Baby versus Digger

1 year old versus toy digger. Who will win?

The face-off begins:

The two attack head on.
In a surprise move, the baby picks up the digger and eats it.

The stunned digger flails as the baby tosses it around.

Slammed to the ground, the digger becomes unresponsive.

Victorious, the baby struts away to find new toys to dominate.

Baby 1: Toy digger: 0

Conceptual confusion

I noticed a bit of conceptual confusion with my son.  When I ask him what country we live in, he sometimes says Michigan.  Other times, I ask him what state we live in, he'll say North America or Ypsilanti.  Its apparent, he is not understanding he differences between the concepts of state, country, and city.  These ideas are simply too abstract for him to understand.  The word state to him has exact meaning.  He knows it represents some category of geography, but does not recognize the hierarchy of concepts and its placement there-in.

While the concepts of city, state, and country are difficult to understand, he can identify the shape and placement of Michigan on a map of the U.S.  We have a puzzle map of the U.S. that he and his sister love to do.  They are both excellent at doing the puzzle through shape recognition.  They can recite the names of about 6 different states.

This brings up an interesting problem with educating children about geography.  It seems at a young age (my son is 5), they can learn about the names of places where they live, but their conception of such places is so vague as to be next to meaningless.  I have tried to use Google maps and slowly zoom out from our house in order to give him perspective of the size and location.  Yet, after I zoom out further than our route to school, I can't really detect if it means anything to him.  Having children learn the names of the 50 states, country names, continent names, etc. is largely pointless at this age because these names have no meaning to him.  Where I should start?   I would think that names of neighborhood streets and nearby parks would be appropriate.  Maybe even nearby city names.  Any suggestions?

Value-dense life

I liked Diana Hsieh's notion of value-dense buying.  But it occurred to me, the same principle should apply to all aspects of one's life.  Everything we do should be value-dense (not just spending).

"Since a value is that which one acts to gain and/or keep, and the amount of possible action is limited by the duration of one’s lifespan, it is a part of one’s life that one invests in everything one values. The years, months, days or hours of thought, of interest, of action devoted to a value are the currency with which one pays for the enjoyment one receives from it." ~ Ayn Rand, IOEP, p. 44

Every action we choose requires time - time that could be spent doing another activity.  So its to our best interest to spend each second on activities that create the most value to us, i.e. are value-dense. For example, I've met many wonderful women throughout my life.  Yet only one packed such an incredible dense value system that was consistent with my own, that I decided to marry her.  Besides a shared appreciation of Ayn Rand, our founding fathers, and many extraordinary inventors and industrialists, we love hiking, camping, board games, sci-fi, reading, discussing politics/philosophy/economics/technology/education, and on and on. As a couple, we strive to find activities that we both find fulfilling.  The more values that each of us can share together, the more value-dense the relationship. And the longer I'm in the relationship, the more value-dense the relationship becomes.  We find ever new ways to connect and grow that makes the marriage ever more satisfying and enriching.

The same applies to friends.  I choose friends that bring me the most values packed into one person.  I meet thousands of individuals, many of whom I could develop friendships if I put forth the effort.  But I reserve any effort at a friendship to those individuals that bring me the most joy.  And guess what, those individuals are value-dense, at least for me.  I do not have lots of friends in part because I choose not too.  I would rather have few friends that are value-dense than lots of friends that are value-sparse.  (In this context, value-dense and value-sparse refer to the values I gain from the relationship, not to any notion of intrinsic value the friends may have.)

Besides people, careers can be value-dense.  After discovering my central purpose in life, I pursued a career that was value-dense.  I love technology, business, teaching, and even philosophy.  As such, my current career as a professor of information systems is value-dense.  I gain values from every minute working in this career.  I could have picked a career as a philosophy professor or an IT professional or high school teacher.  Each of which would have added some values.  But none are as dense in values as my current choice.  Perhaps that's why I love my job so much.

Food should also be value-dense.  One of the things that attracts me to the paleo-diet (even if I'm not fully following it) is the notion that we should eat food that brings us the most value pound for pound.  Why eat things that contain little to no nutritional value?  Calories certainly give us some energy, but vitamins and minerals are such an integral part of nutritional health, that we should be eating far more of it than we currently do.

