One of the most foolish ways to test one's knowledge or intelligence is through standardized tests. These tests have the underlying assumption that we all view things identically and ignore the fact that the inventor of the questions may himself have flawed or inaccurate information. Just remember how Einstein himself was considered a failure in grade school and his own peers in the realm of physics refused to publish him. Over the years some modifications have been introduced in the tests to make it less ridiculous.
When it comes to simple questions like "what is 2+2", the answers are not ambiguous. I have heard though, that even in advanced math, 1+1 is not always equal to 2 but I have not personally studied advanced math so I will continue with my grade school assumptions that 1+1=2. But I have studied other knowledge areas in university and some of these areas have ideas of thoughts that sometime contradict other ideas of thoughts and each position argue their points well. There is "proof" that one should punish a criminal because he is responsible for his actions; alternatively, there is also "proof" that one should rehabilitate a criminal because society has not educated this individual properly enough and that society must pay the price to re-educate the criminal. So it comes down to a matter of a "belief" system to determine which side of the equation that you will fall on.
The problem comes when someone creates a standardized test which asks how best to solve the criminal problem. Naturally, no one ever asks a question so directly in these tests, the questions are much more subtle, but if your "belief" system is against that of the one who created the questions and proper answers, then you failed those questions and you get a lower score on your permanent record. If you are applying for a prestigious career, these tests guarantee that everyone will think the same and be on the same page. Independent thought will not be allowed and when the ship sinks, no one on board will know what happened or why because everyone was blinded in the same way. Government bureaucracies would also function in a similar blindness because everyone in the corrections department would have been tested with the assumption that the best answer was "rehabilitation is best" while everyone in the law enforcement department would have been tested on the assumption that the best answer was "punish the criminal"..... This makes for an interesting schizophrenic bureaucratic department that the political leader must somehow manage especially if the political leader has a third viewpoint on how criminals should be treated.
In the early 20th century, IQ tests were performed on newly arrived immigrants to the US. It was discovered that the average score of intelligence for the immigrant was always 20 or so points lower than that of the average US citizen. Later they discovered that most of the questions were culture specific and that the newly arrived immigrant would have had no idea what the proper answer was. Imagine that the question is "What is the Big Apple" and the immigrant mentions something about a tree with a boost in special fertilizer..... WRONG says the one who corrects the answers (if the one who corrects these tests has no human judgment in determining what may be valid or not, then perhaps he should be in another field of employment).... Everyone knows that the "Big Apple" is a reference to New York and that is why the US citizen had higher marks in these IQ tests.
Today we have come a long way in avoiding such pitfalls and our tests are a bit more sophisticated and we allow less cultural references to be used as a way to test IQ. But the cultural reference mistakes have been replaced with ambiguous answers based upon what the tester believes to be correct when other answers are also debated in intellectual forums as correct. The one who takes the test must determine what the tester believes and then answer accordingly, this does not demonstrate intelligence or knowledge but rather the willingness to adapt to what the tester wants. And if these tests are only to determine who is willing to be a "yes-man", then the tests should be called as such.... The "Willingness to Submit to the Philosophical Idea of the Day" test. Naturally, the true thinker will be excluded from this exercise and everyone who passes this test will all run in the same direction without understanding why they are running nor where they are going..... and when the cliff approaches, most won't recognize it until they have run off of it while the leaders who led us off the cliff will cry out in glee that we are now flying high!
So when 2 or more answers on a multiple choice are equally valid dependent upon the school of thought you ascribe to, the only way to succeed is to understand the philosophy behind the tester, and while you figure that out and succeed in passing the test, you have not demonstrated superior intellect or superior knowledge, instead you have guessed the intention of the tester and acted like a proper puppet. The tests claim that they are looking for people with superior intellect and superior knowledge but they penalize them if they answer the test truthfully, instead they are really looking for clones who will all think and speak alike in a hive mind.
Questions I have seen in some tests that either test intelligence or knowledge in a specified field of study.... (note, these are metaphorical approximations with exaggerated foolishness to make a point because the questions are more subtle and the reader would have to have specialized knowledge in a very specific field to see the flaw in the question and that the average person would probably not see the problem).....
Q1-Who won the Stanley Cup in 1983? (Nice knowledge of trivia but how is it relevant for determining knowledge of sociology or determining that a prospective student has sufficient IQ to be accepted at university?)
Q2-Finish the series 1, 2, 3.... Choice of answers include A)4 B)5 C)6 D)10.....
you choose A) because each number increases by one integer.
you choose B) because each succeeding number is the sum of the previous 2 numbers.... 1+2=3, 2+3=5.
you choose C) because each succeeding number is the sum of all previous numbers put together.... 1+2=3, 1+2+3=6.
you choose D) because this a number system that only has 4 digits and is not a decimal based system..... 1, 2, 3, 10, 11, 12, 13, 20, 21, 22, 23, 30, 31, 32, 33, 100 (and these were numbers from 1 to 16)
Q3-Finish the series 1, 2, 3, 5.... Choice of answers include A)7 B)8 C)14 D)13...
you choose A) because these are prime numbers in sequence.
you choose B) because you add the sum of the previous two numbers....
you choose C) because you multiply the previous 2 numbers and subtract the first digit in the sequence.
you choose D) because you multiply the previous 2 numbers and subtract the digit which is located 2 positions away from the answer.
Q4-What is the widget found underneath an outdated camera that is no longer manufactured and no one will ever use again? (nice piece of trivia, but how does knowing this trivia determine my knowledge of how to take a great camera shot?)
Q5-When was gunpowder first used? (in a European context or Chinese?)
Q6-What year was the new World discovered? (considering the Viking explorers who did not record their time accurately? or the politically recognized official answer?..... not to mention the theory of the Bering Strait crossover from Asia?)
Q7-Who used the first computer? (did the test giver read the latest archaeological journal of the discovery of a mechanical computer found on a sunken Roman ship or is the test giver merely using last year's information?)
For a fictional example of standardized tests and how it won't recognize someone truly brilliant but only find the above average within a pool of average people, I recommend the book: "Cryptonomicon" by Neal Stephenson. The protagonist does a standardized test which he only answers one question in a period of 2 hours and gets it "wrong".... and yet, had someone with proper judgment on interpreting results of tests been correcting the test, he would have immediately seen the brilliant nature of the protagonist....
So the conclusion and the point of this rant against standardized tests is that you won't find the true thinker with this tool and you will only get identical thinking clones who don't know how to think outside of the box.
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
A New Position is Needed
Well our sorcerers of a thousand years ago have been replaced by our economists with about the same rate of success when advising our rulers. Our astrologers have been replaced by our statisticians, and again the success in predicting the future are comparable. One can wonder if the Economist is just the more acceptable word for Sorcerer in a supposed age of scientific rationality, and we can wonder about Astrologers vs Statisticians as well.
The Economist and the Sorcerer has an internal logic to its "worldview", both have an unknown reliance on some unnamed outside force with "almost" mystical powers. The invisible hand of the market to regulate things mysteriously back to its proper rational order? Sounds mystical doesn't it? As I mentioned, the internal logic is sensible. As long as the initial premises, the underlying assumption of how things are supposed to work, are completely true, then the logic follows to a proper conclusion. The study of economics are based upon worldview assumptions of "supposed" philosophical thinkers of the 18th and 19th centuries. I say "supposed" because they begin the first words of their masterpieces with assumptions as if everyone agreed with them as if they were fact when in reality, 3 seconds of thinking demonstrate this assumption to be mere wishful thinking. Imagine Thrasymachus from Plato's Republic were to write a book about Economy and then our entire society bases its foundation upon those ideas, well you don't have to really imagine very hard because this is pretty much the state we are in today.
The Astrologer and the Statistician both use mathematical calculations to chart out data and as long as the data is solid, the interpretation sound, we can predict events with a fair accuracy. Well for astrology, the planets and orbits show their influence upon our events, while the statistical method uses such things as questions asked of the fickle human mind. Today your answer would be X, while tomorrow you decide to answer Y because you had a bad lunch and you did not sleep well or whatever other excuse. You don't quite understand what the question means, so you answer based upon your understanding of the question, a week later after having done a few extra crossword puzzles, your understanding of grammar improves and you are faced with the same question and you answer differently, not because your opinion has changed but because you understand the question differently. As much as the Statistician tries to prevent such misinterpretations by offering unambiguous questions, they aren't linguists so they have no idea how difficult that particular task may actually be. Nevermind that the ones asking the questions are paid by this current capitalist system where the speed of asking questions is more important than the quality, we have many who are tempted to cut corners to get that extra pay bonus for having filled out more questionnaires. Did the respondent answer "what" or did he answer "one", next question please.
Looking at previous blogs, I also mentioned how sometimes the wrong questions are asked. Assumptions are made to determine what a given problem is and the questionnaire does not allow for a person's personal comments because personal comments can't be quantified and then tabulated mathematically for a given result. "The medium is the message" said a Canadian scholar Marshal McLuhan, he was talking about television specifically but I suggest that the actual questionnaire for the statistician also is its own message and people will respond to that message instead of answering what would have been the true thought. Look at the questionnaire as a sort of prism that you are forced to look through to get your data of the world and exclude all other prisms and only focus on this one prism. What happens if this prism allows you to see like a binocular? Useful for very specific inquiries but useless if you want to navigate inside a house or to work on a car engine.
