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A brief excerpt from the comment from blogfriend Charles Cameron:

“The warfare of the Aztecs, the berserkers seeking Valhalla, and most significantly today, the Islamists seeking martyrdom – these are not “rational actors” in a sense that tweaking our Prisoners Dilemma tables will not address.

To know them, we must think not merely our of the box but out of boxes, take not just the road less traveled but a path so overgrown a machete is required to cut it, and no one can say whether it was a path before, or is new found land, a haunt of owls or badgers, or an habitation of ghosts… a trackless track as zen might call it, crossing the Cartesian rift between brain and mind, passing between real and imaginal, fact and myth, story and history as easily as we might pass between Colorado and Wyoming.”

That resonated with me earlier today when I read a blurb in the current issue of The Atlantic Monthly ( who appear to owe Ralph Peters some kind of credit for their   cover story) regarding the disproportionate number of engineers in the ranks of Islamist terrorists, which led me to google these fine papers, posts and theads:

The Engineers of Jihad (PDF) by Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog-  The original paper

Soob -“Engineers of Jihad ” – Excellent analysis by Subadei’s co-blogger Munz

The Small Wars Council – “Engineers of Jihad” 

Foreign Policy – subscription required ( sorry, cheapskates)

RichardDawkins.net –  Worthless, normatively speaking but contains mocking speculation for comic relief

Belgravia Dispatch – illustrates the 4GW angle

Most MENA nations have very limited systems of public and private education and literacy rates are far lower than state figures generally admit. In some instances, Arab states may have illiteracy rates reaching into the 40th percentile.  The well educated, multilingual and scientifically trained are a definite elite in the Arab-Islamic world diverging socially and psychologically from a majority who speak only colloquial Arabic or an ethnic minority language and  (possibly broken) colloquial Arabic.  See Dave Schuler’s comments on Diglossia. Moreover censorship, repression and the boundaries of permissible social, political and cultural discourse vary significantly from Tangier to Bahrain.

In this climate, an engineering education creates a mind capable of rigorously rigid – one might say predisposed to doctrinaire – logical thinking in terms of process with an artificially circumscribed mental palette of content. Narrow vision and a powerful intellect will yield different answers to problems than will a panoramic vision and a powerful intellect. Islamism would serve to reinforce the tendency toward rigidity while ramping up the emotional intensity of the response to frustrating obstacles to solving problems.

Could the “Cartesian rift” or dichotomy of which Charles writes be healed by greater access to liberal education in the Mideast? Ideally, yes, as both a world of possibilities would open up alongside a propensity to question received authority that liberal education brings. On the other hand, the report by Gambetta and Hertog puts humanities majors as disporortionately represented among secular, leftist, terrorists so liberal ed may simply stir the domestic pot in the Mideast  because most societies there remain, to a degree, repressive tyrannies in terms of politics.

Sat down last night with Dr. Von for an enjoyable discussion over dinner and cocktails. Aside from politics, much of the talk was dominated by the subject of education; the need to teach real science and advanced mathematics in schools, the mostly deleterious effects of NCLB ( I’d assess the law as being successful at forcing marginal improvements for students in the second quartile of performance – the law is about basic skills – at the great educational expense of students and schools in the upper 50 %), the future of neurolearning in the classroom. It was a good talk.

One of the well-documented aspects regarding IQ testing on which you can safely make broad generalizations, is that aggregate mean IQ scores  have been rising. Not just here in America or in advanced countries but everywhere (though at different rates), rich or poor, free or unfree, north or south. Moreover, to the extent to which we can assemble reliable and valid psychometric records, this societal increase in mean IQ, known as “The Flynn Effect” after researcher James Flynn, has been going on for about a century.

At the same time that mean IQ has increased, the results of standardized testing of k-12 students at the national level has not reflected this improvement, at least not proportionately; seniors and some parents are also prone to make the anecdotal observation that children today simply aren’t as proficient at many practical kinds of problem solving as they were many decades ago. How can these  phenomena be reconciled ?

Flynn now argues the change is due to the increasing complexity and stimulation of the modern social evironment – children are getting better at certain kinds of thinking (which impacts IQ scores) demanded by their environment but other kinds of cognitive skills are falling into disuse:

“By reverse-engineering the pattern of improvement in IQ tests, you can tell how mental priorities have changed over the century. It turns out that we, far more than our recent ancestors, take seriously the ability to find abstract similarities between objects (Question: how are dogs and rabbits alike? Answer: they are both mammals). And we are better at applying logic to finding abstract patterns, as in Raven’s Progressive Matrices.

