Posts Tagged ‘philosophy’

12
Oct
2020

Stockdale Paradox

categories: academic library, mindfulness

What the Stockdale Paradox Tells Us About Crisis Leadership

https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/what-the-stockdale-paradox-tells-us-about-crisis-leadership

“I lived on a day-to-day basis. … [M]ost guys thought it was really better for everybody to be an optimist. I wasn’t naturally that way; I knew too much about the politics of Asia when I got shot down. I think there was a lot of damage done by optimists; other writers from other wars share that opinion. The problem is, some people believe what professional optimists are passing out and come unglued when their predictions don’t work out.”

The Stockdale Paradox—have faith, but confront reality—can be seen in slightly different forms in many cultures.

Stockdale himself was a follower of the ancient Greek Stoic philosophers, who were noted for their concern with understanding reality correctly and shaping one’s response to it optimally. The maxim of Epictetus, “What, then, is to be done? To make the best of what is in our power, and take the rest as it naturally happens,” has similarities to both Buddhist doctrine and the Alcoholics Anonymous Serenity Prayer. (“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference”). Therapy techniques such as radical acceptance similarly emphasize the point of letting go of desires and beliefs about what should be and seeing reality as it is.

In the words of Marsha Linehan, the founder of radical acceptance: “Radical acceptance doesn’t mean you don’t try to change things … You can’t change anything if you don’t accept it, because if you don’t accept it, you’ll try to change something else that you think is reality.”

Research by Leach and others indicates that people who survive disasters are able to regain cognitive function quickly after the event, assess their new environment accurately, and take goal-directed action to survive within it. This is the balance that the Stockdale Paradox facilitates: the realism to let go of intrinsic survival mechanisms and the deep-seated faith to learn the new ones.

the pattern of human response to disasters has been shown to be remarkably consistent across cultures, and for disasters of many different causes, effects, and durations, from earthquakes to shipwrecks to kidnapping.

Advice and exercises for leaders

Begin meetings by having each person introduce themselves by their name, job title, mission, and their immediate tasks

This provides practical information to rescuers, but also has the effect of bringing people back to themselves and helping them begin to focus again.

Angela Duckworth’s concept of grit may be useful here. By grit, Duckworth does not mean endurance for its own sake, but rather commitment to a high-level goal, purpose, or mission—and the ability to assess and revise lower-level goals and tactics as necessary.

One question should be regularly asked at meetings: “What is something that doesn’t fit in, that doesn’t make sense?” 

Normalize admitting these mistakes and analyzing them. Discuss weak spots, harm reduction, and damage control—people will sometimes fall when traveling uncertain terrain, so how can they fall without injuring themselves?

Create ways for your team to surface both their deep faith and their real fears. 

In mental contrasting, a person:

  • Visualizes a goal and its rewards, and then
  • Visualizes what obstacles—including their own behavior—stand between them and their goal. (It is important to do it in this order.)

In their paper on the Stockdale Paradox, authors C. W. Von Bergen and Martin S. Bressler point to previous studies that show when people focus on only positive thoughts about the future, “they literally trick their minds into thinking they have already succeeded and, so, do not need actual efforts to attain something perceived as already acquired.

01
Oct
2020

office in VR

categories: AR, Digital literacy, e-learning, educational technology, gamification, gaming, information literacy, information technology, instructional technology, VR

https://www.lifewire.com/your-next-office-could-be-in-virtual-reality-5079457

  • The pandemic is driving interest in using virtual reality for business.
  • Facebook’s Oculus 2 VR headset will support an application called Infinite Office that allows people to work in a virtual office.
  • Advances are needed before VR can replace real-life interactions, experts say.

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more on VR in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=vr+virtual+reality

more on XR in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=extended+reality

more on ASVR in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=asvr

07
Sep
2020

Populism vs Meritocracy

categories: academic library

Michael Sandel: ‘The populist backlash has been a revolt against the tyranny of merit’

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/sep/06/michael-sandel-the-populist-backlash-has-been-a-revolt-against-the-tyranny-of-merit

Even a perfect meritocracy, he says, would be a bad thing.

Centre-left elites abandoned old class loyalties and took on a new role as moralising life-coaches, dedicated to helping working-class individuals shape up to a world in which they were on their own. “On globalisation,” says Sandel, “these parties said the choice was no longer between left and right, but between ‘open’ and ‘closed’. Open meant free flow of capital, goods and people across borders.”

