Choosing Darwin, or, grad school has begun!

Who would've thought that with the start of school I'd've blogged less!... okay, everybody. It's a good sign. Means school is keeping me busy. But is it the "this is awesome-but damn is it challenging-but who cares it's awesome" kind of busy or the "this sucks-I hate it-FML-arrgghhh" kind of busy? Definitely the former.

The biggest problem to face was the choice of seminars. There are simply too many on offer here at VT that are amazingly interesting, which probably says something about the breadth of my philosophical interests and the lack of in-depth preference at this point (except perhaps a slight bias toward epistemology and history/philosophy of science, but those are very broad strokes themselves). So, with the DGS's consent, I signed up for four seminars, while the typical course load is three. I then had two weeks to decide which ones to keep and which one to drop. It was a difficult choice.

The original four seminars were about: (1) religion in the public sphere, focusing mostly on arguments for and against religious tolerance, from Locke to Rawls; (2) the epistemology and metaphysics of Locke and Berkeley, and of the pre-Humean modern period in general; (3) the life and work of Charles Darwin, in occasion of the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin of the Species; (4) and symbolic logic.

Of these, the logic course had to stay, since it's mandatory for all new philosophy MAs. In retrospect, I should have tried to test out of it, since it covers 90% of the material I also studied as an undergraduate... but oh well: this will be a less stressful, more diluted refresher. Also the religion course wasn't in discussion, since it's a one-of-a-kind class with extremely interesting readings and a well-prepared professor (Simon May) that may not come up again while I'm at VT. So it was down to Darwin vs. Locke/Berkeley.

After two weeks of attendance, I've decided to drop Locke/Berkeley. I must confess it was intriguing, and the first week's writing assignment has been a lot of fun. Never before had it taken me ten hours to write a two-page paper, but it was the most original and better-reasoned paper I've written all year, barring my undergrad thesis, of course. As it turned out, Dr. Ott thought it was "very well done!", so chances are I would have done reasonably well in the course. That and the fact that it's the most strongly epistemological of all my choices made me reluctant to let it go. Dr. Ott is fun and a freakin' genius, class discussion was exciting... so nothing really tipped the scale against it.

But something tipped the scale in favor of Darwin. Three nights ago, I lay in bed reading myself to sleep with some of Darwin's field notes from the voyage of the Beagle, a class reading. I fell in love all over again. Some of my fondest memories of college date back to my freshman year, when the glorious Warren Zemke made us read Gould, Mayr, Shermer, Sagan, and of course Darwin himself for a course on history of science and scientific methodology. Those memories came back like a flood, reminding me of why I loved Darwin's lucid thinking, his poetic and yet strikingly accurate observations on geology and zoology, and the beauty of the story of the discovery of natural selection. To have re-read Peter Bowler's Evolution: The History of an Idea in the first week of class surely helped, too, as that had been among my favorite texts last year for a paper on the same topic.

In short, I chose with my heart and not with my brain. Sure, I can rationalize my choice all I want. I can say that the history of science will still be useful to me as a philosophy grad student, or that the course's instructor Dick Burian is both an awesome guy and a great philosopher (I remember him being cited as an authority on adaptationism in my textbooks, for chrissake), or that I will be able to focus not so much on the history of science and instead write a phil.bio term paper if I want to, or that the course will still count toward the philosophy degree as an elective. These are all good reasons, but they didn't tip the scale. The pleasure of reading about natural history did.

Whether that was a poor choice, time will tell. But for now I am confident it was the correct one, partly because there were no wrong choices, not really: when you work and study next door to such excellent philosophers and talented fellow grad students, you're doing the right thing by definition. So yeah, I might as well be wearing the infamous "I'm really excited to be here!" t-shirt. Phail much? Hmm. We'll see.

Reflections on TA-ing and other stuff coming soon... soon-ish... well, eventually!

(end of post)

TA training vs. SI training

I'm undergoing GTA (graduate teaching assistant) training at Virginia Tech, and after the first two days--4 sessions out of 6--my opinion is mixed. The presentations and workshops are well-delivered, entertaining, etc. Top-notch stuff. But they're sorely lacking in two important aspects.

