We'll Fix this Question Together in Lecture on Tuesday

remember that there's more than one right answer.

Power of Evidence

We're talking about the role of colonialism and then World War I in turning US and UK culture "noir." We're also stressing the importance of evidence in making assertions and coming to conclusions about whodunit, not to mention everything else.  A major New York Times investigation brings these two issues together.  The story points out that, "Recklessly or intentionally bombing hospitals is a war crime, but proving culpability amid a complex civil war is extremely difficult, and until now, Syrian medical workers and human rights groups lacked proof."  The NYT investigation has proof that the Russian Air Force, in support of the Assad government in Syria, intentionally targeted the four hospitals in question.  The proof consists of several kinds of evidence, which they detail at the bottom of the article. I'll cite the whole thing because I'm such an evidence nerd:

Our reporting began by collecting social media posts, interviewing witnesses and speaking with organizations that support hospitals in opposition-held Syria. They gave us the approximate time each hospital was struck on May 5 and 6.

We obtained access to tens of thousands of flight observations kept by spotters who watch the skies and warn civilians of incoming airstrikes. Each observation logged a time, location and type of plane.

Most crucially, we also obtained thousands of Russian Air Force radio transmissions never before made public. We spent weeks deciphering their code words. By the end, we knew when Russian pilots were receiving coordinates, locking onto targets and dropping their bombs.

Finally, we reviewed the videos of three of the four bombings and consulted with military experts. We concluded that the videos showed the hospitals being bombed at the reported times, and in two cases that they were hit with precision bombs that the Russians possess but the Syrians don't.

Combining all this information revealed that Russian pilots were flying at the time and place each hospital was bombed, that they released their weapons at the same time we'd been told the strike occurred, and that at least two of the strikes were too precise for the Syrians to have even accomplished.

This is an enormous amount of dedicated work.  It's also expensive, which is why most newspapers, including my hometown newspaper the Los Angeles Times, do a lot more cutting and pasting of internet stuff than they do investigating.

In addition to money, there's the problem of savvy replacing truth as the ethos of high-end reporting, at least according to this interesting analysis.

Sherlock Lecture Slides From Friday

We were talking about 2 theories of human intelligence, which we simplistically polarized as Theory 1, Only Sherlock is Sherlock, and Theory 2, Anyone Can Be Sherlock, But Almost Nobody Does the Work.  Here's a slide I raced through about how his personality helps.  Theory 1 or Theory 2? I know you know.

Also there was the kind of closure the "whodunit" or "mystery" offers, particularly before all hell breaks loose for the UK and Europe in World War I.  It gets much harder to make convincing in crime fiction later on.

Finding and Keeping Your First-Choice Major

In lecture we talked about the link between doing well and doing your first choice thing, with all the detectives winding up in what they figure out is their first choice.  Here's a link to the economics article I cited in lecture on December 4th. Like other research on this topic, it suggests that going to a premium university doesn't make much of a salary difference. What you major in does matter.  But looking at "wages by major" data and picking a higher-wage major will not lead to higher wages for you, if you are actually interested in something else.

Getting paid and being happy are most likely tied to doing that something else instead, and figuring out how to get paid for it. Being really good at the craft is the tactic used by our detectives, as well as a lot of other people.

Here's another example from The Who singer Roger Daltrey's memoir.  James Parker's New York Times review starts like this:

God bless the evil headmasters: the deformers, the belittlers, the squashers of dreams, the ones who leave their oppressed subjects in such a condition of churning anonymous rage that the only possible remedy, post-school, is greatness. “You’ll never make anything of your life, Daltrey,” promises Mr. Kibblewhite, nemesis-like, as he expels 15-year-old Roger Daltrey from Acton County Grammar in West London. Sixty years later, with the title of his new memoir, Daltrey offers a tip of the hat. Or a middle finger. Same thing, at this distance. 

Daltrey has been singing for the Who since 1964. . . . this is the hero’s journey of “Thanks a Lot, Mr. Kibblewhite”: the long arc of life-learning whereby a working-class brawler, a delinquent tea boy in a sheet metal factory, discovers within himself the psychic-emotional circuitry to conduct some of the rarest electricity in rock ’n’ roll. 

You might think, "well, it's fine to do what you love as long as you're a genius. But what about everybody else?"  And yet Daltrey is everybody else.  He's a bullied outcast who turns himself into a genius in large part by focusing obsessively on forming bands and getting really good.

Shedding Light on an Especially Violent Week of American Hate

The first question is always the same: can we understand insane acts like the several that made massive news this past week (two senior citizens killed for being black in a grocery store, pipe bombs sent to leading Trump opponents, 11 murdered in a Pittsburgh synagogue)? The course's answer is yes we can. More on that in lecture and section this week.

Two others are, why do people pick the wrong targets? Can detection-like inquiry reduce this problem?  This piece confirms the relevance of this problem in the pipe-bombing case. David Dayen, a prominent financial journalist (author of Chain of Title), starts with this:

Cesar Sayoc, the Donald Trump-loving Floridian who was taken into custody in relation to pipe bombs mailed to prominent Democrats, was foreclosed on in 2009 by a bank whose principal owner and chair is now Trump’s treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin.

Also relevant: this journalist's Twitter thread about the knowledge problems created by "both-sidesism," which, as we know, detectives like Sherlock Holmes scrupulously avoid.

Elements of Learning

Here are two slides on the basics that are emerging from current research about teaching and learning.  I noted that reviewing notes straight through and repeating learning without variation or delays feels pretty good but is less effective that the strategies below.

I've talked a lot about the close relationship between learning and detecting and we've seen a lot of these principles there too--sudden insights based on dogged preparation, different kinds of knowledge mixed together, etc. etc!!

Only seven things to do!

As you can tell, I really like this stuff.

The Exotic Learning Machine

I've talked some this term about learning, and comparing it to the detection process in these books and films.

Real learning is an active process, and I've also discussed my ongoing concern that the lecture format that is common in public universities doesn't encourage active learning.  I assigned my piece about advising in France earlier this term, and am planning to add a layer to this on Tuesday.

Then today the New York Times published an interesting piece about learning.  Towards the end it says this:

One reason scientists suspect that studying in pairs or groups can be helpful is that students are forced to talk to one another about the material — or better yet, argue about it. These are all forms of self-examination, and as such deepen learning more than passively rereading or reviewing the material.

So that's your WRG's for you!  And then there's my favorite paragraph:

The brain is an exotic learning machine, to put it mildly. It does not take orders well. You can tell it to remember the major players in the settling of Manhattan, stress how crucially important that is, and on the test a week later very little comes back. And yet you might remember nearly every play in the San Francisco Giants’ Game 7 World Series victory. Why? Because the brain doesn’t listen to what you say; it watches what you do. And thinking often about Madison Bumgarner pitching, talking about the game, arguing about it: These are mental actions, as well as subtle forms of testing knowledge.

Cognitive scientists aren't just re-installing another testing regime, but trying to figure out the role of self-testing in learning. There are some good ideas in this piece. The book he mentions, Making it Stick, has a lot of ideas that could make your college studying much more effective.  To be continued Tuesday . . .