A strange progression, from understanding to puzzlement!

.“”—‘’
Here is an interesting phenomenon I have observed!  It takes place over several generations, so you have to take it for what it’s worth.

A teacher explains a certain phenomenon to her students.  She understands it perfectly, at least to whatever extent it is possible to understand a thing.  For the sake of clarity, suppose it is about the phases of the Moon.  “So, you see,” she says, “if the Moon happens to be exactly overhead at 6:00 PM, when you can assume the Sun is just setting, the line from the Moon to the Earth will be at 90 degrees to the line from the Sun to the Earth!”

The majority of the students, of course, will see where this is going, and while the Sun may not be just setting, in principle the Moon-Earth-Sun angle is going to be roughly a right angle, as close as makes no difference.  Now, since the line from the Sun to the Moon, and from the Sun to the Earth are nearly parallel (that’s probably a tough sell, too; some of the slower kids will get hung up on the fact that if the Sun lies on both lines, how can they be parallel?  They cannot understand that they’re never going to experience more parallel lines than these two, since the Sun is so far away.  (Oddly enough, kids will not have any problem regarding two sides of a street as being parallel, though in theory they’re actually little bits of enormous circles, and as such the term ‘parallel’ does not even apply to them.)

Anyway, the point is, that if it so happens that the Moon is dead overhead at 6:00 PM, it will have to be a half-moon.  Throughout the night, both the Sun and the Moon will drift Eastwards, but they will essentially maintain the right angle, since it is the Earth that is rotating, while the Sun and the Moon are moving far too slowly to make much of a difference to the angles.

You can imagine that the teacher explains the phases of the Moon in greater detail, and some of the students get it, but others will not.  However, if the teacher is to be considered a good teacher, by the standards that have come down to us, she will give the class some rules of thumb whereby even the students who have not understood the phenomenon can make predictions about the phases of the Moon.

Unfortunately for us, and for humanity at large, you can imagine that it is some of those kids who just didn’t get it, but who were able to use the rules of thumb effectively, who go on to take up the profession of teaching.  Many teachers teach for the love of it.  The rest do it because it is the most convenient thing to do.

Teachers, by and large, are a conscientious lot, and one can imagine that, in advance of having to teach about the phases of the Moon, a teacher will put in a fair attempt at trying to understand the whole business, and what eluded her as a student might easily be within her grasp as an adult, and her students may be so lucky as to have the opportunity to understand the geometry of the phenomenon.  But over several generations, it is quite possible that only the rule of thumb survives.

Years later, it is possible that the principles of a particular phenomenon still hold, but whatever condition allowed the creation of Rules of Thumb no longer applies.  For example, the rules of thumb governing health insurance are probably no longer valid, especially in light of the changed situation regarding pre-existing conditions.  Insurance analysts who relied on Rules of Thumb must make up a whole new set of RoT's to use when they’re not in a mood to really think, on a morning after a night of heavy drinking.  (Actuaries drink like fish.  I’ve seen them.  There’s a rule of thumb for you!)

So if the assumptions on which a Rule of Thumb is based change enough, people will be puzzled, and lose faith in the entire education they have received, which in most cases is just the entire body of Rules of Thumb on which they operate.  Kids these days actually think that the teacher’s entire responsibility is to pass along some rules of thumb (and some professors have bought into this idea), and are puzzled and frustrated when anyone tries to give them the Big Picture.  We have an entire population of kids saying: “Just the facts, Ma'am.”  They mean: Just the rules of thumb, please; I don’t have time for anything else.

The phenomenon of only the rule of thumb surviving is, of course, not by any means restricted to astronomy.  All around us we see examples of people relying on rules of thumb:

• Buy low, sell high.
• Charge whatever the Traffic Will Allow.
• Cheating the Government is OK, because it’s Our Money, Anyway.

Some of these are only Rules of Thumb if you’re not very moral, to begin with.

