Tag Archives: society

Divided we stand

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The BC, Canada election is over… almost. There are two recounts and enough close battles that we need to wait another week to have the late arriving mail-in votes get counted.

If things don’t change, the New Democratic Party, at 46 electoral seats, will be the minority leaders with 47 seats needed for a majority. The Green Party with their 2 seats will actually have some significant influence to ensure the minority government can actually get things done.

Over 2 million people voted and that represented over 57% of those eligible to vote. There was only a 1% gap between the two leading parties.

As I look to the south, I see another election coming, and another close race with a divided vote in November. Having at least 2 strong parties is a good thing in a democracy, but having both be as strong as they are can create havoc when actually trying to get things done.

This divisiveness we are seeing is baffling to me. It’s like our provinces, states, and countries have split personalities. Dichotomies to an extreme.

But if the mail in votes change things up here in BC, I don’t think we’ll see civil unrest. There might be more recounts, but there will also be a peaceful transfer of power. I don’t see the same thing happening down south. I hope I’m wrong.

Divided we stand, I hope we don’t fall.

Surrounded by Fixed Mindsets

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One of the most powerful things we can do is to steadfastly hold an opinion, receive new information… and change our minds. This is what school board member Courtney Gore did:

A GOP Texas school board member campaigned against schools indoctrinating kids. Then she read the curriculum.

“Gore, the co-host of a far-right online talk show, had promised that she would be a strong Republican voice on the nonpartisan school board. Citing “small town, conservative Christian values,” she pledged to inspect educational materials for inappropriate messages about sexuality and race and remove them from every campus in the 7,700-student Granbury Independent School District, an hour southwest of Fort Worth. “Over the years our American Education System has been hijacked by Leftists looking to indoctrinate our kids into the ‘progressive’ way of thinking, and yes, they’ve tried to do this in Granbury ISD,” she wrote in a September 2021 Facebook post, two months before the election. “I cannot sit by and watch their twisted worldview infiltrate Granbury ISD.”

But after taking office and examining hundreds of pages of curriculum, Gore was shocked by what she found — and didn’t find.

The pervasive indoctrination she had railed against simply did not exist. Children were not being sexualized, and she could find no examples of critical race theory, an advanced academic concept that examines systemic racism. She’d examined curriculum related to social-emotional learning, which has come under attack by Christian conservatives who say it encourages children to question gender roles and prioritizes feelings over biblical teachings. Instead, Gore found the materials taught children “how to be a good friend, a good human.”

Gore rushed to share the news with the hard-liners who had encouraged her to run for the seat. She expected them to be as relieved and excited as she had been. But she said they were indifferent, even dismissive, because “it didn’t fit the narrative that they were trying to push.”

To learn new information that ‘doesn’t fit your narrative’, and then to change your mind and take a new stance… this is learning. This is a growth mindset. This is what we need in the world.

But if you read or listen to the full article, you’d learn that Courtney Gore’s new outlook led to threats against her and her family’s lives. It’s hard to change your mind, even harder to change the minds of people with fixed mindsets.

Fixed mindset thinking is why I spoke out before our last School Trustee election. It’s why our votes matter in every election. It’s why we need to pay attention to civic positions of power and not just provincial or federal elections. Fixed mindsets threaten learning and common sense… and can ultimately limit our rights and freedoms. At least here in Canada it’s less likely for guns and threats of violence to be the part of the consequence of fighting a fixed mindset. So we really don’t have an excuse.

Confidence and Arrogance

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I bet you think you can tell the difference between confidence and arrogance. But you are wrong. You are biased. If you take offence to that, don’t worry, you aren’t the only one, I’m biased too.

Disagree? Think you can tell the difference?

Sure you can when it’s obvious. But it’s not always obvious.

We have gender biases about what confidence looks like. Age biases. Cultural biases. Friend group biases.

We even have beauty biases… tell me you don’t judge a pretty or handsome person who finds themselves attractive confident, while someone you deem less attractive sharing the same view of themselves being attractive as more arrogant than confident. Why can’t they be confident too? Or, oddly enough, this could be inversely true with the attractive person’s confidence seeming more like arrogance. Or it could be deemed confident for an 8 year old and arrogant for an 18 or 28 year old.

Yes, there is a big difference between confidence and arrogance, but be careful to judge too quickly… or too arrogantly. Confidence can be a superpower, but it’s also fragile. We shouldn’t be too quick to judge others who are confident, or to attack confidence as if it is arrogance.

