Smart People Really Do Think Faster: I Don't Think So!

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102169531

Well this is an interesting story that just aired on NPR. It contains some beautiful visualizations of the brain. But, I have to say that my initial reaction is that speed alone is not what makes people smart, although I'm sure smart people do think faster.

Think about it. If you have just the tiniest bit of craziness in your brain, and you think faster, that has to exponentially increase your chances of being totally crazy. It cannot be speed that makes one intelligent, because speed would just create a mass of chaos in your head.

Instead, it has to be the right kind of speed with the right kind of information. There has to be the ability to sort information, slow some of it down, and stop some of it completely.

So now I'm wondering if, like, bi-polar individuals and/or schizophrenics are people whose brains have great speed without the ability to slow or stop or erase the information we need to in order to not have hallucinations and/or paranoia. I've read lots of stuff that says artistic and/or creative people have been known to also be a little bit crazy. (I mean crazy in a loving way, not a derogatory way).

Probably, the creative crazies are just really smart people, with fast brain speeds, who don't enjoin certain kinds of information from traveling throughout their heads.

It reminds me a lot of the Internet, because the Internet lets good stuff proliferate, but it also lets crazy, bad, insane, wrong, and illegal stuff proliferate too.

Argumentation and Violence

Another quote from Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1971, which also reminds me of a lot of things contemporary:

"Any society prizing its own values is therefore bound to promote opportunities for epidictic speeches to be delivered at regular intervals: ceremonies commemorating past events of national concern, religion services, eulogies of the dead, and similar manifestations fostering a communion of minds. The more the leaders of the group seek to increase their hold over its members' thought, the more numerous will be the meetings of an educational character, and some will go as far as to use threats or compulsion to make recalcitrants expose themselves to speeches that will impregnate them with the values held by the community" (p. 55)

The authors also point out that argumentation can easily be viewed as a substitution for physical force, aiming at getting people to do something by compulsion. Viewed this way, the textual law itself is an argument, one replacing physical force, like public torture, as Foucault might point out.

Continuing on this line of argument, based on what I've previously said elsewhere, that if the law is a technology, and the law is an argument, it follows that argument is technology. This makes sense to me.

Human Origins: A NSF RFP

"Human Origins": A National Science Foundation Request for Proposals.

My interest in copyright law, in what it tries to accomplish, is linked to my broader interest in origins, and in discourses about origins, including human origins. Origins, as I've previously mentioned, is linked to the concept of "authorship." I've been following numerous publications that provide information on new RFPs -- funding opportunities. And so, I thought I'd collect this RFP on Human Origins from the NSF. The rest of this post is a direct quote from the RFP:

http://www.nsf.gov/publications/pub_summ.jsp?ods_key=nsf09521

This competition is directed towards increasing our knowledge of the complex biological, physical, and behavioral interrelationships that led to the development of our species and that are responsible for both the shared and variable features that characterize living human populations. It recognizes that understanding of the processes and pathways of human evolution requires input from a wide range of disciplines which examine our species from multiple perspectives and across both time and space. Accomplishing this goal requires a large scale initiative which allows research activities that go beyond the smaller, shorter duration, single investigator awards that disciplinary programs have been able to provide in the past. The Human Origins: Moving In New Directions (HOMINID) competition will support large scale, long term, integrative research and infrastructure projects through awards of up to $500,000 per year for up to five years. Contingent on the availability of funds, the program expects to make two awards in each fiscal year. It is intended that HOMINID awards will provide for transformative approaches to long-standing questions about the history of our species. Infrastructure development is also eligible for support either as a stand alone project or as part of a research award. One goal of the competition is to develop a portfolio of awards that reflects the multiple approaches to the understanding of human origins. It is expected that the combination of awards will complement each other and prove to be mutually informative as they progress.

Why Do We Continue to Use Letters of Recommendation?

Letters of recommendation, as far as I know, have been around since the dawn of man.

Why?

Why do we use letters of recommendation?

