Hume in a Toga

I am pondering the revels of Hogmanay today, though they are four months away. I am saddened to realize that this coming New Year will be our last in the UK before we move back to Bethel, Vermont next Summer

They say Edinburgh has the liveliest and most ribald of Hogmanay parties. The city explodes with literary, thespian, and bacchanalian delights. Edinburgh conjures up visions of cobblestone streets, Burns Nicht, dusky pubs, ghost tales, mysterious castles, and the revoltingly delicious haggis. These are worthy and compelling images.

But mostly, Edinburgh reminds me of David Hume, one of my philosopher-heroes. Hume brings to mind many things - not least of which is how intellectually lame he makes me feel. But then, I think it is good to be humbled on a fairly regular basis. It keeps one grounded. David Hume, you may recall, is the guy who awakened Immanuel Kant, the great German Idealist, from his “dogmatic slumber.” Unfortunately, the brilliant and impenetrable Kant forces many of us who try to read him today into REM sleep.

There is a statue of Hume on the Royal Mile in the city. It is halfway up on the right hand side heading west toward the castle, on the cobbled sidewalk outside a fudgery and apothecary. Hume is clad in a toga. Weird, but definitely a more philosophical aesthetic than Georgian coat, leggings and big buckle shoes. Legend has it if you rub his toe you will come into great wealth. I did; but I didn’t. The toe was shiny.

I see Hume and I wonder why we don’t teach him in schools today. We ought to. He is a model critical thinker. He demonstrates the attributes we want our critically thinking kids to have: curiosity, tenacity, self-awareness, a skeptical and questioning disposition, breadth in interests and depth in approach. He understands arguments, evidence, reasons and claims. He knows the difference between Knowledge and Belief. He is courageous in tackling issues which may not be popular. He applies the scalpel of his intellect to all problems major or minor. He achieves understanding by slicing away excess, unimportant and ancillary information, separating the chaff and assessing what remains. These are good habits.

We ought to have a dedicated curriculum track to teach critical thinking (CT) to our young people. The academic landscape is ripe with CT approaches and pedagogical techniques. Some, Argument Mapping for instance, are even demonstrably effective. Yet very few schools adopt focused and deliberate programs. It seems to me that our secondary educational institutions have made a conscious decision to not address the skill directly. Instead, I think they may assume CT proficiency is developed by osmosis, through normal day-to-day coursework.

Write an essay on the nature of Evil in Melville’s Moby Dick, work through a complex Euclidean proof, prove time dilation algebraically, reflect on the causes of the Civil War — not one of these things is bad. In fact, they are all really valuable projects, and I’m sure they do positively influence CT competency to some degree. But none of these examples are direct, head-on, duly rigorous critical thinking efforts.

This lack of laser focus is truly troubling in our colleges and universities. In a 1997 study involving 38 post-secondary institutions, faculty did not fare well on the CT front:

· Though 89% of faculty claimed critical thinking to be a primary objective of their instruction, only 19% could give a clear explanation of what critical thinking is. Further, only 9% were clearly teaching for critical thinking on a typical day in class.

· Though 78% claimed that their students lacked appropriate intellectual standards (to use in assessing their thinking), and 73% considered that students learning to assess their own work was of primary importance, only 8% could enumerate any intellectual criteria or standards they required of students or could give an intelligible explanation of those criteria and standards.

· Although 67% said that their concept of critical thinking is largely explicit in their thinking, only 19% could elaborate on their concept of thinking.

I will infer three things from these data:

(1) Since many of the professors seem not to have a grip on the fundamentals of critical thinking lexicon and pedagogy, their students will be deficient.

(2) Since most secondary education teachers are sourced from our universities and colleges, it is likely that many will not have the necessary academic background to transfer critical thinking skills to their students.

(3) Our kids are likely not receiving adequate critical thinking training in school.

The thing is, CT is not a hard concept to understand. Critical Thinking, according to Dr. Richard Paul, is “The act of intellectually disciplined conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.” I like that one. I also like Dr. Tim vanGelder’s, “The art of being right.” Pithy and compelling.

The irony is that as the volume of information available to us grows exponentially, knowledge does not, at least not necessarily. The ability to reason certainly does not. In fact it seems that at times there is an inverse relationship between access to data and the facility to reasonably assess and compile that data into a coherent argument. In an age of information hypergrowth the premium is not on the information itself, but on the cognitive mechanisms we must deploy to make sense of it – to validate, judge and aggregate it rationally. We must teach our kids the specific skills to survive and thrive in a world community which is becoming more and more info-dense.

A dedicated, purpose-built, high school critical thinking program must enable students to answer the following questions:

- What is the conclusion? What is the bottom line?

- Is the conclusion justified? Should I believe it? Why?