We tell people it is important to be humble all the time, but we admire confidence more than we admire humility. Are they just showing humility or are they shy? Or are they not confident when they should be? Is it arrogance if they know they are good at what they do and show confidence rather than humility?

It’s all judgement calls. And as I mentioned before, when it’s obvious, it’s obvious, but I think we are more judgemental than we think we are. When judging confidence versus arrogance, we shouldn’t be too confident about our judgement… unless we want to show our own arrogance.

All Alone

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“And the waitress is practicing politics 
As the businessmen slowly get stoned 
Yes, they’re sharing a drink they call loneliness 
But it’s better than drinkin’ alone”

Billy Joel, Piano Man

I have always been someone that enjoys alone time. Getting up at 5am and appreciating the quiet of the morning is a comfort for me. But I’m blessed with a wonderful family and I get a lot of social time too. For me, being alone is about quiet time, thinking time, and working out.

For others alone time feels more like isolation. It’s time spent wanting to connect and be with others. Here, the internet is both a tool for good and evil. Some use it to connect, they find groups with interests like theirs and join communities. Others use it to escape loneliness. They can play games, and connect with strangers, watch livestreams, and escape into movies and whole seasons of a tv show. This isn’t always good because it can feed an addiction to things that are really only distractions.

Others are less social and less kind. They are hurt by their feelings of isolation and they use the internet to lash out at the world. Negative comments, hate, and misogyny are ways that they weaponize their contribution to the internet. Their only ‘likes’ are for people who are equally as upset and angry as them. Anyone else feels their wrath.

Their loneliness breeds hate, which is shared in embarrassingly rude comments. Comments which do not add value and actually attack or insult others. The internet becomes a conduit for them to show that they are disgruntled with the world. Some just see this as harmless fun. Others see it as an avenue to vent their unhappiness.

This is fed by ‘influencers’ like Andrew Tate, who embolden these loners and help them feel more aggressive, and powerful, and less like a victim. These lonely followers need an alternative community to join. Countering them and attacking their views emboldens their stance. It’s easy to spread hate when you feel hated. They won’t change because there are counter arguments against them. Instead they need a new place to feel connected and less alone.

But that’s not the way they are dealt with. There is a new approach, similar to what we see when dealing with ‘Karens’. Expose them and ridicule them. No space given for an apology, no opportunity for learning and growth. No, find someone acting mean and ‘out’ them for the assholes that they are.

It’s easy, it feels like justice. But is it? Or is it just punishment? Where is there room for restoration or apology? Even apologies are attacked. No response is worthy. No room for forgiveness. No response to help remove the loneliness and isolation, and so the misguided and disconnected are thrown further into isolation.

How we treat lonely, misguided, unhappy, and alone individuals who are using the internet as a soap box to magnify that they are hurting, this will determine their response. If we become vigilantes it might feel good to us, but then we are only magnifying the problem. We are creating greater isolation and more angry responses. We are feeding the hurt and magnifying the negative response. We are making them feel more alone.

We need to find a different approach. We need to find ways to connect, and to provide a space for learning. We need to find ways to be intolerant to spreading hate, yet still find a place to be kind and supportive.

Like the song lyrics suggest, ‘sharing a drink called loneliness is better than drinking alone’. And if we aren’t sharing that drink, less desirable role models will.

Resilience building

I mentioned this in my post yesterday about Generation X, “for the most part this is a generation that is tough, tolerant, and resilient. Resilience is something I see a lot of younger generations struggling with.”

Here are a few ways I see a lack of resilience in students today:

• Feedback is viewed too critically. Comments on achievement or performance are taken personally, as if constructive feedback on an outcome is a personal attack on the person. “You could have done a better job with…” is interpreted as, “You are a failure”. There is little or no separation between feedback on a presentation or product and feedback on personal identity, all critical feedback feels like an attack.

In my role as a principal I recently gave some behavioural feedback to a student who later emailed me and said among other things, “I’m not a bad person.” At no time did I ever say or believe this person was bad, just making poor choices. It didn’t matter to the student that I separated the behavior out as the issue, it was still taken as a personal attack.

• Hurt feelings are not handled well. Words are treated like physical attacks. There is limited separation between minor and major harm. This can come across in many ways, but essentially the old ‘sticks and stones‘ nursery rhyme has been turned around and sounds more like, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will always harm me more.”

Now I’m not a proponent of the ideas that words don’t hurt. Social bullying can be far more brutal than a physical fight which ends in 20 seconds, and taunting and continuous verbal attacks can be devastating to deal with… But when a simple moment of teasing between friends is seen as just as hurtful as a verbal assault from a bully with a power differential between the bully and the victim, then there is a problem. When words instantly hurt and the scale of impact is always high, there is a definite issue of lack of resilience.

