Grade inflation is the noticeable trend in assigning higher grades to lower quality work. Traditionally it was used to describe the process where students were promoted to higher level classes without having mastered previous curricula.
But the problem is pervasive. It is extending far beyond school and reaching into other parts of our society as well -- and it is ruining us.
In the top 10 of my all time favorite movies is Richard Linklater's Waking Life. It is a series of philosophical conversations and one of them is about whether or not we have Free Will. It's a complicated question -- religiously, philosophically, and mathematically. show video hide video
As I thought more about Free Will and observed the world around me, I noticed that some people appear to have more free will than others. I noticed in my own life, and in the lives of my loved ones, the amount of free will we have within our life changes over time as well. I drew some charts on the white board for this post, click the image for high res:
Free Will Changes, therefore Free Will Exists
As you can see in the illustration above, the amount of free will we have in our lives changes over time. When we are babies, we have almost no free will. We are completely dependent on others to care for us. As we age, we learn more about the world, get stronger and we gain free will. We gain the ability to choose and act on those choices. As we get even older, our bodies decline in strength, we get frail, perhaps our mind begins to go, and once again, we become dependent on others to care for us -- our free will declines. In later life, we may still be able to make choices, but our ability to act on that choice dimishes, so the question of free will becomes moot.
So if we accept the idea that free will changes throughout life, then the question changes from one of whether or not free will exists, to how much free will do we have? What are some of the limits on our free will? Do we want free will? How can we create more free will? Before we can answer those questions, we have to figure out what free will is...
1 : voluntary choice or decision I do this of my own free will 2 : freedom of humans to make choices that are not determined by prior causes or by divine intervention
It is important to note that having a lot of choices is not the same thing as having a lot of free will. Free will is choosing. Free will is making a decision and acting on it.
As an example to illustrate his point, I went to the store the other day, because I needed some dental floss. There were so many choices that I couldn't decide which to buy. I thought, "There must be 30 different kinds of dental floss here! Do we really need that many?" I actually counted 38 different kinds of dental floss. I felt a need to limit my options. I didn't have time to read the packaging and marketing materials about each type of floss, so I said, "I'm going to buy the cheapest one." It turned out to be the store brand. Eighty cents. Some were as much as three dollars for the same quantity.
I had to limit my choices to obtain free will, that is, the ability to choose. Free will is the execution of the choices we make, not merely having a lot of options. It does seem paradoxical, but limiting our options, creates free will.
Create free will by limiting options
So, method #1 for creating more free will is to pick a filter for our options. It doesn't really matter what that filter is, it just needs to help us weed out options so we can actually choose and then act on it. In the example of the dental floss, I told myself to pick the cheapest one. That filtered 38 options down to exactly one option and I acted. Free will requires action.
Social limits on free will
Filters exist all around us. Society institutes these filters to protect us. They protect others from harm we could cause them. They protect us from harm others could cause us. Educational institutions create many filters: high school, college, medical school. There are various certification programs for law, engineering, driving trucks, and computer programming among others. These social filters are designed to help us choose only qualified options for our products and services.
These social filters also limit our personal free will. We can't just be a doctor for example. We have to go to school, learn from other doctors and go through residency. To get through these social limitations on our free will we need lots of the following: Experience, Education, Courage, Money, Influence, Enlightenment, and Perception.
Create Free Will by climbing the social ladder
So method #2 to gaining more free will would be learning about social limits on our free will and working our way through them. Climbing this social ladder is a huge investment in time and money. Many students graduate college with massive amounts of student loan debt, so in a way, while we open some doors, we also close others. College graduates often don't have the choice not to work because they need to pay off their loans. You'll have to decide for yourself where the proper balance is for you.
How much free will do you want?
Gaining free will is a process. Our minds appreciate working hard, gaining experience, learning how to use tools, and gaining free will over time.
Think about how you play video games. In lots of video games, players start out with limited options. As the game is played and accomplishments are made, the game opens up new levels, magic spells, or weapons we can use through the rest of the game. Just as we are born with limited free will, limited options in games keep the game interesting. They give us something to work for and we feel empowered.
Life is like this too. As you get older, doors will open for you. Often times, we make the mistake of wanting to retire early or move right into the big fancy house. This overzealousness can actually limit our free will later on.
Create Free will by saving time
You can also create free will by building tools, products, and knowledge for yourself and for others that will save you time in the long run. When you save time, you create more opportunities to act. The less time you spend acting on decisions, the more time you have to act on other decisions.
So think about your actions before you act. Free will compounds on free will. Every action that leads to multiple time savings later on will make your life more open later.
