Gaiman on The Need to Daydream

Gaiman's speech suggests great value lies in ensuring children access to fiction.  He's not alone in that view.

Bogus Bullying Advice

Remember when airlines used to train everyone that in the event of a hijacking, you should cooperate fully and do everything the hijackers demanded?  Because the professionals knew how to handle it properly?  And do you recall how well that worked out?  And how ignoring that imbecilic advice was the only effective alternative to even worse disasters?  And think:  if intolerance of evildoers' assertions of authority to oppress were more widespread on those flights, how might the scores onboard have succeeded in stomping their attackers at the first sign of their insurrection?  But I get ahead of my story.

Now – today, in 2012 – CNN is running an article explaining that the solution to bullying isn't self-defense, but for bullies to stop bullying.  That we wait for authorities to better teach bullies the error of bullying.  I'll wait while you digest that one.  Obviously, the kids who can be reached with the "don't bully" message aren't by their teens still intimidating underclassmen out of lunch money or homework services.  Oh, better training might improve detection and response, and there could in theory be great gains to be made by authorities (if they can be bothered to direct scarce funding at this, rather than curriculum development or administrators' salaries).  But the idea of stopping bullying at school with a new policy announcement is like halting crime with a new statute.

Please.

Bullies pick victims based on their vulnerability.  They pick the time of an attack to ensure rescue is improbable.  They pick the means of attack to ensure maximum control, and minimum risk.  While it's possible that an incompetent bully might actually get caught, evidence sufficient to support a meaningful sanction is simply implausible to amass.  Certainly not by a terrified, isolated victim who's been cut off from support by blackmail or threats against a victim's person.  What makes bullying possible is the certainty of non-retaliation.

The math on the commandeered 9/11 flights shows that certainty there is no risk of self-defense is the only rational way fewer than a half-dozen bullies can assume control of even so isolated a community as an assembly of passengers.  Look at the sheer numbers involved in each vehcle.  Anyone who's seen an angry mob on the move knows full well that a handful of people with boxcutters or less haven't a prayer against a mobilized mass.  Now, move this to a school.  Teaching children to cry quietly until rescued by officials is not just offensive, it is absurd.  Despite aspirational slogans like "To Protect And Serve", officials out in the real world have no duty to protect citizens.*  They may have a duty to write a report (which they may neglect out of convenience;  I've seen cops talk complaining witnesses out of filing reports by convincing them it will affect their insurability or insurance rates), but that didn't do much good for Joshua DeShaney or his distraught mother.

Doing the right thing is not without consequences.  Allowing evil to continue simply because it's easier to teach compliance than spine is no virtue.

CNN's article – by an author earning an income from the current excitement about bullying – goes so far as to equate self-defense with bullying itself.  Earth to Carrie Goldman:  nobody outside your distant orbit is likely to accept, after thinking about it, that using force to obtain freedom is a moral equivalent or a practical equivalent to using force as part of a planned scheme to elevate one's social or financial standing by repeatedly injuring victims selected for the certainty of a clean escape.  Goldman says that educating children on the rules and methods of appropriate self-defense that a parent will support is doomed because "It teaches kids to out-bully each other, rather than to focus on restoration and restitution."  Her very premise is flawed because it equates bullying with self-defense, and suggests that self-defense depends for its success on becoming a successful bully.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

No one suggests that self-defense won't lead to sanctions – the isolation obtained by the successful bully may make self-defense claims hard to prove – but the safety of the bully depends on the certainty that self-defense is absent.  Parents who support their children's efforts to protect themselves will help their children send the right message to would-be bullies:  this one is a bad victim.  Bullies who don't get the message without a round of self-defense will get it soon enough . . . and there's always a real victim to pursue someplace else.  Parents need to be supported in teaching their children not to be victims.  Whether the schools eve get their heads on straight may be a matter of hope, but parents' education of their children in their own survival is a matter of necessity.

