Tag Archives: knowledge

When you start to realize you’re never going to change the world

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I was one of those little precocious kids who grew up, convinced that he was one day going to change the world. At first, it was going to be through science, as I studied physics, sure that I was able to see the world in ways that no one else possibly could. I had my ground-breaking theory that re-explained the universe’s creation through a process called neutra-matter (my own invention) that was the embodiment of light, and thus, the separation particle that kept the barrier between matter and anti-matter. It all made sense to me, and actually still does. I worked through college to become a physicist, and throughout my education, I devoted a great deal of time just trying to disprove the theory so I could move onto something better. And I never did. So it might be true. Or not. We’ll never know because I didn’t remain in physics, and even if I did, I hit a point where I started to realize that no one really cared.

Yeah, that was true. No one cared. I had this great idea, and I was convinced it could change science. But again, no one cared. So I moved onto a different field. Genetics.

In genetics, I was quickly invigorated with a new idea that consumed my every scientific thought. I now had a convincing argument as to how the AIDS/HIV strain first emerged, and coordinating this theory with the concepts of archaeology (which I was also studying at the time), I realized that there was a way to use my theory to trace down Patient Zero, and possibly erect a cure for AIDS by creating a genetic suppressor from the origin rather than from the current variation of the virus. And it made a lot of sense to me.

So, as this was during the dawn of the AIDS era, I managed to convince a coordinator of the first AIDS conference to listen to my theory, and she was so intrigued by it that she arranged a meeting with me and a group of scientists who were all part of the first conference. They read my report, called me in and then in a round table discussion, asked me all sorts of questions about my theory. And they were intrigued. And then one of them asked me where I got my medical degree, and I revealed that my education was in physics, and that I did not have a medical degree. Essentially, the discussion was over, and no one was really interested in hearing anything else I had to say. In the end, my theory was shelved, and I went on with my life. Decades later, AIDS is still out there, and millions of people died, and unfortunately, I don’t think it’s going to be cured any time soon. Of course, I can’t say my theory would have done it, but it bothers me that it was never considered.

Many years later, I was in graduate school after doing the whole Ph.d thing in political science. This time, however, I was pursuing communication. And suddenly it dawned on me that our usual process for conducting diplomacy was wrong. In the middle of the night, I woke up with an additive theory, utilizing political science international theory, interpersonal

communication theories, a communication rhetoric theory and a mathematical model I designed in my head that would eventually be completed through computer modeling. This new theory, I predicted, would lead to a brand new way of conducting negotiations and diplomacy. Latching onto one of my fellow grad students with a background in history, we wrote up a theoretical paper on this and then presented it at communication conference. After that, a few people from different organizations contacted me by email asking me more questions, but over time, I starrted to realize that it also required people to really think differently than what they were used to. When I tried to present it to the Obama Administration, I realized no one was really interested in learning. People were pretty satisfied with doing things the way they had been doing them since the days of Caesar, so very quickly I got the impression that I was barking up trees that no one wanted me barking near. So I gave up on that as well.

The point is: At some point, you start to realize that no matter how many great ideas you have, eventually you’re probably going to hit the point where you realize that most people generally don’t care. The status quo is so much easier to stick with, so the amount of work involved in getting anyone interested in change is practically at a ridiculous premium. It’s a lot like the Occupy Wall Street movement that’s happened some years ago. I mean, they have great ideas and the best intentions at heart. But the reality is that no one is going to listen to them, and mostly what they will receive for their efforts is ridicule and pepper spray. You can’t convince people to change their ways, even if the change is in their own best interests.

So, at some point, you have to realize that as much as you like, you can have all of the greatest intentions in the world, but at some point you need to do the proverbial growing up of reality and settle for mediocrity and, if lucky, a small step after a period of anarchical punctuated equilibrium.

That’s where I am now. There are so many things I wanted to do with my life, so many things I thought I would do with my life, but in the end, I realize that it really didn’t amount to much. No fame. No fortune. No changing of the minds of the masses or even a few leaders. Not even a really cool career or a stable girlfriend (or an unstable one for that matter). At some point, you begin to realize that all you really have is an apartment full of friendly stuffed animals, a shelf of unpublished, or crappily published, novels, reruns of Star Trek and a delinquent World of Warcraft account.