- What is the evidence? How does that evidence fit together? How should it fit together?

- What happens to the conclusion if a piece of evidence is false or weak?

- How might an alternative point of view affect the argument?

- What are the implications of these conclusions, if correct?

- How am I biased? How do my personal cultural and cognitive biases affect my analysis?

- What characteristics and personal traits should I strive to develop to become a better critical thinker? And so on.

I enjoy running. When I am out doing it, I like to listen to podcasts. One of my favorites is out of Australia. It’s called The Philosopher’s Zone. It sounds like it may spike the geek meter, but it doesn’t. It is very approachable, eye-opening, and fun. If you get a chance, listen to this one on “Philosophy in Schools.” It's great. What you’ll hear is a group of 13 and 14-year-olds discussing things. Simply discussing things, and doing it quite well. They are products of a “philosophy in secondary education” program in Australia. It will surprise you. Probably shock you. Maybe even enrage you. You’ll listen, and wonder if you have ever heard a 13-year-old kid in your immediate circle express him or herself like that. I never have. When I was 14 I recall grunting quite a bit, listening to loud music, and figuring out how to talk to girls.

Critical Thinking is an action… a verb. And this action can be taught. Plus, at the end of it all you get to say things like, “The supporting claims you are using to justify your contention suffer from myriad fallacies, the gravest of which is post hoc ergo propter hoc.” And let me tell you fellas, nothing’ll make you more of a chick-magnet than saying that.

Critical Thinking: We need to teach it. It will enable the creation of a emboldened, responsible and intellectually adept citizenry. It will enhance lives. 

If you don’t feel like commenting below, but want to flame, bludgeon, or otherwise chat, please feel free to contact me at sears.todd@gmail.com. Be well.

Sweet, Popped Little Morsels of Excellence

The holiday season, regardless of the creation-redemption lore we subscribe to, brings with it a tendency for all of us to step back a few paces, assess our lives, and consider issues and ideas of great moment and gravitas. It is during times like these, as we are all wrapped in great swaths of collective social goodness, that I tend to select critical problems to resolve, problems which may have been dwelling well beforehand within the murky depths of self.

There are plenty to deal with, clearly: the recession and bailout, the Madoff Ponzi, taking Afghanistan seriously again, giving Iraq back to the Iraqis, Blagojevichian hijinks in Illinois, crazy mad weather, ridiculously high expectations of the new anointed guy, recovering from the lows achieved with ease by the last one, Russia resurgent in the Western Hemisphere, Chinese military modernization, an intransigent Iran, and an impatient, increasingly reactionary Israel. So many things. So very many things.

So, this year I’ve chosen to work on the issue of which caramel/toffee popcorn snack is best.

My colleague, Dave, and I have been worrying over this conundrum for several weeks. Our solution-set is easily definable. The work is rewarding. Whatever the answer is, it is sure to be found within a group consisting of Fiddle-Faddle, Poppycock, Cracker Jack, Crunch ‘n Munch, and the late, great Screaming Yellow Zonkers.

How does one rate these delectables? Well, it’s simple. We must do what all critics do and set out some basic criteria. For example, if I’m reviewing a film, I might break it down and take a look at such individual components as acting, plot, cinematography, originality, editing, special effects, costume, direction, lighting, cultural symbolism, level of irony, respect for the audience, and catering selection. I would hope that as I disaggregate things and analyze them individually in a systematic and sufficient way, I’d have a better holistic assessment at the end. In theory, anyway.

Likewise for the case at hand with these challenging snacks. These were our criteria:

* Kernel Lightness — it should be airy and cloud-like
* Kernel Size — 3-4 per good mouthful
* Colour of the Toffee Glaze — amber is ideal
* Spelling of the word, “Colour”– it should be with a “u”
* Taste — buttery sweet blasts of fluffy crunchy richness should assault the mouth
* Consistency of the Glaze — not gooey, but crisp and clicky when you bite into it
* Proportion of Kernel-to-Nut — 8:1 is optimum
* Kernel-to-Nut binding characteristics — the nut needs to be firmly bound to the kernels, not separate
* Name — it must be right for the product, and respectful of the eater
* History — it should be culturally iconic

So, we went through the rigor of the process, assuming that all criteria had the same weight. Of course, they probably don’t, but this is an irrelevant bit of white blog noise, not an article for Nature, so we’ve taken some methodological shortcuts.

Initially, we wanted to mark the product down if it was manufactured by a huge conglomerate. That didn’t work out because pretty much every food product in the United States of America is made by ConAgra (except for some interesting sorghum-based breakfast cereals made fresh by a chap name Clive, somewhere in the Dakotas). So, since the conglomerate criterion proved to be entirely non-diagnostic, we wrote it off. We also removed Screaming Yellow Zonkers from consideration because it stopped production when its manufacturer, Lincoln Foods, was gobbled up by ConAgra in 2007. Too bad, because legend has it that an SYZ box actually made it into the Louvre.

