Thoughts and insights on culture and human behavior, living blissfully at the intersection of rationality and irrationality (but mostly irrationality)
I sometimes wish we could freeze a person and examine - in a very comprehensive way - how any one person's thoughts and experiences have led them to see the world in the very specific way they perceive it. Why any one person is exactly where they are, making the decisions they believe they are making, when they could be in an infinite number of other places, thinking and deciding an infinite number of other things.
This site exists because I've come to believe that we learn something from everything we experience. It's not always big. It's not always what we expect it to be. We might think it's contrary to what we already know. Or believe. But it's always something. And it always has a greater impact on our choices and experiences than we ever realize.
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Why I value qualitative analysis
The biggest culprit [contributing to rising costs of higher education] is the lack of objective, publicly available information about how well colleges teach and how much college students learn. Nobody knows which colleges really do the best job of taking the students they enroll and helping them learn over the course of four years. After decades of inaction, some recent efforts have been undertaken to collect that information: It now exists, but colleges and their powerful (and virtually unknown) lobbies will not permit the public to see it.
The above from today's Idea Of The Day article. It had me thinking a bit longer than usual, and it just occurred to me why: it has just illuminated to me why I've always leaned more towards qualitative analysis than quantitative.
The problem I have with metrics is that they have to be interpreted. This is usually done poorly, on some third-grade level like "more impressions/eyeballs=successful message. Quantitative!"
The above suggests that there is a set of data that can be used to determine - objectively - "how much students learn."
As you might imagine, the methods by which those metrics are determined and valued are entirely subjective. This is not to say that they can't be good, it is more to say that they have to be selected carefully.
What it means to "successfully learn something that will be valuable" is just a nebulous question as what it means to "successfully deliver a message." Determining what metrics will best measure those things is a qualitative processes.
In other words: on some fundamental level, it's all qualitative.
(Quant vs qual is obviously quite a complex subject so I'd imagine someone out there disagrees or has another perspective on this. Perhaps it's you? )
Posted by Kyle Cameron Studstill
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"Why can't you just *tell* someone about the meaning of something (presumably important)?"
GS: Why can't you just tell people what the meaning of, say, polluting is?
GN: You can. It's called propaganda.
GS: Why shouldn't we use propaganda then? Why do you have to let people discover the meaning of such things for themselves?
GN: The discovery of radical alternatives happens in smaller steps and in individual minds and hearts. For example, I love baking and I used to do a lot of it in my big old gas oven. Then I put a sensor in my kitchen and learned that a lot of CO2 gets produced. Even after I turn the oven off, hours afterward, CO2 was still sitting in my kitchen to a tune of 2,000 parts per million. The cookies were long gone and I was still sitting in a soup of gas. Once I became aware of that, my wife and I got a convection oven instead, and now we bake with that. I bake less and the oven is a little smaller, but I don't have a CO2 lake in my kitchen anymore. It became actionable to do less because of harm reduction, essentially.
via citris-uc.org
Greg Niemeyer is an artist and game programmer working with interactive art at UC Berkeley. He integrates game mechanics and behavioral economics into projects that get people to change their behavior. I love the above quote from his interview with CITRUS, referencing one of his latest sensor projects that allows people to easily monitor their own air quality.
We try to force meaning onto people all the time. It's not just called propaganda. It's also called advertising.
Posted by Kyle Cameron Studstill
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