Parents must teach their children they are worth fighting for, that they are worth defending from villainy, and that they will be supported by their parents no matter what idiocy may be accepted by absent authorities.  Parents have to believe it for their children to believe it.  Sabotaging this important work – by urging parents to teach children to be pliant victims instead of agents of their own personal protection and that of their larger communities – suggests that even thousands of murders can be shushed by a schmuck chasing a buck.

There are a lot of things worth doing in response to bullying – and schools' inaction – but preventing students' own assertion of self-determination by dismissing self-defense in favor of advancing further victim-culture is just not part of the equation.

*:  A careful look at the facts of DeShaney v. Winnebago City Social Services Dept. is instructive.  The only reason the victim's mother didn't protect the boy crippled by the ongoing attacks was her voluntary compliance with a government official's order requiring the boy to be turned over and over into the custody of his attacker.  Her pleas for Social Services to take action resulted in a number of reports that fully substantiated her claims the boy was being horribly abused, but no action that prevented his eventually being beating to the point of permanent brain damage.  The Supreme Court held the government had no duty to rescue the boy even from a known attacker, and had no need to change any of its practices in the future.

F Student Nabs Nobel

Sir John Gurdon, F student, has won the latest Nobel prize for medicine or physiology.

'Nuff said.

Bullying Still A Problem

With another bullying-related disaster – this one, a teen suicide – the general lack of rules or consequences for harassment that falls short of rape or hospitalization is again highlighted.

Since social pain is processed like physical pain, there's little question how prolonged torture such as is routinely inflicted by packs of bullies can lead to effort to escape at any cost.

Perhaps a region-by-region analysis of the laws of defense are warranted. If bullying is known to create a risk of death by suicide, and is legally tantamount to the indiscriminate application of deadly force, does one's jurisdiction allow application of force by third parties – such as adult observers –against bullies on sight? Deadly force? (It turns out Texas law allows the use of force, but not deadly force, to prevent a suicide.)

Or is there a more effective way to solve this problem?

One Laptop Per Child

If Microsoft had its way, that'd be one software vendor per child.

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program, led by Nicholas Negroponte, is hoping to deliver budget laptops around the world to keep even low-income people abreast of modern technology and to allow them to leverage high tech to improve their lives. OLPC is, in essence, about trying to maintain the possibility of modern education in a world of scarce resources; it is an idealistic effort to provide the tools needed to make sure children can learn to use the tools that make the future possible.

Microsoft's efforts to get pre-installed status on the XO haven't been exactly smooth. OLPC, after all, reportedly rebuffed a no-fee offer by Apple to license MacOS X (whose open-source kernel is derived from the FreeBSD project to which Apple is a contributor, and the Mach project which Apple's retired Avadis Tevanian had nursed at MIT), purportedly because of non-open-source code also involved in MacOS X made the system politically unsatisfactory to OLPC. But apparently you can buy satisfaction. Microsoft, apparently concerned about a future in which discount laptops around the world would obsolete its proprietary file formats and render its high-margin products irrelevant, poured significant resources into a version of Microsoft-Windows designed to run on XO. Microsoft has insinuated its products into the OLPC program, even to the point of causing hardware modifications in OLPC in order to allow its enormous code to be stored and run on the machines. The fact that retail buyers in the US are not yet assured the ability to buy XO with pre-installed Microsoft products is of little concern to either Microsoft (which assumes you as an American can afford a costlier copy, and will do so on your next computer purchase) or OLPC (which is trying to look like an Open-Source advocate).

The fact that towns in Columbia have begun deploying Microsoft-Windows-equipped XO machines in schools (at least in part on Microsoft's nickel, hence the product placement opportunity) suggests that OLPC hasn't really stuck to its principled stance that recipients need to enjoy the Four Freedoms when they use and study software. OLPC is more interested in keeping its own project from becoming irrelevant through lack of funding. And there, OLPC and Microsoft can find common ground.