• Righty Tighty, Lefty Loosey.  (Unless you’re working with certain plumbing fixtures or bicycle pedals!)
• Red Sky In The Morning, Take Warning.
• Taxes are bad for Small Business.
• Government is bad for Health Care.

The rules of thumb for diet and nutrition are the most variable.  Some people avoid sugar, but eat tons of meat, unaware that protein is ultimately turned into either other proteins, or to sugars, especially if you eat a lot of protein.  And unless you eat only egg-white, protein carries along with it a lot of fat (no matter how hard you try to trim it away), and a teaspoon of fat has as much calories as a quarter cup of sugar.  (I’m not absolutely certain of the equivalence; I’ll have to check it and get back to you.  Another scary rule of thumb!!!)

Rules of Thumb for responding to Economic Conditions are pretty interesting, and suspicious, too.  Economists have a myriad ways of advising whether or not to raise taxes, whether or not to raise interest rates, whether or not the Fed should tighten the money supply, whether or not investors should buy stocks versus bonds.  The very fact that these superstitions are so widespread—and make no mistake: they’re superstitions—means that when something unexpected happens, all economists react the same way, just like panic-stricken people in a burning cinema, and of course all the nervous investors on Wall Street are watching each other, just so they can make the same lame-brain move as everyone else.

I used to have a rule of thumb, borrowed from a famous mathematician in Cambridge of the 1920's: give easy exams, but grade hard.  You quickly learn which students know what they’re doing, and which do not.

This really works, provided the kids do not do detailed postmortems of the final examinations for the benefit of their juniors.  Can you imagine the conversation?
“I got a B!  I sort of knew a little of what was going on, but I just didn’t have the time to put in much work all semester, but I must have nailed the final!  He gives easy finals, y’all!”
So of course the next class doesn’t do a stroke of work, anticipating an easy final.

So I give really difficult finals.  They certainly are harder to grade, but with a lot of work, it is possible to decide which students really know what they’re doing, and which ones are just applying Rules of Thumb.

[Added later:

I’ve seen much the same phenomenon even among my close friends, when we go to a seminar or an informational meeting.  It is almost the expected thing to do, to ignore almost everything except what is known as the Takeaway.  What is the Takeaway?  It is the whole event condensed into a Rule of Thumb.  Distilling everything into trivial niblets is a way of life, for those of us who just can’t bother to deal with, or can’t handle, the subtleties of modern life.  It is certainly true that people whose job is giving information have lost the knack of delivering the information tellingly and succinctly.  But even if the speaker was a genius, there is always that executive summary that everyone demands.  Executives are people who do not have a lot of brains, but have a lot of responsibility, and most of the time they work with rules of thumb (more’s the pity).  But once everybody wants to Takeaway only the Rule of Thumb, we are in deep trouble.]

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MOOCs and Education, Floods, Unemployment, Public Assistance, and Baby Boomers

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Baby Boomers

Recently there was an article in Yahoo (who knew they had articles?  Amazing) about Baby Boomers.  It was about 10 things that Baby Boomers Won’t Tell You.  As with all journalism, the headline is more to suck in readership than to inform about the content.  But it’s well worth reading, because it is sort of a demographic summary of the Baby Boomer generation.

One thing it says is that Baby Boomers are less likely to leave their kids an inheritance.  Apparently we spend all our money.

This isn’t exactly news.  It is our generation that assumed that sending kids to a good college would take care of everything that we should have done to prepare them for life.  The fact is, we thought we learned pretty quickly that our parents hadn’t prepared us for life.  We learned, much more slowly, that they sort of had; some parents prepared their kids in some ways, others in other ways, but the smarter ones among us kept an eye on the parents of our friends, and learned a lot that way.

The biggest lesson I learned was that parents across the universe could be doing a better job, especially younger parents, who have to work a little harder at their jobs.  (I don’t think jobs have become particularly harder; it’s just that employers are working harder to try and keep everyone’s nose to the grind, with productivity staying pretty much the same.)

