Saturday, June 22, 2013

Warlick Response Condition 1

First, I'd like to thank Mr. Warlick (known in the Matrix as The Developer) for responding to my hastily prepared and informal response to his hastily prepared and informal synopsis of his larger talk.  
Condition 1, preparing children for an unpredictable future.

My point is that in the 1950s, '60s and '70s, we didn't know we were preparing students for such rapid change and there was little in the institution designed for such a task. Today we do know that rapid change characterizes our children's future, yet, too much of today's educational practices continue to be based on the assumptions of a half century ago. If we truly understood this one fact, that we can not describe the future for which we were preparing our children, then it would have a profound impact on what we teach, how we teach it, and the very roles of teacher and student.

I'm not entirely sure how much I agree or disagree with this idea.  That said, I do think David is making a leap of logic when discussing predictability and change.  Rate of change and predictability are two different ideas, and its not possible to deduce one from the other.

For example, one can observe slow change that is unpredictable.  A drunkard slowly stumbling down the street is changing his location slowly, but often unpredictably.  A better example would be evolution by natural selection.  Drastic morphological changes take place slowly over geological time scales, but how an organism is going to specifically adapt to an environmental challenge is often unpredictable beyond the most broad generalities.

One can also observe fast predictable change.  For example, the progression of many cancers, e.g., pancreatic, are fast and predictable.  A more operative example, technologically speaking, would be Moore's Law.   Gordon Moore predicted, almost 50 years ago, that the number of transistors per unit area of an integrated circuit would double every two years.  This prediction has been uncannily accurate, and only recently it is being discussed the the rate may be slowing to a doubling every three years.

So what type of change are we experiencing? Fast-unpredictable, slow-unpredictable, fast-predictable, or fast-unpredictable?  I haven't given this any deep thought yet, but I would think today's change most closely approximates fast-predictable change.  The reason for its fast pace is also the reason for its predictability: the information explosion our planet is experiencing.  This is allowing us to understand how the world works to a high degree of accuracy.  This understanding is leading to the fast pace of technological change, but also allowing us to predict more accurately what is possible in the immediate future.  That is, as our knowledge matures, our technological abilities and our predictive abilities increase hand in hand. It does not seem very likely there is going to be a major paradigm shifting discovery anytime soon, given how accurate our scientific theories are at present, but there are exceptions such as AI, abiogenesis, and complexity theory. I'm certainly not saying we have a complete picture of the world, but we are approaching that line asymptotically.

(I'm going to use a long parenthesis, a la Stephen Jay Gould, to dispel a predictable objection to this line of thinking.  It has this general form: "People once believed the sun revolved around the earth and that their knowledge was close to complete; look how wrong they were!  Who knows how different our understanding will be in 500 years? It is pure hubris to think we have a better understanding of nature!"

This objection quickly deteriorates upon closer scrutiny.  When one begins to embark on a serious study of anything, they are initially going to have some very wrong ideas about its nature. For instance, let's look at Sugata Mitra's experiment about the computer in the wall.  The children initially tinkered around with the device, not knowing much about it, and displayed some wrong ideas with regard to how it worked.  After some time, manipulation, collaboration, and study, they began to understand it more and more until they were able to operate it about as well as any other laymen.  Are we to say that just because they were very wrong at the beginning, and there understanding has changed so much since, their present understanding will also prove to be very wrong and will change just as drastically in the future?  Of course not.  And the same is true with humans general study of natural phenomena.  We truly are understanding the world much more accurately, so our technologically abilities and predictive powers should also be increasing at about the same rate).

Hopefully, I'll be able to respond to the other points in full, but free time is a virtue at this moment.

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