One, presentations are mostly frontal-delivery, one-(wo)man shows with little interaction and no hands-on learning... which is pretty bad, since they're supposed to be shaping teachers. Two, the content of this TA workshop is aimed at people who have never been on the deep end of the classroom before. The first issue is endemic to academia and I won't discuss it. The latter is more of interest to me.

For the last two years of college at Wartburg I've served as a Supplemental Instructor for introductory courses in philosophy. The duties of a SI are quite similar to a TA's, minus the grading (though some SIs do that too). SIs lead discussion, help out students with difficult concepts and putting the material in perspective, assist the professor with scheduling and class communication, and re-lecture as needed. Heck, I've even taught two plenary sessions when the professor was sick. In general, SIs use their hybrid more-than-student, less-than-faculty post to serve as a bridge between faculty and students. The duties and image of TAs are much closer to the faculty side than to the student side, but from a practical standpoint their tasks are nearly identical to SIs. As a result, 95% of the material discussed in these GTA workshops was simply old stuff for me, with the few local differences peculiar to VT accounting for the rest.

I'm a (wannabe-) philosopher, so I name things and affix blame. For one, I blame Virginia Tech for not differentiating between those students with previous SI experience. SI is a national program and more than a few fellow GTAs I've met these days have been SI leaders. They, too, were more or less peeved, depending on the level of SI training they had received at their undergraduate insititution. There should have been some sort of pre-screening based on previous SI-ship experience or advanced sessions for former SIs--or even involvement of former SIs in training non-SI new TAs, just like SI peer mentors carried out a significant portion of SI training at Wartburg. You get my drift. There were countless options, but I feel that the human resources weren't properly utilized. Pity.

More importantly, I praise Wartburg for preparing me so well. The training I've received from (among others) my SI supervisors Jeff Beck and Michael Gleason and my SI peer mentor Lia Kampman was amazingly attuned with VT's declared expectations for their TAs, at least based on these workshops. Now perhaps in a couple months I'll find out I'm an awful TA, and if so I can blame both Wartburg and VT for all-around insufficient preparation--and/or myself, of course, for being a poor learner and not having done more.

Regardless, my point is that I'm very glad that the knowledge and experience I've accumulated in the last two years as a SI, easily the most rewarding part of my college life, is turning out to have been sound, poignant, and resting on solid pedagogical foundations. Whether or not I'm massively deluded, I'll find out. But for now it feels good.

(end of post)

(OT) Airport meanderings

I love airports. I love the smells, the sounds, and most of all the people. Sure, I'm still basically a kid at heart, and what kid doesn't love those giant dick-shaped flying machines--but there's so much more than that. Nothing smells like an airport. It's a mixture of old plastic, new rubber, and human skin. Seriously. When the day is done and you smell your travel clothes, they smell like airport. Unmistakable. And as I said, the people! In no other place than a major international airport do you see such a potpourri of nations, colors, habits, and tongues... and I'm not even very much the multicultural kind: my Wartburg friends know I've never even attended an I-club meeting, party, or whatever! Haha. But today in Rome, as I was waiting to board, I saw a family of Hasidic Jews holding Torahs, waiting in line for the bathroom, next to three Roman teens video-texting someone and talking football in delightfully untranslatable terms. Nearby, the American fat lady tried to placate a crying toddler whom I hoped wouldn't be on MY flight (he was), all the while the Swedish 10-something brother and sister play-wrestled each other on the floor (as only Scandinavian kids can do) as their parents half-laughed and half-scolded. It was one of those epiphanies: we're all basically alike, we're all awesome and we all suck pretty much the same.

Here in Chicago was no difference. See, I cancelled my flight to Roanoke at the last minute and am staying overnight to catch the first flight out at 7am. So since I'm at the Hilton, which is on airport grounds and within walking distance of most terminals, tonight I just toured the airport. Yep. Seriously, how many times do you get to do that? In an airport, you're either running because the flight's on time and you aren't, or you're waiting because the flight's late or the personnel is incompetent. Neither is the good state of mind to consider your surroundings. Despite my love for airports, I admit I haven't really ever gotten to enjoy them, because all the time spent there is time spent worrying, running, or generally being very focused on what needs doing. (For a foreign national in a country with severe repercussions for the smallest mistake in your immigration papers, concentration is a must). Plus, airports are really supposed to be functional, not pretty.

