Holiday Recommended Reading

Due to some serious offline issues the past few months, I have not been able to devote a sufficient amount of attention to a number of significant projects and arguments going on in this corner of the blogosphere. A critical one is Dr. Barnett’s attempt to fashion a potential “grand bargain” for Sino-American relations, which he has done in partnership with John Milligan-Whyte and Dai Min, with the support of Wikistrat, for whom Tom is the resident Chief Analyst. Given the reception the proposal has received in Beijing, this is Tom’s most significant geostrategic work since The Pentagon’s New Map.

I am going to give this fuller analytical examination in the near future, but here is some explanation from Dr. Barnett:

….Okay, a gruesome analogy, perhaps, but apt. I’m here to tell you that America plunged its fingertips into the Middle Kingdom’s body politic across the 1970s, beginning with Nixon going to China in 1972 and culminating with Jimmy Carter’s normalization of relations in 1979. The first embrace allowed aged Mao Tse-tung to extinguish his nonstop internal purge known as the Cultural Revolution by firewalling his fears of Soviet antagonism. The second cemented China’s wary-but-increasingly-warm relationship with the United States and allowed Deng Xiaoping, who narrowly survived Mao’s insanities, to dismantle the dead emperor’s dysfunctional socialist model, quietly burying Marx with the most revolutionary of eulogies – to get rich is glorious!

Deng chose wisely: Reversing Mikhail Gorbachev’s subsequent logic, he focused on the economics while putting off the politics. This decision later earned him the sobriquet “the butcher of Tiananmen” when, in 1989, the political expectations of students quickly outpaced the Party’s willingness for self-examination. But it likewise locked China onto a historical pathway from which it cannot escape, or what I call the five D’s of the dragon’s decline from world-beater to world-benefactor: demographics, decrepitude, dependency, defensiveness, and – most disabling of all – democratization.

Eide Neurolearning Blog – Analogy as the Core of Cognition, Curiosity and the Creative Drive

Two excellent metacognitive posts by the Drs. Eide:

Jonah Lehrer adds this additional interesting reflection: “the scientists found is that curiosity obeys an inverted U-shaped curve, so that we’re most curious when we know a little about a subject (our curiosity has been piqued) but not too much (we’re still uncertain about the answer). This supports the information gap theory of curiosity, which was first developed by George Loewenstein of Carnegie-Mellon in the early 90s. According to Loewenstein, curiosity is rather simple: It comes when we feel a gap “between what we know and what we want to know”. This gap has emotional consequences: it feels like a mental itch, a mosquito bite on the brain. We seek out new knowledge because we that’s how we scratch the itch.”

This is a prerequisite for insightful breakthroughs – the desire to “know” is high without the student having internalized the “rules” of what the field consensus considers “impossible”.

Colonel Robert Killebrew at CNAS – Crime Wars: Gangs, Cartels and U.S. National Security (PDF)

This report is from late September but I only ran across it now – strongly recommended.

SEED – On Education

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