Why criticize these two disciplines? Am I being too harsh? Well the over-reliance upon these flawed disciplines and the pretense that their flaws are either non-existent or downplaying their severity encourages me to blast at them. Especially since our governing rulers consult the Economist and the Statistician exclusively to make decisions, not that they always listen to their advice good or bad, but the "Thinker's" voice is not heard. The Thinker who would take his time to consult and contemplate a problem. We have had Thinkers in the past, they are usually the ones who contemplate something, ignore the statistics of the day or the scientific beliefs of the day and make an outlandish claim in their area of expertise and then let the non-thinkers work among themselves the "proof" and the statistics to arrive at the same conclusion as the "Thinker". Einstein is one who decided to "think", and in his area of expertise, he was more correct than the scientists of his day.
Now I would not recommend a "Physicist" to give advice to government officials on health or education, even if this "Physicist" is a thinker because this expert would be more suited in the laboratory than in making laws to improve healthcare access or how to determine which classics should be chosen to read for a 12 year old student.... Although this hypothetical "Physicist" would probably still do a better job in coming up with solutions than the "Economists" and the "Statisticians" of our society, it is better to have a "Thinker". The "Physicist" has his knowledge based upon very specific areas and the proper "Thinker" should be more of a generalist who has a bird's eye view of many disciplines of knowledge (which can also include economics, but we are way over-saturated by that tool-set that we can start swinging the pendulum away from them.... not necessarily too far away, the tools can be interesting exercises to see things differently and offer an extra perspective). Don't throw out the binocular just because it has been useless inside a house because you may enter a building like a stadium where the binoculars can still have a usefulness (as long as you then inspect close up with your own eyes as to not over-rely on a tool).
How do we define the "Thinker" and where do we find one? Well the thinker would be a true philosopher, not necessarily someone who has studied philosophy. Those who study philosophy are more like sports commentators than genuine athletes. They know the game, but they have never played, or if they have played, they would be incompetent compared to the real athlete. Some of our 18th century and 19th century "Philosophers" are closer to commentators than genuine athletes. But it is understandable that the layman can't recognize the difference because the commentator speaks a good show and can outplay the layman. Of course a genuine "Thinker" may have studied philosophy, but the criteria of selection should never be based upon the degree acquired. One does not look for a decent steak by looking at the pretty packaging but rather at the steak itself.
The main point of this blog is not how to find the proper "Thinker", this can be the subject of a future blog, no the point is that we should invent the position of the "Thinker" to be consulted by whoever ends up consulting "Economists" and "Statisticians". If a corporation can afford to consult "Sorcerers" and "Astrologers" then they should at the very least include the "Philosopher" on the payroll. Governments have an even higher necessity to include the "Philosopher". Of course, it becomes self-destructive if the rulers never listen to the advice of the "Thinker", but again, that is a subject for another blog.
So far our society reacts to new problems that seem to surprise the current experts who advise our rulers, so lets hire alternative experts who don't spend their time reacting to supposedly surprising problems but rather contemplate and avoid these easily foreseeable problems which seem to surprise many people. For example: if you have 4 people do a 10 person job, of course it will fall apart and disaster will strike. If a person gets promoted for speed rather than quality, of course we will have poor service in our industries. If a person gets a bonus for sales rather than having a relationship with a customer, of course lies will be told to get the sale.
The "Economist" and the "Statistician" can never understand why disaster strikes in the above examples because they assume in the first that the 4 people will work in such a way to achieve what the 10 had previously done through extra efforts and better posturing and 30 second less on a coffee break and other nonsensical calculations instead of accepting that a human being has defined parameters that you don't play with them unless you are ready to face disaster. Why are we surprised that absenteeism is so prevalent? The assumption is also that the increase in speed means that there is no reduction in quality. The next time you go to the grocery store and do at least $100 in purchases, go back with your receipt and do a price check on each of your items on your receipt, you will be surprised at how many items were mis-priced.... not because the grocery store wants to deceive you but because they are more concerned in speed than getting the job done right that corners are cut and eventually they will get to it.... but because of this, you lost out on the service of accurate pricing. You are told at a hardware store that the barbecue you are buying in December at a reduced price has the option you were looking for! Yay, then May comes and you try out your new barbecue and oops, this model doesn't have the feature you were looking for. (Do you really believe that that store's competitor won't have the same type of employee who lies?) Again, the "Economist" and the "Statistician" don't record these discrepancies or how the anger it produces makes you distrust the merchant who has "stolen" from you.
Previous blogs also show actual situations that have happened in the news which would be the direct result of not thinking for 2 seconds and relying upon a "reactionary" solution to when problems appear and always surprised when the easily preventable problems actually happen.
So to conclude, a new position should be available to advise leaders and this new position should have at the very least the same credibility as what "Economists" and "Statisticians" have in our current society.... even though once implemented and actually following the advice, they will show very quickly how they deserve much more credibility. Now the trick is to find genuine "Thinkers".
The Economist and the Sorcerer has an internal logic to its "worldview", both have an unknown reliance on some unnamed outside force with "almost" mystical powers. The invisible hand of the market to regulate things mysteriously back to its proper rational order? Sounds mystical doesn't it? As I mentioned, the internal logic is sensible. As long as the initial premises, the underlying assumption of how things are supposed to work, are completely true, then the logic follows to a proper conclusion. The study of economics are based upon worldview assumptions of "supposed" philosophical thinkers of the 18th and 19th centuries. I say "supposed" because they begin the first words of their masterpieces with assumptions as if everyone agreed with them as if they were fact when in reality, 3 seconds of thinking demonstrate this assumption to be mere wishful thinking. Imagine Thrasymachus from Plato's Republic were to write a book about Economy and then our entire society bases its foundation upon those ideas, well you don't have to really imagine very hard because this is pretty much the state we are in today.
The Astrologer and the Statistician both use mathematical calculations to chart out data and as long as the data is solid, the interpretation sound, we can predict events with a fair accuracy. Well for astrology, the planets and orbits show their influence upon our events, while the statistical method uses such things as questions asked of the fickle human mind. Today your answer would be X, while tomorrow you decide to answer Y because you had a bad lunch and you did not sleep well or whatever other excuse. You don't quite understand what the question means, so you answer based upon your understanding of the question, a week later after having done a few extra crossword puzzles, your understanding of grammar improves and you are faced with the same question and you answer differently, not because your opinion has changed but because you understand the question differently. As much as the Statistician tries to prevent such misinterpretations by offering unambiguous questions, they aren't linguists so they have no idea how difficult that particular task may actually be. Nevermind that the ones asking the questions are paid by this current capitalist system where the speed of asking questions is more important than the quality, we have many who are tempted to cut corners to get that extra pay bonus for having filled out more questionnaires. Did the respondent answer "what" or did he answer "one", next question please.
Looking at previous blogs, I also mentioned how sometimes the wrong questions are asked. Assumptions are made to determine what a given problem is and the questionnaire does not allow for a person's personal comments because personal comments can't be quantified and then tabulated mathematically for a given result. "The medium is the message" said a Canadian scholar Marshal McLuhan, he was talking about television specifically but I suggest that the actual questionnaire for the statistician also is its own message and people will respond to that message instead of answering what would have been the true thought. Look at the questionnaire as a sort of prism that you are forced to look through to get your data of the world and exclude all other prisms and only focus on this one prism. What happens if this prism allows you to see like a binocular? Useful for very specific inquiries but useless if you want to navigate inside a house or to work on a car engine.
Why criticize these two disciplines? Am I being too harsh? Well the over-reliance upon these flawed disciplines and the pretense that their flaws are either non-existent or downplaying their severity encourages me to blast at them. Especially since our governing rulers consult the Economist and the Statistician exclusively to make decisions, not that they always listen to their advice good or bad, but the "Thinker's" voice is not heard. The Thinker who would take his time to consult and contemplate a problem. We have had Thinkers in the past, they are usually the ones who contemplate something, ignore the statistics of the day or the scientific beliefs of the day and make an outlandish claim in their area of expertise and then let the non-thinkers work among themselves the "proof" and the statistics to arrive at the same conclusion as the "Thinker". Einstein is one who decided to "think", and in his area of expertise, he was more correct than the scientists of his day.
Now I would not recommend a "Physicist" to give advice to government officials on health or education, even if this "Physicist" is a thinker because this expert would be more suited in the laboratory than in making laws to improve healthcare access or how to determine which classics should be chosen to read for a 12 year old student.... Although this hypothetical "Physicist" would probably still do a better job in coming up with solutions than the "Economists" and the "Statisticians" of our society, it is better to have a "Thinker". The "Physicist" has his knowledge based upon very specific areas and the proper "Thinker" should be more of a generalist who has a bird's eye view of many disciplines of knowledge (which can also include economics, but we are way over-saturated by that tool-set that we can start swinging the pendulum away from them.... not necessarily too far away, the tools can be interesting exercises to see things differently and offer an extra perspective). Don't throw out the binocular just because it has been useless inside a house because you may enter a building like a stadium where the binoculars can still have a usefulness (as long as you then inspect close up with your own eyes as to not over-rely on a tool).
How do we define the "Thinker" and where do we find one? Well the thinker would be a true philosopher, not necessarily someone who has studied philosophy. Those who study philosophy are more like sports commentators than genuine athletes. They know the game, but they have never played, or if they have played, they would be incompetent compared to the real athlete. Some of our 18th century and 19th century "Philosophers" are closer to commentators than genuine athletes. But it is understandable that the layman can't recognize the difference because the commentator speaks a good show and can outplay the layman. Of course a genuine "Thinker" may have studied philosophy, but the criteria of selection should never be based upon the degree acquired. One does not look for a decent steak by looking at the pretty packaging but rather at the steak itself.
