Food Art

A local art teacher showed me this power point presentation on food art. It was fascinating.

Structure & informal cultural ties

In their article "Institutions and the story of American religion", Stout and Cormode make a number of interesting points.  I'll limit myself to one for now.  They reference DiMaggio's idea that formal organization structure and informal cultural ties produce taken for granted social norms.  The premise of the article itself is that religious communities and movements need to be seen as institutions that combine structure and culture.

Now this doesn't seem like an overly radical idea to anyone with much common sense.  However, it does have some far reaching implications.  One simple idea is the "symbolic universe" in which people exist is constraining (Stout, Cormode, 1998).  This somewhat out of fashion idea suggests the language of representation controls some aspects of thought. Since I don't think this idea goes very far, I think it is better to say the norms which emerge from within a culture are, in part affected by structure in a mildly recursive manner.  The way people represent this interface is probably indicative of which elements produce societally implicit resonances.  I would expect any structural control on actual thought to be pretty minor.  

Fall of academic fads

Just a quick link to an interesting post over at Gene Expression.  The main idea is recent academic world views have fallen out of favor.  

Fourth, the sudden decline of all the big-shot theories you'd study in a literary theory or critical theory class is certainly behind the recent angst of arts and humanities grad students. Without a big theory, you can't pretend you have specialized training and shouldn't be treated as such -- high school English teachers may be fine with that, but if you're in grad school, that's admitting you failed as an academic. You want a good reputation. Isn't it strange, though, that no replacement theories have filled the void? That's because everyone now understands that the whole thing was a big joke, and aren't going to be suckered again anytime soon. Now the generalizing and biological approaches to the humanities and social sciences are dominant

This leaves one wondering what approaches are emerging as useful?  In the social sciences I agree with the post and expect to see a big rise in partially written slate theories (some biologically determined fitness landscapes). I have a feeling this approach will be hard on many extreme relativists.  It requires comfort with ambiguity mingled with a history of hard science. 

Magical Thinking

An interesting post over at The frontal cortex on magical thinking.   Clark has a brief commentary up at his blog.

Evangelizing an emergent God of the complex

I just downloaded quite a few podcasts from Point of Inquiry. I must have been lucky, because Michael Dowd was on the first program. The other 3 or 4 I have listened to haven't been nearly as understanding about their flip positions in the religion / science interface. I did, however, think Dowd captured a nice middle ground.

Dowd's views are solidly naturalistic and evidentiary. He uses religious language (night language), from what I can gather, because its tendrils capture the richness and interconnectedness of morally spandreled ideas. His positions are thoroughly atheistic. This sits him well in the science camp. He can use traditional religious language and yet agree with everything an atheist proposes. In this sense he is very captivating. It gives the fundamentalist minded science camp an opportunity to see the efficiency of the language, and in some ways the rallying power of morally embodied groups.

One thing I like about his interview is that he doesn't just give in to non-overlapping magisteria. To me this has always seemed like a cop out. At the very minimum there are significant evolutionary tendencies towards religion, quasi-religions or supernatural religions. These tendencies have real effects and probably aren't well described with non-mythical, hard scientific language. Certainly our language norms could change, but from what I heard Dowd arguing, it is unlikely that mythic, symbolic and sacred language are going anywhere. We can change the words used, but over time, these will develop similar connotations.

The thing that made me perk up was Dowd's position as an evangelizer for Kauffman's position. One of the things I was wondering about was how effective Kauffman's God of creative complex emergence would sell. After all, the growth of new religious movements is based on much more than a good idea. It is interesting to see a camp developing around an emergent God of the complex.

Michael Dowd's free podcasts

The point of inquiry podcast of Michael Dowd

Dealing with Circularity Issues

A practical way to deal with circularity issues is through iteration.  J. Willis' popular R2D2 instructional design model  gets lots of attention for its rejection of linear solutions.  There are actually a number of standard conventions for diagraming such processes.

As mentioned iteration is often a good way to work through circularities.  In educational technology for instance, hardware, training and management must be tackled in a seemingly simultaneous manner.  In real life, this tends to be impossible.  There are good reasons why any one of the three items should come first.  The reality is if any one item gets too far ahead of the other two, there are problems.  Training, management and hardware don't have to progress at identical rates, but as soon as one gets too far out of sync with the others, people notice limitations.  The answer is to keep cycling from one component to another.  

For some time, management needs to be seen as the solution.  Some time later, hardware, then training, etc.  The difficulty is this shifting tends to burn out people in organizations.  Human resources are generally designed to implement static solutions.  They can handle cycling, but the frequency has to be carefully managed.  The general way to handle this is to put some sensors into the process that light up as soon as people start sensing limitations.  However such feedback loops are easier said than implemented.  In fact, they tend to grow to require what John Ralston Saul calls heroic leadership.

A good philosophical base from which to approach circularity issues is Charles Sanders Peirce.  Clark has a very good philosophy / religious blog  based around his ideas.  As a pragmatist contemporary with Dewey and William James his ideas fit well with education.  Dewey has been popular with the education crowd for a number of decades, but since the rise of post-modernism, I think Peirce's perspectives are much more timely.

Circularity

Any substantive educational change runs into tremendous roadblocks. Tyack & Cuban’s book Tinkering Toward Utopia is probably the standard text exploring this issue. Michael Fullan’s work is a justifiably popular series of handbooks on this topic. There are a couple of basic perspectives that emerge with substantive educational change. Here’s the range I view myself operating within.

1. Significant educational change doesn’t stick until a generation dies out. Effort doesn’t really change this. It just mimics the larger changes that are all ready occurring. In effect, you are just keeping up with the progression from early to late adopters.

2. Educational change requires systemic change from all levels of the system. You can’t just change one stakeholder’s views, you have to change the views of all stakeholders. With education’s societal role, this is a big task, and in practice it ends up looking a lot like 1. Expense is justified because the average person seems so easy to tip with just the right sort of push.

3. Educational change is significantly affected by the loose coupling (controls) that exist within it. Teachers are basically autonomous agents. They are mainly affected by their own moral imperatives, not by external direction. As a result change rates are largely dictated by the rate at which teachers re-interpret their own priorities.

4. Educational change is similar to religious change. As such it can be viewed through Stark’s somewhat antiquated lens of rational choice theory, or through the lens of Wilson’s evolutionary based group level selection theories. The latter view is largely the same as 3,. but tackles the usually avoided issue of group dynamics.