into his ear, “Remember, you are mortal.” When using a probabilistic forecast, we should always hear a whisper in our ears remind us: The model is never the system.
I agree. I often tell my statistician buddies that to create a model that factors in everything in a complex system they would first need to create the universe.
I think the models they create are like the artist’s rendering of a subject. With a great artist, his or her rendering may be good to hang on the wall, but it tells us very little about the true workings of the subject’s world.
The rendering of a mountain landscape, for example, will not give us any information about how weather fronts move over those mountains or how universal forces combined to create the majestic landscape. The artist’s rendering is nothing more than well placed brush strokes on a canvas that merely represent the landscape from one particular point of view at one particular point in time. A statisticians model is much closer to that than it is a living model of the real world.
Of course, some folks entertain the thought that our universe is a simulation. Perhaps we live in a model of a statistician that took my advice to heart.
Jim Manzi, in his book, Uncontrolled, writes about how the invisible hand orders more of our lives than just commerce. It exists in all systems with human interaction, including common law (p. 52):
The common law’s noble lie/leap of faith is that practitioners serve some concept of justice; its invisible hand is that a series of disputes in which both sides pursue self-interest under a regime of competent regulation produces, over time, outcomes that tend to support a society capable of creating public order and material abundance.
I’m a fan of American Ninja Warrior. It’s a TV show and obstacle course competition that originated in Japan and is now serving up summer entertainment for us ninja wannabes.
Those who seem the most adept at conquering the tough obstacles are those with free running and parkour background and training. These are the dudes that use their creativity to jump and flip off of normal, everyday things like park walls and stairs. They sometimes jump from building rooftops. For them, it’s an art and it’s all about the creativity in how they get from one obstacle to the next.
I’ve noticed in many of the competitor profiles on the show, the contestants are working out at new-style parkour gyms, like this one (fun video). These gyms offer obstacles similar to what you might find in a park or urban setting and some obstacles that you see on American Ninja Warrior, like cargo nets, warped walls, the quad steps and salmon ladders.
Many of these obstacles are currently hand made out of plywood, boards and pipe from the home improvement store.
If the show and sport continues to gain popularity, this will be an excellent example to watch how the free and invisible hand of the market organizes resources to satisfy the desires of people looking to improve their fitness with American Ninja style obstacle courses.
Watch more parkour/obstacle gyms open up. I wouldn’t be surprised to see an American Ninja Warrior-branded gym.
Watch companies start to make the obstacles for these gyms and for individuals as the handmade obstacles give way to the professionally designed and made obstacles. I wouldn’t mind having a go at the warped wall.
Just as cities installed skateboard parks, perhaps they’ll lay out new Ninja Warrior parks.
This trend could fizzle and go nowhere. But, if it grows, it’ll serve as a good example to watch as people try to respond to other people’s’ desires. Not everything will work. It will evolve and it may look different down the road. But, nobody is guiding this centrally. The invisible hand is at work.