• Self loathing. Self talk like, “I’m not good enough.” Or, “It’s too hard.” Or simply, “I can’t!” …All get in the way of effort. There seems to be a (legitimate) struggle with the mental aspect of doing hard things. I added ‘(legitimate)’ because I’m not trying to say that the person is just quitting, rather there seems to be a mental roadblock that some students face which gets in the way of successful work.

This is very hard to deal with as a teacher. It comes across as the student being lazy, or distracted, or even defiant. But it’s not so much that the students doesn’t want to, they just really don’t know how to frame the work in a way that makes it a priority. I think this is a resilience issue too. When hard things are avoided rather than faced over and over again, the work of doing something hard becomes too difficult to face, and what gets defined as hard becomes less and less difficult over time.

I can’t put my finger on the causes for the lack of resilience I’m seeing today? It can be a trifecta of parenting, technology distraction, and media influences, or maybe just cultural norms? But we need to start thinking about resilience building as a teachable outcome.

Failure is not getting a bad result, failure is accepting a bad result without learning the hard lessons about what didn’t work. Failure is not seeking out the support to do better next time. Failure is a lack of reflection and feedback about how to improve. Failure is a lack of resilience, and resilience is something that isn’t strengthened without hearing hard things, and feeling hurt, or discouraged, or disappointed, and both working though and overcoming the difficulty.

Resilience is built, it is earned, it isn’t bestowed. It’s tough to toughen up. If it was easy it wouldn’t actually build resilience.

Broken models

Here are two things that are broken and need fixing. Neither of them have an easy fix. Neither of them will be fixed any time soon. I don’t pretend to have answers. I don’t know who has answers or if they can be solved in my lifetime?

1. The shareholder model of ownership. When companies act on behalf of shareholders they do not act on behalf of customers or employees. The shareholder only cares about profit and gains, and those come at the expense of workers and end-users.

2. Religious zealots. Every religion has good people of faith who live good lives and are sincerely wonderful people. But that doesn’t make all religions equal. Some religions allow for the truly faithful, those following the faith devoutly, to do bad things in the name of God. That’s a broken system. It has removed the purpose of the faith away from the benefit of humanity.

Both systems are entrenched in tradition. Both models create bad incentives that do not serve the public good. Both of these will outlive me. Again, I don’t have answers. I just know that the models are broken.

We aren’t getting rid of shareholders, we aren’t getting rid of religion. How do we reduce the bad incentives? How do you tell a shareholder that their returns should be lower so that employees are better paid, or consumers should get a more affordable price at their expense? How do you tell a person willing to martyr themselves for the glory of God, and their righteous place in heaven, that they should be kind to everyone regardless of faith while they are here on earth?

Again, I don’t know? What I do know is that greed and blind faith are evil, broken parts of systems that need to change. Because everyone suffers in a world where these broken models continue.

High versus low trust societies

I love when someone adds to my perspective on social media. That’s exactly what happened after I posted Basic assumptions a couple days ago. The post reflected that, “people no longer give each other the benefit of the doubt that intentions are good. This used to be a basic assumption we operated on, the premise that we can start with the belief that everyone is acting in good faith.”

I shared the post on Twitter and Chris Kalaboukis and I had the following conversation thread:

Chris: Reading your post: could we be transitioning from a high-trust to a low-trust society?

Dave: Yes, that seems like an appropriate conclusion. Is there an author that speaks of this idea?

Chris: Not that I can recall, however, if you look at the attributes of low-trust societies you see a lot of what is happening now.

Dave: So true! The circle of high trust seems to be shrinking and it really seems like a step backwards… tribalism trumps the collective of a greater community.

Chris: It is. It seems that even our institutions are driving us towards more tribalism and division.

Dave: And how do you suppose we correct this course? I honestly don’t have a clue, and see things getting worse before they get better.

Chris: I think that in reality, most people prefer to live in a high-trust society. We need leaders and media who support that vision.

Dave: I think the biggest problem right now is that most leaders do not want to step into a limelight where both social media and news outlets are only interested in focussing on the dirt. It seems everyone is measured by their worst transgressions, regardless of many positive deeds.

Chris: If it bleeds it leads. we’ve never been able to communicate with more people at the same time but the only communication which seems to get through is negative. It’s all about keeping your attention to sell more ads.

