Do we stop learning when we leave school?

Posted on 28 March, 2021 by alloporus

Of course not.

True learning only starts after graduation. It’s then that the real world smacks us in the face and we have to engage our street smarts and tough skins to survive and prosper. The formal learning might stop when the cap is thrown in the air, then our life learning begins in earnest.

And where do we get that learning from?

Sources of everyday learning

Our parents have already done their best to impart wisdom through our teenage tantrums and our grunts as the highest form of communication. Now they just want us out the door.

We can ask Google or Siri any number of questions. This gets us realistic answers as factoids and snippets of detail that we don’t otherwise know. This works so long as you ask the robots the right questions.

Then there are the online feeds with factual content indistinguishable from the advertisements and opinion of the bullshit artists.

Most of us still browse a news media site or maybe still watch the news on the TV. Only these outlets are companies for the most part with no obligation to educate us in the things that are important. They decide what is printed, what is investigated, what is picked up from the distributors to fill the column inches. Their bean counters have only the company’s bottom line on their minds. They think of their audience in ratings and do not ask if they should be providing their customers with a service – eyeballs and clicks are all that matter.

Hold on though, around the world, there are publicly funded and state-run media. Some of those outlets have more latitude to publish content that is educational. And for the most part they do, along with a set of government-sanctioned messages.

My experience here in Australia is that the public services must increasingly chase that elusive viewer or else lose more of their funding.

Then there are all those little videos presented by Joe and Jill public. Some are great and some are awful. They all rely on our judgement to decide if they give us any life lessons or wisdom. Remember that the Tic Tocers and Instagrammers are after clicks too.

Alright so we keep learning and the sources of material for us to consume are endless and require us to be vigilant.

Does everyday knowledge matter?

Are the topics that enter the conversation via the media the most important to humanity?

Here is one answer.

But the horse race that matters most is humanity’s collective race to defuse the climate emergency. What’s ultimately being decided in these elections is nothing less than whether all of us are going to have a livable planet 20 years from now and beyond. If the press is most comfortable chasing fires and sending reporters into disaster zones, so be it. But newsrooms should know: the disaster is here. It is raging now. Our job is to cover it with the urgency it deserves.
Mark Hertsgaard, Executive Director, Covering Climate Now.

Climate advocates push that agenda of course and they are right to provoke crisis thinking around this problem. It is a huge deal. As I edit this post Sydney is in the middle of a five-day rain deluge breaking rainfall records only a year out from drought and horrendous bushfires.

The climate change that we’re experiencing is easily sufficient to cause the next mass extinction, particularly as the effects are accelerated by human land use.

Recall that four of the five previous mass extinction events were climate-related. The dramatic changes across the planet will affect every single one of us. Not talking about climate change is a criminal omission.

But this is an advocate talking. Why pay attention to climate over other critical issues? If the climate gets the lion’s share of our eyeballs and worry, what about soil, food security, population, sustainability, not to mention pandemics (yes, there will be more than one)? The list of acute issues is a long one.

This begs the broader question of what is essential learning? And, of course, who decides what is important for us to know.

Knowable knowledge

The body of human knowledge is so vast now that no one person can be across all of it. Even a slither is challenging.

In my own discipline of ecology, the number of scientific journals and articles published each year has risen exponentially over the last decades. And since I was a postgraduate student, when it seemed possible to get your head around most of the concepts and the literature that described those concepts, nowadays, it seems impossible to even read the systematic reviews.

Recently we completed our own version of an evidence review on the wild dog problem in New South Wales. This is dogs that are feral domestic dogs often mixed with dingoes into various levels of purity that occasionally predate livestock in the rural areas.

Farmers respond to livestock losses negatively as you can imagine. Nobody who grows animals wants to see those animals killed or maimed even in small numbers.

The literature on the dogs though is quite extensive. A Google scholar search on ‘wild dog Australia’ generates 23 research papers with these words in the title and over a hundred related to the topic since 2017. Keeping up with all of this information in its raw form is difficult.

The media has an important role to play in presenting information in an objective way, synthesized into bite-sized chunks. What it seems to be doing though is sensationalizing everything in order to get eyeballs.

I believe the media should be telling us about a whole bunch of issues that currently don’t even get any airplay at all.

Particularly the crisis in the soils. The requirement to grow food and increase production at 2% for 30 years. The notion of the demographic transition, that humanity will peak at a large number of people. And we’ll have to feed that large number for a long period of time before that declines through natural attrition.