Think of your actions as investments into your future. Imagine, if you spend 15 minutes every day doing some particular thing, but it will take 45 minutes to automate that action, then by the fourth day, you have 15 extra minutes every day. This 15 minutes could be spent learning a skill or improving your product.
Keep making small incremental improvements like this and your free will will grow exponentially throughout your life.
Think of others. The world has more people in it than just you. What you do makes a difference. What you do affects other people. It affects the world.
Be conscious. Forget the rules. The rules are for the unconscious.
Do you want to follow the rules or do you want to make the rules or do you want to be immune to the rules? If you want to follow the rules, then rule number 1: Forget the Golden Rule. Here's your new rule:
Treat other people the way they want to be treated
That's right. Simple enough isn't it? Here's the hard part: It's a lot of work. It's a lot of work to get to know people and understand what they want -- especially millions, perhaps billions of customers. That takes a lot of work.
Ask yourself why many of the products we buy are made in China. It's because they work really hard! They work really hard to do a lot of work and they don't expect very much in return. That's the exact opposite of what is going on in the United States right now. We ask for a lot and don't work very hard to get it.
A lot of people think Wal-Mart takes advantage of Chinese labor, but I think the Chinese want more of Wal-Mart's business. Someone I met years ago spends a lot of time in China. He has a factory there. When he goes to visit the factory, the town cheers! They love him. They are so happy that he built his factory there. They are happy to have stable jobs and food and homes.
Many would say Wal-Mart is not following the golden rule because they wouldn't want to work the way Chinese workers work in China. I've never been to China, but if that story the gentleman told me about his factory is true, then the Chinese are happy to have the factories. Their lives before the factories were much harder than their lives after the factories. I know there are some terrible conditions around the world. But maybe the conditions we think are terrible, they think are great.
Remember, we are all people
It's easy to forget on this anonymous Internet that those we interact with are people. You have to remember people. You have to remember that you are a person. You have to remember that your customers are people. You have to remember that your clients are people. Your vendors are people. Your suppliers are people. We are all people. We aren't just corporations, we are corporations composed of people.
This whole planet is full of people and you can't treat them all the way you want to be treated. You have to treat them the way they want to be treated. The Golden Rule accomplishes a lot of that. Most people want to be treated with honesty, respect. They want to be flattered, they don't want to be hated. They don't want to be disagreed with, they want to be understood.
Understanding People is the Hardest Part
They aren't rational like computers. They don't accept for loops and boolean operators as input. They accept logos, ethos, and pathos as input. Understand that. Understand them.
I keep asking myself, "Why am I writing this on my company blog?" I keep telling myself, "The business books would look at me like I'm an idiot... you can't show your soul and get customers..." Well, I don't believe that's true. I think customers want honesty. They need it. They deserve it.
I'm tired of business as usual. It's time for some change. We have to think about the future. We've been thinking about the short term for too long. We can be dishonorable in the short term and get away with it, but in the long term, we have to be more thoughtful about how we behave and interact in the world.
I was watching this interview with Ayn Rand on the Donahue Show. Donahue is my hero. Donahue starts off talking about how baseball pitchers get hit with the ball and just brush it off, no pain. He said men are taught, "Don't show your feelings.... it's sort of a tyranny that men are not supposed to express..." I suspect he was about to say "Emotion" but then Ayn says, "It's a weakness, it's not strength. The strong man doesn't mind showing his feelings -- unhappy ones, or pain, or enthusiasm."
America has lost its emotion
We have sacrificed emotion for monetary gain. We've bought happiness with debt. We are stiffing the Chinese and our own employees. We can't do that anymore. We have to think and behave with vision. We can't replace happiness with products and consumerism. We have to be creative and productive and produce ideas and better lives for those outside our country if we are going to survive.
Americans in my generation and below, we were born into debt to the rest of the world who has worked hard for the past decades to build the products we buy. The food we eat. The clothes we wear.
If we keep going down the path we have been, our generation will be the first that will not have a better life than our parents. Debt, exhuberance, gluttony, sloth... and the rest of the deadly sins. They all describe our society. Maybe not all the individuals in it, but the sum total. No, I'm not lying, here's the list, maybe Wikipedia is lying. It would take 2 China's buying our products, to pay off our debt to the world and they have 4 times as many people as we do.
In a sense, the entire world can't pay off the exhuberant lifestyle Americans have lived for the past 5 decades. But Americans are very creative people. Perhaps the most creative in the world. We need to put that creativity to use now. We can't rely on ways of the past.