AND YET! Chicago O'Hare is a beauty. I've toured all four terminals in a little over an hour of walking, of course limiting myself to the areas before security. The structure is huge, extremely complex and yet impressively simply laid out and easy to follow. There's a dozen ways to get to the same place and it's nearly impossible to get lost. Everything looks like it can be fully operational at 3am as at peak hours with a million people swarming around. Speaking of people... A mother realized her flight left at 7:45 instead of 8:45, swore loudly in Spanish while her two tween daughters laughed, and then explained to them in broken English that they'd have to run if they wanted to make the flight; they spoke perfect English. A businessman insulted his girlfriend (or whatever) on the phone, totally making a fool of himself. A guy had a prosthetic arm with a hook; a frickin' HOOK! A Hispanic TSA guard went out of his way to help a heavily veiled Iranian (I guess) woman who got confused on which gate to go.

I'm not sure why, but I love all this. Airports are among the most amazing places you'll ever see, both architecturally and from a human(e) standpoint. They're hubs of multiculturalism and varied humanity, and you can't consider yourself a serious people-watcher if you don't go to your local airport every once in a while and just look around. Okay, lately I've been at Fiumicino, Heathrow, Detroit Metro, and O'Hare, which are all very large and very busy...... but you get my drift. :)

Frustration much?

How frustrating it is that all I have to read here at home that's even slightly philosophically oriented (and which I haven't read) is Plantinga's Warranted Christian Belief. I'm not really sure why I bought it in the first place, years ago. I usually appreciate what AP has to say about warrant and epistemic circularity, but I'm not too interested in philosophy of religion anymore, so... ah well. I guess it's back to printing articles from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. And yes, I'm whining. As much as I LOVE being with my parents right now, I'm stuck here for another week and I just can't wait to go back and start classes and shit.

(ignore the stuff below: this IS the full post...)

Asimov's "Foundation" book review

Just got done reading the first book (1951) of Asimov's Foundation saga, made of seven novels and dozens of short stories. I'd only heard the highest praise about it. It won the Hugo award for best sci-fi literary series of all time and it's often flaunted as the genre's highest achievement. My father especially loves it and has read the series many times over.

I really enjoyed the first book. It's intelligent, unpredictable, original, and direct: it tells the bare facts, most of the action happens in dialogues, and there's almost no character development--all stuff that usually spells "bad lit," but which is exactly what I like, as I said last week. I have some reservations, of course, but overall my opinion is positive.

Plot recap. In a very far future, four quadrillion humans populate the Milky Way, united under the huge Galactic Empire. A dying psychologist, Hari Seldon, develops the science of psychohistory, which allows mathematical prediction of the behavior of very large populations. Seldon predicts the Empire will fall within a few generations, and 30,000 years of barbarism will follow before a second Empire will rise and re-unite the galaxy. The fall is by now inevitable, but Seldon develops a Plan to preserve human knowledge afterwards, an intellectual ark to shorten the upcoming middle ages to a mere 1,000 years.

He creates two Foundations of a few thousand settlers at opposite ends of the galaxy. The first Foundation is on Terminus, a small and barren planet in the extreme periphery of the Empire. In the coming decades, Terminus endures a series of "Seldon crises," crucial moments when the Foundation must ensure history follows the Seldon Plan. The first few Seldon crises concern the Four Kingdoms, powerful warmongering planets that threaten to invade Terminus. The Foundation keeps them at bay first with atomic power and then with free trade. Since knowledge of atomic power is already lost in the outer systems, the Foundation introduces its atom-based technology as a religion: its agents pose as "high priests" who are the sole keepers of atomic power plants. Terminus traders, then, establish a clever symbiotic relationship with the Kingdoms, making them purchase household atomic gadgets with food and raw materials. At the end of the book, though, characters realize that rules are changing fast. Korell, a planet closer to the center of the galaxy than the Kingdoms, has retained some knowledge of atomic power and even has some old Imperial starships and weapons. The Foundation's religion is thus ineffectual, and Korell can only be controlled by pure trade devoid of mysticism. Here Asimov suggests that the Foundation will need to keep reinventing its policies as it expands closer to the galaxy's center, where the Empire is still alive and well... for now anyway.

