So gang, it has been a little while since I’ve blogged. I must admit that it wasn’t an intentional break, at least at first. But, now that I’m returning to it I’m glad that I took a little time off. Sometimes, it’s necessary to stop with all the output and allow some time for input, inspiration, and ultimately rest.
Here are a few of the things I’ve been reading and watching lately that have caught my attention.
Afghanistan
1) “The 72-Hour Expert” by P.J. O’Rourke
The intro is classic O’Rourke and sets the tone for what proves to be a heck of an article on the tragedy of Afghanistan, the kind of tragedy that you have to sometimes laugh at lest you break down and weep.
If you spend 72 hours in a place you’ve never been, talking to people whose language you don’t speak about social, political, and economic complexities you don’t understand, and you come back as the world’s biggest know-it-all, you’re a reporter. Either that or you’re President Obama. I called my wife. She said, no, she certainly is not vacationing at government expense in some jet-set hot spot with scads of her BFFs. Looks like I’m not President Obama. But I am a reporter, fresh from Kabul. What do you want to know about Afghanistan, past, present, or future? Ask me anything.
On traditionalism,
Traditionalism being one of the things that makes Afghanistan so hard for Americans to understand. We Americans have so many traditions. For instance our political traditions date back to the 12th-century English Parliament if not to the Roman Senate. Afghans, on the other hand, have had the representative democracy kind of politics for only six years. Afghanistan’s political traditions are just beginning to develop. A Pashtun tribal leader told me that a “problem among Afghan politicians is that they do not tell the truth.” It’s a political system so new that that needed to be said out loud.
The Pashtun tribal leader was one of a number of people that Amin arranged for me to interview. Tribalism is another thing that makes Afghanistan hard to understand. We Americans are probably too tribal to grasp the subtlety of Afghan tribal concepts.
The Pashtun tribal leader was joined by a Turkmen tribal leader who has a Ph.D. in sociology. I asked the Turkmen tribal leader about the socioeconomic, class, and status aspects of Afghan tribalism.
“No tribe is resented for wealth,” he said. So, right off the bat, Afghans show greater tribal sophistication than Americans. There is no Wall Street Tribe upon which the Afghan government can blame everything.
The reality of why hearts and minds may be a big illusion,
We’re outsiders in Afghanistan, and this is Occam’s razor for explaining the Taliban. Imagine if America were a country beset with all sorts of intractable difficulties. Or don’t imagine it—America is a country beset with all sorts of intractable difficulties. Our government is out of control, wantonly interfering in every aspect of our private lives and heedlessly squandering our national treasure at a time when Americans are suffering grave economic woes. Meanwhile vicious tribal conflicts are being fought for control of America’s culture and way of life. (I’ve been watching Fox News.)
What if some friendly, well-meaning, but very foreign power, with incomprehensible lingo and outrageous clothes, were to arrive on our shores to set things right? What if it were Highland Scots? There they go marching around wearing skirts and purses and ugly plaids, playing their hideous bagpipe music, handing out haggis to our kiddies and offending our sensibilities with a lack of BVDs under their kilts. Maybe they do cut taxes, lower the federal deficit, eliminate the Department of Health and Human Services, and the EPA, give people jobs at their tartan factories and launch a manhunt for Harry Reid and the UC Berkeley faculty. We still wouldn’t like them.
College Education
2) English Professor’s William Deresiewicz (author of two of my favorite articles on education and leadership) and Mark Edmundson discuss academia and the pressure for college professors to be cool in order to receive better student critiques which are increasingly important for faculty tenure and whether or not this trend is positive for education…among other things. Full Bloggingheads discussion here.
Thinking
3) “We Are All Talk Radio Hosts” by Jonah Lehrer
Something that has grown in fascination to me over the past few years is how biases influence our thinking. This article looks at how “overthinking” things can often lead us to poorer decisions as it allows time for the introduction of confirmation bias.
Reasoning is generally seen as a mean to improve knowledge and make better decisions. Much evidence, however, shows that reasoning often leads to epistemic distortions and poor decisions. This suggests rethinking the function of reasoning. Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade. Reasoning so conceived is adaptive given human exceptional dependence on communication and vulnerability to misinformation. A wide range of evidence in the psychology or reasoning and decision making can be reinterpreted and better explained in the light of this hypothesis. Poor performance in standard reasoning tasks is explained by the lack of argumentative context. When the same problems are placed in a proper argumentative setting, people turn out to be skilled arguers. Skilled arguers, however, are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views. This explains the notorious confirmation bias. This bias is apparent not only when people are actually arguing but also when they are reasoning proactively with the perspective of having to defend their opinions.
How about you? What has been on your radar? I look forward to slowly getting back into the grind of writing – hopefully more in the style of the “Why We Need to Read Fiction” post.
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