The main point of this blog is not how to find the proper "Thinker", this can be the subject of a future blog, no the point is that we should invent the position of the "Thinker" to be consulted by whoever ends up consulting "Economists" and "Statisticians". If a corporation can afford to consult "Sorcerers" and "Astrologers" then they should at the very least include the "Philosopher" on the payroll. Governments have an even higher necessity to include the "Philosopher". Of course, it becomes self-destructive if the rulers never listen to the advice of the "Thinker", but again, that is a subject for another blog.
So far our society reacts to new problems that seem to surprise the current experts who advise our rulers, so lets hire alternative experts who don't spend their time reacting to supposedly surprising problems but rather contemplate and avoid these easily foreseeable problems which seem to surprise many people. For example: if you have 4 people do a 10 person job, of course it will fall apart and disaster will strike. If a person gets promoted for speed rather than quality, of course we will have poor service in our industries. If a person gets a bonus for sales rather than having a relationship with a customer, of course lies will be told to get the sale.
The "Economist" and the "Statistician" can never understand why disaster strikes in the above examples because they assume in the first that the 4 people will work in such a way to achieve what the 10 had previously done through extra efforts and better posturing and 30 second less on a coffee break and other nonsensical calculations instead of accepting that a human being has defined parameters that you don't play with them unless you are ready to face disaster. Why are we surprised that absenteeism is so prevalent? The assumption is also that the increase in speed means that there is no reduction in quality. The next time you go to the grocery store and do at least $100 in purchases, go back with your receipt and do a price check on each of your items on your receipt, you will be surprised at how many items were mis-priced.... not because the grocery store wants to deceive you but because they are more concerned in speed than getting the job done right that corners are cut and eventually they will get to it.... but because of this, you lost out on the service of accurate pricing. You are told at a hardware store that the barbecue you are buying in December at a reduced price has the option you were looking for! Yay, then May comes and you try out your new barbecue and oops, this model doesn't have the feature you were looking for. (Do you really believe that that store's competitor won't have the same type of employee who lies?) Again, the "Economist" and the "Statistician" don't record these discrepancies or how the anger it produces makes you distrust the merchant who has "stolen" from you.
Previous blogs also show actual situations that have happened in the news which would be the direct result of not thinking for 2 seconds and relying upon a "reactionary" solution to when problems appear and always surprised when the easily preventable problems actually happen.
So to conclude, a new position should be available to advise leaders and this new position should have at the very least the same credibility as what "Economists" and "Statisticians" have in our current society.... even though once implemented and actually following the advice, they will show very quickly how they deserve much more credibility. Now the trick is to find genuine "Thinkers".
Thursday, November 5, 2009
PASS the Buck
Well the main topic on the news is the flu shots (where are we at now, the Tulip Flu, the Wheat Flu, the Trout Flu, the Swine Flu or the Avian Flu?) Ah, no matter, it all sounds the same to the person on the street. Yesterday, it was SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome), a few hours ago it was the Avian Flu and minutes ago it became the Swine Flu or as it is now supposed to be called: A H1N1 Flu..... All of this sounds technical and dangerous and people are unaware of the true impact of what all of this means, including the experts themselves. This has caused apathy in the entire system. So I want to talk about this general apathy and how we can solve it.
Lets follow the example of our experts and find a catchy name to make our exposé sound intellectual: Political Apathy Situation Solution (PASS). Now lets look at the phenomena of the flu shots and how people have reacted to it, and how the experts reacted to this. We hear about this flu being a problem sometime in April 2009. Our political experts urge the public to get vaccinated. Most resist, they are not that concerned about the virus and many health professionals give out conflicting information. Our government officials seem surprised at the public response and are seen on television scratching their collective heads. "Why won't the population believe us that this is a serious problem?"
Well here's a story: in the 1950s, we are told to go get some medical shots to prevent whatever illness of the day. The population rushes out to get the shots because science is never wrong. Twenty or so years later: "Ooops?!? Science had not considered this or that and many people seem to have developed extra complications to their health, sorry about that dear public at large." During the 1970s, the medical experts and the political leaders throw out some other alarm about some other disease and the necessity to get some kind of shot as well, the public dutifully obeys and gets their shots. Twenty or so years later: "Ooops !?! Science seems to not have predicted these negative secondary results, sorry about that."
Today, we have experts who wonder about if this whole mess is just shouting fire when there is only the smoke of an extinguished match, others wonder about the effectiveness of a vaccine in the first place when the flu can potentially evolve into a different strain altogether which then potentially makes the vaccine user that much more at risk compared to others.... and then others wondering about if all of this is only to line the pockets of the pharmaceutical companies by creating a phony danger. Our politicians tell us that they have been preparing for the worse since June or so and that we must all get vaccinated, science is on their side. "Why won't the public believe us?" Well the public doesn't trust you.... Haven't you figured that out yet?
Fictional TV series and fictional movies portray the government bureaucrat as an incompetent fool who is there for his own personal interests and not for the interest of the public at large.... Sure you have the occasional hero who selflessly protects the public at large, but the hero faces 2 enemies, the bad guy who did an awful thing and the foolish bureaucratic system that prevents a decent human from doing the right thing at the right time. We all watch this and identify with the situation.... all of us. Then the news shows us yet one more example of a company or a government bureaucracy that did the wrong thing by following the existing bureaucratic rules. My own previous blogs demonstrate this.
Why is it such a surprise that we have such apathy for the political leader or the bureaucratic process? How do they solve this? Well they pay millions of dollars to statisticians to ask us questions to see what the problem is..... The flaw is that the statistician or the social scientist who will use the statistical process don't know what questions to ask. Everyone assumes that the system, the bureaucracy works and the questions reflect this unproven assumption, so no solution can ever be attained through the bureaucratic methodology of statistics..... and since we are in a capitalist society where we must produce and produce and do this quickly, no one takes the time to think for a mere 3 seconds (contemplation) and see the problem clear as day..... no instead the statistician must produce a questionnaire in half a second and use the remaining half to ask the population and then spend one second to analyze the obviously flawed results.... Well we saved one second in comparison to the thinker who just want to "waste" his time contemplating. Then we have the politicians shrugging their shoulders as to why a population is so unresponsive to the "science" of today.
Then tragedy strikes. A young teen dies from the virus. Was science right this time around? Were the politicians genuine in their warnings? Well, the public now mobilizes to get themselves vaccinated as quickly as possible. Scientists don't really inform us that this death is in the category of extreme rarity in odds because now the population has decided to believe in the severity of the problem that the government has mentioned all along..... But guess what..... this same government who warned us of the dangers, who says that they have been preparing since June of this year, the same government who scratches their heads as to why they are not trusted..... well they don't seem to be very prepared. The news reports how there is a shortage of vaccines, how people who are not on the list of priority get vaccinated before others who have priority (a sports team, inmates from a prison to name but 2). Children who do have priority get vaccinated but their parents do not which means that they will have to come back in a few weeks to get their turn. The lineups are huge and some people wait up to 8 hours before being told that they have run out of vaccines on that day..... And then the governing leaders have the gall to wonder why we don't trust them?
Again the PASS (Political Apathy Situation Solution) is simple: think about things, don't react to them..... the whole vaccine situation for the A H1N1 flu of the year 2009 should have been thought about since 1950. If a situation occurs where an entire population needs to be vaccinated, then these are the steps to take... and every 5 years or so, we re-evaluate the procedures and update them as technology or other factors change. We do this so that we don't have a few experts meet in June in reaction to a danger and then try to implement a solution under threat of time and then discover how the system is not working.... well duh! Most are hired to blindly follow contradictory rules and then the leaders who implement these rules are surprised at the results. If you react to a danger, its already too late and you will have to accept the results of your reflexes versus the incoming danger. If you contemplate how to use your reflexes and you make the practice of implementing this on fictional dangers, then as soon as a legitimate danger appears, you are much better prepared. But capitalism doesn't like to invest in thinking, they would rather make profit and react when the water of the sinking ship has reached their cabin.
This brings me to another point, the opposition reacts strongly and claims that the current leader of whatever department should resign..... Why? Would they do any better under this current system? If you have flawed tools, how can you be expected to perform your task as you could? This then brings me to VACUUM thinking (Voter Apathy Considered Using Uncommon Methodologies ie. thinking). See the voter is not apathetic in the politician itself. Candidate A wants to put 25 cents out $100 in the blue cup while Candidate B wants to attribute that same 25 cents in the red cup. Why the hell should the voter care about the 25 cents in the red or blue cup? The system itself is flawed and neither candidate is willing to do anything about it.... So the voter becomes apathetic and either does not vote altogether or chooses quickly to get the entire exercise over and done with. Find me Candidate C who will tell the voter the truth, to function properly we need $400 and we will ignore this $100 constraint we have fictionalized for ourselves and ignore 25 cents for blue or red cups and get the $400 we need and transform society..... and if any rule should prevent us from doing what is right, then we change the rules. Laws are there to serve Justice, if they don't do their job, we change them accordingly. Why do you think Barack Obama from the US had so many people enamoured with him? The slogan "Yes We Can" indicated that he was someone who was actually willing to do what needed to be done..... unfortunately, it did not pan out. Barack suffers from the same problems that Candidate A and B have: flawed bureaucratic tools.
I am all for using tools when they serve my purpose, but when the tools become the master and that I must comply myself to them to function, then I can not do the job as I originally envisioned it and must submit myself to how the tool evolves my problem into a supposed solution..... and history shows that these solutions are illusions and create many more problems. So replace the worker and the new worker will have the same problem with an inadequate tool. Replace the tool and allow the human back in control of his destiny. This will prevent political apathy and also prevent our current crises from becoming the norm. So if the government gives a health warning, it will be legitimate and people will trust it to be legitimate and it will be implemented professionally.
