Yaron Brook speaking at UMich

This Oct. 6th, I plan on attending a Yaron Brook speech at University of Michigan on the topic "Capitalism without Guilt". I watched an earlier version of this presentation given last year and really enjoyed it. Of course, every video I watch of Yaron simply blows me away. His his knowledge of philosophy, business, and history are incredible. But his Q&As are fantastic. His ability to dig to the philosophic root of a question and yet do it in a respectful fashion to the questioner, has not been matched by any other speaker (except Ayn Rand) to my knowledge. It will be great to see him in person.

Many of the GLO members will be there. Link to the Facebook event. Hope to see you too.

My first requested interview

Yesterday, I received two solicitations for interviews. Considering that no one has done this before, I was quite tickled. Apparently, a journalism professor requires his students to interview professors that have gone through the Academic Service-Learning Fellowship at EMU. I am one of those professors.

As I've stated before, ASL is a mixed bag of ideas. At first, I was a bit apprehensive about speaking to a journalism student about this experience in part because there is a real possibility that it may get published in the school's newspaper. When I speak, I speak my mind. If my views became public knowledge, it could make my experience at EMU...let's just say interesting. Considering that I have a full plate already, I really do not need the extra distractions.

However, I reconsidered. I realized that the truth about ASL should not be hidden just because it might inconvenience me a bit. If I cannot be proud of my beliefs and willing to stand by them, then by default the wrong ideas will be perpetuated. This does not mean I will be antagonistic. In fact, I will be very careful in how I choose my words so as to respect the other faculty involved. I do still have to work with them after all. But I can still speak strongly against the elements in ASL that should not be part of our education. And this I will do.

Even if these interviews never see the light of day, speaking to the students will be good practice and may - just may - help that student to see things a bit more objectively.

Google Wave

For all of the techie fans of my blog, watch this video about Google Wave. A very innovative product/platform for communication and collaboration on the web that includes elements of instant messaging, wiki, email, message board, document sharing, and every imaginable Web 2.0 concept, into a single platform for interaction.



The possibilities are extremely exciting.

Writing 5 year goals

Look around you. Identify the most successful people you know. Now, ask them if they have a long-term plan or goal for themselves, for their career, or for their business. I did this a number of years ago and found that each and every successful person I talked to could identify, usually quite explicitly, where they wanted to be in 5 years.

The relationship between having and pursing long-term goals and success in a career, in a business, or in life is not accidental. It stems from the intimate relationship between purpose and productivity. No one has better articulated that relationship than Ayn Rand. In "The Objectivist Ethics," The Virtue of Selfishness, 26, she states:

"The virtue of Productiveness is the recognition of the fact that productive work is the process by which man’s mind sustains his life, the process that sets man free of the necessity to adjust himself to his background, as all animals do, and gives him the power to adjust his background to himself. "

She goes on to say:

"'Productive work' does not mean the unfocused performance of the motions of some job. It means the consciously chosen pursuit of a productive career, in any line of rational endeavor, great or modest, on any level of ability. It is not the degree of a man’s ability nor the scale of his work that is ethically relevant here, but the fullest and most purposeful use of his mind."

The great inventor, Thomas Edison, also identified this relationship between success, productivity, and thought.

"The first requisite for success is to develop the ability to focus and apply your mental and physical energies to the problem at hand - without growing weary. Because such thinking is often difficult, there seems to be no limit to which some people will go to avoid the effort and labor that is associated with it...."

To be successful, one must achieve high levels of productivity. To be productive, one must think continuously and to their fullest ability.

So what does all of this mean in terms of writing 5 year goals? It begins by the identification of one's central purpose in life.

"Productive work is the central purpose of a rational man’s life, the central value that integrates and determines the hierarchy of all his other values. Reason is the source, the precondition of his productive work—pride is the result." - Ayn Rand

This identification does not necessitate many months of thinking. It does, however, require applying your full capacity to think. Approached correctly, it can be accomplished in as little as an hour, as I have explained and accomplished before. With a clear purpose, one can start to identify gaps between where we are now and where we want to be. These gaps mark the outline to one's 5 year goals. Author Burgess Laughlin analyzes the nature of a central purpose in life and criteria for writing a successful central purpose for your life.

As a personal example, I was unsatisfied with my career five years ago as a web developer. It would have done me little good 5 years ago to say, "Well I'm hear right now, now what?" There were literally an infinite number of ways I could have proceeded. I could have continued as a web developer. I could have focused on database administration. I could have specialized in project management. I could have pursued my MBA. I could have... well, I could go on and on and on, but I think you get the point. In fact, I had been contemplating all of those various career choices I listed above. The sad thing is, I probably would have been dissatisfied with the results in any of those choices because I hadn't identified my central purpose.

I realized that these various professions did not address my passions. I loved teaching, loved technology, loved business, and loved researching and learning new things. Above all, my passion was with helping individuals make the best decisions possible, either through use of information technology or through education of proper thinking skills. The only career path that allowed me to combine all of my passions was a professor of information systems. I could teach thinking skills to students, teach proper development of information technologies to facilitate successful business operations, and research how people make the decisions they do and see how technology can supplement an individual's decision-making process.