The reason I think the older generation saved up like fury, and left money for their kids was because their brand of materialism was a little different: they believed that the only thing keeping people from doing better in life (being better people, more prestigious, better citizens and parents, bigger shots in their communities, and better leaders, and perhaps a little more comfortable) was having money to start out life with.  While our own generation certainly felt that having money from the ’rents was great, (A) not all of us got a lot of money, and (B) we weren’t convinced that those who did inherit a lot of cash were the better people, in the first place.  They certainly had better homes and better education, but they were just as big a$$*%&#s as everybody else, maybe bigger.  Let’s face it: a good education does not always translate into a more functional human being (though it should).

This would have been a good excuse for the Baby Boomer generation not to save so much.  But they had bought into the idea of education, and invested in big colleges, rather than saving money.  Giving your kids a big inheritance translates into the education of your grandchildren, really.  Or rather, it would, if your kids could be trusted to use the money wisely after you were gone.  Generally, though, most parents don’t trust their kids to use money wisely, so money spent on college seems a wiser choice than handing the kids the cash posthumously.

Finally, our generation has done more than its fair share to pay for medical insurance and college and the necessities of life.  We have also worked harder to suck up luxuries that we’ve felt we totally deserve.  (This can partly be blamed on the marketing blitz to which we’ve been subjected all our lives, far more than any preceding generation.  But, generally speaking, our parents ---certainly my own--- did a good job of giving us the tools to resist advertising.  But many others of us tended to think that anything we saw on TV was the Lord’s Truth, and went out and proceeded to subsidize Businesses of America.  This was good, otherwise Business would have been in a bad way.  Yeah, right.)

But the main thing is that we were, generally speaking, rather weak, and unable to discipline our kids, and tell them, "No, I’m not going to buy you that awesome car; I’m going to let you have the money after I’m dead.  And I’m going to die young, so you can have the cash sooner, before it becomes absolutely worthless."  We gave them the car.  (I mean, I didn’t, but most of you probably did.)

Education and MOOCs

Recently, Bill Gates is supposed to have given a talk at Microsoft saying that MOOCs are going to profoundly change education.  I realized that I had been missing the bus in regard to education.

Education has many angles.  First, there are students who need to be taught certain things that they might not want to learn.  Secondly, there are people out there hungry for information, and structured information that is otherwise hard to pick up by just reading a book.  Thirdly, there are bright and persuasive people out there who are desperate to pass on what they know, and know that they’re better at doing this than the average guy on the street.

For kids who need to be strongly guided to learn things that they do not want to learn, MOOCs are useless.  It is the discipline of being kept at his books, and being threatened with bad grades, and the fearsome sight of his classmates working harder than he is that keeps junior more or less on the straight and narrow.  There are an awful lot of these sorts of rich kids out there (to whom you’re not leaving as much money as your parents left to you!!  Just kidding).  On the other hand, there are other kids, and some older ones who may have missed the bus the first time around, or even students who are able to learn better from practically anyone other than the teachers to whom they have been assigned.  That’s the way kids are; the professor in the other class is always better than your own professor, even if her students are dying to get into your section.  At any rate, and I can only guess at this, perhaps MOOCs (massively open online courses) are taught better and produced better, than courses in a typical college.

As to the faculty, the third group: most faculty do not teach because the pay is so amazingly good.  Teaching is something some people like to do.  And it certainly helps that you get your summers mostly off, though some professors do put in a fair amount of preparation for the upcoming year.  And professors are academics, which means that they are better than most people at abstract thinking, which is a way of distilling the essential characteristics of certain things, so that they can be studied in a particular way.  Without abstraction, things can’t be studied to any deep level, simply because the irrelevant details are too confusing and distracting.  Of course, non-academics are fond of saying that academics oversimplify things to such an extent that the real world has no similarity to the abstraction at all, and in some disciplines this may be true.