Is the current health warning legitimate? History will answer that like it showed how legitimate the previous health problems were in the 20th century. Do people trust the current government? Only after the media informed us of the tragedy of a teen's death did people run to the vaccination centres, so figure that one out. Are the current vaccines being distributed professionally? The experts reacted to a problem instead of contemplating how to act if a problem should ever occur with the obvious consequences. Experts put faith on dead bureaucratic principles that stifle imagination or initiative and were surprised at how underlings react when no explicit instructions are available when unusual circumstances arise.
So I humoristically say, PASS the buck and do some VACUUM thinking!
Lets follow the example of our experts and find a catchy name to make our exposé sound intellectual: Political Apathy Situation Solution (PASS). Now lets look at the phenomena of the flu shots and how people have reacted to it, and how the experts reacted to this. We hear about this flu being a problem sometime in April 2009. Our political experts urge the public to get vaccinated. Most resist, they are not that concerned about the virus and many health professionals give out conflicting information. Our government officials seem surprised at the public response and are seen on television scratching their collective heads. "Why won't the population believe us that this is a serious problem?"
Well here's a story: in the 1950s, we are told to go get some medical shots to prevent whatever illness of the day. The population rushes out to get the shots because science is never wrong. Twenty or so years later: "Ooops?!? Science had not considered this or that and many people seem to have developed extra complications to their health, sorry about that dear public at large." During the 1970s, the medical experts and the political leaders throw out some other alarm about some other disease and the necessity to get some kind of shot as well, the public dutifully obeys and gets their shots. Twenty or so years later: "Ooops !?! Science seems to not have predicted these negative secondary results, sorry about that."
Today, we have experts who wonder about if this whole mess is just shouting fire when there is only the smoke of an extinguished match, others wonder about the effectiveness of a vaccine in the first place when the flu can potentially evolve into a different strain altogether which then potentially makes the vaccine user that much more at risk compared to others.... and then others wondering about if all of this is only to line the pockets of the pharmaceutical companies by creating a phony danger. Our politicians tell us that they have been preparing for the worse since June or so and that we must all get vaccinated, science is on their side. "Why won't the public believe us?" Well the public doesn't trust you.... Haven't you figured that out yet?
Fictional TV series and fictional movies portray the government bureaucrat as an incompetent fool who is there for his own personal interests and not for the interest of the public at large.... Sure you have the occasional hero who selflessly protects the public at large, but the hero faces 2 enemies, the bad guy who did an awful thing and the foolish bureaucratic system that prevents a decent human from doing the right thing at the right time. We all watch this and identify with the situation.... all of us. Then the news shows us yet one more example of a company or a government bureaucracy that did the wrong thing by following the existing bureaucratic rules. My own previous blogs demonstrate this.
Why is it such a surprise that we have such apathy for the political leader or the bureaucratic process? How do they solve this? Well they pay millions of dollars to statisticians to ask us questions to see what the problem is..... The flaw is that the statistician or the social scientist who will use the statistical process don't know what questions to ask. Everyone assumes that the system, the bureaucracy works and the questions reflect this unproven assumption, so no solution can ever be attained through the bureaucratic methodology of statistics..... and since we are in a capitalist society where we must produce and produce and do this quickly, no one takes the time to think for a mere 3 seconds (contemplation) and see the problem clear as day..... no instead the statistician must produce a questionnaire in half a second and use the remaining half to ask the population and then spend one second to analyze the obviously flawed results.... Well we saved one second in comparison to the thinker who just want to "waste" his time contemplating. Then we have the politicians shrugging their shoulders as to why a population is so unresponsive to the "science" of today.
Then tragedy strikes. A young teen dies from the virus. Was science right this time around? Were the politicians genuine in their warnings? Well, the public now mobilizes to get themselves vaccinated as quickly as possible. Scientists don't really inform us that this death is in the category of extreme rarity in odds because now the population has decided to believe in the severity of the problem that the government has mentioned all along..... But guess what..... this same government who warned us of the dangers, who says that they have been preparing since June of this year, the same government who scratches their heads as to why they are not trusted..... well they don't seem to be very prepared. The news reports how there is a shortage of vaccines, how people who are not on the list of priority get vaccinated before others who have priority (a sports team, inmates from a prison to name but 2). Children who do have priority get vaccinated but their parents do not which means that they will have to come back in a few weeks to get their turn. The lineups are huge and some people wait up to 8 hours before being told that they have run out of vaccines on that day..... And then the governing leaders have the gall to wonder why we don't trust them?
Again the PASS (Political Apathy Situation Solution) is simple: think about things, don't react to them..... the whole vaccine situation for the A H1N1 flu of the year 2009 should have been thought about since 1950. If a situation occurs where an entire population needs to be vaccinated, then these are the steps to take... and every 5 years or so, we re-evaluate the procedures and update them as technology or other factors change. We do this so that we don't have a few experts meet in June in reaction to a danger and then try to implement a solution under threat of time and then discover how the system is not working.... well duh! Most are hired to blindly follow contradictory rules and then the leaders who implement these rules are surprised at the results. If you react to a danger, its already too late and you will have to accept the results of your reflexes versus the incoming danger. If you contemplate how to use your reflexes and you make the practice of implementing this on fictional dangers, then as soon as a legitimate danger appears, you are much better prepared. But capitalism doesn't like to invest in thinking, they would rather make profit and react when the water of the sinking ship has reached their cabin.
This brings me to another point, the opposition reacts strongly and claims that the current leader of whatever department should resign..... Why? Would they do any better under this current system? If you have flawed tools, how can you be expected to perform your task as you could? This then brings me to VACUUM thinking (Voter Apathy Considered Using Uncommon Methodologies ie. thinking). See the voter is not apathetic in the politician itself. Candidate A wants to put 25 cents out $100 in the blue cup while Candidate B wants to attribute that same 25 cents in the red cup. Why the hell should the voter care about the 25 cents in the red or blue cup? The system itself is flawed and neither candidate is willing to do anything about it.... So the voter becomes apathetic and either does not vote altogether or chooses quickly to get the entire exercise over and done with. Find me Candidate C who will tell the voter the truth, to function properly we need $400 and we will ignore this $100 constraint we have fictionalized for ourselves and ignore 25 cents for blue or red cups and get the $400 we need and transform society..... and if any rule should prevent us from doing what is right, then we change the rules. Laws are there to serve Justice, if they don't do their job, we change them accordingly. Why do you think Barack Obama from the US had so many people enamoured with him? The slogan "Yes We Can" indicated that he was someone who was actually willing to do what needed to be done..... unfortunately, it did not pan out. Barack suffers from the same problems that Candidate A and B have: flawed bureaucratic tools.
I am all for using tools when they serve my purpose, but when the tools become the master and that I must comply myself to them to function, then I can not do the job as I originally envisioned it and must submit myself to how the tool evolves my problem into a supposed solution..... and history shows that these solutions are illusions and create many more problems. So replace the worker and the new worker will have the same problem with an inadequate tool. Replace the tool and allow the human back in control of his destiny. This will prevent political apathy and also prevent our current crises from becoming the norm. So if the government gives a health warning, it will be legitimate and people will trust it to be legitimate and it will be implemented professionally.
Is the current health warning legitimate? History will answer that like it showed how legitimate the previous health problems were in the 20th century. Do people trust the current government? Only after the media informed us of the tragedy of a teen's death did people run to the vaccination centres, so figure that one out. Are the current vaccines being distributed professionally? The experts reacted to a problem instead of contemplating how to act if a problem should ever occur with the obvious consequences. Experts put faith on dead bureaucratic principles that stifle imagination or initiative and were surprised at how underlings react when no explicit instructions are available when unusual circumstances arise.
So I humoristically say, PASS the buck and do some VACUUM thinking!
Friday, October 16, 2009
Jean Sarkozy Wants a Fair Chance to Serve
So who is this Jean? Well he is 23 years old and he is in his second year of university. He has not graduated yet but he has the chance of being the leader of a governmental agency which handles several billions of Euros for its yearly budget. Now do I believe that this guy has the capabilities to run this large governmental agency when he is only 23 years of age without a university degree? Well Jean is asking us to just give him that chance and he will prove it to us that he can do it. Is it possible? Sure it is, after all, Alexander of Macedonia (known as the Great) conquered a fine chunk of the world before the Roman Empire became a reality, and Alexander was a young adult at the time of his conquests.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Bobby Fischer, Tiger Woods, Blaise Pascal and John Stuart Mill were all famous for doing great work at a young age. So it is not unusual to believe that the capability is possible for someone who is 23 years of age or that the university degree is not necessary to prove capability. Would this Jean Sarkozy have the capability? Who knows, I would not dismiss this possibility. Jean may have the brains and wisdom for this position. What surprises me is the cavalier attitude that Jean and his father, the President of France, when people would dare to accuse that this job position would be acquired through nepotism. Nepotism is when you get a position based upon the family you are a part of instead of having earned it through skill and capability.
Nicolas, the father who also happens to be the current President of France, says that what is important in France is not the family you are born into but rather the hard work and the studies which prove your worth. Well ironically, Jean, the son, has not worked long enough, nor does he actually have the studies to prove that he is capable for this position. Jean himself said that he would prove that he could do it if we just give him the chance. Looks like dad's defence of his son contradicts what the son pleads for. On the one hand, dad says that hard work and studies is what proves one's worth and on the other hand, the son says that if given the chance, the proof will appear.