Process minefields aside, here are the results we realize you anticipate greatly:

#1 was Cracker Jack (75 pts). Though it fell short on glaze consistency, toffee quality, and peanut binding, it finished very strong with maximum points for historical iconography (”Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” Does anything more need to be said?). We also like the name very much. We like to be associated with Cracker Jack, even to be called one. “Kid, you’re a cracker jack, a real cracker jack” has a very wholesome retro vibe about it, which we feel good about. Sort of like, “I like ya, kid. Ya got moxie.”

#2 was Poppycock (73 pts). It missed the mark, but battled well. Poppycock was the clear favorite on metrics of taste and overall component quality. We especially liked the toffee texture and the buttery honey-like burst it gave us in every bite. It would have won easily if it had at least some historical relevance. It didn’t. In actual fact, Poppycock seems to be the product of focus groups and food-industry bureaucrats. A lot of flash bang with its shameless almonds and baroque use of pecans, but no soul at all. We also had a major problem with the name, Poppycock. We found it to be quite rudely dismissive. It’s in the same league as Fiddle-Faddle, in that regard. It feels as if we said something that ConAgra thought was stupid, and they responded corporately with, “Oh, poppycock.” or, “That’s just fiddle-faddle.” It begged the question for Dave and I as to why ConAgra doesn’t yet have a product called Pish Posh. And if they did, what would it be?

#3 was Crunch ‘n Munch (69 pts). Good effort. We both think it is a decent snack, but suffers from lack of historical importance. Apart from a (failed) attempt in 2004 by the Yankees to replace Cracker Jack with a Crunch ‘n Munch concession, it’s got nothing. We had problems with the name on this one, too. We found it to be far too directive. It is telling us what to do. “Hey you. Take this and Crunch it. Then Munch it.” We don’t like to be told what to do, unless it is Monica Bellucci doing the telling. We also thought the order of the command was illogical. We both agree that one munches before one crunches, not vice versa. It is simply the way of things.

#4 was Fiddle-Faddle (48 pts). This score actually comes across as more negative than it needs to be. We have already addressed the dismissive nature of the name above, with Poppycock. But Fiddle-Faddle suffers in the scoring from its inherent and tragic lack of nuts. We had a couple of criteria which were very nut-centric, and so couldn’t give poor Fiddle-Faddle any points for those. This caused it to suffer in the final reckoning; though we both found it pretty tasty.

There; that issue is resolved. Now I can go back to work on reducing global suffering. Happy New Year.

A Rehash, but Not Hash

I was married once before. My wife, Hala, was an Egyptian– 100%. She’s the mother of my oldest, Alexander. She was mercurial, emotional, passionate and stubborn. I was working a lot, buried in books, busy, and tending to my career — much of it at sea. That combination wasn’t good, and we found ourselves leagues apart, after time. Following an earnest attempt to pull it back together, we ultimately decided to end the chapter, close the book, and move on with our lives, separately.

I’m convinced we did the right thing. Both of us are far better and far better off, than we likely would have been. We are still quite close, we both remain dedicated and loving parents to our son, and we do, now and again, take the opportunity to drive one another bats#@t crazy, mostly over Skype, for that visual touch. She’s in Iraq as we speak, working in the big business of providing Arabic linguists and interpreters to our soldiers and diplomats on the ground there.

Oh, that Arabic language is a sweet and subtle thing. Filled with nuance, history, and the heat of Suns, this language is a challenge on many levels. Hala taught me quite a bit of it, but I didn’t learn as much as I would’ve liked.

In 1992, after grad school, Hala, me, and my buddy Rico (now an FBI special agent on the West Coast) planned a trip to El Arish, on the Sinai Peninsula. It was Hala’s hometown. I really adore Arab culture and especially the people. They are some of the kindest, most hospitable, friendliest, and proudest people in the world. We were psyched about the journey. And we arrived.

We roamed Bedouin markets in the town center, shopped for kelim’s at the bazaar, enjoyed the scent of exotic spices wafting over and within the warm easterly winds, gazed upon the sunlit Mediterranean coastline, and took the edge off our hunger with delectable Nile delta citrus — all of these things made for a great experience. But, as with most vacations (and probably life itself), the really memorable tales are borne of the unexpected, the tangential, and the serendipitous.

On this particular day, we awoke to a hot, dry, and sunny morning. I’ll say we had pickled local vegetables, spicy foul mouddamas, stacks of freshly baked eesh baladi, fruit, and tea; as that is what we had most days. Delicious. Not ones to plan, but to just let things happen, Rico and I, knowing that Hala had some personal business to take care of, decided to walk down to the Med and hang out, just a mile or so away.

