A classmate of mine from the MA program at Waterloo has come to a similar conclusion independently about narrating workâor professional blogging, as he might call it. He’s working as a copywriter so his posts are usually lively and informative, and he’s a far more prolific blogger than I am. You can read him here: http://allanmcdougall.wordpress.com/
Who is the smartest guy in the room?
I started to write a post about influence of emotions on our ability to reason. It grew much longer than I expected, so I’m developing it into an article instead. If I can’t place it in the media, I’ll post it here. In the meantime, here’s the short version:
Twenty-five percent of all students who enter the Faculty of Arts at the University of Waterloo this fall will fail to graduate. Most of those will flunk out by April of 2009. The problem is not intellectual ability: the university has refined systems to guess who can muddle through their course-work. What the university can’t measure is whether a student has the emotional stability to get through their freshman year. Why should we care? Recent research in neurobiology has shown that emotions are central to how reasoning works. The things that determine our intellectual ability–logic, memory, and other high-order brain functions–are shaped by the emotional regions of the brain.
From the outside, flunking out of university looks like poor judgment: the student generally stops attending class, handing in assignments, and eventually withdraws. From the inside, the student is trying to understand how to live away from home for the first time, how to make an intimate relationship work, maybe for the first time, or distracted by some other emotionally motivated problem. Remember, the university choses students for their intellectual ability, and there is little difference in the intellectual horsepower between the drop out and the academic award winner.
There are other spectacular failures of judgment that have clear emotional warning signs, even if we don’t acknowledge them. McLean and Elkind’s Enron: The Smartest Guys In the Room draws a profile of Enron’s CEO Jeffrey Skilling and his senior team as people with severe emotional difficulties. Their research is drawn from information that was publicly available throughout Enron’s rise, and yet people ignored the emotional signals, revered Skilling, and continued to invest in Enron.
If we, as a society, are interested in protecting ourselves from massive failures in our social systems, like credit markets, potentially dangerous scientific research, or oppressive copyright law, we need to begin to account for the influence of emotions in our reasoning processes.
Posted in Criticism.
– September 21, 2008
What I’m Working On Now
I realized that I should probably be writing a little more about what I’m working on (narrating my work, remember). Alas, I have a presentation this Friday which is chewing up my time. Projects tend to get hungrier for time the more you feed them. So, for now, here’s the (long) list of things that occupy me:
- A presentation to some friends in Hamilton on ePartnerup. We’re trying to enjoin our friends to champion our project with their contacts in business associations and government who may have access to funds for a project like this.
- I’m booked to start writing a study on how participatory web technologies (like blogs, wikis, social networking, etc.) can best be applied to e-learning. This will start in the next week or two.
- Revisions to a paper I wrote called The Emotional Determinants of Reason: A Cognitive Approach to Pathos for the Rhetoric Review. This was some really exciting work that looks at using developments in cognitive science to explain how we use emotional appeals in language, and vice-versa
- Revisions and trying to place another paper I wrote called The Poetics of Social Criticism: Dante’s Influence on Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Foreign influence on Victorian writers is an understudied area, and there is almost nothing written on the influence of Dante on Dickens. What has been written establishes some evidence that Dickens had read at least the Divine Comedy thoroughly.
- A grant application to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for doctoral study funding. I thought I would keep the option to pursue my Ph.D. open for another year by applying for this major grant. I’m proposing a project to look at how figures of irony “colour” our language (for lack of a better term). I’m still defining this project.
- My thesis. This is probably the most important project I have, and the one that receives the least attention for the moment.
Posted in Start-Up.
– September 9, 2008
Term Paper: Part II
My plans to document the term-paper writing process in progress were overwhelmed by my workload, so I’ll need to write this series retrospectively. To follow on from my last post, what came out of my readings was not so much a thesis as a slightly more specific idea of the direction I wanted to take in my paper.
Except for his survey of the intellectual history of judgment, Leslie Thiele’s The Heart of Judgment was not helpful. The history Thiele wrote highlighted for me the importance of judgment in decision-making. Or, put another way, good decisions allow circumstances to change or soften the application of rules to a situation. This raised the question of what or how do we perceive circumstances?
This question fed directly into the next book I picked up, Descartes’ Error by Antonio Damasio. The ability to make any decisions, Damasio argues directly depends on the emotional areas. He presents some very compelling stories about people who have had an emotional region of the brain damaged, whose lives crash prior to this damage in spite of their normal (rational) appearance. Damasio’s work is still the cornerstone of thinking in this area 14 years later. This book is accessible and well worth a read.
At this point all I had was a vague notion that making judgments, especially good judgments, depends as much on emotions as logic. I approached my instructor with this who suggested an article and a book that were crucial in the development of my paper, and which I’ll cover in the next post.
Posted in Process.
– August 30, 2008
Sharing in Another Sense
When I met with my partners at The Informed Life a few days ago, we decided to make our data freely accessible by developers. This means that they will be able to include the information we provide in their own Internet-enabled applications (e.g. websites, cell phones).