Well, the answer is not simple, but the fact that we do use them provides empirical evidence in support of some of Latour's theory.

He states:

"Who will win in an agnostic encounter between two authors and between them and all the others they need to build up a statement S? Answer: the one able to muster on the spot the largest number of well aligned and faithful allies." (1986, Drawing things together, p. 23)

The letters do the work of bringing back things, your allies, and presenting them all in one place for your audience.

Latour states:

"If you wish to go out of your way and come back heavily equipped so as to force others to go out of their ways, the main problem to solve is that of mobilization. You have to go and to come back with the "things" if your moves are not to be wasted. But the "things" have to be able to withstand the return trip without withering away. Further requirements: the "things" you gathered and displaced have to be presentable all at once to those you want to convince and who did not go there. In sum you have to invent objects which have the properties of being mobile but also immutable, presentable, readable, and combinable with one another." (1986, p. 7, Visualization and Cognition).

Thus, I say, we have the letter of recommendation. A service like interfolio.com increases both the immutability and the mobility of these letters.

Here, letters of recommendation are symmetrical to the citations on a reference page. Those citations accomplish the same results, in that they bring the "thing" back to one location, and as they appear in the reference list, have the properties of being mobile but also immutable, presentable, readable, and combinable with one another.

Authorship and Origins

Foucault says that the origins of anything is an ever receding point. However, we should still try to trace origins. Tracing origins necessitates the tracing of authorship, every time, even in science, because in science origin stories are still authored.

The simple connection between authorship and origins is that both are strategies for ownership. A claim to authorship is a claim to ownership. An origin story as well, is a claim to ownership. If a certain peoples originated in a certain geographical location, than that gives them a claim to ownership. There are also claims to the ownership of one’s origins. The claim that human kind originated in the Garden of Eden at the hand of god, is a claim to ownership of the history of human beings, ownership of the correct, real, true story. A claim to authorship is a claim to being the originator of something. If I claim authorship in this blog or that power point, than I claim that it originated in me. This is the simple connection between authorship and origins. They aren’t the same thing, but they are connected.

Chaim Perelman talking about how justice is the first goal, and adherence to legal technicalities is the second goal

In his chapter of "Self-Deliberating" from _The New Rhetoric_ with Olbrechts-Tyteca, page 43, he writes:

"It is a common, and not necessarily regrettable, occurrence even for a magistrate who knows the law to formulate his judgment in two steps: the conclusions are first inspired by what conforms most closely with his sense of justice, the technical motivation being added later. Must we conclude in this case that the decision was made without any preceding deliberation? Not at all, as the pros and cons may have been weighed with the greatest care, though not within the frame of considerations based on legal technicalities. Strictly legal reasons are adduced only for the purpose of justifying the decision to another audience. they are not adduced, as Mill suggests in his example for the purpose of making an expert formulation of the general maxims of which the governor had only a vague idea. Mill's scientism makes him think of everything in terms of a single audience, the universal audience, and prevents him from providing an adequate explanation for the phenomenon."

This passage reiterates what I found in my study as far as writers working towards justice in their composing decisions without necessarily referencing legal technicalities. Later, rationales or understandings emerged in order to fit the end decision into whatever the law provides. The sense of justice comes first, then the understanding of the law is fit into that by the writer. So whatever the law actually is, if we were ever able to know that, is fairly irrelevant. Instead, what matters is how the law is enacted, and it is enacted backwards from what one might expect. Those who compose laws doubtfully intend for individuals to just ignore them. You see how agency issues crop up in that the law as written has little agency.

As for legal reasoning, the way Perelman describes the magistrate's two step process also fits within our understandings of good lawyering, at least at the reactive stage rather than the planning stage. If a crime has been committed, the lawyer has to squeeze the law to fit the facts in the best way possible in order to argue his client's innocence. That's his job - in order to be "just" in the US legal system. On the other hand, lawyers who are advising clients *before* the possible crime will read across legal precedents and then extract a course of action that hopefully avoids the crime in the first place.