“At that point I began to get excited”, says Flynn, “because I began to feel that I was bridging the gulf between our minds and the minds of our ancestors. We weren’t more intelligent than they, but we had learnt to apply our intelligence to a new set of problems. We had detached logic from the concrete, we were willing to deal with the hypothetical, and we thought the world was a place to be classified and understood scientifically rather than to be manipulated.

….There is still the puzzle of how environmental differences can be so weak when we compare individuals born at the same time, but so strong over time. The key, which Flynn attributes to fruitful discussions with his collaborator, William Dickens, an economist at the Brookings Institution in Flynn’s home town of Washington, DC, lies in the observation that superior genes cause superior performance by co-opting superior environments.

….Everything falls into place with the observation that, for the first time in human history, some people’s superior mental abilities are making superior mental environments available to everyone. Humans are social animals. The most important part of the environment that created your mind is other people’s minds. Before the 20th century, only the privileged had easy access to ideas. Now, when one person thinks something worthwhile, we can all think it and that thought changes all of us.

….The Flynn effect is not a story of pure gains. There are signs that children are missing concrete experiences that help develop some mental abilities. Michael Shayer, a psychologist at King’s College, London, has spent most of his working life studying the foundations of mathematical ability. In 1976 he tested children on their understanding of volume and shape, an understanding thought by many to underlie all future mathematical ability. When he repeated the tests in 2003, 11-year-olds performed only as well as eight-year-olds had done 30 years earlier. “

In the words of Aristotle – ” We are what we frequently do”. Or more practically, students, on average, will get better at what they spend time doing, including cognitive behaviors.

I’m not sure this hypothesis decisively knocks a hole in the important role of heritability on IQ, given the mounds of evidence in it’s favor, but Flynn is certainly proposing a reasonable explanation for the scattershot outcomes of “the Flynn Effect”. Nor is it true that ” this is the first time in history” everyone is benefiting from superior environments created by a few. That has always been the case and there is a proper name for it – ” civilization”. What is different today is the greater magnitude of scale, accelerated velocity and connectivity of such superior environments due to globalization and the information revolution.

I’d like to hear Dan of tdaxp  weigh in here.

ADDENDUM:

Herrick of Gene Expression already has with “10 Questions for James Flynn“

A STROKE OF LUCK AND A MOMENT OF IRONY

Some of my older readers may be familiar with the late Mortimer J. Adler of the University of Chicago, a “popular” philosopher and lifelong advocate of “Great Books” and “Western Canon” programs of liberal education. One of Adler’s many efforts in this regard was his editorship of The Encyclopedia Britannica ‘s 53 volume “Great Books of the Western World” series, which the public could buy on subscription, one volume at a time.

It seems quaint now, in the Google age, to recall buying sets of encyclopedias or series like Great Books but as a product line, it had a definite market appeal for the GI generation that had suffered through depression and world war and only about half of whom had managed to graduate high school. I suspect they liked seeing the rows of “serious”, leather-bound books on a shelf and took some pride in the fact that their children, the Boomers, had access to them for school work ( though they were probably used with as little enthusiasm as encyclopedias are used by students now).

I mention this because earlier today, I picked up Adler’s entire 53 volume Great Books set from a library for free, saving it from the discard pile when the librarian was kind enough to let me cart them away. Between forty and fifty years old, aside from a little dust, they are essentially brand new books of the highest quality. Few of them were ever opened and they will look quite handsome on my shelf, as I’m sure they once did on someone else’s. Running from Homer to Freud they include about every “deep” book that we generally feel guilty that we never read yet. I’ve read quite a few ( though less than I imagined) and look forward to reading more and I am generally, quite pleased with myself for snagging them.

Part of me though, suspects that Adler would have been chagrined to learn that in 2007 a library had no room or interest in his beloved canon. Or that college students could conceivably graduate from a university without ever having read, cover to cover, any “great book” whatsoever. Times change of course but some things have a lasting value and the Net generation is missing out on some of them.

BUILDING AN INNOVATIVE-INTERSECTIONAL IDEA SOCIETY -PART II.

In Part I. , we looked at John Kao’s call for a more innovative America and Howard Gardner’s analysis of the mindsets that would be required for creative, innovative endeavors. In Part II. we continue with the analysis of Frans Johansson in The Medici Effect .