Crazy Ads

After posting about some poor rhetoric found in the anti-evolutionary debate, and admitting the view that ID offers little of value to the science curriculum as is offers to cloud rather than to encourage exploration of natural forces that might be discovered to govern the physical world (and thus may be subject to manipulation to advance quality of life), I started noticing Google posting some interesting adverts on this site.

Google picks ads on the basis of content, but also on the basis of what amounts to an auction.  Guess who turned up as the high-bidders for the post discussing evolution?  Have a look:

I'm naturally curious who would bankroll adverts soliciting requests for free booklets touting Creationism.  Anyone with an interest in the subject can have a look at Genesis, free of charge, without waiting for a pamphlet in the mail.  Indeed, those hoping for spiritual enlightenment are likely much better looking at the . . . well, admittedly not the original, but one of the numerous, different, but well-intended translations of copies accessible to would-be translators.  Such translations have at least a colorable claim to derivation from originals, whereas pamphlets published originally by mortals hoping to sell specific explanations of how holy works are meant to be interpreted in light of presently-accepted facts about the natural history of the planet are frankly as suspect as can possibly be.  

Those guys are just selling something.

The above advertisement is an even more transparent effort to harmonize current views of the evidence with religious thought in ways that appear to discourage serious effort to view the world about one.  The thesis that the observed facts are consistent with divine will and not with the happenstance of nature, and that scientific efforts to discover physical laws by examining Creation are somehow undermining the dignity of the Creator, requires one to accept a number of interesting axioms regarding the Creator, Creation, and their relationship.

Consider for a moment the position of Henry David Thoreau, who seemingly believed escaping nature to spend the Sabbath indoors an affront to the work placed before Man for his enjoyment and study.  If there is a manual set forth by the divine to instruct human beings in the way in which to live their lives, why should that manual not be the very universe itself?  Where Genesis recounts the first divine instructions given humans, it is interesting that these early requirements did not include a command that each should abase one's self as beneath the contempt of the Creator, and to hide one's eyes from the world as it it, too, were beneath notice, and to accept learning only by memorizing texts distributed by a priesthood.  Genesis 2:19 seems to suggest very strongly that it was an approved project of our species to inspect and name everything that can be found.  How shall we undertake such lofty work if we fail to investigate what's been laid before us?

Someone should examine these pamphlets to see what they contain.  Google's rules prevent me from clicking the links.  I have some doubts about the depth of their theological analysis, and I suspect strongly that they represent an effort to preach religion as contrary to the study of the world in which we live.  Such a strange idea, that we should not learn from the world the rules laid out to govern those within it.  

Whatever else ought one to do?

The folks who view science as opposite to their religion must have a very weak grasp of their religion, or little power to reason.  The scientific method is nothing more (or less) than a system of rigorously subjecting hypotheses about the world (its contents and the rules that govern them) to tests intended to reveal flaws in the hypotheses.  Without the method we'd have little confidence in things like the charge on an electron, the gravitational constant of the universe, or the speed of light through vacuum.  The scientific method has allowed its practitioners, over time, to develop a considerable heap of hypotheses that have survived substantial abuse, to the point that (regardless their poor initial reception) they are regarded as if unbreakable laws.

Consider ideas like the universal theory of gravitation, and the principles of conservation.  For millennia, humans continued to observe that objects (a) tended, when not otherwise supported, to fall down, except birds, which somehow pushed the air, and (b) tended to come to a halt when no longer pushed.  Far from representing obvious truths, these ideas needed some experimental validation.  Objects dropped outside a gravity well don't fall to Earth.  Objects released under zero-resistance conditions don't come to a halt.  Programs to study other planets would hardly be plausible without understanding like this.  Programs to provide energy and food to a planet of finite resources will depend on proven principles in which careful people will be able to risk huge sums with confidence.

People who believe religion is contrary to experimental discovery of the principles that govern the behavior of the things found in the universe where they live have developed a shocking religion indeed.  The idea that people would expend scarce resources advertising to convince people to turn their backs on science as a religious requirement is curious and disturbing, but given the range of people on this world, entirely unsurprising.