Now I believe that Jean probably has the capabilities to lead.... until I see his cavalier attitude and his misunderstanding of what nepotism is or is not (this includes dad, but my goal here is not to find reasons to discredit an existing job holder in public service.... I still maintain the flaw is within the system, not the individuals who live by the flawed systemic rules). Jean makes the plea to give him a chance. Nice plea, but why should he be given a chance when there are many out there who could also do the job just as well as him but will never be recognized as intelligent enough or capable enough because they have not been given their initial chance to do something better.
Many names were mentioned above demonstrating brilliance at a young age, here is one to remind France of its own history: Napoleon. Now Napoleon was a Corsican and before the Revolution in France, no one would have ever given him his chance to become anything in any position of power..... Corsicans were not seen as capable?! The revolution gave the luck to this Napoleon to demonstrate that he had capabilities beyond most of his peers and he revolutionized many strategic concepts. One of my previous blog pointed out that there are some "Einsteins" out there who are not recognized for their worth by those who are supposed to be in charge of our egalitarian society and supposedly promote merit... well how many out there could do this job but will never be given the chance that Jean Sarkozy has had because of his dad's family? I would suggest the same plea, give me the chance, give this blog's author the same access and chance as Jean Sarkozy has had and I could also run this governmental agency as well or even better.
Jean Sarkozy claiming that he has the capabilities and sneering at those who suggest nepotism demonstrates a lack of thinking of how the world actually works and this alone discredits his claim that he can do the job. Of course this same criteria would also have 93.7% of the world leaders fired from their jobs and have them replaced with bona fide thinkers. (side note, anyone who challenges my statistics should think more and judge less)
So Jean Sarkozy wants a fair chance to serve? May he give up his money for 3 years (minimum) and live in France (his home country) as an immigrant with no ID and have no contact with anyone he knows as if he entered France alone and introduce himself under an assumed name. He would become the pauper like in the story of the Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain. This would allow Jean Sarkozy to acquire wisdom of the injustices out there in the country he loves dearly. When he realizes that there are many out there who work hard and get no reward, he will be a better leader if and when he chooses to pursue that noble path in a later part of his life.
Nothing makes me roll my eyes in frustration more than when I see the rich spend a couple of days or a few weeks doing labor in front of the cameras of the world to demonstrate that they work hard like the others in the "workplace" and yet they will always be able to come back to their rooms that are as big as most people's houses when it is all over. No, for this to work, one must have the same low wage as most of us get and have the same living conditions and the same social circles.... how could Jean Sarkozy learn what true hard work is if after working at a construction site he comes back to an appartment that has a sound system worth the same as a typical construction worker's yearly salary? With the maid and the chef serving his whims?
So if Jean really wants to serve, he can start with developping his wisdom and time to think about issues.... if he does that he will be more deserving than most for every position of leadership on the planet.... irrelevant of his age or educational background. Perhaps he will hire me as an advisor on that day.
lol
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Bobby Fischer, Tiger Woods, Blaise Pascal and John Stuart Mill were all famous for doing great work at a young age. So it is not unusual to believe that the capability is possible for someone who is 23 years of age or that the university degree is not necessary to prove capability. Would this Jean Sarkozy have the capability? Who knows, I would not dismiss this possibility. Jean may have the brains and wisdom for this position. What surprises me is the cavalier attitude that Jean and his father, the President of France, when people would dare to accuse that this job position would be acquired through nepotism. Nepotism is when you get a position based upon the family you are a part of instead of having earned it through skill and capability.
Nicolas, the father who also happens to be the current President of France, says that what is important in France is not the family you are born into but rather the hard work and the studies which prove your worth. Well ironically, Jean, the son, has not worked long enough, nor does he actually have the studies to prove that he is capable for this position. Jean himself said that he would prove that he could do it if we just give him the chance. Looks like dad's defence of his son contradicts what the son pleads for. On the one hand, dad says that hard work and studies is what proves one's worth and on the other hand, the son says that if given the chance, the proof will appear.
Now I believe that Jean probably has the capabilities to lead.... until I see his cavalier attitude and his misunderstanding of what nepotism is or is not (this includes dad, but my goal here is not to find reasons to discredit an existing job holder in public service.... I still maintain the flaw is within the system, not the individuals who live by the flawed systemic rules). Jean makes the plea to give him a chance. Nice plea, but why should he be given a chance when there are many out there who could also do the job just as well as him but will never be recognized as intelligent enough or capable enough because they have not been given their initial chance to do something better.
Many names were mentioned above demonstrating brilliance at a young age, here is one to remind France of its own history: Napoleon. Now Napoleon was a Corsican and before the Revolution in France, no one would have ever given him his chance to become anything in any position of power..... Corsicans were not seen as capable?! The revolution gave the luck to this Napoleon to demonstrate that he had capabilities beyond most of his peers and he revolutionized many strategic concepts. One of my previous blog pointed out that there are some "Einsteins" out there who are not recognized for their worth by those who are supposed to be in charge of our egalitarian society and supposedly promote merit... well how many out there could do this job but will never be given the chance that Jean Sarkozy has had because of his dad's family? I would suggest the same plea, give me the chance, give this blog's author the same access and chance as Jean Sarkozy has had and I could also run this governmental agency as well or even better.
Jean Sarkozy claiming that he has the capabilities and sneering at those who suggest nepotism demonstrates a lack of thinking of how the world actually works and this alone discredits his claim that he can do the job. Of course this same criteria would also have 93.7% of the world leaders fired from their jobs and have them replaced with bona fide thinkers. (side note, anyone who challenges my statistics should think more and judge less)
So Jean Sarkozy wants a fair chance to serve? May he give up his money for 3 years (minimum) and live in France (his home country) as an immigrant with no ID and have no contact with anyone he knows as if he entered France alone and introduce himself under an assumed name. He would become the pauper like in the story of the Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain. This would allow Jean Sarkozy to acquire wisdom of the injustices out there in the country he loves dearly. When he realizes that there are many out there who work hard and get no reward, he will be a better leader if and when he chooses to pursue that noble path in a later part of his life.
Nothing makes me roll my eyes in frustration more than when I see the rich spend a couple of days or a few weeks doing labor in front of the cameras of the world to demonstrate that they work hard like the others in the "workplace" and yet they will always be able to come back to their rooms that are as big as most people's houses when it is all over. No, for this to work, one must have the same low wage as most of us get and have the same living conditions and the same social circles.... how could Jean Sarkozy learn what true hard work is if after working at a construction site he comes back to an appartment that has a sound system worth the same as a typical construction worker's yearly salary? With the maid and the chef serving his whims?
So if Jean really wants to serve, he can start with developping his wisdom and time to think about issues.... if he does that he will be more deserving than most for every position of leadership on the planet.... irrelevant of his age or educational background. Perhaps he will hire me as an advisor on that day.
lol
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Looking at Two Social Experiments
There are two experiments that psychologists undertook in the 20th century that can explain the problems we are having in society and how it will only get worse as the years go by. The first one took individuals and placed them in the position of electrocuting a victim because a supervisor told them to do it. The second one took a group of people and divided them into security guard roles or into prisoner roles and watched them react.
The electrocution experiment took everyday people who applied for the job of helping in a social experiment. The individuals who applied for the job were told that the test subject would memorize a sequence of words and then they would be tied into some type of electrocution device. The recruit would then ask for the sequence of words in their proper order. If the test subject forgot a word or said the wrong word then the recruit would push a button to give a tiny jolt of electricity and then upgrade the voltage for the next jolt. This means each wrong answer would result in receiving an electric shock, and each shock received would be worse than the one before.
About one or two jolts before it was getting in the red zone (approximately 100 or so volts), the test subject would manage to free himself from the restraints. The supervisor would instruct the recruit to re-attach the test subject. The supervisor was there with a lab coat and a clipboard writing notes as the recruit questioned the test subject and pushed the button. The recruit would then walk in the next room and re-attach the test subject back into the electrocution device. The test subject would plead and beg to be released.
Now the reality of this entire experiment was not to test how electrical shocks can improve our memory or how to torture someone with electricity.... No, the one being electrocuted was really an actor and the recruit, well the recruit was the test subject. The experiment was to see how far we would go in a morally ambiguous instruction. The shocking results (pun intended) were that most people followed the instructions and kept pushing the button. Many protested the right and wrong aspect of what they were doing but kept pushing the button because the authority figure told them to do it. On a variation of the experiment, there were two test subjects.... One would ask the question while the other would push the button. Can we see specialized labour here? On those occasions, there were less protests and more compliance.
When asked why they kept pushing the button, the answer was generally because they assumed that the authority figure was the one ultimately responsible.... As for the variation, the button pusher was only pushing a button, he wasn't asking the questions so he detached himself from any responsibility. The job was simple, push a button when told to, someone else would judge the legitimacy of this. The one asking the questions would be happy that he did not push the button. The job was simple, ask a question and instruct the button pusher to push a button if the answer was wrong.
Can we see how our bureaucracy in the name of efficiency and blind reaction to crisis has created a culture of specialized and compartmentalized work force? Department A does not know what department B is doing and very few people have an idea of what the whole is supposed to be doing. Each bureaucrat does the job he is instructed to do as efficiently as possible and is rewarded for compliance.... thinking is not encouraged unless it is to increase efficiency in the immediate task at hand.