It makes sense to apply that same principle to pursuing all values as densely as possible, including buying things.  As a financial principle, we should spend money on things that are value-dense - things that pack the most value into the budget we have.  This doesn't mean we should be frugal.  Rather, we should identify those things that will bring the most value and then pursue them with a passion.  Suppose you love to travel.  There are certainly expensive ways and cheap ways to travel.  Properly identifying the value you gain from traveling will help you make the optional value choices as to where to spend money when you travel.  Do you enjoy the pampering you get a hotels?  Then by all means, spend money on a nice hotel.  Do you enjoy learning the local culture?  Then maybe skimping on the hotel is justified and splurging on local events may suite you best.  Decisions on spending should be based on achieving maximal value and should be pursued with full consciousness and awareness of opportunities passed up for the choices made.

Combined, all of these examples suggest a value-dense approach to life is ideal and achievable.

Singularity

To end my class in the Intro to Information Systems, I'm exploring future predictions of technology innovation.  There are a lot of interesting predictions, but one that I find fascinating is the idea of the Singularity.

Futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil has predicted the singularity in about 30 years.  In this Ubiquity interview with Ray, he states his premise:

I make the case that this exponential progression will lead us to an understanding of human intelligence. And by understanding I mean we will have detailed mathematical models and computer simulations of all of the regions of the brain by the mid 2020s. So by the end of the 2020s we'll be able to fully recreate human intelligence. You may wonder: "OK, what's the big deal with that? We already have human intelligence; in fact, we've got six billion human brains running around, so why do we need more?" One of the answers to that question is that it will be a very powerful combination to combine the subtle and supple powers of human pattern recognition with ways in which machines are already superior. 

While I do not doubt our ability to understand pattern recognition to a very great extent, I believe that his definition of intelligence rests primarily on pattern recognition and not concept formation.  It may be possible to simulate concept formation in computers, I'm just not convinced it will be achieved in 20 years.  Regardless of the timeline, the ultimate effect may be profound.

Ray goes on to say:

My second point is that nonbiological intelligence, once it achieves human levels, will double in power every year, whereas human intelligence—biological intelligence—is fixed. We have 10 to the 26th power calculations per second in the human species today, and that's not going to change, but ultimately the nonbiological side of our civilization's intelligence will become by the 2030s thousands of times more powerful than human intelligence and by the 2040s billions of times more powerful. And that will be a really profound transformation.

The difficulty with this statement is how can intelligence be more powerful.  Is it simply faster?  Can it remember more?  Undoubtedly true.  Can it think better?  That is a subject we cannot fathom at this point, but sound highly suspect.

My second difficulty is with the assumption that human do not enhance their own cognitive capacities through integration with computing machines.  Simple electronic interfaces already exist in Cochlear implants, prosthetics, and BrainGate.  In 20 years, we may be able to achieve fantastic integration of computers and brain functionality.  Eventually, we may be able to download our memories or learn new skills Matrix style.

There is also the difficulty of moving this intelligence into economically feasible applications.  As another futurist Max More points out:

I also see a tendency in many projections to take a purely technical approach and to ignore possible economic, political, cultural, and psychological factors that could dampen the advances and their impact.

And to that I agree.

Concepts in learning

I recently ran across two educational psychologists, Ausubel and Novak, that argue for a conceptual basis for learning.  While philosophically, they differ in their definition of concepts with Objectivism, they offer an approach to learning that focuses on conceptual understanding of knowledge, the relationship between concepts and the necessity of context when presenting information to students.  This approach emphasizes the importance of "meaningful learning" as opposed to "rote learning". 

According to Ausubel and Novak, meaningful learning occurs only when new concepts are carefully defined, when examples of the concept  relate to a learner's context, and if the new concept is integrated with the learner’s prior conceptual framework.  Because learners have free will, they must be motivated to integrate the knowledge.  In rote learning, the learner memorizes the conceptual definitions or memorizes the links between concepts without real understanding.  Such rote learning is quickly forgotten.  Meaningful learning and rote learning exist on a continuum.

While I am still in the early stages of reviewing Ausubel's and Novak's research, it looks like a promising research stream.  It reminds me of the approach used at the VanDamme Academy.  If anyone is familiar with their work, I would love to hear your thoughts.