To Lessen War

Philosophy time! Is there an objective reality? How much knowledge can we have about this objective reality if it exists? If there is no objective reality, then how do we say what is true or not? These are certainly philosophical questions, but often, especially in STEM, those philosophical questions are left to the philosophers. And maybe it's bigger than STEM. I've often experienced that describing a conversation as "philosophical" means that it is unintelligible, unimportant, nitpicky or impractical. But I do think these questions are important, and their answers have practical consequences for STEM. As engineers, we would like to make engineering decisions and develop engineering designs based on things that are true. All decisions require an understanding of the truth (as well as a set of priorities and constraints). And we design something because we think that there is truth to that something's form or function. It does what we think it does. It communi...

Humility has been a theme of my thinking for this semester and I think it has strong implications as an ethical virtue. This is especially the case when talking about technology. I first started thinking about writing this blog post when I listened to the first of songs off of J Cole's Forest Hills Drive album. It struck me that I had not often heard a rapper talk about not being on top, and about a struggle that was relatable (something other than "started from the bottom, now we're here"). And I realized that it took a lot of humility on his part to rap about that. The chorus of the song that sticks in my mind is "no such thing as a life that's better than yours" and I think this is something that engineers need to hear, also, if they think of engineering as something that makes life better. I'm defining humility as "the acknowledgment of limitations on your ability to achieve or control outcomes". Defining it like this, it sounds r...

What's my mission? My mission is to encourage engineers to reflect on their impacts on society . I've been thinking about missions because they accomplish a few things . They narrow down our pursuits - I find that my pursuits have been very broad and have seemingly only broadened since I started graduate school. I would like to investigate the neurology of engineering and the intersection of innovation and humanitarian design and do my own design for charitable causes, but I cannot do them all, and keeping them all in mind hinders me. Missions also give us purpose, as opposed to jobs - they motivate us, and I find I have been lacking in motivation, recently. What my mission means:  When I say engineers , I don’t limit that to engineering students. I would like to expand the definition beyond those who have degrees, but that might be too broad of a mission, so I narrow it back down. In particular I am interested in engineers that are on the job. This means that my wor...

I've been thinking about this principle for a while, and I wanted to talk about it in the context of research. "If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you." - George Bernard Shaw It is obviously relevant because research is about discovering the truth and telling it to people. However, as the quote claims, just telling the truth is not enough. Take the example of climate change. There are whole centers created in order to communicate climate change in such a way that it changes people's behavior. Telling people that they are making the world a worse place for themselves and their children, building the mounting evidence of the truth that climate change is caused by human activity, it is not enough. It is not enough, to tell the logical truth. It is either eclipsed by some other more attractive idea (regaining your coal jobs), or it is easy to ignore. People don't want to be scolded, and just flat out telling someo...

My heart is racing because I don't know how honest I should be. I don't know how much of myself I should put out here. The sharing of ideas on the internet is sensational. It is one big game of telephone. Things that travel are things that get scandalous attention, I know that. And regardless of platform, the internet is almost designed for us to take things out of context. By saying anything meant to provoke people's thoughts, you may provoke one person's ire, and that is all that it takes to rally the ire of many. This process does not regard the truth. Here is a great TED talk about it. I tried taking my own posts out of context and I got the following: " But what is the worst that could happen to me if I fail? Maybe I die young, or I can't make it through graduate school" - Doesn't want graduate school enough. Not confident? "curiously learning with little regard for what a good person it makes me, or how much impact I will have....

I am nobody. No-one will remember me. I will not make a huge difference. This is a huge relief. Since I got to graduate school, I have been motivated by the desire to become somebody. To be a great researcher, to make an impact, to be known as someone who can challenge the militaristic and narrow-minded thinking that produces harmful engineering design. I think this can also be expressed as fear of dying, if the most final death happens the last time someone speaks your name. Like a pharaoh, I would like to truly become someone recognizable. In the heat of my desire to become someone, the fears of a fall from grace hound me. I imagine failing out of graduate school, or worse, getting a Ph.D. and not being able to make an impact once I graduate. I imagine the bridge to becoming somebody is burning, and so I try to run quickly across it. But what is the worst that could happen to me if I fail? Maybe I die young, or I can't make it through graduate school and I become a high schoo...

Organ donation as a transhumanist technology can complicate our ethics. Take this somewhat classic utilitarian dilemma : A doctor has several patients who will die if they don't receive organ donations. Perhaps one needs replacement kidneys, another needs a replacement heart, or whatever. Now supplies of these organs have come short, and there are no spare organs. There are, however, a number of healthy people available who could be suitable donors, except that they are unwilling to sacrifice themselves to save the others. The number of people required to supply the organs is less than the number of lives can be saved by carrying out the transplants and, in this situation, it is suggested, utilitarianism supports killing some people to save the lives of those in need of replacement organs, since the harm of killing a few is supposed to be less than the harm of many dying. This does not always follow, depending on who is killed and who is saved by the organ donation, but someti...