This plot just begs reading. No sci-fi before or since has tackled human history on such a large scale. The only way to make this gargantuan storyarc readable is to focus on facts and single episodes, so the book does read like a summary, and that too abridged... but once again that's fine by me. A negative side effect is that characters are limited to stock American white males. They all speak and act like post-WWII, pre-Cold War era stereotypes: scorfnul, sexist, and a bit racist. It's a shame that a novel with this scope should be written at a time of relative intellectual hegemony, between two major revolutions. Asimov does eschew self-righteous patriotism, though. The Foundation is not Captain America but rather a stalwart of universal (progressive) principles of science and knowledge. If anything, the novel could have been seen as somewhat anti-American upon release: the Foundation prevails thanks to a careful handling of free trade and State-supported religion, two mainstays of the U.S. after WWII. By portraying free trade and religion as little more than organized manipulations of the masses, Asimov is obviously trading jabs at capitalism. It must help that he's a Soviet-turned-American!

A little less forgivable is that he completely ignores the role of women and children, a grave miss in a sociological tale. You write a novel about the preservation of all human knowledge in a time of barbarism and you "forget" to discuss things like procreation, education policies, civil rights, or anything other than the (puerile) cabinet politics of rich white men? Even just in the 1970s he would have been crucified for this. Along the same lines, the novel forgoes any talk of genetic engineering and bioethics, preferring instead the typical, morbid post-WWII infatuation with all things atomic. Asimov can't be fully blamed for all this, though. The genetic turn, for example, was unforeseeable even for an erudite futurist like him at a time when DNA hadn't even been identified; and times probably just weren't mature enough for more social-oriented considerations. Also, perhaps some of these issues are addressed in future Foundation books, which he kept writing well into the 1980s. We'll see.

When all's said and done, the book's main asset remains that it embodies what science-fiction should always be about: a projection of a possible, future state of affairs based on historical, sociological, psychological, and philosophical hypotheses. Science fiction is unwritten history, and the masters of the genre interpret it this way, surely influenced by the "Three Greats": Isaac Asimov, Arthur Clarke, and Robert Heinlein, to whom I might add Philip Dick (not to mention other major authors like Ursula LeGuin and Kurt Vonnegut, who have ventured into sci-fi but not often enough to be properly called "sci-fi authors"). In Foundation, the genius idea of psychohistory follows these canons. It lends a side to philosophical considerations about free will and predestination which Asimov acknowledges even in this first novel. The idea is fascinating that psychohistory can predict the future of the masses with great precision but is completely unable to make predictions about any one individual. As the Master Trader Hober Mallow explains halfway through the novel, given a large enough population some individual is likely to come along whose characteristics are necessary and sufficient to fulfill the task at hand and keep the Seldon Plan on track... and that's a fantastic metaphor for the workings of actual, past history.

As my father wryly reminds me, in the second novel a new menace comes from "the Mule," a humanoid mutant with extrasensory, psychic abilities that Seldon could not predict and who thus seriously endangers the Plan. I look forward to that! For now I just wish, perhaps childishly, that this kind of novel had been written later in the 20th century, when a wider variety of issues could be tackled and factored in the Seldon Plan. But ah well. :-)

End of July

Reflections on Asimov's Foundation coming up. The FINA World Championships are keeping me way too busy for proper philosophizing (a welcome break), and now that Michael Phelps is finally defeated, things are going to get interesting in the 100m and the freestyle relays!

Meanwhile, check out Sam Harris's op-ed on Obama's choice of a scientific advisor. I have a long-standing love/hate relationship with Mr. H so I'll soon comment on this too.

We're the dumbest generation. Now what?