But this is not news in the true sense. It is predictions of the future and news agencies are very wary of such things. The last thing they want is to be shown to get the future wrong, they will say their job is to report the present. They shy away from anything futuristic.

What about the immediate consequences of longer-term stories? What about the aging farmers or the increased rates of suicides amongst farmers? The debt to equity ratios in rural communities or the number of rural properties operating as businesses that are just not profitable, never have been, never can be. What about the properties that are heading in that direction that were once viable and are now becoming unproductive?

What about the fact that wild dogs are not really a pest at all? In terms of an economic impact, in the aggregate they are benign.

What do we know?

I suspect that our desire to learn is a string as ever but I worry we are learning the wrong things and are ignorant of what’s going on in the world around us. We hide in our social feeds that are designed to deliver content that we like. And the youngsters who are trying to live on the edge of their comfort zones are really looking for that early life excitement more than education.

The thing is when you get to a certain age you realize that education is actually fundamental to what you’ve just been through. And that if you’ve been successful most likely you have gathered about yourself the equivalent of education in various forms even f most of them are informal.

Then you realize that you should have been doing that purposefully from the beginning.

And education is not about certificates and grades or being the valedictorian. It is all about building your own capacity, your own level of understanding about yourself and how the world around you works.

And how you can chart a better course for yourself as part of humanity.

Reposting is fine by me

Can your manager read faces?

Posted on 21 March, 2021 by alloporus

Photo by Khashayar Kouchpeydeh on Unsplash

I recently completed a mesquite emotional intelligence test.

This sort of thing happens periodically in the business world. Executives decide that the company needs better management of staff and seeks to upskill it’s managers, usually with limited success. This trend has leaked across into the bureaucracy. Notorious for its dreadful management capabilities and leadership vacuums, the civil service is hoping to fix some of these problems by getting managers to understand their emotional insides.

So I completed the test.

Later, I had a fascinating hour-long debrief with the lady from the consulting firm conducting the process.

Turns out I’m skilled in the area of emotional intelligence, which is encouraging I suppose. Gives the old ego a massage and a feel-good factor for not being a complete dope when it comes to feelings.

We proceeded to have an interesting conversation about what emotional intelligence brings to the workplace. She soon figured that I needed a bit of emotional uplift and was very complimentary about many of the scores on my test.

However, one area with a poor score was recognizing emotions in people’s faces.

The test results decided I wasn’t skilled at finding the tell that flashes across people’s faces before they put on their mask. The signal that people can’t hide before they say, “oh yes, I’m all very fine, thank you” and smile at you.

The little dip in the eyebrow or the clenching across the mouth indicating that they’re actually either in pain or some form of distress. All those little tells that are the stuff of spy dramas and whodunit mysteries.

The suggestion was that I might want to improve my skills in this area. Wouldn’t it be great if I could pick a colleague’s emotional state from their facial responses?

I jumped into my ego and said, “Well actually, I use body language, tone of voice and other information sources not just looking at people’s faces.”

Yes, such additional information was conceded as giving up more than the fleeting glance. But I should still get better at face reading.

The rationale given for improving my skills in facial tells was not to understand people’s emotions better, but so that I could manage those emotions. Now, the word manipulation was never actually said but the notion of managing somebody’s emotions I found disturbing.

In my world, your emotions are yours, my emotions are mine, and whilst they sometimes clash when triggered, what you feel and how you feel is entirely yours and your responsibility to manage, or not as the case may be.

I pulled the lady up on her assumption that managers should manage the emotions of their staff with the alternate that I wasn’t interested in managing people’s emotions because that was their responsibility. And whilst I understood that emotions in the workplace might need tweaking to get the best possible outcome for the team, it should be a personal thing, not one for the manager. I was really keen to let her know that I didn’t like the manipulation idea.

My hunch is I haven’t chosen to actively improve my face reading skills over the years because I don’t want to engage at that level of detail in people’s emotional selves.

The return argument was this.

“Well, okay, that’s fair enough, but it’s also always useful to have much more information about how people are feeling in order to be better informed yourself about their state. It helps you with empathy, helps you with understanding and a chance to be kind and thoughtful towards those people. Doesn’t always have to be about manipulating them for a particular end.”

Fair comment.

But then she spoilt it by going on to quote the following rationale. Apparently, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) says emotional intelligence is an important skill that senior managers need to have in order to be successful.