Is There a Chilling of Digital Communication?: The Dissertation

I've finished a complete copy of my dissertation and submitted it to the committee.

http://sites.google.com/site/martinecourantrife/

An abstract for the 300+ page document appears below.

ABSTRACT

IS THERE A CHILLING OF DIGITAL COMMUNICATION? EXPLORING HOW KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDING OF FAIR USE INFLUENCE WEB COMPOSING

The study explores copyright law’s mediational influence on digital composing using a sequential transformative mixed methods research design. The author conducted a digital survey and discourse-based interviews with digital writers regarding how they factored in copyright law and fair use in their composing decisions. The study is framed with activity theory, rhetoric theory, and also draws upon Foucault’s notion of the author-function. Three main areas of inquiry in the study include examining the status of knowledge and understanding of copyright law in the field of technical and professional writing (TPW) as well as in professional writers. A second research goal is to investigate the creative thinking processes, or rhetorical invention, of writers in these programs composing webtexts in light of copyright law. A third research goal is to examine what happens to mediational means as writers leverage them in digital contexts.

The study’s six major findings are that 1) web spaces are sites of cultural collision, or commonplaces, where students occupy sometimes conflicting positions such that the very notion of “studentness” is inverted. Web spaces as commonplace challenge existing concepts such as “author” and “originality”; 2) The intertextuality of web-space-writing provides support for Foucault’s theory that the single author is an ideological production representing the opposite of its historical function, i.e. the “author-function,” in the larger culture. “When a historically given function is represented in a figure that inverts it, one has an ideological production” (Foucault, 1984, p. 119). No support was found for a human culture existing without an “author-function,” whether it is a workplace culture or even a more community-knowledge-focused culture as exists in India. Yet, “the author” switches in and out of a subject position in relationship to human and non-human actors; 3) For this group of writers, digital speech was not chilled. Copyright law as a system of invention organized by rhetoric, produces knowledge; 4) Rhetorical topics congeal as a heuristic mediating the digital composing process of writers. This study provides a small and incomplete snapshot of this heuristic structure; 5) When we consider the hierarchical and embedded nature of rhetorical topics that mediate digital composing choices, for this group of writers, ethics trumped the law; 6) While the study supports the idea that laws have agency, as knowledge and understanding increase, that agency is increasingly diminished by the human actor. The agency of the law is connected to where the law ends up on the AT triangle.

The author ends the study by calling for more research in the area of copyright law’s agency in the composing process, suggesting that drawing upon Actor Network Theory and its notion of radical symmetry might prove helpful for future studies.

Rejecting the Gestalt View of "Tacit Knowledge"

The difference between how Polanyi talks about tacit knowledge, and the way Vygotsky talks about internalization is this, I think. Vygotsky rejects the Gestalt view of development because this view sees development and learning as concentric circles, with learning being the smaller circle inside development. Learning takes place and informs development in really complicated ways that can never be truly deciphered. I think from what I've read of Polanyi so far, he would agree with this Gestalt view.

Vygotsky on the other hand, sees the relationship between learning and development differently. Learning is ahead of development and pulls development up. So, people grow into the intellectual life around them. This also explains his theory of the zone of proximal development. You have your actual development (independent problem solving), and you have your zone of proximate development (what you can do when being mentored by others, or when working collaboratively).

Contrast this with (Binet??'s) view or other psychologists, that you shouldn't try to teach someone something until they are developmentally ready. I detest this view, frankly. When I am in a conversation and someone says: "Well that's developmental" -- I interpret that to mean they are saying the student can't learn. That the student isn't ready to learn until something else out of the control of learning takes place. I disagree with this.

On the other hand, the really nasty downside to my view is that smart teachers end up with smart students at the end of the semester. Period. This sounds kind of arrogant, but I think it is true. Teachers who are inventional and innovative have students who are the same. Teachers who are prescriptive and circumscribe what students are allowed to do, have students who tame down everything they do. These students learn less in the course of a 16 week semester.