New research done by Dr. Hollie Nyseth Brehm at The Ohio State University focuses on war criminals of the Rwandan genocide, and shows that overwhelmingly the criminals attempted to appeal to the goodness of their character when they were being tried. From a broader sociological perspective, this research fits into a larger picture - these criminals fail to recognize themselves as "bad" people. They were capable of justifying even murder, capable of considering themselves good people at the same time as recognizing that they had participated in the genocide. What if this is the rule? I cannot easily regulate this thinking and behavior to Rwandan genocide criminals. Maybe the potential to justify even these abhorrent crimes is present in anyone? In fact, I find this very relevant to the current state of American race relations and the concept of white innocence. I won't get more into that with this post, and it will probably be a while before I read Ta-Nehisi Coates new...

Justice and mercy can fall on a spectrum when considering ethical systems. Justice is a key principle of ethics and is present in the    principlism    that I mentioned in a previous post. But, as is recognized in principlism,  justice comes in many forms. Distributive justice is about people receiving a fair amount of something, whether it be resources, the opportunity for resources, attention, etc. Procedural justice is about a fair process being used for determining outcomes. Also known as fair play. Restorative justice is about restoring things to a fair state, putting things back as they were. Retributive justice is about punishment, administering fair repercussions for someone who acts unfairly. And even amongst any of these, "fair" also has to be defined in order to have any practical definition of justice. Even though justice is a key aspect of ethical systems, there are some models, like Kidder's model for ethical decision-mak...

Humility is one antidote to unethical engineering. I've been watching Death Note. Not the shitty Netflix movie, but the original anime, which is very thought-provoking. I was going to write a post about the effects of The Market on work and human suffering, and whether or not capitalism was ethical, but writing this blog post allows me to rationalize watching TV as "research". The story of Death Note focuses on a young genius, Light Yagami, who comes into possession of a notebook that can kill anyone whose name is written in it, as long as the killer also has the victim's face. Very quickly Light adopts the alter ego, Kira, and begins killing any criminal he can, literally writing for hours at a time. His intent is to act as a god that scrubs the earth of all those who do not belong, and to usher in a new world. Kira gains an international following, and also the attention of a mysterious super detective batman figure, L, who labels him a serial killer. I won...

Relativism is a useful tool for understanding ethics, it has a limit, and at that limit are more steadfast and general truths. My friend (let's call him Q) and I had a conversation about "Engineering Ethics and the Public", a class taught by Marc Edwards that we are currently involved/enrolled in. The conversation was specifically about how the ethics class is taught. Q has more experience with ethics and he is skeptical of and surprised by the specific attention paid to one's "personal morality" in the discussions of ethics that occur in the class. "Ethics is conceptual", he claims, and without attention to ethical frameworks, the class may quickly devolve into ethnocentrism. A simple example: In a country where vaccinations are culturally/religiously prohibited, we may have the personally derived ethical impetus to vaccinate and protect people from illness, but we are not necessarily in the right. Following our personal ethics and choosin...

Lately I've been thinking about a political principle. That a powerful form of activism is to live with integrity. I first started thinking about this after watching the film "As We Forgive". A key theme of that film is that it took love, legitimate one-on-one connection, to restore the country of Rwanda after the genocide. So love is political. Connection and tolerance are political. They are intertwined in our citizenship. And then I ran into a few instances of this philosophy in rapid succession. Jordan Peterson, who I have started investigating (and disagree with on some solid points, but have some admiration for nonetheless) espouses this philosophy from a conservativish standpoint: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ti1Tob5Ceh8 I started reading "The Slow Professor", and a key message concerns the power of the individual. That the Slowness of one academic, even in short admissions of imperfection and short grabs for meaningful time, are acts of resist...

Intro About a month ago, A google engineer sent around to his fellow employees a memo with the title “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber”. The memo went viral about a week ago, and he was fired soon after. The main points of this memo were the following ( in his own summary ): Google’s political bias has equated the freedom from offense with psychological safety, but shaming into silence is the antithesis of psychological safety.  This silencing has created an ideological echo chamber where some ideas are too sacred to be honestly discussed.  The lack of discussion fosters the most extreme and authoritarian elements of this ideology.  Extreme: all disparities in representation are due to oppression  Authoritarian: we should discriminate to correct for this oppression  Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don't have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership.  Discrimination to reach e...

