When growing a community on a social networking site such as Facebook, I’ve noticed that the majority of users perform little recruiting. There are, however, a small number of users who contribute greatly to the overall population of the group, and these users form the hubs around which the group eventually grows.
In the absence of internal motivation, students will still study for exams, but will put little additional effort into a course.
So an absolutely brutal means of motivating these students is to give 10 exams and keep only the lowest 2 (or drop the lowest and keep the next two up).
They would study because every exam would count. They couldn’t afford to slip up.
It’s the sort of thing that I wish I didn’t even have to think about. In an ideal world, all students would be motivated…
Kohlberg’s stages of moral development indicate not only moral codes, but what people are primarily motivated by (an inseparable consequence of how one sees the world). This makes it useful for marketing.
The majority of individuals fall between stages 3 and 4 of this theory – the “conventional” stages: these people consider actions proper if they support social roles or a position of established authority (“following laws for their own sake” or “doing something because everyone else in my situation does”) or if they promote interpersonal accord (“this will help bring the community closer together”).
Particularly within the area of non-profit advertising, I am finding that this is how a message must be tuned – not “why is it good for its own sake?” but “how will this benefit the most people?”
Holding the position that there is no conflict between individual goals and those of society has made me eager to demonstrate it, however. Particularly when creating a new educational paradigm, this isn’t difficult.
I’m reading about Schopenhauer’s concept of the will, and his position seems dualist: that will and consciousness are separable entities and that the will is a property independent of the mind.
But consider a hungry man at mealtime. His will (to live) compels him to eat. Now consider that same man but with a mild case of gastroenteritis. Only his body has changed – it would still be a rational objective response to eat, in order to acquire additional energy to fight off the illness and to remain hydrated. Any will existing outside of the body should take this into account.
And yet the man would lose his appetite. A change in the condition of his body has resulted in a change in his will. Thus the will must exist inside of the body.
Beware of self-defeating philosophies and the people who hold them. They are parasitic.
I’m currently reading an interesting book on the philosophy of the Legend of Zelda games (that sort of thing immediately jumps out at you when you see it in a bookstore). The first chapter is on why we care about what happens in the game world, knowing full well that it is fictional.
The author first criticizes the “suspension of disbelief” and “pretend” theories, as we are fully aware that the game situation is not real on a rational level yet are unable to fully control the emotional responses it evokes. The author then proposes a multilevel system of consciousness, under which we may locally consider the game world real yet may be globally aware that the world is still a game (performance anxiety is another example of this – some performers, myself included, become very stressed out prior to a performance, but are we in any mortal danger? No.
I think the author’s theory explains part of the scenario: just as we would pull away from the touch of a hot oven without thinking (a reflex arc), we apply the rules we’ve learned in the real world to the game world:
Fire -> Danger
Spikes -> Sharp pointy objects -> Danger
Monsters -> Deadly animals -> Danger
etc.
When under threat, it has been evolutionary advantageous for us to react quickly, with little to no intermediary processing. We apply our rules to the character, determine that we’re in danger, and respond as if the danger were real.
But there’s the rub: why do we care what happens to the protagonist? Link isn’t a real person. He can’t even speak. We don’t have any situations that can literally relate to his dungeon crawls (although it can be argued that Link’s adventures can be conveyed as metaphors for frightening scenarios in our own lives).
The answer lies in our capacity for empathy: we identify with Link’s motives, with the interactions he has with other characters, and in how his actions move the storyline forward. Because we are controlling Link, we often internalize his actions (“I just found the Master Sword” vs. “Link just found the Master Sword” are both plausible statements when playing the game), but we are just his guide. And because we are responsible for him and we have come to empathize with his motivations and struggle, we endeavor to protect him when threatened.
Genius is merely the combination of original ideas and a level of skill sufficient to realize them.
There’s a problem with Matlab. Even though it’s great for high-level programming, it just has too many functions, of which even the most seasoned developer is doomed to know only a small fraction. For example, the function pdist will return a matrix of pairwise distances, yet I’ve seen the same being done manually countless times.
Rather than cutting down the functionality provided by the language or forcing the user to “specialize” in studying certain Matlab functionality, I thought of an alternative approach:
The user knows what he wants to do. He wants to “compute the pairwise distance between observations in matrix A”. At this moment, his best bet is issuing the command “lookfor pairwise” and sifting through the results.
But wouldn’t it be nice if he could type “I want to compute the pairwise distance between observations in matrix A”, and, based on the documentation and some tagging of the functions, Matlab would automatically fill in “pdist(A)”?
This can apply to any language, of course. Java seems another good candidate, given the number of standard classes in J2SE.
I stumbled upon this article:
http://exp-platform.com/semmelweisReflex.aspx
And found an interesting extract from it:
“According to Childbed Fever: A Scientific Biography of Ignaz Semmelweis (p. 69) an 1856 publication in a prominent Viennese medical periodical, Viennese Medical Weekly, by Jozsef Fleischer, a student of Semmelweis, showed success of chlorine washings. However, the editor for the periodical wrote at the end of the report “We believe that this chlorine-washing theory has long outlived its usefulness. The experiences and statistical results of most maternity institutions protest against the views presented above. It is time we are no longer to be deceived by this theory.”
Vienna continued to ignore his recommendations. In 1861, he published a book, but the community rejected his doctrine. In 1865 he suffered a nervous breakdown and was taken to a mental hospital, where he was beaten by asylum personnel and died. It took another 14 years for the discovery to be accepted, after Louis Pasteur, in 1879, showed the presence of Streptococcus in the blood of women with child fever. Semmelweis is now recognized as a pioneer of antiseptic policy.”
First of all, I’ve never heard of Semmelweis before this, but I certainly have heard of Pasteur. Second, Semmelweis’ work had literally no impact in the scientific community because it was ignored until Pasteur replicated the findings (upon which everyone suddenly started paying attention, and probably attributed the discovery to him for quite some time).
Finally, and most compelling, taken from Semmelweis’ perspective, this was an utter loss. He found a way to save lives and greatly advanced medical practice (even if he wasn’t quite aware why), and for it, he was variously ignored, denounced, and vilified to the point of his own death. So what if he is now remembered? What good does posthumous recognition do him?
All of human history is a battle between simplicity and complexity. It is reflected in our culture, our science, our philosophy, our governments, our conflicts, and our actions.
We constantly build large, intricate, complex systems, only to later knock them down and return to basics.