After identifying a central purpose in life, the next step is a fact finding mission to discover all of the potential means of achieving that end. When I first decided to pursue a career as a professor, I had to go research more about teaching at the university level. Although I originally thought that the only way to get into academia was with a PhD, I learned that individuals can teach at the university level with just a master's degree. But, in order to teach students in a master's or PhD program, I would need to have a PhD. Because I wanted that additional potential interaction with master's and PhD students, my original notion of obtaining a PhD was warranted. I also had to research various university requirements for admission and potential programs of study that best fit my needs and background.

The fact finding mission should reveal various paths to the end that you want. Anyone of these paths will get you where you want to be. The path that best aligns with your values, your personality, and your lifestyle should become your 5-year goal. This process often takes a great deal of introspection and integration of all the details, before a goal emerges that sings to your passions.

On a more practical note, 5 year goals should be written such that they are a stretch, but doable. Consider everything that can be accomplished in 1 year if you apply all your effort. If you can imagine completing your 5 year goal in 1 year, the 5 year goal is not big enough. We often underestimate what we can do if we apply a continuous effort and fully apply our mental capacities. By considering what can be done if we "stretch", we begin to feel an urgency to act that we may not if there is no urgency. That urgency to act is exactly what is needed.

What is the most important part of 5-year goals? ACTION! It is action, driven by rational thought, leading to productive work in one's central purpose, that leads to success. Writing solid 5 year goals sets the ground work - engaging in sustained and continuous effort turns the goals into success. To turn 5-year goals into such sustained effort requires identification of shorter-range goals and plans of action (on the scale of 1 year, 1 month, and 1 week respectively). How to achieve this, however is a topic beyond the scope of this post.

Update: Read my personal example writing 5 year goals.
Update: Tips to actualizing 5 year goals 

Dewey's wrong approach to education

"Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself. “ ~John Dewey

While in general, I am not a big fan of analyzing quotations out of context, I am familiar with Dewey's educational philosophy. So when I saw the above quote, I immediately winced. This is what is destroying our educational system.

First, "Education is not preparation for life..." is absolutely false. Education is preparation for life. That is why we have degrees that signal the end of a student's studies and a transition to the work world. Students select majors in order to learn a subject that they can later apply in their work. That is why as a professor, I approach each class as if the students will leave my classroom and use what they learned in their life. The classroom may temporarily consume a student's life, but the entire purpose of education is to prepare the students for a productive and virtuous adulthood.

Dewey would have us believe that "education is life itself". Leaving aside that this statement is confusing at best (which I believe he does on purpose), equating education with life accomplishes two of Dewey's goals, to reify knowledge acquisition and at the same time, to de-objectivize (my own made up term) concepts. If education is life itself, then knowledge acquisition through education is an end in itself. If education and life are synonymous, then our life is nothing but education and learning. When do we ever apply the knowledge? When do we act? Dewey would likely argue that the act of acting helps us to gain new knowledge. But that is not necessarily so. A person may act in the same self-destructive ways for many years. The mere act itself does not necessitate learning.

The second goal of Dewey, to de-objectivize concepts, is also accomplished with this statement. Dewey's statement rests on the assumption that life is a complex mixture of emotions, social relationships, ideas, and work. By equating life and education, Dewey proposes that education should be a complex mixture of emotions, social relationships, ideas, and work. By including the social aspects in the definition of education, Dewey attempts to de-emphasize the objective nature of concepts. He attempts to make concepts subjective in nature (de-objectivize). The blatant subjectivism makes education of objective concepts impossible.

"Subjectivism is the belief that reality is not a firm absolute, but a fluid, plastic, indeterminate realm which can be altered, in whole or in part, by the consciousness of the perceiver." ~ Ayn Rand.

If education succumbs to subjectivism, then a person will be presented with no firm or absolute concepts in which to live. They will be left with emotion filed, pseudo-understanding of ideas. Reality will always be a mystery to them and often conflict with what they "believe". This can only lead to suffering with the frequent contradictions of what they believe and the facts of reality.

Dewey's argument gains some logical plausibility because he equates "learning" with "education". But this should not be the case. Certainly, you can continue to learn after school. But "education" is a systematic program of study. A proper education helps a person to learn the conceptual skills he needs to live his life. A person may also learn some of the concepts need to live his life, without a formal education.

The correct approach to education can be glimpsed from this quote by Ayn Rand:

"The only purpose of education is to teach a student how to live his life—by developing his mind and equipping him to deal with reality. The training he needs is theoretical, i.e., conceptual. He has to be taught to think, to understand, to integrate, to prove. He has to be taught the essentials of the knowledge discovered in the past—and he has to be equipped to acquire further knowledge by his own effort." ~ 'The Comprachicos' in The Return of the Primitive

I would further recommend Leonard Peikoff's "Philosophy of Education" lecture for a sketch of a proper education based on Ayn Rand's ideas.