English professor Mark Bauerlein (Emory) writes in The Dumbest Generation that the digital age is stupefying the youth of America, who are so ignorant and so blissfully unaware of past and tradition that they're unfit for the pressures and duties of informed citizenship. His evidence is dozens of scholarly studies showing a steep decline in youth's reading habits and critical skills. They (well, "we": at 28, I fit into his "Don't Trust Anyone Under 30" warning...) are less and less able to retain even basic information and perform simple intellectual tasks. The cause? For one, even though high technology and the media offer plenty of informational opportunities, young people are less and less informed, and so tech is to blame. But so (and primarily) is the previous generation, his own. In what he calls "the betrayal of the mentors," the X-ers haven't fought the stultification of the Y-ers, but instead have glorified it and ennobled it. They've placed it on a pedestal as a new and untouchable status quo. The millennials are rising, they've got cool gadges, they're smarter, and need to be let do as they please. The consequences? Very grim, says Bauerlein, and not at all a bright, multicultural future as the indulgents claim. Knowledge and tradition should help young people become informed citizens and fight their battles, but knowledge and traditions are being lost and battles are being fought on mere hearsay and sheep-like herding. Informed civic engagement is an essential prerequisite for citizenship and a thriving democracy, but very few of tomorrow's leading citizens are informed in any conceivable way, old or new. Consequently, the decline in reading and sound schooling among the youth will result in not only a loss of our common heritage, but possibly in a failure of the democratic system as a whole. When reading ends, so does our way of life.

I'll argue that despite his insufferable style and cheap kid-bashing, Bauerlein is basically correct. His evidence is sound and devoid of major bias. He clearly establishes the situation, points his finger at the right causes, and predicts a sensible set of near-future consequences. Unfortunately he doesn't offer a solution beyond the obvious "kids should read more," though that was never the book's goal. The goal is to awaken the adults, the mentors, to fight the ever-spreading kid-centered media culture, even at the risk of being tacitated as old dinosaurs. The author holds some assumptions that aren't self-evidently true as he claims, and he fails to argue some points as thoroughly as he should, but overall he's right on the mark... unfortunately.

For one, let me get the ad hominem out of the way: Bauerlein is an asshole. His (excellent) writing is pompous and verges on self-righteousness, attitudes largely mirrored by his media appearances. He is not the kind of person with whom I'd pleasantly converse. The most annoying feature of his book is the kid-bashing. In countless instances he describes everything adolescent as "petty," "irrelevant," "silly," "stupid," or downright "mindless." These refer not only to the generation he criticizes, but to the status itself of being an adolescent. He spits venom like a cobra on anything that isn't intrinsically intellectually enriching. To boot, he severely downplays many achievements of the Y-generation, wich I'll argue later is the book's main miss. So while I endorse the main claim and most of the evidence, I could have done with less fervor and judgment, which is as immature as that which it criticizes.

Now to the meat of it. It takes The Dumbest Generation 163 pages to get to the point. The first four chapters provide the evidence on which Bauerlein's case rests, and it's pretty good evidence. If you're strapped for time, all you need to know about the first two-thirds of the book is that he proves that kids read less and watch too much tv. We knew that, and now he's proved it with high stockpiles of scholarly evidence, so we're good (but I'll discuss a couple shortcomings in the evidence later).

In the two concluding chapters Bauerlein first sums up his evidence, then affixes the blame, and finally spells out the consequences. The first argument is simple: kids in the digital age have isolated themselves into a nexus of high-speed information that overblows the importance of peer validation and transient concerns. In other words, we and our peers matter too much and we seek quick, cheap thrills. We live in a present that centralizes us and blots out everything else, and tradition and knowledge are first to go. It's true that everything is social, but it's individualistically and narcissistically social, not culturally so. It's hard to counter this argument, which has been true for quite a while. If anything, I take issue with how Bauerlein downplays some achievement of "my" generation, namely the increased interconnectedness and the spike in volunteer work and community caring. While it's true they were more in touch with tradition and knew more overall, older generations however promoted violence, segregation, and quasi-theocratical forms of church and state. Our generation is following in the X-ers' footsteps in moving away from those and toward a one-race notion of humankind... but this Bauerlein mentions only in passing and drowns in "but" and "however" phrases, which is a significant and somewhat sectarian misrepresentation of how things really are. The positive and the negative coexist and must both be given their due.