Here is a fictitious example which could be real: Department A advertises that their shoes are the greatest in the world. Department B sells the shoes they receive to customers. Department C is the legal team that finds ways to prevent bad publicity from being broadcast to the world. Department D has an efficient distribution system to move the shoes from where they are made to the actual retail stores. Department E hires the children in the third world nation to keep costs down. Department F does the accounting to show to the shareholder how they are making more profit than their competitors. Department G donates money to a women's shelter in a rich community to show that their company is community oriented. Department F makes sure that the child workers don't steal the shoes they make and give out harsh penalties if the children don't work as hard as they should or try to sneak out during work hours.
The second experiment, is where a group of volunteers are divided into either a security guard or a prisoner. They will enter a building which has been set up as a detention centre and the goal is to see what will happen under specific circumstances. This experiment was supposed to last a certain length of time but it was cut short because people's lives were at risk. Once the role was assigned, security or prisoner, they played that role and forgot who they were. The security saw the prisoners as shifty and deceptive and conducted abusive behaviour against them. The prisoners saw the security personnel as overlords to be overthrown and tried to resist their imprisonment as best as they could manage and they would become deceptive and uncooperative. Remember, these are not security guards or prisoners (but they got into that role and forgot that their former compatriots were just like them a week ago).
Combine the results of both experiments and see how we act in our current jobs. We take on the role given to us, almost without question. We don't contemplate to see if what we are doing is morally correct because that is not what we were hired to do and we see the other team as the bad guys. Ask yourself this question, you see a television report showing corruption in a government office or a food poisoning scandal or a hospital who neglected some patient to death or even a scandal where a police officer shot some citizen for illegitimate reasons. Your reaction is probably one of disgust of how these other people are immoral and something should be done about it. Now ask yourself this question, you find out on the news that the employer you are working for has just lost a court case on issue X and must pay back to society for their mistake, you find out that one of your departments is being blamed for corruption. Or imagine what it was like for the Enron employee to find out that his corporation which had great financial success immediately decided to declare bankruptcy or for the retired auto-worker who will lose his supposedly guaranteed pension because the owners mis-used the pension money and are still receiving their bonus at the end of the year.
In our current positions at work, we are encouraged to do the best we can in our immediate circle and to ignore what other departments do. We are isolated in our work environment, we are rewarded if we push that electrocution button without question and we identify ourselves with whatever team we happen to be in and we mistrust other teams. The media is not to be trusted if they investigate us, but we definitely believe what the media say when they report on other people's corruption.
These two experiments are not hidden from public record but no one seems to be doing anything to prevent the negative aspects from affecting us. Quite the opposite, it seems that we are encouraged to blindly follow instructions and to be part of a "team" whether you are the prisoner or the guard, it does not matter because you will be occupied in following instructions from your immediate supervisor and complain about the opposite team..... How can democratic participation be promoted if we are manoeuvred into compliance?
For those who wish more info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
The electrocution experiment took everyday people who applied for the job of helping in a social experiment. The individuals who applied for the job were told that the test subject would memorize a sequence of words and then they would be tied into some type of electrocution device. The recruit would then ask for the sequence of words in their proper order. If the test subject forgot a word or said the wrong word then the recruit would push a button to give a tiny jolt of electricity and then upgrade the voltage for the next jolt. This means each wrong answer would result in receiving an electric shock, and each shock received would be worse than the one before.
About one or two jolts before it was getting in the red zone (approximately 100 or so volts), the test subject would manage to free himself from the restraints. The supervisor would instruct the recruit to re-attach the test subject. The supervisor was there with a lab coat and a clipboard writing notes as the recruit questioned the test subject and pushed the button. The recruit would then walk in the next room and re-attach the test subject back into the electrocution device. The test subject would plead and beg to be released.
Now the reality of this entire experiment was not to test how electrical shocks can improve our memory or how to torture someone with electricity.... No, the one being electrocuted was really an actor and the recruit, well the recruit was the test subject. The experiment was to see how far we would go in a morally ambiguous instruction. The shocking results (pun intended) were that most people followed the instructions and kept pushing the button. Many protested the right and wrong aspect of what they were doing but kept pushing the button because the authority figure told them to do it. On a variation of the experiment, there were two test subjects.... One would ask the question while the other would push the button. Can we see specialized labour here? On those occasions, there were less protests and more compliance.
When asked why they kept pushing the button, the answer was generally because they assumed that the authority figure was the one ultimately responsible.... As for the variation, the button pusher was only pushing a button, he wasn't asking the questions so he detached himself from any responsibility. The job was simple, push a button when told to, someone else would judge the legitimacy of this. The one asking the questions would be happy that he did not push the button. The job was simple, ask a question and instruct the button pusher to push a button if the answer was wrong.
Can we see how our bureaucracy in the name of efficiency and blind reaction to crisis has created a culture of specialized and compartmentalized work force? Department A does not know what department B is doing and very few people have an idea of what the whole is supposed to be doing. Each bureaucrat does the job he is instructed to do as efficiently as possible and is rewarded for compliance.... thinking is not encouraged unless it is to increase efficiency in the immediate task at hand.
Here is a fictitious example which could be real: Department A advertises that their shoes are the greatest in the world. Department B sells the shoes they receive to customers. Department C is the legal team that finds ways to prevent bad publicity from being broadcast to the world. Department D has an efficient distribution system to move the shoes from where they are made to the actual retail stores. Department E hires the children in the third world nation to keep costs down. Department F does the accounting to show to the shareholder how they are making more profit than their competitors. Department G donates money to a women's shelter in a rich community to show that their company is community oriented. Department F makes sure that the child workers don't steal the shoes they make and give out harsh penalties if the children don't work as hard as they should or try to sneak out during work hours.
The second experiment, is where a group of volunteers are divided into either a security guard or a prisoner. They will enter a building which has been set up as a detention centre and the goal is to see what will happen under specific circumstances. This experiment was supposed to last a certain length of time but it was cut short because people's lives were at risk. Once the role was assigned, security or prisoner, they played that role and forgot who they were. The security saw the prisoners as shifty and deceptive and conducted abusive behaviour against them. The prisoners saw the security personnel as overlords to be overthrown and tried to resist their imprisonment as best as they could manage and they would become deceptive and uncooperative. Remember, these are not security guards or prisoners (but they got into that role and forgot that their former compatriots were just like them a week ago).
Combine the results of both experiments and see how we act in our current jobs. We take on the role given to us, almost without question. We don't contemplate to see if what we are doing is morally correct because that is not what we were hired to do and we see the other team as the bad guys. Ask yourself this question, you see a television report showing corruption in a government office or a food poisoning scandal or a hospital who neglected some patient to death or even a scandal where a police officer shot some citizen for illegitimate reasons. Your reaction is probably one of disgust of how these other people are immoral and something should be done about it. Now ask yourself this question, you find out on the news that the employer you are working for has just lost a court case on issue X and must pay back to society for their mistake, you find out that one of your departments is being blamed for corruption. Or imagine what it was like for the Enron employee to find out that his corporation which had great financial success immediately decided to declare bankruptcy or for the retired auto-worker who will lose his supposedly guaranteed pension because the owners mis-used the pension money and are still receiving their bonus at the end of the year.
In our current positions at work, we are encouraged to do the best we can in our immediate circle and to ignore what other departments do. We are isolated in our work environment, we are rewarded if we push that electrocution button without question and we identify ourselves with whatever team we happen to be in and we mistrust other teams. The media is not to be trusted if they investigate us, but we definitely believe what the media say when they report on other people's corruption.
These two experiments are not hidden from public record but no one seems to be doing anything to prevent the negative aspects from affecting us. Quite the opposite, it seems that we are encouraged to blindly follow instructions and to be part of a "team" whether you are the prisoner or the guard, it does not matter because you will be occupied in following instructions from your immediate supervisor and complain about the opposite team..... How can democratic participation be promoted if we are manoeuvred into compliance?
For those who wish more info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Let's get Educated
One of the important aspects of democracy is the debate. It is obvious that there will be alternative points of views and one will want to express this view to come to a viable solution so that everyone can be satisfied at the end result. Sometimes there will be compromise, sometimes there will be consensus, and sometimes it may just come to a majority.
The latest issue in US politics is its health care reform. Unfortunately there seems to be no debate. There are many attempts at setting up the proper stage for this debate to happen, but when the participants show up, you get nonsense. On one side you have some intellectual sounding rhetoric stamped with jargon that can only be understood by those who speak the same language.... and it certainly doesn't sound like English to the unfamiliar; and on the other side you have shouting and yelling that prevents any neutral observer from hearing the foreign dialect of the intellectual.
Agree or disagree with either position, it doesn't matter because there is a pretty high chance that you don't know the nuts and bolts of the issue, nor what either side are actually trying to say. In a nutshell, you have one side explaining in technical terms that health care reform is great and is not dangerous and the explanations become steeped with the latest astrological formulas (what we call economics in the 21st century).... and somehow these intellectuals believe that the jargon will silence the doubters.... the other side yells things like "You are lying to me!" or "This policy will destroy my car engine." or the best yet: "We can't believe in this policy because the President is not even an American citizen."
Well the problem is a debate amongst the uninformed (both sides). The solution is to have a better education system available to all citizens. Currently we have grade school which teaches reading, writing and arithmetic.... and a post-secondary educational system that emphasizes more on technical achievements than on thinking or realizing of issues.
The high school graduate believes himself skilled enough in recognizing how to scrutinize a debate of ideas between intellectuals. A first year university student studying in politics realizes very quickly how inadequate most of us are in scrutinizing political issues. The university graduate believes himself intelligent because he can speak the jargon of the intellectual.... unfortunately, most of what is said is complete foolishness.
