Learning and understanding

In the last post I mentioned that I seem to learn things differently to most people. I found this description which seems to sum it up. I have always found it easier to get things straight in my own mind if I imagine describing them to others. It was something that I used to do mentally while out running as a teenager - a form of mediation.
One immediate consequence that occurs to me would be that this should also make one a better teacher but I am not sure this worked for me. While I have done quite of bit of teaching (tutoring/lecturing/instruction whatever you want to call it), I am not certain that I am particularly good at it. Once I understand the concept and can explain it to my own satisfaction, I have too little patience with others that have not yet caught on. I think my wife can probably vouch for this :-)
In terms of learning, I suppose I consider the approach of  'do more and more problems until you become familiar with the way of solving it' to be a bit brute force. It is hammering the information into the students minds and holding it there until it stops falling out. I prefer a little more finesse and try to work out how the technique or information fits with what I already know, perhaps adjusting mental models along the way, until there is a space to place the learnings where it will take root.
I am sure that good teachers approach things this way - although I haven't actually thought about it until recently so I haven't taken notice about how I was taught. However, it does require the teacher to understand the topic *in depth* themselves before trying to pass it on. It also requires the student to be willing and able to adjust their mental view of the world to incorporate the new knowledge.
Perhaps I can see why it is not such a common approach.

Working under Pressure

ON occasion I have been told that I am *too* laid back at work. Usually by a manager who feels that there is some virtue in rushing around like a head-less chook, in such a state of stress that you can't think straight. Obviously if I am not constantly active in pursuing my work then I can't be taking the deadline seriously enough.
Personally I find that most of the time, a more *effective* response is to slow down; to identify what truly needs to be done - and that is often NOT what is on the project plan - and to make sure it is done in the simplest and more useful manner. In other words, to take the time to understand the problem and generate a straightforward solution. Even if that means short-cutting the existing project plan.

This is not new. I do recall that when at Uni, and even at school, I could not understand how much effort everyone else seemed to put into their study. I had friends who would spend hours endlessly memorising formulae and doing problem after problem. I tended to find it sufficient to take a little time to concentrate on exactly why the theory worked and how the equations were derived, often running just a few key problems just confirm. I was generally not the highest ranking student but I was certainly up there - and with considerably less effort than most of my class-mates.
To be clear I believe the best students were the ones that did both - understood the theory AND memorised the text. But I have since found that it is rare that the diminishing returns are worthwhile in a real business, especially taking into account the opportunity costs.

There is also a tie in with another observation I've had about people I have worked with - and would avoid ever working with again if I have a choice. Those who work best under pressure.
If you are one of these people there is a distinct advantage to putting a project into crisis. You get to shine and display the heroic actions to save the day.
One of the most egregious examples of this was a lead I worked alongside. Another architect assigned to a project came came up with a practical solution to the business problem, but one that side-stepped the lead's vision. So he re-designed it himself - halfway through the testing phase. After a complete re-write of the solution, and with the deadline pressing, it was found that the theoretical approach could not deal with real world necessities and they had to revert. For various reasons this meant another re-write, re-testing, deployment etc. all happening after the original deadline.
A month of over 80 hours a week by the entire team got the project over the line. The lead was promoted for 'saving' something that he put in danger and the original architect left he company.
I wish I could say this was an isolated occurrence, but that lead could *only* work well under pressure. And after a couple of repeats he was the chief architect of the whole programme.
Needless to say - we did not get on well together.

One final point that occurs to me in re-reading this: How much of the work being done actually needs doing? How much is due to the inability of people to 'work smarter not harder'? And how much effort could be saved if people would just THINK about the problem a bit instead of falling into the Politician's Fallacy.