The blame-argument points a finger at the mentors, the X-generation. Adults who should "commend [kids] when they're right and rebuke them when they're wrong" have instead elevated adolescent attitudes to a new status quo, one that mustn't be attacked lest one be accused of being a curmudgeon, a backwards grandpa. This interpretation is also quite correct, and it struck a chord. It reminded me of a point that was dear to Stephen King, who in his autobiography On Writing wrote that his generation was largely responsible for the sorry state of the world entering the 21st century: they had the chance to change the world for good but they "preferred free trade, fast-food, and 24/7 supermarkets." In other words, our once-idealistic parents got rich, stopped caring, and raised us in a laissez-faire environment almost completely devoid of tradition and moral fiber, going instantly from one bad extreme to another. This rang another bell. Not 40 years ago corporal punishment was the accepted standard, but then came the Spockians and everything changed. While I do believe that c.p. is barbaric, immoral, and counterproductive, when it went there was nothing to replace it. Families and institutions went from inhumanly strict to unbeliavably inept as "don't punish" (a good thing) became "don't do anything at all" (a disaster) in just a few decades. Likewise it is with culture and tradition: kids are leaving behind the knowledge and methods of their ancestors but aren't replacing them with anything that yields even vaguely comparable results in terms of critical thinking and civic engagement. Yes, it's natural to ditch the old ways and it must happen for us to evolve, but more efficient new ways must come in their place, or "it's like fucking yourself in the ass" (thanks, Lewis Black).

(As an aside--take the statement I just made, that critical thinking and civic engagement must be preserved. Is that obviously true? Notice how it isn't a cultural statement, but a meta-cultural one. Why are critical thinking and civic engagement so self-evidently good that we don't even feel the need to justify them? Couldn't the new ways, which favor intragenerational connectedness and intergenerational exile, be the new standard? What's so important in having a cultural heritage that we must preserve it at all costs? Compare these questions with my previous observations on transhumanism and cybernetic enhancements: by going that route we'll probably lose our humanity as we know it today, but why is that bad? Seldom do writers seriously look into that question, and yet it always nags me, bordering on absolute nihilism as it does. Absolute nihilism feels like anathema most of the times, but at others it feels inescapable, and as such it is an extremely fascinating concept, both logically and ethically. More on that some other time.)

Bauerlein comes a bit close to answering it with his final argument, that is, what the consequences are being and will be of the dumbest generation. Functional democracy requires informed engagement, and informed engagement requires sound schooling. By simple modus tollens, if sound schooling is lacking democracy falls apart. Here we notice that Bauerlein is far from the Dickensian Gradgrind-like automaton of the opening chapters, the champion of useless educational utilitarianism. He is a defender of knowledge not in its guise of guardian of tradition, but as an essential requirement for our very modus vivendi, our way of life. His overarching purpose then is strictly pragmatic: if kids are allowed to disconnect from our common heritage, democracy will be rendered useless.

This too squares well with a notion that has been nagging me for the last few years: democracy isn't working. It isn't working because the idiot has the same voting power as the genius; the culturally isolated, 18-year-old World-of-Warcrafter counts for as much as the philosopher. Joe the Plumber's opinion counts the same as Michel Foucault's before the law and in the public square. This egalitarian character is democracy's greatest asset, but when the information superhighway leads straight off a cliff, then it's its weakest spot. This is not to say that democracy is inherently "good" or "bad," or even that some of its mechanisms should or shouldn't be contested. Surely a major point in the 1960s culture wars was that the fact that Foucault can publish his ideas while Joe the Plumber can't is reason to believe the system is oppressive and must be terminated in its present form. But regardless of whether or not this is true, culture wars must be fought with information and knowledge, which is Bauerlein's main point and which is a bloody good one. The last 5-10 pages of the final chapter are very telling in this sense. If you're a strong leftist like me you might be irritated by Bauerlein's clear right-leaning tendencies, but his points are strongly argued and very much in touch with current reality.

I never say this, but... yeah... you owe it to yourself to read this book, and of course also some that attempt to refute it (which is what I'll look for next). It's important.