But, just as we were leaving the house, Hala’s cousin, Ahmed, popped by to meet us (he had heard there were a couple of Americans in town). So, we enjoyed some more tea, and with Hala translating, learned that Ahmed would be very honored to take us around town and show us the sights while he was “doing his rounds.” Well, it turns out that Ahmed was a charcoal deliveryman. He would pile huge bags of it on his creaky wooden, donkey-powered cart, and drop it off at businesses and residences in the town. Clearly this was an experience not to be missed, so Rico and I opted to not miss it.

Ahmed sat in the front of the cart, on a tattered pillow, holding reins of beat-up rope and leather, to control this very gentle, if lugubrious, beast as it burdened stoutly on. Rico and I had no where else to go but to the back of the cart, behind the 7-foot pile of charcoal bags, and perch ourselves precariously on the stern edge of the platform, legs and feet dangling down near the dirt road below. Just like a hay-ride, but without the pumpkins. Or the hay. Perfect.

Apparently it didn’t matter that Rico and I had very little Arabic between us. Ahmed was a talker. He couldn’t see us over the pile of bags and get that important eye contact, so he compensated by shouting things loudly, probably describing that particular part of town, or gossiping about this or that passerby. So we smiled and nodded to ourselves, and shouted back “ay-wa” (”yes”) quite a lot. I’d had enough Arabic to barely get by. I knew how to say, “I’m hungry,” “I’m thirsty,” “Dark Shadows is a campy gothic drama,” and, of course, very many permutations of swearing at myself, which I had learned from my wife. I was not fluent. More like effluent.

Soon, the clouds masked the Sun, temps dropped, and we started to feel misty warm rain on our skin. Apparently, Ahmed thought the precipitation was a good opportunity to stop work for a while and go visiting. So we did. We left the main roads of the town and took a bumpy track about a 1/2 mile out and eased the donkey down a short incline to the front of a large open-front barn on what seemed to be a farmstead.

Rico and I had no idea where we were or what we were doing until a big burly man in traditional dress came out and introduced himself. He had decent English and we were able to finally figure out what was going on. His name was Mohammed and he was Ahmed’s uncle, and Hala’s, too, distantly. He grew olives and lemons, and enjoyed professional wrestling.

Well, the rain was coming down faster, introductions were over, and it was time to be more graciously welcomed. This usually involves tea, and it did in this circumstance. It also involved the company of about 15 farm workers sitting in a circle around a shisha, smoking apple-flavored tobacco and watching TV. They were sitting on the floor in the middle of this big hay-strewn barn.

The guys made space for Rico and I, and we sat down in and amongst them. On the TV was a BBC production of Othello being broadcast out of Israel. It had Hebrew subtitles. It was overdubbed in Arabic. Surreal.

The gents were very friendly. They asked us questions, translated through Mohammed, and we began a nice conversation. The shisha mouthpiece made its rounds. My turn; all conversation stopped as gazes locked onto me. Feigning experience in these matters, I smiled and tried to project a look which said, “Yeah, I do this all the time, boys.” I drew deeply and felt the smooth, water-cooled smoke surge into my lungs. I cloaked the tweak of vertigo I felt with a hearty belly laugh and passed the nozzle to the next guy, Hamza. Talk continued, and so did the orbit of the pipe. After three times around, my dizziness turned to confidence infused with giddiness.

Oh yes. I had gone native. I laughed at jokes I thought I understood. I talked about Othello and imagined people cared. I may have slapped Hamza on the back. The tobacco was strong. The nicotine levels must have been way higher than the run-of-the-mill Marlboro you take a drag on over 1 too many beers at the local tavern. I had the inevitable, “Hell, I really hope this is tobacco, and nothing else.” moment, but carried on. And it continued.

Finally, as I was looking out the barn at the poor donkey left in the rain, I decided that the entire group needed to know that I thought the animal must be sad being left out there getting all wet. So, in my best Arabic, after ahemming and declaring that I had an announcement. I told the entire group, while pointing at the beast, “Ana homarrah hazeena.” Translated, “That donkey is sad.”

After a pause, the gang erupted into fits of near hysterical laughter. Men were rolling onto their backs, grabbing their guts. Some buried faces into their hands and just shuddered with mirth. “Ah, I impressed them with my sweet linguistic skills,” I thought, vaguely aware that something may have been slightly amiss.

Well, it turns out that, “Ana homarrah hazeena” actually means, “I am a sad donkey.” So there’s that.

Rico and I left after a while, both of us gifted with the best olive oil and lemons we had ever tasted, riding on a cart being driven by Ahmed, and pulled along by the donkey, which, it seemed to me, might have been smiling.