Some thoughts on job creation

The justification for governments giving incentives to companies and cutting spending on individuals - especially in 'tough' economic times - is that companies create jobs and so there is a natural trickle down of funds to the population.
Of course, this approach was dis-proven by Thatcherism and Reaganomics but it still seems to be a common anti-pattern for governments.
The error is the theory is that companies create jobs. Any company worth its share rating considers job creation as a last resort. Almost any other efficiency will be sort to reduce costs and increase productivity. The larger the company, and therefore more distant from the people of which it is composed, the less feeling it has about those people.
The only reason for an organisation to add jobs would be if they could not meet demand any other way. In other words the best way for a government to increase jobs would to increase the demand for services that jobs provide. i.e. increase the disposable income of individuals.
Of course, if you are looking across an entire country, shifting jobs from one industry to another does not really achieve the goal. Hence attacking the issue by dealing with large established industries is just shuffling jobs between one company to another - with little room for growth in the total.
Instead focusing on new and innovative industries - especially those which are labour intensive is likely to provide more bang for your buck. IN today's world that means knowledge based industries and new technologies. Apart from anything else the nature of the internet means that individuals are more capable of creating their own jobs now than at any time in the past. The options for commerce that it opens up, particularly in small, personal operations is enormous.
But the nature of politics has never been attracted to de-centralisation and distributed growth. It is much more flashy and news-worthy to publicity hungry politicians to focus on large showy projects.

The Transition Plan

Over the last few years there have been several articles or accounts I have seen talking about the new world order; the era of abundance in all things, the age in which everything will know will collapse. The end of the world as we know it, possibly replaced with something immeasurably better, perhaps replaced by ecological or economic or cultural collapse.
The one thing that seems to be missing in all these accounts is - how do we get there from here?

I did a post about this before but a couple of things have brought it to mind again. For a start, the city in which I live has recently seen the closure of not one, but three major employers. Leading, of course, to headlines about the mass job losses which will result. At the same time, I have heard many in the know who talk about the many small start-ups, new enterprises and even government organisations that are moving into the area and soaking up all the available staff.
The difference is that the closure are large manufacturing companies - Ford, Shell, Alcoa - while the myriad ventures that are taking over are technical and in the service industries. In other words - a microcosm of the (apparent) global trend.
The upside is that there is much more energy, better work conditions and potential involved in the new order. I would argue that it is a major improvement for the city and the society within it. On the other hand, the downside is personal and immediate to those affected. A blue collar worker who has spent his entire working life in the engine assembly plant is *not* going to get a job with an insurance office or at a biomedical research team.

So how are we to get to the wonder of the future from a time of upheaval and personal disaster. The stories are all either local and short term disaster, or global and long term golden age. The question that occurs to me is: what about the middle?
What is the transition plan? What is happening to families, not the society; what will occur in the next few years not decades? How can we best minimise the harm while still aiming for the stars.

Obviously the answers will be controversial. It is a topic on which personal experience plays a major part. For myself I feel the shiny goal is worth the mud we need to slog through to get there, but I am not the one getting stomped into the ground by the stampede.
I think this is topic that is likely to lead to more posts - at least until I get distracted by something else.

Aniarism

I recently saw a post which described an attitude toward religion that I have felt but not articulated before.
The sentiment is basically that it plays no significant role in my life - certainly not enough to bother associating myself with the various labels that exist. I realise that many people in our society, and definitely in less sophisticated cultures define themselves according to their religion but this is often not the case amongst within the WEIRD cultures. Even those who attend church regularly can scarcely be called devout. In many cases religion is something one does on the weekend and it barely touches everyday life.
I reject the term atheist because it implies a deliberately negative stance on the existence of a God. In the past I have considered myself agnostic with tendencies toward atheism. The point of view being that I would be quite disappointed if I found that a supreme being created the universe and has a hand in everything that happens. As an answer it closes down so many interesting questions in a very unsatisfying way.
Recently however, I have realised that even this was a Friday night philosophy belief and, in truth, I didn't really see how it mattered in any meaningful way.

But, to the point of this post, what is the correct term for this attitude? Traditionally atheism or agnosticism would be the only options. In keeping with the Greek roots of those words I suggest "Aniarism" from the word aniaros = uninteresting.
I have no idea if anyone else has already come up with something similar. And really I don't care.