Blogfriend Steve DeAngelis of ERMB has referenced The Medici Effect many times in the past two years; in his initial post on Johansson’s work, Steve gave a superb summary of the Medici Effect concept:

“In his very interesting book The Medici Effect: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts, and Cultures, Frans Johansson talks about the value of creating a space in which people from diverse fields of expertise can get together to exchange ideas. The Medici’s, of course, were a wealthy and powerful Italian family who played an important role in the Renaissance. The family’s wealth permitted it to support artists, philosophers, theologians, and scientists, whose combined intellect helped burst the historical pall known as the Dark Ages”

Johansson’s thesis is that breakthrough innovation is generated most frequently at “the intersection” where two or more different domains meet rather than by predictable, linear, improvements within one field (” directional innovation”). Intersectional opportunities are increasing, Johansson argues due to increased migration, trends toward scientific consilience and ready access to the improved computational tools of the information revolution.

In The Medici Effect, Johansson tackles both cognitive tools as well as social environment that facilitate innovative thinking and productivity. Like Edward DeBono’s lateral thinking exercises, Johansson encourages conscious and methodical attempts to find novel, intersectional, combinations of concepts; he points to cultivating an autotelic mindset; reversing one’s premises to smash through “associative barriers”; using multiperspectivalism ( agreeing here with Howard Gardner); and defusing the social factors that inhibit organizations from effectively brainstorming. These are all solid suggestions, though most have been made elsewhere as well.

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More attention is paid in The Medici Effect to the social environment that is interactive with the innovator in helping to create a climate conducive to synthesis and the generation of insight. moreover, Johansson identifies the creation of a dynamic and stimulating “community”as a critical factor for sustaining an innovation:

“Garfield offer’s two reason for Magic’s [ a sword & sorcery card game that was a cult hit] success: a prolonged and exciting learning phase and an expanding community of players. Examined closely, you will see that he is talking about the intersection of games and collectibles”

Gaming is itself, a very powerful tool for teaching adaptive thinking skills and for driving the assembly of a “ value network” that can be turned toward productive purposes. Indeed, Johannson spends a great deal of time discussing the potential of these networks to function as a two-edged sword in regard to innovation. Moreover, the social and financial organization clustered around the innovator can be determinative in the success of the innovation in a way that is wholly counterintuitive, according to Johansson. Excess support brings restrictions in the form of vested interests from old value networks, stigmatizing failures that are a necessary part of the learning curve and blunting internal motivation with the distracting prospect of extrinsic reward. There is cognitive strength in ” staying hungry” and needing to stretch resources with value-added thought ( see Don Vandergriff’s Raising the Bar).

What Is To Be Done?:

Looking elsewhere, like The Smithsonian Magazine’s “37 under 36 Young Innovators” we see many mining Johansson’s intersections or using Gardner’s Synthesizing and Creative Minds but these bright folks are social outliers. What we need is re-engineering of institutional cultures and structures, particularly that of our educational system to balance the development of analytical prowess with generative, creative, synthesisizing, capacities. John Hagel recently had a post at Edge Perspectives with a number of sage suggestions for driving innovation:

“Diversity. As Scott Page and others have persuasively suggested, new insight and learning tends to increase with cognitive diversity. This principle highlights the importance of designing institutional arrangements that extend well beyond a single institution, with particular attention to the opportunity to connect to diverse pools of expertise and experience. Diversity can often be enhanced by connecting into spikes – geographic concentrations of talent – and by targeting “brokers” within social networks, creating a multiplier effect in terms of the number of participants that are potentially accessible.

Modularity. When activities are tightly specified and hard-wired together, the opportunities for experimentation and tinkering are very limited. Segmenting people and activities into discrete modules with well-defined interfaces can help to create much more space and opportunity for distributed innovation and learning.”

Read the rest here.

In practical terms, what does this mean for schools, corporations, universities and governments ? In my view, “hard-wired” hierarchy with rigid requirements, stiff penalties and centralized decision-making is going to have to be relegated to niches in the future rather than being the dominant form of organization that it is today. Hierarchy, with it’s mania for control and accountability, remains useful for transactional delivery systems upon which reputations depend, logistical flows upon which production processes depend and security procedures upon which safety may depend. That being said, hierarchy will have to yield to more lateral, more collegial, more networked, more ecologically oriented models of connectivity where the generation of new ideas represents the lifeblood of an organization.

Hierarchy is Newtonian; Free Scale and Modular Networks are Darwinian. An innovation nation is, by definition, adaptive.

ADDENDUM:

Sir Ken Robinson ” Do Schools Kill Creativity?”