So when Bill Gates says that MOOCs are awesome, he’s right.  MOOCs are a way of getting fabulous information out to those who are really interested in it.  (Of course, entrepreneurs ---think: businessmen who want to make a buck in a new way--- are out to make a buck out of MOOCs as well.  But long after the entrepreneurs have tired of milking MOOCs, these online courses will probably still be with us.  Look at books and music, for example.  Music- making is not the multi-million-dollar business it used to be, but there’s still free music on the Internet.)  But for hammering training into a reluctant kid’s head, a real live college is probably still your best bet.  On the other hand, there is tremendous diversity in the inclinations and abilities of the younger generation.  The Baby Boomers are probably the last group that could be generalized about with any success; those who come after are too diverse to be dealt with using rules of thumb.  You would have noticed that Rules of Thumb are not as useful today as they might have been in earlier times!

Floods, Unemployment, and Public Assistance

Swimming areas stand empty, while kids go around on bikes. 
(inset shows park sign)

My wife works for the County Government, and gets a good view of how public assistance works.  Throughout the last several decades, fiscal conservatives have been working hard to divert public money from homeless shelters, state and federal parks and reserves, and of course libraries, hospitals, emergency services, schools and public projects of all sorts.  In the poor County in which she works, the people who staff homeless shelters and libraries and such places really work for very little pay, and when the State cuts funding to these places, their incomes go down still further.  We were recently at a State Park, only to find that the public beaches were closed, due to large numbers of geese who have moved in.  Geese tend to fill the beaches with their enormous droppings, which also destroy the quality of the water.

It’s not clear whether the goose infestation is a result of funding cuts, or the warming climate.  At any rate, the Park Ranger who happened to be there told us that it was the geese who were to blame.  It was heartbreaking to see a vast expanse of water recreation area and beach shut down, the concession stands empty, and the parking lots deserted.

Forty miles away, another park was still open, and there were gaggles of teenagers riding around on bikes.  Their families must have come for the pools and the water sports, but geese had taken over that pool, too.  Luckily there were other things for the kids to do, but it isn’t looking too good for the future.  I’m at a loss to recommend a remedy; public recreation areas are a complex thing, and the skills that go to making recreation and tourism work in a state are too difficult for an amateur to advise about.  I’m confident, though, that the cutting of taxes and subsequent downsizing of park services begins a trend that seems very difficult, or even impossible to reverse.

The Republicans are presently successful in encouraging business and industry in Pennsylvania, evidently at the cost of the environment and public services.  This is a clever ploy, because if a Democrat majority were to be elected to replace those who put these manifestly unsuccessful policies in place, they will find it impossible to reverse the detrimental consequences of these policies without massive increases in taxes, which are sure to be hugely unpopular.  This would put the GOP back in the saddle, which is obviously great for the GOP, but terrible for the State.  So the GOP has hit on a strategy that ensures their own success at the cost of the well-being of the general population.

In a completely unrelated piece of news, recently the tiny community of Beech Creek was hit by a flash flood.  There was no possibility of appealing for emergency funds from the State or from the Federal Government, because the damages must exceed $17 million to qualify for aid.  Because it is a poor community, with a tiny population, their homes would not be valued very high, there were few businesses (who are experts at inflating damage costs), so the total damages were under half a million.  By the same token, a half-million grant (or even less) would enable the community to get back on its feet.  A very small grant would probably encourage the building and repairs to be made of reasonable quality.  It would also encourage the residents to stay, rather than become a burden on a larger city or town that surely doesn’t need the extra population.

So, a lot of bad news, in a week of bad news all round.  The George Zimmerman case is depressing everyone.  Mr Zimmerman may not like non-whites loafing around his pristine neighborhood, but we must all tolerate a lot of loafing in all our neighborhoods, because in this economy there’s little else to do.  Let’s face it: blacks and minorities don’t like whites sniffing around their pristine neighborhoods, either, but the incidence of deadly force in black neighborhoods probably is a lot less than in white neighborhoods.  (One wonders whether a defense of Stand Your Ground in a black neighborhood would work in a court of law in Florida.)  The point is that there must not be neighborhoods of any particular color; they’re all just neighborhoods.

So, dear friends, keep well, do good work, and keep in touch!  (Garrison Keillor)

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