“Those at the top deserved their place but so too did those who were left behind. They hadn’t striven as effectively. They hadn’t got a university degree and so on.” As centre-left parties and their representatives became more and more middle-class, the focus on upward mobility intensified.

Blue-collar workers were in effect given a double-edged invitation to “better” themselves or carry the burden of their own failure. Many took their votes elsewhere, nursing a sense of betrayal. “The populist backlash of recent years has been a revolt against the tyranny of merit, as it has been experienced by those who feel humiliated by meritocracy and by this entire political project.”

Does he empathise, then, with Trumpism? “I have no sympathy whatsoever for Donald Trump, who is a pernicious character. But my book conveys a sympathetic understanding of the people who voted for him. For all the thousands and thousands of lies Trump tells, the one authentic thing about him is his deep sense of insecurity and resentment against elites, which he thinks have looked down upon him throughout his life. That does provide a very important clue to his political appeal.

“Am I tough on the Democrats? Yes, because it was their uncritical embrace of market assumptions and meritocracy that prepared the way for Trump. Even if Trump is defeated in the next election and is somehow extracted from the Oval Office, the Democratic party will not succeed unless it redefines its mission to be more attentive to legitimate grievances and resentment, to which progressive politics contributed during the era of globalisation.”

“We need to rethink the role of universities as arbiters of opportunity,” he says, “which is something we have come to take for granted. Credentialism has become the last acceptable prejudice. It would be a serious mistake to leave the issue of investment in vocational training and apprenticeships to the right. Greater investment is important not only to support the ability of people without an advanced degree to make a living. The public recognition it conveys can help shift attitudes towards a better appreciation of the contribution to the common good made by people who haven’t been to university.”

A new respect and status for the non-credentialed, he says, should be accompanied by a belated humility on the part of the winners in the supposedly meritocratic race.

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Why meritocracy isn’t working

https://www.ft.com/content/f881fb55-8f06-4508-a812-815a10505077

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As we “knowledge workers” know, clever people aren’t always the most collaborative. And what they have in brainpower, they often lack in empathy. We live, after all, in a cognitive meritocracy in which IQ is valued much more highly than EQ (emotional intelligence) or most physical abilities.

political analyst David Goodhart, whose new book Head, Hand, Heart

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Over the past several decades, as traditional class structures in countries such as the US and the UK began to break down, they were replaced by a new system of educational and professional advancement based on test scores, grades and intelligence, at least as narrowly defined by IQ. Suddenly, smart working-class kids could become part of a meritocratic elite.

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But there was a dark side. As British sociologist Michael Young observed when he coined the term in his prescient book of dystopian fiction The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958),

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members of the working class must judge themselves not by their own standards — in which traits of character, experience, common sense and grit are often as important as test-based intelligence — but by the standards of the meritocratic elite. Without the appropriate degrees, professional qualifications and opinions sanctioned by their educated overlords, they were all too often deemed unworthy — or as Hillary Clinton once put it in a quip that helped end her political career, “deplorables”.

In their book Deaths of Despair, Anne Case and Angus Deaton spelt out the toll this has taken on working-class white men in particular. Contempt can be just as lethal as poverty — low status in a hierarchy produces the stress and anxiety that trigger immune system-damaging cortisol to be released in the body.

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more on populism in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=populism

on meritocracty in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=meritocracy

01
Sep
2020

digital ethics

categories: academic library, information technology

O’Brien, J. (2020). Digital Ethics in Higher Education: 2020. Educause Review. https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/5/digital-ethics-in-higher-education-2020

digital ethics, which I define simply as “doing the right thing at the intersection of technology innovation and accepted social values.”
Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, written by Cathy O’Neil in early 2016, continues to be relevant and illuminating. O’Neil’s book revolves around her insight that “algorithms are opinions embedded in code,” in distinct contrast to the belief that algorithms are based on—and produce—indisputable facts.
Safiya Umoja Noble’s book Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power

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International Dialogue on “The Ethics of Digitalisation” Kicks Off in Berlin | Berkman Klein Center. (2020, August 20). [Harvard University]. Berkman Klein Center. https://cyber.harvard.edu/story/2020-08/international-dialogue-ethics-digitalisation-kicks-berlin

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more on ethics in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=ethics

28
Oct
2019

AI Ethics, Policy and Governance

categories: announcement, Digital literacy, educational technology, information technology, instructional technology

https://hai.stanford.edu/?sf111258978=1

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more on ethics in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=ethics

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