Previous blogs mentioned our society's problem on lack of time. Well once time is regained, we would have to provide free education for any who want it.... this includes university all the way to the PhD level. We would have to stop companies from requiring advanced education when it isn't needed.... we only want those who wish to learn more to actually benefit from advanced education. Profit motive is a wrong motive to seek advanced education. The necessity of paying off a debt for a university education limits choices of subjects on what will provide the easiest way to pay off this debt (another form of profit motivation). Who will want to learn how to distinguish a rational form of argument versus rhetorical manipulation of emotions if the other choice is to learn about how to maximize profits for some corporation which is definitely not a democratic institution? The corporation will hire you if you can make them more profit not if you can be a better democratic citizen.
So the first thing to do is to provide time for each citizen, instead of forcing the citizens into wage-slaves for corporations who care nothing for democracy but care only for profits. This extra time should allow citizens to further their education without economic pressure. In other words, some form of stipend should be provided to cover rent and food (and I don't mean junk food which seems to be the university student's diet because they can't afford the better meals). When both of these things are covered, the third thing to do is to streamline the university classes so that they become less about jargon to make yourself sound intelligent but rather to say things in everyday words so that non-experts can understand with little effort. The most ironic thing I personally have found in my own university studies was that the scholars who studied how we communicate with each other were the most difficult texts to comprehend. It seems that complex sounding words are supposed to impress the uneducated.
The education system should focus on taking one's time to think things through instead of trying to come to a quick solution (without thinking of the consequences). DeBono once used an illustration about 2 chickens. One of these chickens was slightly blind while the first chicken had perfect eyesight. The experiment using these two chickens was to lower them onto one side of a box with a dish of food on the other side of the box. The first chicken with perfect eyesight went straight for the food and gobbled up the food happily. The other chicken would poke away at the ground and eventually get to the dish. Our capitalist system promotes the first chicken, the quick-thinker who gets to the solution. The second experiment had a glass wall in between the dish and the chicken. This wall did not go from one side to the other but it was in the middle leaving enough room for the chicken to go on either side and bypass the glass wall. Well the first chicken with perfect eyesight goes straight for the food dish, and bangs into the wall over and over.... trying to get to the food but never able to. The second chicken, who does not see the food just pokes on the ground and eventually bypasses the glass wall and then gets to the food. Life tends to have a lot more glass walls than we seem to realize and our current society promotes one form of thinking and punishes the alternative.
Free university and more time would bring more balance and improve our society and prevent tremendously easy problems that we have suffered if we just think for 3 seconds. Our current economic crisis could have been completely prevented had we had some decision maker have the luxury of time to just think about an issue or a citizenry the luxury of time to debate where our society is going.
So what society do you want? The capitalist is already using propaganda to say that the consumer makes better decisions than anyone else (greed determines our goals), the communist is trying to regain credibility by insisting that the worker should be given more economic power to make better social decisions for the majority. Why are we stuck in this consumer versus laborer dichotomy? Both are economic foolishness dreamt up by philosophers who began their philosophy with foolish assumptions that could have been easily been torn down like a house of cards if someone would have taken 3 seconds to just think about it. (To be fair, if their assumptions are accurate, the following logic that follows within their economic models are proper).... Why not focus on the democratic model... the insistence that we make our society full of responsible citizens. Our current democracy is really flawed and in many cases quite undemocratic, but we can correct this if we, as citizens take back what was stolen from us by thieves and reclaim our time and our money.
If a corporate entity (an artificial citizen under the law of most nations) has more budget than the poorest nation state.... there is definitely something wrong. This non-living artificial citizen, who is not even a real human being (a modern version of a built up idol/statue), should not have anywhere near the budget of the poorest nation-state government in our current international community. Nevermind the fact that these non-human artificial citizens should have the political clout to move society toward more profit at the cost of human dignity.
We either fight on economic arguments including how we spend our budgets (both foolish exercises), or we fight on democratic arguments and we give ourselves the time to do it and the proper educational opportunities to achieve this.
The latest issue in US politics is its health care reform. Unfortunately there seems to be no debate. There are many attempts at setting up the proper stage for this debate to happen, but when the participants show up, you get nonsense. On one side you have some intellectual sounding rhetoric stamped with jargon that can only be understood by those who speak the same language.... and it certainly doesn't sound like English to the unfamiliar; and on the other side you have shouting and yelling that prevents any neutral observer from hearing the foreign dialect of the intellectual.
Agree or disagree with either position, it doesn't matter because there is a pretty high chance that you don't know the nuts and bolts of the issue, nor what either side are actually trying to say. In a nutshell, you have one side explaining in technical terms that health care reform is great and is not dangerous and the explanations become steeped with the latest astrological formulas (what we call economics in the 21st century).... and somehow these intellectuals believe that the jargon will silence the doubters.... the other side yells things like "You are lying to me!" or "This policy will destroy my car engine." or the best yet: "We can't believe in this policy because the President is not even an American citizen."
Well the problem is a debate amongst the uninformed (both sides). The solution is to have a better education system available to all citizens. Currently we have grade school which teaches reading, writing and arithmetic.... and a post-secondary educational system that emphasizes more on technical achievements than on thinking or realizing of issues.
The high school graduate believes himself skilled enough in recognizing how to scrutinize a debate of ideas between intellectuals. A first year university student studying in politics realizes very quickly how inadequate most of us are in scrutinizing political issues. The university graduate believes himself intelligent because he can speak the jargon of the intellectual.... unfortunately, most of what is said is complete foolishness.
Previous blogs mentioned our society's problem on lack of time. Well once time is regained, we would have to provide free education for any who want it.... this includes university all the way to the PhD level. We would have to stop companies from requiring advanced education when it isn't needed.... we only want those who wish to learn more to actually benefit from advanced education. Profit motive is a wrong motive to seek advanced education. The necessity of paying off a debt for a university education limits choices of subjects on what will provide the easiest way to pay off this debt (another form of profit motivation). Who will want to learn how to distinguish a rational form of argument versus rhetorical manipulation of emotions if the other choice is to learn about how to maximize profits for some corporation which is definitely not a democratic institution? The corporation will hire you if you can make them more profit not if you can be a better democratic citizen.
So the first thing to do is to provide time for each citizen, instead of forcing the citizens into wage-slaves for corporations who care nothing for democracy but care only for profits. This extra time should allow citizens to further their education without economic pressure. In other words, some form of stipend should be provided to cover rent and food (and I don't mean junk food which seems to be the university student's diet because they can't afford the better meals). When both of these things are covered, the third thing to do is to streamline the university classes so that they become less about jargon to make yourself sound intelligent but rather to say things in everyday words so that non-experts can understand with little effort. The most ironic thing I personally have found in my own university studies was that the scholars who studied how we communicate with each other were the most difficult texts to comprehend. It seems that complex sounding words are supposed to impress the uneducated.
The education system should focus on taking one's time to think things through instead of trying to come to a quick solution (without thinking of the consequences). DeBono once used an illustration about 2 chickens. One of these chickens was slightly blind while the first chicken had perfect eyesight. The experiment using these two chickens was to lower them onto one side of a box with a dish of food on the other side of the box. The first chicken with perfect eyesight went straight for the food and gobbled up the food happily. The other chicken would poke away at the ground and eventually get to the dish. Our capitalist system promotes the first chicken, the quick-thinker who gets to the solution. The second experiment had a glass wall in between the dish and the chicken. This wall did not go from one side to the other but it was in the middle leaving enough room for the chicken to go on either side and bypass the glass wall. Well the first chicken with perfect eyesight goes straight for the food dish, and bangs into the wall over and over.... trying to get to the food but never able to. The second chicken, who does not see the food just pokes on the ground and eventually bypasses the glass wall and then gets to the food. Life tends to have a lot more glass walls than we seem to realize and our current society promotes one form of thinking and punishes the alternative.
Free university and more time would bring more balance and improve our society and prevent tremendously easy problems that we have suffered if we just think for 3 seconds. Our current economic crisis could have been completely prevented had we had some decision maker have the luxury of time to just think about an issue or a citizenry the luxury of time to debate where our society is going.
So what society do you want? The capitalist is already using propaganda to say that the consumer makes better decisions than anyone else (greed determines our goals), the communist is trying to regain credibility by insisting that the worker should be given more economic power to make better social decisions for the majority. Why are we stuck in this consumer versus laborer dichotomy? Both are economic foolishness dreamt up by philosophers who began their philosophy with foolish assumptions that could have been easily been torn down like a house of cards if someone would have taken 3 seconds to just think about it. (To be fair, if their assumptions are accurate, the following logic that follows within their economic models are proper).... Why not focus on the democratic model... the insistence that we make our society full of responsible citizens. Our current democracy is really flawed and in many cases quite undemocratic, but we can correct this if we, as citizens take back what was stolen from us by thieves and reclaim our time and our money.
If a corporate entity (an artificial citizen under the law of most nations) has more budget than the poorest nation state.... there is definitely something wrong. This non-living artificial citizen, who is not even a real human being (a modern version of a built up idol/statue), should not have anywhere near the budget of the poorest nation-state government in our current international community. Nevermind the fact that these non-human artificial citizens should have the political clout to move society toward more profit at the cost of human dignity.
We either fight on economic arguments including how we spend our budgets (both foolish exercises), or we fight on democratic arguments and we give ourselves the time to do it and the proper educational opportunities to achieve this.
Monday, July 20, 2009
Einstein in the Bakery
Einstein was lucky, I mean look at his background... he flunked out in high school and most people were convinced that he was below average. Throughout his life people wondered at his intelligence because he had to be told to bring an umbrella when it was raining so that he would not get wet. When Einstein decided to write about physics, EVERY single university physics journal rejected his writings. Einstein managed to publish in a philosophical journal and through luck, some physicists bothered to read and give this idea a chance, and then: the story we hear in school about Einstein being brilliant becomes reality. So yeah, Einstein was lucky.