Dave: I sound like quite the pessimist, that’s not usually my stance on things, but I do struggle to see a way forward from here.

—–

The idea Chris shared that we could be ‘transitioning from a high-trust to a low-trust society’ seems insightful and really intrigues me. It isn’t happening at just one level, but many!

• Scam phone calls and emails are perfect examples. We used to operate from a position of trust, but now unknown calls and unsolicited emails are all necessarily met with skepticism.

• Sensationalized news leads with misleading headlines that are more about getting attention and clicks than about providing truthful news. And if the news slant doesn’t match your beliefs, it’s ‘fake news’.

• Sales pitches and advertising promises almost everything under the sun, you aren’t buying a product with a basic function, you are buying a product that is going to change your life or transform how you do ‘X’, or use ‘Y’… your results will surprise you and you’ll be amazed!

• If you are even slightly left wing you are ‘woke’ or ‘Antifa’ in the most derogatory way you can use these words. If you are even slightly right wing you are ‘Alt-right’ and racist. No one gets to sit on a spectrum, you are either viewed as an extreme on one or the other side. And even agreeing on one topic on the other side makes you less trustworthy on your side.

These are but a few ways we’ve become a lower-trust society. Ad hominem and straw man attacks get more attention than sound arguments. A well said lie is easily shared while complex truths are not. Saying a situation is complex and sharing nuance does not make for catchy sound bites, and aren’t going to go viral on TikTok, or Instagram Reels. No, but the snarky personal attack will, as will a one-sided, extreme view that packs a powerful punch.

What’s worse is that moderate voices get shut out. And in general many people feel silenced or would rather not share a view that is even slightly controversial. So the extreme voices get even more airtime and attention.

I feel this often. Writing every day, and sometimes picking controversial topics to discuss, I find myself tiptoeing and treading very carefully. I said in my Twitter conversation with Chris above, “It seems everyone is measured by their worst transgressions, regardless of many positive deeds.” I sometimes wonder what one thing I’m going to say is going to get blown out of proportion? If I write one single inappropriate or strongly biased phrase, will it define me? Will it undermine the 1,500+ posts that I’ve written, and make me out to be something or someone I’m not?

This sounds paranoid, but I wrote one post a few years ago that a friend private messaged me about, then called me and said I’d gone too far with my opinion on a specific point. I totally saw his point, went back and adjusted my post to tone it down… but I feel like that one issue, that one strong and overly biased opinion shared publicly put a rift in our friendship. And that’s someone I respect, not some stranger coming at me, not someone that doesn’t know my true character. My opinion in his eyes is now less trustworthy, and holds less value. That said, I appreciated the feedback, and respect that he took the time to share it privately. That’s rare these days.

The path forward is not easy. We aren’t just swaying slightly towards a less trustworthy society, we are on a full pendulum swing away from a more trustworthy society. Tribalism, nationalism, and extremism are pulling our world apart. Who do you trust? What institutions? Which governments? Who do you consider a neighbour? Who will you break bread with? Who do you believe?

The circles of trust are getting smaller, and the mechanisms to share bias and misinformation are growing. We are devolving into a less trusting society or rather societies, and it’s undermining our sense of community. We need messages of kindness, love, and peace to prevail. We need tolerance, acceptance, and more than anything trustworthy institutions and leaders. We need moderates and centrists to voice compromise and minimize extremist views. We need to rebuild a high trust society… together.

The task of education today

This quote was shared with us in our Principals meeting yesterday:

“This is the task of education today: to confront the almost unimaginable design challenge of building an education system that provides for the re-creation of civilization during a world system transition. This challenge brings us face to face with the importance of education for humanity and the basic questions that structure education as a human endeavor.” ~Zachary Stein

One of our Assistant Superintendent’s added, “We are trying to build a utopian society in triage conditions.”

There is no doubt that it is much harder to be an educator today than it was when I started my career over 25 years ago. And as we navigate ‘building an education system that provides for the re-creation of civilization during a world system transition,’ we are bound to struggle a bit. How do we mark assignments that are written or co-written by AI? What skills are going to be needed for the top jobs of 2030? How different will that be for 2040?

Ultimately we want to support the education of students who will become kind, contributing citizens. But how do we do this in a world where Truth seems arbitrary to the sources you get it from, and politicians, religion, and corporations are all pushing conflicting information and agendas? I think this goes beyond just working on competencies like critical thinking. It requires mental gymnastics that most adults struggle with.

