Greetings from Roll the Bones! Here we muse about complexity, learning, epistemology, accomplishing goals in complex environments, and whatever else I might be in the mood to discuss.
One thing I want to drive home is that life is not a game. The only simple, widely-understandable rules it follows are given by God Himself. In all other aspects, things are often more complex than they appear.
Some Brief Housekeeping
Firstly, thank you so much to everyone who responded to the questionnaire. I’m mulling over the results. I’ll leave it open in case there are late submissions.
Secondly, I’m putting together an article on Medium that will describe the Functional Resonance Analysis Method (FRAM) in practical, plain English, perhaps with some commentary. It’s a way of reasoning about any system that you want to “keep working” and how to best do that. I’ll link to it in a future newsletter, or you can check on Medium.
This Week’s Links
There are no affiliate links here, just things I’ve been reading. None of the authors have any idea their work is about to be featured either.
The Ironies of Automation
Did you know that when you automate something, you may in fact make it more likely to fail? L. Bainbridge knows, and she’ll tell you all about it. There are consequences and trade-offs when you automate something. How deeply have you thought about the effect automating something will have?
This is an important and historic paper. It’s not too long and doesn’t have a lot of the usual exclusionary, academic jargon. If you deal with automation or complex systems that sometimes surprise you, you owe it to yourself to get familiar with these concepts.
I gave a (poorly delivered) 20-minutes talk about this paper last year in Singapore.
When you automate something, you’ve now got to monitor the automation to some extent - especially if you automated something important. Boring and unpleasant. How do you know if it is working? How do you debug and fix it if it breaks?
If it stops working, do you know what to do? If the work still needs to get done, do you know what state things are in? Do you even remember how to do the thing anymore? What if the thing happens much faster now that it’s automated, can your manual process keep up?
Automation is incredible and has done so much for us. It’s just not a magic spell that makes all our problems go away. It shifts them.
2010s EdTech Hall of Shame
This article is a detailed list of 100 EdTech failures that happened in the last decade. It’s written by Audrey Watters, who was recommended to me by reader @free_oscillator. Want to peer into the dysfunction of modern “education”? Look no further.
I’m looking at what doesn’t work to better understand the dynamics and stress in this space. Learning is important to me, be it human, animal, or machine. Have recommendations or opinion? I’d love to hear from you.
So many companies are raising funds, putting out a shadow of what was promised, and then folding/getting bought out. While VCs give incentives for founders to take cash they don’t have to pay back in the event of failure and thus take crazy (irresponsible?) risks, I didn’t expect this much of a mess.
Businesses need money to live. How to teach well or inspire != how to get people to give you money. Thus, I think a lot of efforts fail to be effective in their search for profitability.
I’m thinking that efforts, tools, and research into teaching and learning should be decoupled from schooling systems entirely. There are too many twisted incentives and there’s too much existing baggage. Learning > schooling.
I want to help people learn. I want to enable them to flourish. I think we can do much better than current educational systems. More on that some other time.
Revelation of Preferences - NNT
Much ado has been made about how to “reveal preferences”, particularly in the field of economics. Too often, though, we get twisted up in knots when the answers are in front of us. People prefer what they do, not what they say they prefer.
Too often we might say “that shouldn’t work” or “that’s ridiculous!” when the result is right in front of us. Ask any Computer Scientist and we’ll tell you how many times we re-learn that lesson.
What you believe is “cheap talk” if it costs you nothing. What you value is directly evidenced by what you’re willing to give up for it. The true test of preference is to have two things in your hand and to have to throw one of them out to keep the other, so to speak.
“Faith without works is dead” - James 2:17. You can look at trials in life as a forced revelation of preferences. Reality is the ultimate test. Not p-values, not how married you are to your particular solution, not whether or not it “makes sense”.
What do you prefer, that you keep telling yourself that you don’t? If you don’t like the answer, what will you do about it?
Hmm, maybe I do prefer being tired if it means I don’t have to go to bed on a set schedule…
Thank you for reading and engaging.
I appreciate you taking a chance on this newsletter. It’s free, but if you want to help support it you can always make a one time donation.
You can also engage with me on Twitter at @10101Lund about these or any other topics. Archives of this newsletter are here.
Tell a friend. See you next issue!