Recommended Reading

Slouching Toward Columbia –Drone panic: New weapon, old anxieties

Poor drones and drone-operators: as the latest generation of weaponry on the battlefield, it’s now their turn to be subject to that great generational scrutiny of moral and ethical suspicion. Poor thinking public: we get treated to these arguments as if they were all original or unique to drones.

This piece from the Atlantic, addresses (among many other things) many of these themes. Unfortunately, it perpetuates a number of very tired tropes about military technology and tactics.

The first overused and under-scrutinized argument is the fear that drones make war “easier to wage” because “we can safely strike from longer distances.” Well, we’ve had that ability since the birth of air power and missile power, it just makes it a lot easier to hit certain kinds of targets at acertain tempo. After all, it’s only the pilots who are “far away,” the drones themselves still operate from bases with real, flesh-and-blood people who are potentially exposed to retaliation, and those bases are not necessarily any further away than bases for manned aircraft (in most cases they service both)…..

The subtext to some of the anti-drone angst is that it is an effective use of American power against some of the worst bastards on Earth, hence the hurry to tangle up in investigations, regulations and lawfare, something that is morally indistinguishable from an artillery shell or infantryman’s bullet.

Ribbonfarm –Extroverts, Introverts, Aspies and Codies

 The reason I’ve been thinking a lot about the E/I spectrum is that a lot of my recent ruminations have been about how the rapid changes in social psychology going on around us might be caused by the drastic changes in how E/I dispositions manifest themselves in the new (online+offline) sociological environment.  Here are just a few of the ideas I’ve been mulling:

• As more relationships are catalyzed online than offline, a great sorting is taking place: mixed E/I groups are separating into purer groups dominated by one type
• Each trait is getting exaggerated as a result
• The emphasis on collaborative creativity, creative capital and teams is disturbing the balance between E-creativity and I-creativity
• Lifestyle design works out very differently for E’s and I’s
• The extreme mental conditions (dubiously) associated with each type in the popular imagination, such as Asperger’s syndrome or co-dependency, are exhibiting new social phenomenology 

An old post by Venkat I stumbled across.

Gary Rubinstein–The ‘three great teacher’ study — finally laid to rest 

Rubinstein deconstructs a study that undergirds a central tenet of corporate Ed Reform:

….When you look at this graph, the first thing that might seem unusual is that the high group is not the 555 group, but the 455 group.  Why is that?  Well, because the 555 group had a different starting point than the 111 group, so it would not be a valid comparison.  None of the twenty graphs have both the 111 and the 555 groups since those groups never had a close enough starting point.  They explain in the paper that this is because:

Page 2 of 3 | Previous page | Next page