A Theory of Shopping

Getting a good martial arts instructor is like getting a good auto mechanic, plumber, or
physician. If you don't know anything about the field, you're in a poor position to tell the wheat from the chaff, and you're likely to get had. If you walk into the shop and ask whether the professional you need is the one standing in front of you, you know already the answer you'll get:

Why, certainly.

What you need, my friend, is a guide. Hopefully, a little common sense will set you on a less treacherous path.

The first thing you need to know when you are shopping -- for anything -- is What You Are Looking For. If you don't know What You Are Looking For you will either go home empty handed (if you are extremely cautious) or will go home having bought whatever was available when you stumbled into the first salesman who caught you. If you don't know what you want,
if you don't know what need to satisfy, you will likely fall to some sales pitch designed to move whatever is in stock (or, to push whatever expertise is available, if you're buying services).

This is why, if you want to avoid disaster, you (a) make a grocery list and (b) don't go grocery shopping hungry. Ever gone shopping hungry someplace that takes credit cards? Then you know exactly what can happen.

Supposing you are interested in shopping for a martial arts instructor, you might be looking for:

• Exercise
• Outlet for Competitive Instincts
• Self-defense
• Dating Material That Is Fit
• Company of People Who Afford Leisure Activities
• Someplace Harmless To Kill Time 'Till The Addiction Meeting
  
• An Alibi
  

Other things may come to mind. If you want to be able to fight you may want to find an instructor that is either built like you are (understands how one with your body fights), or has satisfied students built like you are. Talk to them. How long have they been there? How has the class changed the way they do anything they do in their lives?

(If you're looking for a mechanic, you might be asking: what kind of car do you want maintained? How far are you willing to drive? Do you need a loaner when you drop it off? Some of these questions will be very similar regardless whose skills you hope to employ.)

Let me give you a little hypothetical. A man of obvious physical fitness and great demonstrable strength runs a martial arts business some distance from the campus of a well-known university. Through a personal connection with a member of the coaching staff, he is able to offer a class through the university for credit. The school allows students to get one credit for P.E., which is two semesters of some P.E. activity like kayaking or Karate. When you meet the instructor, he's wearing a red-and-white belt that (he says) indicates that he's a 6th Dan, or sixth-degree black belt. As you ask him questions, he tells you he's about to start an Aikido class, and why don't you stay to watch? You see folks of all sizes rolling on mats, practicing falling on their butts, and moving on command in repetition of various strikes and blocks using short staves about shoulder height or shorter.

Here's what you don't see: The instructor's 6th Dan is in Karate, and he's only first studied Aikido last summer. The reason the students in all his classes use a weapon is that the cost of the weapon isn't part of the student's tuition, and enables a direct-sale opportunity directly from his school. He tried to upsell them into a high-end uniform, too, of course. The instructor's enormous physical strength makes him utterly oblivious to the problems facing small women asking advice about wrist throws' effectiveness against thick-jointed men with an eighty-pound advantage, and when questioned about specific techniques that do depend on either surprise or superior force, he acts like the students just aren't doing it right. After all, it always works when he does it. When he demonstrates projecting chi (spiritual energy) -- a subject on which he is happy to open discussion, mostly because (you can tell by his smirk) there's nothing anyone can say to prove wrong anything he might claim -- there's nothing he ever seems to do that isn't fully explained by the fact he's a wall of muscle who weighs two hundred thirty pounds if he weighs an ounce (and probably more). Students are invited to attend master classes given by guests, that serve as advertisements for his classes because they are all held at his studio. (In fact, the entire university course is an advert intended to allow himself to distinguish his business as the only one endorsed by the blue-chip university whose coach is his personal buddy.) A master class instructed by a little 5'5" guy from Atlanta turns out to be a killer deal: the guy really knows his stuff and can teach in one day what the studio owner can't convey in a year, because he knows the answers to questions, and the studio owner is basically a giant brute who's carefully learned all the buzzwords needed to redirect pesky questioners trying to ascertain whether he has deep understanding to convey, or is just personally a highly-fit badass who's memorized a specialized vocabulary of Japanese.