In my study, I am looking at "tacit knowledge" but more as internalization than the way that Polanyi describes it.

Men's Bible Study in the Coffee Shop and Polanyi's Personal Knowledge

Here I am making a note that if there is this thing called Personal Knowledge, you might not be able to differentiate that from God. When I was getting my coffee today at the coffee shop, at 6:55 am (getting coffee because the coffee I made at home was awful due to the fact that I opened a new back of Starbucks' unground coffee beans, finally noticing that the words "decaf" appeared very faintly on the packaging label [not interested in decaf]), a group of 15 men were doing bible study; they had their bibles open, scattered here and there among their other artifacts of externalized cognition, and they were talking about things in the bible. OK. One was saying: "we know how all knowing god is, so where in our lives should we rely on God"? I quickly put the lid on my coffee and scurried out. Yes, scurried.

So if they are turning it over to God, that's kind of like relying on your Personal Knowledge, except that if it's God, then you give God agency. Otherwise, the Personal Knowledge keeps the agency, like Lacan's unconscious.

Ong and Vygotsky and Gestalt psychology

Gestalt psychology was important to Vygotsky because he was critiquing it in his own work. Gestalt psychology was a response to the behaviorists and the experimental psychologists, who agreed that psychological processes could be studied by analyzing “basic constituents” (Cole & Scribner’s intro to Vygotsky, _Mind in Society_). Gestalt psychology rejected the notion that complex processes could be accounted for by examining simple processes.

“Vygotsky believed that the internalization of culturally produced sign systems brings about behavioral transformations and forms the bridge between early and later forms of individual development” (Cole & Scribner, p. 7). Vygotsky has a chapter on the importance of examining writing when studying how cultural sign systems are internalized. This reminds me of Ong’s argument in his chapter on how “Writing Restructures Consciousness” (1988). Except that, Ong comes at this from a different angle, because he is talking about “restructuring.” This is different than “internalization” in some ways, and in others it is not different. The problem with Ong’s discussion is that it makes it sound like people who do not write, are generally on a lower intellectual level than people who do write. In some ways though, this also maps onto Vygotsky’s discussion of children who are yet unable to internalize certain cultural tools. And yet, the stances of these two authors differ because Vygotsky does not seem as arrogant and patronizing as does Ong. Vygotsky points out that because “mentally retarded” children have difficulty thinking abstractly, one approach was to remove all abstract-thinking curriculum, or curriculum that encourages abstract thinking, from their education. But, this had a detrimental effect on the mentally retarded children’s development. Instead, Vygotsky argues that because they have difficulty with abstract thinking, mentally retarded children should certainly receive education that encourages this type of thinking. My point is, Vygotsky was trying to help marginalized people. Ong instead, judges them --- at least that’s how he reads sometimes. Not to say Ong doesn’t have good points. (Vygotsky also argued for the intellectual benefits of play, since humans play above their level of actual intellectual development – so if you want people to become smarter, you have to let them play).

Vygotsky and Ong map onto each other because both of them are concerned with how technology influences the way we think. Vygotsky was concerned with learning, while Ong was concerned with intellectual capability. He focused more on writing and rhetoric.

An older colleague of Vygotsky, PP Blonksy, had already developed the idea that “behavior can only be understood as the history of behavior” (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 8). I believe the following is key to why Vygotsky has become so attractive as a theorist to those studying digital writing:

“Blonsky was also an early advocate of the view that the technological activities of people were a key to understanding their psychological makeup, a view that Vygotsky exploited in great detail” (p. 8).

Later in 1988, Ong argues that writing is a technology, and that “more than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness” (p. 77). I'm not sure about this idea of "transforming" and "structuring." This I am still thinking about because I think I might disagree that that is what writing does. So, I have to think about the differences between "mediation" and "structuring."

What I wanted to talk about was the differences between Polanyi and Vygotsky, but I'm not there yet. Obviously their focuses are very different, but what I mean is how are they different when it comes to their views of knowing.