Meanwhile, the majority of school schedules still put students into blocks of time based on the subjects they are learning. “Let’s think critically, and do challenging problems, but only in this one narrow field of study.” We aren’t meeting the design challenges we face today if that’s what we continue to do.

More than ever students, future citizens, need to understand complex issues from multiple perspectives. They need to understand nuance, and navigate when to defend an idea, when to compromise, and when to avoid engagement altogether. They need to be prepared to say “I don’t know,” and then do the hard work of finding out, when the accuracy of information is incomplete or even suspect. They need to be prepared to say, “I was wrong,” and “I am sorry,” and also be prepared to stick to their convictions and defend ideas that aren’t always the accepted norm.

That’s not the future I prepared students for 25 years ago. It is indeed an ‘almost unimaginable design challenge‘, and as we navigate new challenges we have to recognize that mistakes will be made… but not changing is far scarier than trying.

The mischaracterization of the Metaverse

“The Metaverse is already here.” That’s the insight that never really occurred to me until I heard Mustafa Suleyman, Google’s Deep Mind Co-founder, on The Diary of a CEO podcast with Steven Bartlett.

“You know, the last three years people have been talking about Metaverse, Metaverse, Metaverse. And the mischaracterization of the Metaverse was that it’s over there. It was this like virtual world that we would all bop around in and talk to each other as these little characters, but that was totally wrong. That was a complete miss-framing. The Metaverse is already here. It’s the digital space that exists in parallel time to our everyday life. It’s the conversation that you will have on Twitter or, you know, the video that you’ll post on YouTube, or this podcast that will go out and connect with other people. It’s that meta-space of interaction, you know, and I use meta to mean ‘beyond this space’, not just that weird other, ‘over there’, space that people seem to point to.”

We are already in the Metaverse, I’m in the same room as my daughter right now. She’s watching a movie, I’m writing on my phone. We are entered into parallel universes, physically together but disconnected. We are both in spaces, on screens, beyond the physical space we are in.

Before hearing this quote, I thought of the Metaverse as something in the future, like the ‘fitless humans‘ from the movie WALL•E.

We are already there. We have iPads babysit (or at least occupy the attention of) our kids. We rage about stupid things on Twitter and YouTube. We share content with people we have never met, and they share content with us. We are influenced by influencers. We buy things from virtual stores. We play games with people in different time zones.

The Metaverse is already here creating parallel experiences to the ones we physically experience… It’s not something we are heading towards. We are already living a good part of our lives, ‘in spaces beyond the physical space we are in‘. Sometimes it’s hard to see the forest through the trees, or in this case the spaces beyond our screens.

Monkey brains

I remember seeing a video clip where Neil deGrasse Tyson was talking about the possibility of alien life. He said that when you consider the intelligence difference between humans and chimpanzee DNA is just 1% (actually closer to 3%, but the point is still valid)… how much smarter could aliens be if they had an even bigger DNA difference to us? It could be possible that alien life forms could be so intelligent that we seem like chimpanzees or even chickens in comparison. ‘Oh look, those human teens are learning simple algebra, how adorable.‘

So aliens might see us as quite simple life forms in comparison to themselves. This could also happen with Artificial Intelligence here on earth. Maybe one day we create an intelligent identity that thinks of us as simple-minded. I shared this idea before that man will never invent artificial intelligence that is ‘as smart as’ humans. The moment an AI is as smart as us, it will instantaneously be smarter than us. When we get to that threshold, the AI will instantly be a lot smarter. It will be as smart as us but also faster at mathematical calculations, faster at solving puzzles, and could also be stronger than us, see better than us, and would definitely have a better vocabulary than us.

We are amazing creatures. We are at the pinnacle of intelligence on planet earth. We are also still quite barbaric. We fight over land, we don’t feed everyone despite having enough food. We take unnecessary risks with our lives, and we even kill one another. We live tribal lives, and while we use tools and technology in ways that far exceeds what any other living thing can do on this planet, our achievements could be minor on a cosmic scale.

We have no way of visiting a distant planet in a single lifespan. We act like parasites on earth, spreading wildly, and killing the planet as we overpopulate large parts of both hospitable and even inhospitable land… meanwhile displacing key animals on the food chain. We are slightly intelligent life forms, with monkey brains.

If we ever come across aliens, they will probably be a lot smarter than us. If we ever create as-smart-as-human intelligent life it will instantaneously be smarter-than-human. In both cases we will move from being the smartest of animals to being less intelligent, and maybe less significant, than another intelligent form.

Still, so far we are the smartest monkeys. It’s just too bad that we do so many dumb things.