Enabling Knowledge

There are two aspects to turning information into knowledge. If we take the term 'knowledge' to refer to information that is stored in a person's head, then there are two phases to putting it there. First there is in finding the important point or insights that will resonate with knowledge already held. Then it has to be presented in such a way that it can be absorbed clearly and effectively by the target.
 Neither of these activities are particularly easy since both depend on the unknown idiosyncrasies of the person taking in the knowledge.For instance, in many cases the missing piece is not actually information as such. It may well be a way of linking two previously discrete items to provide a new insight. Much progress is made in science by people outside their area of experience simply because they are able to make these linkages.
[By the way, there is an existing profession which specialises in exactly these activities. In our culture it is called teaching.]

Presentation of data is something that everybody thinks they know something about, but which only a few people are seriously studying. Edward Tufte is the only one I know off the top of my head but I have not made a serious search myself.
Nevertheless, new ways and different ways of presenting complex information so that it is meaningful to the recipient are being introduced constantly. The internet is a prime cause of this since so many different mechanisms can be trialled, and incrementally improved, with a large number of people. And multiple different techniques can be available at once so that learners are able to try to find a method that works for them. The Khan academy is a prime example of a new way of learning, Open University initiatives abound and the TED organisation provides many cool presentations.

In each case the major variable is the audience and for someone to internalise the information - to properly learn it - the presentation needs to be keyed directly to them. Not only prior knowledge is important, but also the context of the presentation and even the state of mind of the target. When I was a fitness instructor, the way I talked about the topic was quite different for a client, a class of student trainees or to a group of office workers.

The other difficulty is in finding useful information in the first place. I said above that I don't know how many people are seriously studying presentation techniques. That is not because that information is not readily available on the Internet. But I really don't care enough to wade through the search results that would appear in Google if I tried to look it up. Tracking down useful information is easier now than it ever has been in the past but the signal to noise ratio is very high.
What is needed is a method of curating or maintaining information in such a way that key points can be easily found. Google does a good job in search, but the sources are scattered and disparate with almost no consistency in either quality or content. Attempts have been made to correct this situation but the anarchic nature of the internet resists standardisation even at the most basic level.
Categorisation as an overlay, held separately or independently of the actual source itself would seem to a possible solution. A catalogue to the Internet - such as Google attempts to be - but with metadata evaluating the quality, reliability and even usefulness of the information. It is difficult to see how such a thing could be practical for any organisation unless something like cloud-sourced tagging were used.
But I am not an expert in the management of knowledge or information - just an interested amateur. Of course there are people who are trained in exactly this field and who deal with highly complex classifications of all fields of knowledge. Any organisation wishing to structure their artefacts or introduce a knowledge base should probably hire at least one trained librarian.

Turning Information into Knowledge

There are a couple of things recently that brought my attention back to the topic of knowledge, information and data. At a recent presentation about TOGAF certification it was mentioned that there was still some disagreement about the distinction between data and information. It seems to me that the next step, processing information into knowledge is at least as important and is still an unrecognised gap in the conversation.
I can see an obvious link to the current focus on "Big Data" and the extraction of useful correlations from the enormous and diverse records collected by entities such as Facebook or Google. To me, this appears to be in the same category as trawling through mine tailings in search of missing nuggets. This is not necessarily a pointless activity - many mines are becoming profitable as new extraction techniques allow finer traces of material to be recovered. However, more intelligent application of tools at the time of collection would seem to provide a more efficient (and timely) method of collecting useful artefacts.
But, to stretch the analogy, even as the rock is only useful for the ore it contains, the ore cannot be used without further processing. Data is only useful because of the meaning/information that may be extracted. But that information is only valuable because of the knowledge that may be gained. Knowledge that may then be used to direct an enterprise and create value; or just to create pretty things.
One known 'gotcha' when dealing with "Big Data" is the possibility of false positives - patterns in the data which appear simply because there is so much data that some of it must be linked in some way. The best way to avoid this problem is to have a discerning review of the findings by an experienced person (not machine). In other words to connect the information extracted to the framework of knowledge held in someone's head. Similarly low-yield ore is discovered and discarded during processing and only the pure metal is extracted (at least in principle).