The biggest reason we’re doing this is to increase the number of people who use our service. While we’re satisfied with the number of users we’ve been seeing, we think there are many more that we haven’t reached yet. We have two options to increase our exposure: market the service ourselves, or allow others who have their own audiences use our stuff. The first option is either labour intensive or financially draining–or both. We still have one marketing opportunity we’d like to pursue, but for the most part, we’ve already decided to shift our time and money to our ePartnerUp project. That leaves us with option two.
This is really exciting, but it also means we need to do streamline the way our systems have been running, and get our documentation ready for other people to read. I’m responsible for publicity, and publishing our API. That’s a technical term for the instruction manual on how a programmer (as opposed to someone browsing our site) would use the service.
The publicity part is a little new to me. I have some bloggers in mind that I’m going to contact, a few developer forums, and some user-generated news sites. For an Internet service, I think these are the best outlets but I’m open to suggestions.
Posted in Start-Up.
– July 5, 2008
Term Paper: Part I
This is the first in a series of posts where I’m going to share the process of writing a graduate-level term paper in English Literature. Briefly, a graduate-level English course generally requires you to give one or two formal presentations, and write a 20-page paper that aims to make a contribution to current scholarship on your topic. Given time and interest, I’ll write a post about the all the inputs and outputs related to graduate courses, but I’m focusing here on the term paper part.
I’m still in the early stages of developing my term paper for the last course of my degree, Cognitive Rhetoric. This course looked at what our use of language reveals about the way we know the world. Rhetoric leads a strange double-life in academia: it’s often attributed to teaching people how to use language; it’s also concerned with studying the patterns of how language is used. At Waterloo, it’s rhetoric in the second sense that is taught. So in this course we argued about the ways in which patterns of speech and writing helped us understand the properties, principles, and structures of knowledge. If you’re interested in the topic, I would highly recommend reading the syllabus.
At this point, there are a number of ideas still swirling in my head that need to be grounded by some more reading. For this paper, I’m vaguely interested in how pathos (roughly speaking, emotional appeals) as a persuasive technique is related to the cognitive dimensions of decision-making.
Right now, I’m in a mode where I glance at a lot of things in order to find my bearings on the topic. This includes:
- The Heart of Judgment by Leslie Thiele, which looks at morality and political thought from the perspective of neuroscience.
- I’ll also have to track down a study that suggests the “emotional area” of the brain is more active in making decisions than “rational area”.
- I’ve also browsed through a couple of recent encyclopedias of psychology which gave me a long list of books and essays to track down on the subject of emotion and affect theory.
- At the intersection of judgment and psychology, I’ll probably need to do some reading on game theory, and the prisoner’s dilemma.
What I’m hoping comes out of all this reading is a provisional thesis. That is, I’ll try to say something insightful, original, and provocative about the subject, based on my reading. Then I’ll try that thesis out on some people like professors and classmates who know something about the topic, and that will lead us into the next post.
Stay tuned!
Posted in Process.
– June 23, 2008
Narration of Work
The difference between thriving blogs and the dead-end kind appears to be a focus on narrating something impersonal about our lives. That’s vague: by impersonal I mean something that refers to the world outside our heads, like news, tips, and work. This has the sound of the obvious in it because, after all, who wants to read someone else’s navel gazing.
Someone will argue that news, tips and work are personal because they deal with an individual’s reaction to other things and people, but this definition moves the line of personal just a little too far away to be useful. The object of those topics is about how relationships, not necessarily the writer’s, shape our view of the world. When entertainment news describes Angelina Jolie’s various adoptions, we learn something about overseas adoptions, the people who go through it, and how they are treated by others.
That’s not to say that all of this writing has the same value but they all function in a similar way, and the way is materially different from navel gazing. Well, so goes my hypothesis, and this blog is a test. I’m building on an idea expressed by early bloggers like Dave Winer and Jon Udell that one really excellent use of blogs would be to narrate our work.
Why bother? The philosophical reasons concern the future, present, and past. David Brin, an astro-physicist turned novelist and cultural critic, has argued persuasively that the best way to fight the misuse of technology in the future surveillance is to force a transparency. Narrating our work has a deep connection to transparency in this sense.
As a highly educated member of society, I feel I have an obligation to publicize part of what I do and have done so that others can benefit from my experience. For some valid historical reasons, academics tend to limit this aspect of their professional lives to their books, articles, and the students they supervise. I think there are more people interested in the professional lives of people who sit around and think all day than just students.
Finally, there is something about the integration of work and household that we have lost to history. In the English-speaking west, we probably lost it around the mid-nineteenth century when the industrial revolution took “work” far out of the home and we segregated ourselves based on age. One way to give our children a stronger sense of direction is to model behaviour for them, and showing them our work is one way of doing that.
In any case, I hope you’ll find something novel, helpful, or entertaining about this exploration.
Posted in Writing.
– June 21, 2008