No emotion, no virtue
I wondered, Why has it become part of our society to deny emotion? I think there are two reasons. Have you ever been depressed? Did you feel like working? When I'm depressed I just don't like doing anything. If we aren't productive, we don't work hard enough and we don't make enough money.
But I do like reading stuff depressed people write. Kurt Vonnegut was pretty depressed, which I can understand. I like art from depressed people. Van Gogh cut off his ear just to feel anything. So it seems like there are good things that come from depression. If good things come from depression, why do we try to suppress depression? Why are there so many advertisements on television for anti-depressants? Do a lot of depressed people watch tv?
We shun depression, because depression is not productive. We need to be productive. We need to go to work. We need to keep the machine running. Depression is bad... But avoiding depression is worse. It has allowed us to avoid reflecting on why we are depressed. Why we should be depressed. It's okay, it's natural.
But what about other emotions? What about excitement? Love? Happiness? Elation? Business leaders aren't supposed to have those either... why? Donahue and Rand were talking about the extreme joy from the Americans when they beat the Russians at hockey. Rand said that was a rare example. In football today, if a football player makes a touchdown, he has to control his excitement. Do a dance, get fined. Those emotions aren't counter-productive.
So why can't we succeed in business if we show emotion? We all have them, don't we? Maybe the emotions don't match the business. Maybe they are stuck in the middle. Maybe a "sold soul" can't be happy... Maybe the skill isn't in suppressing the happiness, but in masking the sadness. It's easier to smile than it is to frown. If you want to smile, you don't even bother frowning... Where has the happiness in business gone?
We've lost our emotions and we've lost our courage. Those aren't my words. I heard it from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his address to Harvard in 1978. It was such a painful and honest truth, I cried when I heard it. Don't dismiss this man. He has shown the world painful truth when it could have cost him his life. That video is difficult to watch and listen to, but it is worth the hard work.
Getting rich quick isn't all it's cracked up to be
Mo' money, mo' problems. Kurt Cobain killed himself when I was in high school. I still remember that gloomy overcast day. Why do we let genius die like that? Maybe someone killed him, I don't know. Who knows? Research shows you only need fifteen thousand dollars (or maybe it was pounds) a year to be "happy enough." After that, we don't get much happier.
Most of the videos I linked to were from the 1970's. I don't see many things like that on Television today. In this conversation with Buckminster Fuller from 1974, they talk about Cable Television. Cable was very new back then. Radio waves for TV were one way communication, but cable enabled two way communication. The conversation they have about cable TV was the same as the conversations we have about the Internet today. They talk about all the great things that can happen with two way communication, like voting, community development, etc. Why didn't those things happen?
These lessons here are all from 3 decades ago. People identified this trend decades ago. It seems like if we had listened to them then, perhaps we would have even better lives now. Not only Americans, but the whole world. Less poverty, less disease, less malnutrition, less homelessness. These great ideas are out there. The ideas that we think are new today, ideas we think are only now possible because of the internet, were ideas discussed three decades ago when cable television was introduced.
Why weren't those great ideas implemented? It wasn't due to a lack of technology... Maybe it is a lack of courage, a suppression of emotion, a short term focus... I think we can change the world if we start with those things.
When we abandon the golden rule, we can start thinking outside ourselves, outside our society, outside our world and start to think about future generations. Let's make life better for future generations on the planet. Let's enable future generations on this planet. There's enough to go around if we don't consume it all.
From the Youtube description which I will look up:
Stoorn är ett kul älg projekt som förhoppningsvis ska byggas på en kulle som heter Vithatten.
What I do know, is that it is a big moose. If I remember correctly, Stoorn means "The Big One" in Swedish and it is big. You don't even have to understand what is being said in the video to understand that.
And these things are big in real life too. I saw two in northern Canada and I was on a train in Sweden when it hit a moose in the middle of the night, woke everyone up, I remember it sounded like we had hit a house. These things are big. I also remember looking out at the night sky and seeing the northern lights for the first time.
Anyway, it's Thanksgiving and I'm thankful to the Swedish people for honoring the moose with such a grand construction.
As I drove through the neighborhood, screeching tires drew my eyes to a child tumbling off the hood of a shiny new sports car. I called 911 and the robots arrived just a minute later to assess the situation. The paramedics were on the way and wanted to know what they'd be facing when they got to the scene. They connect by WIFI to robots to see what they see, hear what they hear, and ask them questions to assess the situation.
The robotic sentries are a real convenience of the future. They cut crime with their watchful eyes. They relay important information about tragedies like the car accident to the experts miles away. These robots will be preprogrammed for particular scenarios so they will be able to provide assistance to humans and identify critical information. Eventually they will replace the paramedics all together. We already have robotic surgeons.