And as you stand in the studio after the master class, you learn there's a dicount: if you sign today, you can join the Black Belt Program for 10% off the normal price, which is itself a 25% discount off the price you'd pay month-by-month, and you get the belts thrown in for free, plus a special patch indicating you're in the Black Belt Program. Asking about what the Black Belt Program means you'd discover it is a prepaid program for about a year and a half of classes, or until you pass the black belt test, whichever comes first. Folks who stop making payments on their Black Belt Program contracts discover that a contract for services is enforceable where the studio does its business, and that deciding you're done with the school because it's not teaching you the things you need to learn (or because incompetent instructors have allowed you to become injured by insufficiently supervised students) isn't going to prevent a court from enforcing your obligation to pay a few grand in tuition fees. This last bit, you can learn spotting the studio owner walking into the county courthouse, where he is not shy about telling you he's there to sue nonpaying quitters because he's got a business to run.

Oh, yeah. Did I mention I actually met this guy? I see on his web site that he's got a long-limbed woman working as an instructor. I'm thinking already that her ability to smack female competitors for points while they're still too far away to hit back (the body is points under most strike-oriented martial arts tournament rules, not the limbs) was probably a major plus when she was recruited.

This isn't to say giant, brutal badasses can't be good martial arts instructors. There's a specimen like this in Austin who can probably outgrapple a bear, and studying with him will make sure you (a) know where your technique is faulty, and (b) know when you are trying to win with strength (which doesn't work against him) and when you are actually succeeding in some defense due to quality technique. And that's the problem: you can't tell by from their advertisement or their portrait which ones are the worthless chumps and which ones have What You Need. You need to meet them. You need to see if their philosophy about their craft is deeper than a pile of buzzwords. You need to see if the school is all about selling belt tests, or is really about the craft.

If you don't want to compete, do not go to a studio that requires competition or whose instructor uses competition results as a credential. I'm here to tell you it's possible to win in tournaments by being longer-limbed, quicker, more heartless ... there are lots of things that can aid the race to a winning score in a tournament than being able to impart knowledge about martial arts technique. In fact, being a worthwhile teacher is probably not much of an asset in a tournament. On the other hand, if you want competitive athletics, find studios that organize attendance at several events a year -- or run their own tournaments that attract out-of-towners. Don't look at what the instructor has won, look at his students and ask them how they've done.

Watch a class. Bored students, questions that don't get answered effectively, instructors who don't seem attentive and don't stay with students they're correcting until they've got it right ... walk. Most of all: before you sign a big contract to get that quantity discount, get a sample to make sure it's a cake you really want to eat.

I've seen instructors give students explanations cribbed from ninja movies, stuff about launching bone splinters into the human brain for immediate death, and so on -- there are folks who will try anything on the gullible, and some of them have actually fallen for it themselves. Like the big oaf who talked about chi, he didn't know any better. At his size, he'd never if noticechi took a vacation. And, looking at him at work, I'm thinking it's been on sabbatical for years. It's his business plan that's gotten the good exercise. And the word of caution is that good salesmen stay in business longer (skills or no skills) than teachers who haven't worked out how to make a profit. Survival bias favors businessmen, not martial arts instructors.

It's a jungle out there.

The sad thing is that the story is exactly the same when you need an attorney, a pediatrician, a mechanic ... you really benefit from having a native guide to help you understand who you're dealing with. A surgeon knows what surgeon to visit if personal need arose. These kinds of references are invaluable. Shopping by the yellow pages is a lottery.

You can google for commodities and not get burned: the reason they're commodities is that they're interchangeable. Skilled services is harder to shop for. Later, I'll post on services that allow folks to rate businesses with which they've had experience. This looks like a trend that may really be worthwhile, though the possibility exists that fear of liability may prevent some bad reviews.

More later.