It’s almost as though because it was the OECD that said it, it must be true.

So obviously, I jumped on that one.

With a howitzer, I said, “Why would I listen to the OECD? Why would I be listening to the neoliberal capitalist model that has got us into this mess in the first place? The reason why people are putting on their happy face when in fact inside they’re all chewed up.”

That didn’t go down so well.

What I found interesting was that this person who was clearly an expert in emotional intelligence had taken on, hook, line, and sinker, that commerce is great. That we should be understanding emotions for the bottom line when for everyone there are many, often more important reasons.

Emotional intelligence matters to people. It improves our relationships, our intimacy with others, our ability to form strong and meaningful bonds. It gives us the ability to have well-being both inside and outside the trappings of modern life.

I don’t think the lady got what I was saying and there wasn’t enough time to fully explain.

Maybe she went away and realised that she was subconsciously peddling a message that she might not even have believed in herself. And this is what we do all the time. We take on board messages subconsciously and we run with them. Often without realizing that we’re doing it even when the topic of the exercise is our inner selves and our emotions.

I’d like to think that we could move on from these primitive fundamentals. We can take the chance offered by a pandemic to reset some of these core agendas of managers taking control of our emotions and that the OECD must be right as examples of modernity. At the very least to question them and try to decide if they’re actually what we want.

I think it’s happening. Some people are having conversations to decide what the options might be. And it’s a hugely challenging area. It’s never going to be easy to move the juggernaut that is modern economics in a different direction or even dismantle some of it and put it back together in a different shape and size.

Anything requiring a transition on that scale is likely to cause an enormous amount of grief and upset. But we have to recognize that the current model is flawed. It’s not supporting all of the people all the time the discrepancy between the rich and the poor is growing.

In crises like COVID it’s the vulnerable elements of society that are impacted. The poor, the old, the unfit. Groups that occur across the whole of society.

So I’ve decided that I will have a look at that weaker skill of mine. Maybe learn more about how to look at people’s faces more precisely and try to understand what they’re thinking. There’s plenty of opportunities, particularly in the days of Zoom calls where you can actually stare at people for quite some time without them even realizing it’s happening.

And we’ll see if that improves my understanding of how the world works and whether it raises empathy or whether it just makes me more annoyed about how people are not able to control their emotions.

I’ll get back to you on this one.

Please browse around for a while on Alloporus | ideas for healthy thinking there are over 400 posts to choose from

A different message from Sir David

Posted on 14 March, 2021 by alloporus

Sir David Attenborough has made another wildlife documentary. No surprise there, the legend has made dozens of them over his long and distinguished career.

What is different about this one is summed up in his final sentence

“What happens next is up to every one of us.”
David Attenborough’s, Extinction: The Facts

For the first time, BBC programmers and Sir David decided we were big enough and brave enough to hear the truth of the matter. All the habitat loss, the pollution, the poaching, climate change impacts, expressed as wildfire impacts, and the inevitable species extinctions.

It is all true.

It is happening every day and in Sir David’s lifetime, there has been more than enough time for even the blind to see the consequences of human appropriation of net primary production, the landscape changes and the, well, the consequences of nearly 8 billion of us.

Of course, we do not want to be told, at least that’s what the TV producers decided.

Only against expectations, the viewing numbers in the UK screening were good and got better as the show progressed. It seemed like we were up for the messages after all. Perhaps we are ready for the reality of what we have done.

The interesting part is the last postulate at the end of the show that will no doubt become a classic

What happens next is up to every one of us

Here is what we need to do next

Feed an average of 8 billion souls every day for a hundred years – that means around 23 trillion kcals a day for 36,500 days at least.
Change the trajectory of our diets so that this calorie and nutrient challenge is achievable
Pay attention to soil and learn all we can about how to keep it healthy everywhere
Rewild up to a third of the land area and a third of the surface ocean volume to give the remaining global biodiversity a chance to survive, but also to maintain critical ecosystem services
Adapt through innovation to inevitable climate change impacts whilst transitioning to carbon-neutral economies
Be positive and hear the messages even when they are frightening, then act

And to achieve all of these there is one more thing…

Vote for progressive politicians.

I know this last one is the most difficult, for just now politicians with ideas are like hen’s teeth, exceptionally rare and hard to spot. But with necessity, they will appear and will stand out.

You’ll know them instantly.

Best of luck to us all.