Had I known that a long time ago, I probably would have chosen a much easier route to get here.

The Problem With National Intelligence and Classified Information

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One of my pet peeves has been the concept of classified information. It’s commonly used as a gatekeeper to give some people access to information and keep others away from it. When people talk about it and think about it, it’s often considered of significant importance that this information is kept classified and away from other people who don’t have access. Strangely enough, no one really seems to think about it from the perspective of wondering why we keep all of this information classified in the first place.

In the old days, and I mean like the 1940s, classified information was important because it meant keeping it away from the Axis powers who meant to do us harm. During the Cold War, it was to keep the information away from the evil KGB and their cronies who were out to do all sorts of harm to the US people. I guess now it’s being kept from terrorists who, of course, mean to do us harm.

What I find myself asking more and more these days is why is the stuff we keep classified actually being kept classified. And almost always, the reasoning seems to fall short of any test of logic.

I was looking at the requirements for working for the State Department the other day and noticed that to be in practically any position, including a mechanic, you need at least a Secret clearance level. And this immediately started putting my thinking process through the obvious channels of one thing leads to another. I thought, why does a mechanic need a Secret clearance? And then you go through the usual Kevin Bacon approaches to connecting dots and start thinking “well, he might be working in the motorpool one day when some guy with Secret information might be talking about secret things.” And then you realize how absurd that is because the guy with Secret information shouldn’t be talking around people who don’t have clearances in the first place. And that got me thinking, what exactly would someone in the State Department be talking about that should be classified? And basically, it kept coming back to even more questions that bothered me because in each case, the “Secret” information appeared to me to be information that might be embarrassing if it got out but generally not something detrimental to the country itself.

And that’s what I’m starting to realize is the reason for most of our classifications today. We make things Confidential or Secret because we really don’t want anyone else to know what it is we’re tracking or talking about. Yet, the information we’re talking about probably shouldn’t be classified in the first place.

We live in a country that values its freedoms. But in order to truly value those freedoms, the people of that country need to know what their leaders are actually doing. But we don’t. Because they classify everything to make sure that we don’t know what they’re doing.

Does this protect our country? Not in the slight. As a matter of fact, it makes our country even more vulnerable because its people are putting others into power based on limited knowledge of what might really be going on. And we’re told that it’s better this way because what’s really doing on is too important for everyone to know what’s going on. It’s kind of one of those vicious cycles that doesn’t ever get any better.

So, who are we supposed to be protecting this information from? The Russians? The Chinese? The North Koreans? It all sounds good in theory, but in reality, so little of that information that is classified these days would make a difference if any of those entities actually knew what was going on. Well, maybe the schematics of how to build a nuclear device, or something like that, but that’s not really what we’re classifying. We’re classifying conversations between people who couldn’t build a nuclear device if their lives depended on it. They’re bureaucrats who really don’t have a lot of intricate knowledge about anything.

I sometimes think the majority of the stuff they classify is just to appear more important than they really are. And this mentality feeds upon itself and often makes things even worse.

Back when I was in the service and working in that field, I used to see things become classified that had just been printed in the New York Times. But because some bureaucrat read it, he would then type up the same article and then declare “SECRET” or even “TOP SECRET” and make sure only those with high clearances were able to read it. But the newspaper article would still be out there, being read by anyone who bought it, including parakeets who had it lined on the bottom of their cages. And as sad as this seems to admit, people were threatened with being brought up on charges because of disclosing something that they might have actually read in the newspaper but some other bureaucrat only read it in a security briefing (because of that doofus who classified it in the first place).

I’ll come out and just say what I believe here, but I think way too much information is deemed classified in a society that should be a lot more open with its information. We classify farm reports, trade manuals, articles from newspapers (as previously mentioned), financial forecasts, political meetings, patents, treatments for diseases and illnesses, phone call records, as well as so much more information all in the guise of protecting “national security.” And honestly, what’s the benefit?