But what happens if the robot encounters a scenario that doesn't match any of its preprogrammed scenarios? The robots will be quite intelligent in the sense that they are full of existing information, but it will also be important to process information that didn't exist before the robot. How are the robots going to accumulate and integrate new information into their existing database of knowledge? Once acquired, how are they going to communicate unknown concepts to humans and other robots?
This is one of the issues being addressed by the Semantic Web and the problem there is a difficult one. It is much easier though, than our real world example where robots run around the world. On the Semantic Web, humans are categorizing information into ontologies that will help the robots ingest and utilize information more effectively. But these ontologies don't exist in the real world. How will a robot tree surgeon know if a particular tree is deciduous or evergreen? How will it know a particular plant is a tree at all or be able to identify if a tree is jeopardizing power lines?
The information behind these questions can be stored in a relational database. There may be a table for trees with common names, descriptions, family, genus, and species. Perhaps an image for visual identification. But this database will never be complete. Scientists discover 50 new species every day. Robots will too. Robots will discover new concepts more frequently than humans by orders of magnitude. How are they going to store and categorize that information, share it with other robots and humans, build reports analyze and use it to make the world better?
Humans do this as we mature. We learn something new every day, right? As we learn new languages, eventually we are able to ask questions about new things or abstract concepts using our vocabulary of smaller or more familiar words. There is a certain minimum vocabulary needed to bootstrap -- apparently it's around 3000-4000 words. This isn't the best analogy, because many of the words are translations into a familiar language and they both describe the same world. Learning a new language requires finding new words to match words we may already know, where our robots are encountering totally new information that doesn't exist in any information set they know.
What then, is the minimum corpus of knowledge necessary for a robot to exist independently? The world around us is more than just words, it's behaviors, physical laws, and mathematics. Interacting with humans compounds the complexity. Each one is unique. How much will a robot need to know about a person to evaluate benevolence or malice?
In the information world around us, humans have hand built thousands of data warehouses, many of them in robots already, but to be successful, our robots will have to do it themselves in an automated fashion. A robot won't have time to ask a human, "How do I model my information?" People are too slow. Instead, robots will examine the world and derive properties of objects for fields in a table. They'll build data models and construct relationships. They'll put nice interfaces on the information so they can communicate it to humans. It's from this data in context that meaning will show itself.
Qrimp is an ancient ancestor of these robots. While Qrimp can't understand meaning in the spreadsheets you give it -- not yet, it can present it to you in ways that will help you get a better understanding of it. It can automatically find relationships in your data and build data models and reports for you. This is one step in the process. We still have a long way to go. It will be an interesting journey.
Nomadic working is all the rage. There are many articles this week in The Economist discussing this new nomadic work lifestyle. This new way of working is a vision of our company and our motivation is in no small part fueled by our love of getting out of the office.
At Qrimp, we are facilitating this movement by web enabling the enterprise. We are breaking down the information silos so that your company's information is available anywhere you have access to the internet -- even if that access is from a mobile phone. You can browse, edit, even upload attachments to your Qrimp application from many modern mobile devices. Tara uses her HTC Touch almost exclusively.
Not only do we embrace this new way of living, but we live it ourselves. We have no physical offices to pollute the environment. We don't waste time commuting for hours each day. We work from home or we go to the coffee shop down the street. Sometimes we work from our clients' offices, but mostly, we work wherever we are.
We do presentations online and work with clients remotely using conference calls and webinars to get feedback. Because Qrimp is completely web enabled, we can make changes to applications right in the web session and get immediate feedback on system design and functionality. In the old days, these kinds of changes might take days at least -- plenty of time to forget what the end user asked for. As a consequence, we build better systems faster with a higher end user appreciation than the office settings of yesterday provided.
Back in the days of consulting, I would fly each way once a week, lugging my laptop and a week's worth of clothes. Eventually I splurged on two sets of everything so I could leave one packed to be out the door in a moment's notice: razors, shampoo, toothbrush -- two of everything. The traveling work lifestyle is expensive, time consuming, and trying. Many of us still do it. Some love it, some hate it. I love and hate it, but still I think there is a better way.
The constant vision of a better way seems to be an underlying principle of everything we do here and remote working (a.k.a. nomadism, telecommuting, wifi-working) is definitely a better way. It's better for the environment. It's better for our personal health and family relationships. Ultimately, it's better for our communities and our companies too. I am glad to see it getting more press, especially from an esteemed publication like The Economist.
show video
Subscribe