Environmental science degrees in Australia just took a massive hit

Posted on 7 March, 2021 by alloporus

In the 2020 Federal budget the Australian government, in its wisdom, decided that they would shift funding allocated to particular subjects within the university sector. The media have focused on reductions in the amount of money spent on arts degrees and the promotion of STEM subjects, technical and hard science degrees.

Only one of the big losers in that story was environmental science.

The student contribution to environmental studies was cut from $9,698 to $7,700 a year – meaning students will pay less for their degrees. A positive of course.

However, the commonwealth contribution paid to the universities to run these degrees was cut from $24,446 to $16,500 per student per year – meaning that the government will fund each degree less. Unless the university can be remarkably creative, less money received per student means a poorer quality of education.

This is very short-sighted, obviously.

At a time when the youth are turning their minds towards their futures and what kind of environment they’re going to live in; not to mention their children and grandchildren. They are concerned. They think that the current and previous generations have given them a hospital pass. And they’re about to crash into the opponent with very little protection.

Many of them are keen to find out more, to engage with environmental problems, and to search for solutions. Apply their sharp and agile minds to make the world safer and more sustainable.

The environmental sciences, one would have thought, are in the best interests of everyone.

No matter what your value set, not understanding how the environment works is just a massive miss to any economy, society and individual well-being.

Think about it for a moment.

All modern economic systems are founded on feeding the people. There are only two ways to feed the people: grow enough food or buy food from another grower. Either way, you need a strong system of economic organisation in order to be able to achieve the outcome by either method.

Failure to feed your population and strife is never far away.

And here is the thing… whether we like it or not,

The environment is where we grow our food

Until we have created greenhouses on the moon or vertical gardens on every building in every city, the majority of our food supply will come from the land. It will be grown in soil. That’s going to be the case for at least the next hundred years and beyond.

Not recognizing this fact just because we seem to have enough food right now, is morally abhorrent. That senior leaders and advisers are not even contemplating future food security is criminal.

Remember that on any day of the week at least 700 million people are hungry and not all of them live in obscure countries that few know exist.

We have a small window for finding options to grow and distribute food for everyone. A short time to throw alternatives around and have their value debated before landing on the values that take precedent in which locations.

Soon this window for rational discussions will have passed and will be in crisis mode.

And a crisis is what it will come to for hungry people are desperate.

In spending less on environmental science education governments are undermining the capability to even act in crisis mode by making it harder for a youngster to be educated in this area of interest. It is tragic. A small budget item decision that really points to the stupidity of the people in power.

Not just the government

It may be that the environmental scientists themselves must take some of the responsibility.

In my hirsute youth way back in the late 1970’s, I completed a degree in environmental science at the University of East Anglia in the UK. It was a new degree at the time and UEA promoted itself as a place of open-ended learning and student-centred inquiry.

A fascinating subject combined with a novel pedagogy fitted my personality to perfection.

I absolutely loved it.

I spent hours in the library on my open-ended inquiry. And was both fascinated and empowered by the student-centeredness of the whole approach. In one of the courses, I even marked my own assignment, only to be told by the lecturer that I might have undersold myself.

That this type of degree was available at the time was magical to me.

The ability to mix and match a whole range of different subject matter, that would otherwise have not gone together or insufficient on their own to merit undergraduate study, was perfect. Ecology, sedimentology, geochemistry, meteorology, sustainable development… and that was just the first year.

Later it was Environments in time, more Ecology, Ecosystem Management, Land Resource Development, and Toxic Substances in the Environment. In total a thorough grounding in the bio-physicality of the world with and without humanity.

This STEM version of environmental science was not taken up in every program.

In many universities, these topics never really came together and environmental science was hijacked by the human end of it. The value-laden decision making by individuals and the consequences of people being involved in the environment more so than the objectivity of the information that you can get about how the environment works.

In other words, the sociology of the subject risked diluting the objectivity.

These programs are less able to be precise about the science of the environment being absorbed in the social aspects of it.

Consequently, environmental scientists are not winning Nobel Prizes. They’re not at the forefront of the men in white coats that governments are now trotting out to explain the COVID crisis.

The discipline of environmental science does not have the standing needed to attract resources to empower the next generation. I think we have to take some responsibility for that, for not actually putting ourselves forward well enough.

But if I was a climate actions youngster skipping school in order to protest about my future, then I would be looking closely at that cheaper degree and hoping that the quality of the program was up to scratch.

Then I would enrol in environmental science.

Society will need what I learn.