How many Einsteins are out there waiting to be discovered? Waiting to be given a decent chance to work at something which will have tremendous impact in our society? Probably many of our great intellectual heroes have had similar backgrounds of being unrecognized by most until a stroke of luck gave them their chance to shine. Problem is, for every genius discovered there may be dozens who go unrecognized.
This reminds of two stories, the first is with the Simpsons cartoon, Homer is laying on the couch watching some TV and little baby Maggie is on a toy piano playing an elaborate piece of classical music. Homer, being annoyed at having his TV viewing interrupted, yells at little baby Maggie to stop that racket.... Maggie, obedient, stops playing (society forever losing another Einstein). The second story is from Neal Stephenson's book "Cryptonomicon". Here we have one of the main characters filling out a standardized test to see how smart he is.... the first question is about how a boat is going upriver at a certain speed and how the current of the river is going at another speed and the question asks how long it will take the boat to reach destination X. The main character spends the entire time of the test answering question 1 by coming up with a formula to distinguish how the water temperature can affect the speed of the current and depending on the curves of the river combined with the depth and the spin cycle of the boat engine, this would allow (and here the test ends with question 1 unanswered).... The correction of the test places the main character in the least intellectually stimulating job environment you can imagine.... of course later in the book our main character is "discovered" to be brilliant in code breaking....
So what does all of this have to do with Einstein in a bakery? Well if Einstein is undiscovered and is not placed in an area which will help society discover new things, where would this Einstein be? Why not a bakery? Einstein needs to work at a job to eat, doesn't he? Well if Einstein is at a bakery, you can imagine that he isn't doing very well at his job. Remember the real Einstein, he flunked out of high school and was considered dumb, the world of Physics rejected Einstein's papers, he didn't know how to dress for whatever occasion.... so imagine this Einstein serving you bread at a bakery. Not very impressive huh? Now consider how management would view him.
Management is not concerned about placing people in the proper areas in society to help society out with new discoveries; no, management is only interested in making Einstein a better baker and by hook or by crook they will transform him into some kind of baker or fire him if they can't succeed. The problem is this: how do we get society's Einsteins to be recognized and placed in an area which will do society (and the Einstein in question) the greater benefit? Standardized tests to measure potential?
Remember, if management can not recognize an Einstein in their midst, how can a someone who corrects a standardized test be able to judge how or why a person answered just 1 question on an IQ test and got it wrong? And lets assume for argument's sake, that Einstein #A does do well in a standardized test with pretty decent scores placing him in the top 5 percentile.... how does he go about getting a job? Where does he go to allow his "potential" be used in his full capacity?
Is the homeless person you met last week an undiscovered musical genius like Mozart? How about the janitor who mopped the floor behind you in the shopping center: an undiscovered genius who could study biochemistry and discover the cure for cancer in a short afternoon? The homeless person is faced with a non-understanding bureaucracy who judges him in a similar way as the janitor is judged.... on his immediate performance. Which is probably a pathetic performance if you compare it to the average Joe....
Now let us assume that Einstein #A manages to get a job interview for some large corporation which can potentially allow him to use his talents.... how does he sell himself? "I can play chess and beat the computer on any setting in under 15 moves." The interviewer would most likely not have a clue what this really means and probably reject Einstein #A as being too arrogant.... or hire him as stock room clerk..... and then have management make fun of him because he can't tell the difference between duck tape and masking tape after being on the job for 6 months.
So if you are one of these Einsteins out there.... use the saying "I'm just an Einstein in the bakery" when describing yourself (maybe someone intelligent will notice and bother asking you what you mean and perhaps has some actual power to help you (and society) get to the ideal position for you)..... or you'll just feel better by saying it (who knows).... If you know someone who is "weird" and "dumb" yet has something intelligent about him, perhaps he is an Einstein waiting to be discovered..... and you should try to help him (or her) with your talents that this Einstein seems to lack.... vouch for him, encourage him.... this can help society out and therefore you as well.
Of course, the danger with this is that you can have people like "Sex" from the "So You Think You Can Dance" franchise who shows up every year to the auditions and tells the judges that he is someone who "believes in himself" and is an excellent dancer.... and when he begins to dance, it is quite obvious even to non-dance experts that he is mediocre at best..... So I don't wish to see intellectual morons believing themselves to be Einsteins in bakeries, because that is not the intent of this blog. Dance is easy to gauge between skilled and unskilled but you need experienced dancers to distinguish between great skill and decent skill.... For the matters of brains and intellect, it is not so easy to distinguish between skilled and unskilled.... (and sometimes management does not want to recognize such talent because they fear that they will lose their edge over their underlings because the Einstein will publicly point out management flaws once discovered).
So how many Einsteins in the bakery do you know?
How many Einsteins are out there waiting to be discovered? Waiting to be given a decent chance to work at something which will have tremendous impact in our society? Probably many of our great intellectual heroes have had similar backgrounds of being unrecognized by most until a stroke of luck gave them their chance to shine. Problem is, for every genius discovered there may be dozens who go unrecognized.
This reminds of two stories, the first is with the Simpsons cartoon, Homer is laying on the couch watching some TV and little baby Maggie is on a toy piano playing an elaborate piece of classical music. Homer, being annoyed at having his TV viewing interrupted, yells at little baby Maggie to stop that racket.... Maggie, obedient, stops playing (society forever losing another Einstein). The second story is from Neal Stephenson's book "Cryptonomicon". Here we have one of the main characters filling out a standardized test to see how smart he is.... the first question is about how a boat is going upriver at a certain speed and how the current of the river is going at another speed and the question asks how long it will take the boat to reach destination X. The main character spends the entire time of the test answering question 1 by coming up with a formula to distinguish how the water temperature can affect the speed of the current and depending on the curves of the river combined with the depth and the spin cycle of the boat engine, this would allow (and here the test ends with question 1 unanswered).... The correction of the test places the main character in the least intellectually stimulating job environment you can imagine.... of course later in the book our main character is "discovered" to be brilliant in code breaking....
So what does all of this have to do with Einstein in a bakery? Well if Einstein is undiscovered and is not placed in an area which will help society discover new things, where would this Einstein be? Why not a bakery? Einstein needs to work at a job to eat, doesn't he? Well if Einstein is at a bakery, you can imagine that he isn't doing very well at his job. Remember the real Einstein, he flunked out of high school and was considered dumb, the world of Physics rejected Einstein's papers, he didn't know how to dress for whatever occasion.... so imagine this Einstein serving you bread at a bakery. Not very impressive huh? Now consider how management would view him.
Management is not concerned about placing people in the proper areas in society to help society out with new discoveries; no, management is only interested in making Einstein a better baker and by hook or by crook they will transform him into some kind of baker or fire him if they can't succeed. The problem is this: how do we get society's Einsteins to be recognized and placed in an area which will do society (and the Einstein in question) the greater benefit? Standardized tests to measure potential?
Remember, if management can not recognize an Einstein in their midst, how can a someone who corrects a standardized test be able to judge how or why a person answered just 1 question on an IQ test and got it wrong? And lets assume for argument's sake, that Einstein #A does do well in a standardized test with pretty decent scores placing him in the top 5 percentile.... how does he go about getting a job? Where does he go to allow his "potential" be used in his full capacity?
Is the homeless person you met last week an undiscovered musical genius like Mozart? How about the janitor who mopped the floor behind you in the shopping center: an undiscovered genius who could study biochemistry and discover the cure for cancer in a short afternoon? The homeless person is faced with a non-understanding bureaucracy who judges him in a similar way as the janitor is judged.... on his immediate performance. Which is probably a pathetic performance if you compare it to the average Joe....
Now let us assume that Einstein #A manages to get a job interview for some large corporation which can potentially allow him to use his talents.... how does he sell himself? "I can play chess and beat the computer on any setting in under 15 moves." The interviewer would most likely not have a clue what this really means and probably reject Einstein #A as being too arrogant.... or hire him as stock room clerk..... and then have management make fun of him because he can't tell the difference between duck tape and masking tape after being on the job for 6 months.
So if you are one of these Einsteins out there.... use the saying "I'm just an Einstein in the bakery" when describing yourself (maybe someone intelligent will notice and bother asking you what you mean and perhaps has some actual power to help you (and society) get to the ideal position for you)..... or you'll just feel better by saying it (who knows).... If you know someone who is "weird" and "dumb" yet has something intelligent about him, perhaps he is an Einstein waiting to be discovered..... and you should try to help him (or her) with your talents that this Einstein seems to lack.... vouch for him, encourage him.... this can help society out and therefore you as well.
Of course, the danger with this is that you can have people like "Sex" from the "So You Think You Can Dance" franchise who shows up every year to the auditions and tells the judges that he is someone who "believes in himself" and is an excellent dancer.... and when he begins to dance, it is quite obvious even to non-dance experts that he is mediocre at best..... So I don't wish to see intellectual morons believing themselves to be Einsteins in bakeries, because that is not the intent of this blog. Dance is easy to gauge between skilled and unskilled but you need experienced dancers to distinguish between great skill and decent skill.... For the matters of brains and intellect, it is not so easy to distinguish between skilled and unskilled.... (and sometimes management does not want to recognize such talent because they fear that they will lose their edge over their underlings because the Einstein will publicly point out management flaws once discovered).
So how many Einsteins in the bakery do you know?
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