I'm currently at ASEE 2017 (https://www.asee.org/conferences-and-events/conferences/annual-conference/2017). It's a lot of fun. I met a whole bunch of new people. While the first one was primarily fun, I find that I have formed a professional goal for this conference, and I've had some success working at it - and with it I've done quite a decent amount of networking. My goal for this conference, after getting my presentation off my chest, has been to field ideas for carving out a dissertation from the Capstone to Work project that I've been working on. I have a lot written down already, and I'll probably copy and paste. But with this conference I also find myself with a clearer picture developing of my position in the field, and with that a clearer picture of my own life, honestly. For instance, I still need to read the slow professor, but currently if it requires the speed with which many of my elders seem to move, I do not think I will be able to stomach...

Yesterday I watched Black Mirror season 3 episode 5, Men Against Fire. Something about it hit me in a deep place, too deep for me to immediately recognize where. It had a little to do with all of the similarities with the Holocaust, but I knew it was something more than that. Thinking just a few minutes ago about how I would enter writing about my research, it hit me. What is particularly interesting about this episode is how an actual rift in identity (in this case, Gee would call it a biological identity) is exploited to create a larger, artificial rift in identity that minimizes empathy. So the mechanism at play throughout the whole episode is a learned identity difference that is systematized and thus the system as a whole has less empathy to spare, to influence it. This reminds me of Schon and Argyris' model I and model II organizations. How does this play into my research? Engineering is a community of practice that does the same thing. We emphasize an identity differ...

Ramon and I were talking about a dichotomous conversation dynamic, based off of my experience trying to convince my roommate to vote in the upcoming Virginia primary election. In that conversation, I ran up against a few dead ends: 1) Me: Why are you not interested in voting? Roommate: I don't think it makes much of a difference to vote for delegates. M: Well we're actually voting for Governor. R: Virginia is not my home state. M: If you had a vote that could make a difference in any state, why wouldn't you use it? You do care about people other than yourself, right? This vote is a privilege that not all american citizens have, but you do! R: Well, I'm not interested in voting. M: Why aren't you interested? R: Because I'm not. 2) R: I have a different perspective on power than you do, and that's okay. M: It's not okay for me, if I think your vote could be of benefit to others, then it is my responsibility as a U.S. citizen and within my et...

My Ethnography Ramon and I briefly talked about yesterdays writing, and he focused again on the idea of auto-ethnography. He recommended I watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3EJfPN9sIg&t=231s. I haven't done much but skim about 5 minutes of it, yet, so he suggested two primary (and correlated) take-away's from that keynote. - Auto-ethnography builds empathy - Auto-ethnography satisfies a current need in the sciences I have only had roughly-hypothetical interactions with auto-ethnography. I haven't read a full study, though I have been to a seminar on one that is in the process of being written. I've been in brainstorming session for another graduate student writing one. I read a very powerful "ethnography of one" by Foor et al. that I guess I conflated with auto-ethnography until Ramon and I started talking about writing one in earnest. While I am still fairly sure that I won't be writing one yet, it is an interesting question of what I...

My friend, Ramon Benitez, writes a blog ( http://bramon1.wixsite.com/animalempathengineer/blog ). I don't read it. This is partially because we communicate pretty regularly, and I'm fairly certain we've discussed the blog topic in depth by the time he has written the entry. I need to read it. I'm probably wrong about that fair certainty, and regardless, Ramon's take-aways from our conversations will surely be different when in his own words. I also don't read it because I have a lot of hermit behaviors that disconnect me from social networks. Even though I don't read it, people do! It's something I hear people talk about. And even if they didn't talk about it, he writes it! He writes a blog. His most recent entry is about using the blog as a sort of memoing, in the grounded theory sense (positioning the writing as theoretical work, with intellectual merit and impact) and in the James Comey sense (a documentation of important experiences that can...

Here are some of the voices I've heard concerning this (disclaimer, there's some profanity): Laci Green Casey Neistat Tim Urban (Wait But Why) Ethan & Hila Klein (H3H3) June Lapine (Shoe0nHead) VOX Media CGP Grey Top post on r/endlesswar School of Life Slavoj Žižek Simone Giertz This is in addition to personal conversations, conversations in classes, and to the exception of most news sites, which I don't really trust to have integrity (I don't trust VOX all that much either, but at least they're coherent). The two that resonate the most: H3H3's video is a good goofy video, Slavoj Žižek is pretty fantastic to listen to; but regardless and of course, all have their merits. Here's what I want to say to all of those who felt they needed to save this country and perhaps the world from Trump. Feelings Feelings are powerful and are useful. Without them we have difficulty connecting with each other. In my experience, feelings are the spark of ...