Monthly Archives: August 2017
It’s a half moon out. How long before the next full moon?
What does it mean to be a good person?
Best paragraph written in human history?
My choice is the first aphorism of Hippocrates:
Art is long but life is short, the opportunity fleeting, experience delusive, therefore judgment difficult. The physician must not only do the right thing himself but make sure the patient, the attendants, and the externals cooperate.
This aphorism applies to every sphere of life and every profession.
What is your choice?
What does it mean to be a good person?
A good person does the right thing. But what is the right thing? Right doing begins with a right attitude in everything you do. What are the qualities of a right attitude? There are seven. Imagine an oak leaf with seven lobes.
Gratitude comes first. As Cicero wrote: gratitude is not only the first of the virtues but the parent of all the others. In religious terms, first comes love of God then love of neighbor. If you are not feeling thankful, you are unlikely to be kind to others.
My favorite analogy here is the security message at the beginning of airplane flights. When the oxygen masks drop, you are told, make sure to put your own on first. Gratitude is your oxygen mask.
Courage comes next. Aristotle even put it first. Courage is the first of the virtues because it makes the others possible,he wrote. Well, I’m sticking with Cicero, but I can see Aristotle’s point.
Kindness is to me courage’s twin. Confidence and self-respect must be paired with respect and empathy for others. Politeness is the natural expression of kindness.
Beneath the trinity of gratitude, courage, and kindness come a pair of virtues: self-knowledge and self-control. Socrates nailed the first of these. And as the classics have said the truly powerful is the person who can control himself.
Completing the leaf are two lobes: diligence and excellence. More mundane than the first five but indispensable in a complete picture of virtue. If the first five harken back to the virtues of the warrior and priestly castes, so these final two recall those of the craftsman and yeoman farmer.
Too often “being a good person” is reduced to “being nice.” Goodness is not one dimensional. It has at least seven components. Each must be nurtured.
Does family structure matter?
I will never forget when, as a Berkman Fellow at Harvard Law School, I brought up in the course of an informal weekly discussion groups, the question of family structure. The silence was deafening. It was as if I had proposed infanticide.
At first I didn’t get it. Then I realized that for the Left, family structure and family values are issues of the Right. “Family structure” is “dog whistle” politics and code for racist scorn for black people. The real issue is white racism and economic exploitation. Family is an ideological weapon, a cynical tactical device to distract the attention of the ignorant and the gullible.
This is tragic. The 50 year taboo on family structure originated with the Moynihan report of 1964. A concerned liberal Democrat, Moynihan was denounced as a victim-blaming racist for suggesting that the black family had some issues as the out-of-wedlock birth rate among blacks was 24%, 8X higher than the white rate of 3%. Today the white rate is 25% and the black rate 67%.
The good news is that the taboo on the left is lifting. Kathy Edin, a professor at Harvard, and a progressive ethnographer has tried to focus attention to what she calls the problem of “complex and unstable families.” In a forum on inequality she said that to talk about inequality without talking about the inequality in family structure is lunatic. Similarly, Robert Putnam, also a progressive has chronicled the tragic consequences of family structure deterioration in his book Our Kids.
Raj Chetty, the economist, in his study on social mobility in America has found that the most important single variable in explaining differentials in social mobility across all races is family structure.
Most encouragingly, Putnam has teamed up with Charles Murray, a conservative and gone on a joint speaking tour trying to highlight together the severity of the problem and the need for bipartisanship. This ecumenical spirit is also evident in the joint study by the Brookings and American Enterprise Institute on the subject. But in my experience these are still isolated voices of reason in a sea of partisan bickering.
Why has family structure deteriorated so dramatically in the last 50 years?
As with any big historical trend there are multiple causes: technological, economic, political, and cultural. The development of the birth control pill helped de-stigmatize extra-marital sex, welfare eligibility requirements made marriage economically irrational, income-support programs made having children a potential source of income, the women’s movement helped spread the idea that a single mother could do it all herself, technological change and globalization made it more difficult for many men to play the traditional role of breadwinner, the decline of religious faith weakened the fear of divine retribution. Whatever the causes, the result has been the emergence of a caste system: one caste with intact families, the other without.