To be honest, I don’t perceive this changing any time soon because bureaucrats love to think of themselves as more important than they really are. That’s never been different in our civilization. The greatest impediment to evolving knowledge is when we hoard knowledge and evidence, yet we seem to do that more and more these days.

The Ignorance of the American Public in an Age Where People Think an Opinion is Knowledge

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We're #1! Yep, we're proving ourselves stupid again.
We’re #1! Yep, we’re proving ourselves stupid again.

There’s an interesting article that’s making the news today from Gfk Public Affairs & Corporate Communications that states that 51 percent of Americans question the Big Bang Theory. Teaching political science at a community college, I have no problem adding that if you asked those same people surveyed if they even knew how to explain the Big Bang Theory, chances are pretty good that you’d get a bunch of clueless responses. You see, I think something much worse is happening than people are squeamish on current accepted scientific knowledge; I think the real problem is that not only do people not know what’s current in scientific knowledge, but they believe that because they have an opinion, that somehow that’s some kind of knowledge, too.

Let me explain. Some years ago, I was working for a hotel back when I got out of the service. A young woman who worked in human resources was engaging me in a conversation one day in the employee cafeteria, where she was explaining to me why she thought that I was incorrect for indicating that the time line was not 2000 years old until December 31, 2000, rather than on the day the world counted as January 1, 2000. In other words, my argument was that for a full 2000 years to pass, you have to actually finish the 2000th year. Anyway, regardless of who was right or wrong, she explained that I couldn’t be correct because “the majority of people think the way she thinks” as opposed to the “bizarre” interpretation that I was giving. I then explained that scientific knowledge is not survey based, and she made some really strange response of how most people wouldn’t think that (the irony of that response didn’t escape me then either).

This is how I see the current state of knowledge in the United States today. People no longer rely on evidence or even on scientific theory but think that if they can argue some kind of rudimentary logic, then it must be as good an explanation than if you were to offer formal proofs. I believe part of the problem stems from science’s mistaken usage of the word “theory”, which causes so many people to think that the “theory of evolution” is just a theory, which to them means it has as much ground as the “theory of imaginative fiction” because the word “theory” is involved.

I was watching this week’s COSMOS, and I would like to say that it brought up something brilliant that so few people will latch onto. And that was the struggle that geochemist Clair Patterson underwent when he was trying to prove lead poisoning was killing people in the 20th century. What the episode did a great job of exposing was how easy it was for one doctor, on the payroll of the lead industry, was able to convince so many people that lead wasn’t a problem, when today there’s not a scientist alive who wouldn’t claim it was killing people in the way it was being used in industry. If that episode did anything for the future, I hope that it got people to pay closer attention to what big business tries to “sell” as “safe” whenever there’s something that should be scrutinized a lot more before being made mainstream. But we’re stupid people, which means we’ll take “experts” at their word, conduct surveys of the rest of us who don’t know better, and continue to enrich people who don’t care if they kill us while they profit off our dead bodies.

The Struggles of Teaching Political Science to College Students

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My role as a teacher

Every semester that I teach a new batch of students in political science, I find myself less and less confident in the future of America. Every now and then, a semester will throw off this natural trend, but more often than not, I find myself wondering what kind of future we’re leading to when so many students seem to have little to no grasp of the events happening around them.

I’m not talking about obscure political knowledge here. I’m talking about answers to simple questions like: “What’s going on the country today?” or “What are the important events happening in the world today?” I can understand the concept of being put on the spot to think of something. It used to happen to me when I first started my undergraduate days at West Point and an upperclassman would jump in front of your face and demand answers to “Tell me what’s on the front of the New York Times, New Cadet!” and you’d draw a blank more because you were scared to death of failing rather than actually not remembering what you read in the paper that morning. But this is different. When we finally end up with some story of current events in the discussion, like Obama’s “big speech on Thursday” I look around the class, and I’m met with completely blank stares, like they have no idea what was just mentioned. And when this continues over EVERY subject that gets brought up, you really start to feel scared when it comes to young people understanding what’s going on around them.

