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ATTENTION vs. MEANING ADDED

Dave at Thoughts Illustrated has a high-impact graphic you need to see.

BLACK SWANS FLYING

John Robb had a great post at Global Guerillas entitled “CATASTROPHIC BLACK SWANS“. An excerpt:

“If we follow this trend line, the path in development is clear. First, over the next decade, the size of the group necessary for global warfare will continue to decrease and decentralize (through a near term shift to systems disruption and open source organizational forms). Second, we will eventually reach a point when the weaponry available to these groups will enable them to initiate a catastrophic black swan (an event that is impossible to predict). “

I would argue that the devolution is really toward the emergence of superempowered individuals, Ted Kaczynskis on steroids, who realize that their total anonymity and lack of prior activity or membership in known networks, renders them the best possible secret first-strike weapon.

On the other hand, there are factors that mitigate such risks. The number of individuals with the requisite intelligence, knowledge base of systems, resources and sufficient degree of alienation and task persistence to carry off a singlehanded 9/11 are relatively few. Moreover, the only way these potential superempowered individuals can be ” activated” by al Qaida and retain their capacity for stealth, is by inspiration. This elevates the premium on IO, cyberpropaganda, symbolic terror operations and efforts by al Qaida to reach beyond their narrow popular base to non-Salafi or even non-Muslim demographic groups that might share al Qaida’s anti-American strategic goals for their own reasons.

FLAT

Gave a presentation today which I had to put together on relatively short notice, one of the numerous things putting a dent in my blogging time lately. It was also cutting ito my sleep time, leaving me feeling fatigued and flat when it came time to give the talk. It went over well enough, as far as the audience was concerned, but I definitely did not feel ” in the groove” when I gave it. The next two weeks promises to be even more hectic.

Going to bat out a couple of short posts and then go offline for some “down time”.

AUTOTELIC LEARNER, MODULAR MIND, ANACHRONISTIC SCHOOL

I fear this post may be an example of public rumination on my part as I am simply reflecting on many inspirations: a recent conversation with a research neuropsychiatrist; reading Howard Gardner’s Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century ; Dan of tdaxp’s posts “Fingertip Feeling, and Other Implications of a Modular Mind“, “Time, Orientation, Universalism, and Vocab: Notes from Chapter 2 of “Adapting Minds” by David J. Buller“, “Social Teaching Strategies” and “Genetic and Experiential Individuality” ( the latter inspired by J.R. of Edgewise who asked Dan as well as myself via email about Rudiger Gamm).

Pondering these things is leading me in the direction of concluding that the public school system will only be successfully reformed if it is redesigned with the primary objective of producing autotelic learners. Such an outcome would certainly be beneficial for the students whose productive working life may stretch to America’s tricentennial and who will have to demonstrate nimble cognitive adaptivity in order to prosper through waves of technological and societal changes.

Unfortunately, such an objective runs counter to:

a) the priorities of the American educational establishment who are deeply invested in the current institutional structure of public schools and universities, a highly regimented, 19th and early-mid 20th century, mass-system, hybrid.

b) the political and social goals of public education’s harshest conservative critics, who while open to considering radical changes in institutional structure, are often inclined to authoritarian models of curricular instruction that actively deter the emergence of genuinely independent thought.

These are very broad generalizations. Exceptions exist of course.

Students today live at the onset of a radical globalization and violent countervailing forces amply detailed by Dr. Barnett in PNM and BFA. That however is not the entire longitudinal picture. Consider just these few fields of research:

Nanotechnology

Quantum Computing

Genetic Engineering

Ai

There are others, say Complexity, Network, String theories, Brain research and so on. The list can be increased or reduced but the point remains the same. Each of these fields are in a different stage of development but all have the potential to yield results with significant to highly significant society changing effects. And all are likely to intersect during the lifetime of today’s kindergarten student. Thus, they face a near-future world that may- from the standpoint of society if not biology – have not just one but many potential points of “singularity“. To say that these students will need to be resilient in the face of these changes is the acme of understatement.

What are we doing today to prepare these students ? Not all that much. NCLB, which is a stupidly blunt and economically wasteful instrument, has laudable goals of enforcing a national minimal standard of content richness, student skill mastery and teacher quality. It is about raising the floor a little, not about fixing the collapsing roof, broken wndows or decaying walls. Neurolearning research has, for some time, demonstrated evidence that the human brain has the quality of modularity but the educational system up to a least the undergraduate level continues, predominantly, to push instruction in a starkly linear fashion.

And American education will continue to do so, despite the best intentions of its teachers or political leaders or legislative mandates, because that is what it is structurally designed to do and can do nothing else.

UPDATE:

Dan of tdaxp ponders the question further.

ESTIMATED COST OF AN ACT OF NUCLEAR TERRORISM: $ 1 TRILLION

Some chilling food for thought in the tradition of Herman Kahn. Calculating the outlier ripple effects of a nuclear blast at an American port city, a paper by RAND.

Hat tip to Jedburgh at The Small Wars Council.