What are the most important parts of the US Constitution? What do they say?
Some things you can’t make up. One day, as a Berkman Fellow at Harvard Law School, I had the perverse urge to test knowledge of the Preamble on the part of Harvard law school students. I was appalled at how few were able to recite it or summarize its contents. Then I decided to test Harvard Law School professors.
A similar result. Then most astoundingly I met separately with three professors of US Constitutional Law and found that not one of them passed the test either. Only one of the three was embarrassed. The other two had an excuse: their job was to teach students to write appellate briefs and the Preamble was never cited there.
Another canary in the coal mine of academia. So what is the Preamble and why should anyone care?
The Constitution has three basic parts: the Preamble, the Articles, and the Amendments. The Preamble is important because it lays out the reasons for having a government. The best way to teach the Preamble is to, on the first day of class, ask the students to write down why you think we have a government.
You should do this right now before proceeding.
Once you have completed this assignment compare your list with the Founders’ list and note any discrepancies. What is missing from the Founders’ enumeration from an 18th century perspective? from a 21st century perspective?
After the Preamble come the Articles. Do your best to summarize each before you go to the text itself and then compare what they actually do to what you had thought.
Then write down what you think the First Amendment says before actually going to the text to see what it actually says. The precise wording matters. So does the order in which the rights are listed. Does the First Amendmennt apply to all levels of government or just the Federal government? Does it dictate a strict wall of separation of church and state at all levels?
After the First Amendment, what is the most important Amendment and why?
What is the case for the 14th Amendment? What is the incorporation doctrine?
These are questions eighth graders should be able to answer. If you can’t please consult the text of the Constitution. If you need a helping hand, please consult the best annotated version I know of: Linda Monk’s The Words We Live By. Civic literacy requires work. No pain, no gain.
It’s a half moon out. How long before the next full moon?
A good measure of the American educational system’s utter failure is the inability of most Harvard physics majors to answer these questions. I have been testing them episodically for 7 years. This failure is perfectly consistent with the results of Philip Sadler’s testing of the knowledge of the reasons for the seasons among Harvard and MIT graduates back in 1989. Sadler’s findings were the basis of a film called the Private Universe. It is also consistent with the testing of knowledge of the most fundamental concepts of physics by Harvard Professor of Physics Eric Mazur.
The most common answer among physics and non-physics majors to the half moon to full moon queston is the same: two weeks. The next most common answer is: “I have no idea.” One reason given for the second response is “I don’t know how long the lunar cycle is.” Wow! The third is: “it depends if it is waxing or waning.” The typical answer to the follow up question of what is it in each case is: well if it’s waxing two weeks, if it’s waning 6 weeks. Wow, again.
Why two weeks? Well, half moon suggests half a cycle and if a full cycle is a month. a half moon must be half that. Another reason might be the experience is that the shape of the moon changes only very gradually and the intuition is that it can’t possibly go from half to full in less than two weeks.
But two weeks is wrong. the answer is either 1 week or 3 weeks depending if it is waxing or waning. The rule of thumb answer how to tell waxing from waning is whether or not the C shape is backwards or not. The most common and wrong answer to the relative position question is that the New Moon (eg. no visible moon) is when the earth casts a shadow on the moon. No, that is called an eclipse.
Three Points: the scientific method is all about observing, asking, guessing, testing, and telling. This little case study shows that students are not being taught to observe, ask, guess, test, and tell. The best way to teach the scientific method and the joy of science is to start where humanity started: with the sun, the moon, and stars.
The best algorithm for ranking the power of experiments to teach the young is that they be easily repeatable and low cost. Turning the sky into a laboratory makes sense on both counts.
Best science experiment selection algorithm?
The best science experiments to teach children are ones that involve the least equipment. The very best involve no more than their own bodies. Repetition is the key to learning anything. The less equipment the easier to repeat and share with others. Example: stand up, change the angle of your head. What happens to the rest of your body? Why?
What is your favorite science experiment selection algorithm?