At one point in the past, I completely figured this was inconsequential because I started thinking, “who cares who knows anything about current events?” I figured it wasn’t all that important anyway. But it is important because significant decisions are being made each and every day in our governments, and quite often the people who influence public opinion and the decisions of leaders are completely clueless about what’s going on anyway. As Mussolini pointed out, when you have a population that is so blind to what’s going on around them, you can so easily influence them into doing anything you desire.

When we look at the last presidential administration and the atrocities that may have been carried out in our name, I look at the people of this country who don’t seem to care, and I immediately understand why so many bad things can happen at the hands of our leaders because no one will ever hold them accountable if no one has a clue what’s actually going on. When a presidential election occurs and the only reason someone votes for a leader is because of what partisan letter they registered for at one point in their life, we have a real problem. The country is divided into two camps of partisan designations, which means that the people who make up the party leadership of those two parties can practically do anything they want to do, and they’re still going to get the support of blind, oblivious constituents.

This is why someone like former Detroit mayor Kilpatrick can commit outright crimes against his own constituents, and he’d probably get reelected by the same people he cheated because their loyalties are to a mindset rather than to an individual. It’s why we have so much corruption in our governments these days. It happens so often that leaders rarely even hide it because they realize that they’re still going to get reelected because they’re not “the other guy”. This sort of thing stems from the fact that it takes a simple majority to put someone into office, and the majority of the population is filled with people who have no clue what’s going on in their government, and more importantly, don’t care.

The usual response to this argument is that “education” is the solution, but as one of those educators, I practically give up myself because no matter how much energy, how much struggle or how much entertainment I add to a class, students are generally only interested in rote memorization that will lead them to the answers for a test that they generally don’t understand. I’ve had students tell me a correct answer, but when I try to analyze the answer to see if there’s an understanding of the nature of that concept, they stare at me as if I just asked them the question in Klingon, meaning a) they don’t understand it, and b) as Klingon is from Star Trek, they figure it’s not important for them to give a rat’s ass about it anyway.

Yet, each semester I teach, I’ll receive a random email from a former student who thanks me for opening his or her eyes to knowledge he or she never realized existed, so I feel that I got through to someone. But when you have a classroom of 30-50 students, reaching two of them each semester leaves you with a sense that it’s not a successful achievement on a cost benefit analysis. You start to wonder if they would have come to this knowledge regardless, and you’re just surfing the wave that was heading towards the shore anyway. Or did you cause the wave to form? And if so, was it worth the costs of creating the wave in the first place.

I fear that not enough people are “getting it” to make a difference because when only 0.4% of the people who vote understand the process well enough to cast an enlightened vote, do the 99.6% doom us to bad choices, a doomed future and inevitable Mussolinis?

Learning to Code can sometimes be like learning to disarm nuclear weapons but harder

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A long time ago, I was learning the computer language COBOL. The first two books I went through were very simple. It was almost like learning to tie my shoes. And then the third book was like learning calculus right after learning subtraction. Nothing made sense. And everything before had almost no relevance to anything that came after.

I experienced that again today. I’ve been learning Objective C, Alice and XCode programming. It’s all been going well. As part of my learning, I’ve been following the Apple itunes demonstration lectures, and like COBOL, the first two were very simple, almost like learning how to plug in your computer. The third lecture started off with advanced algorithms that even Commander Data would have struggled with. And he went so fast, and the type was so small, and then out of the blue (due to time constraints) he decided to plug in predesigned code (to speed things up), and that’s right about the time I lost him (and it completely).

So I’m having to refigure where I am with this language, and now I’m discouraged. This happens a lot with computer languages. Something goes so easily, like they teach you how to program “Hello World” and then lesson two is how to break into the Pentagon and rewire their networks to get free HBO from the World Bank.

Having said that, I start teaching college classes again next week. I’ll try to make sure I don’t teach the same way I’ve been learning lately. I’d rather not have all of my students jumping off bridges.