Leaving Anhedonia

Moving the Needle

Life is at its essence the ongoing struggle to move the needle. Something inside us or in the hostile external world or in the corrupt political environment must be not only be shaken but mightily pushed into a direction that promises hope, progress, and overall improvement of some sickly condition. 

History is a compendium of people who moved the needle. 

In the spiritual world, Jesus moved the emphasis from outward piety to focusing on the secrets of the heart. 

Paul moved the emphasis from religious tribalism to religious universalism. 

People without scruples appropriated Jesus and Paul’s teachings for their own political ends. They in effect moved the needle to amass power. 

In the modern world, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg changed the way we use gadgets, which in turned radically altered not only the way we communicate with others but with the metrics for gauging our self-worth and social approval. 

Inventors of transportation move the needle. 

Inventors of vaccines move the needle.

So do misinformation trolls, online mountebanks, and populist political hacks.

Roger Aisles turned a news network into an alt-right propaganda machine so that crackpot conspiracies became mainstreamed into the minds of millions, and this moved the needle in American politics. 

When we talk about moving the needle, especially in the realm of politics, there is debate about the Pendulum Effect or the Irreversible Change Effect. Does a reality star mountebank who stirs nativist prejudice represent the pendulum shift reacting to liberal democracy or does this impostor represent permanent damage to a democratic institution? 

Whether these types of authoritarian impulses are pendulum shifts or represent some kind of recalcitrant evil, these impulses are met with fierce resistance. A lot of news and political commentary at present is about how this fierce resistance appears to fail in its objective to move the needle. Life is an endurance test: How long does one resist before shriveling in the face of apathy? What glimmers of hope might fuel the fight for change? How much hope is needed? 

People who stave off apathy and hopelessness by providing persuasive evidence that resistance is working are moving the needle. 

Wisdom is knowing the difference between effective efforts to move the needle and self-destructive ones. The definition of a self-destructive attempt to move the needle is anything that is a diversion from the real task of moving the needle and believing that this diversion is a desirable path toward real change and happiness. As a case in point, we can accumulate “friends,” “likes” and the endorphin-buzz of hundreds of comments for our Instagram and Facebook posts but remain the emotional dumpster fire we were before we went online. We failed therefore to move the needle. 

Based on the life of William Randolph Hearst, the movie Citizen Kane is about a rich man who tried to move the needle inside his broken heart by accumulating things, including safari animals. He failed to move the needle. He died in despair. Today zebra herds run through Pismo Beach. 

When we talk about moving the needle, we can refer to any earth-shaking experience that permanently changes our behavior. We may switch from instant to fresh-roast coffee. We may become vegetarians. We may quit eating sugar and gluten. Or we may change our name and identity and become someone who is unrecognizable to ourselves and the world. 

Moving the needle refers to significant change in our values, priorities, and desires, and our behavior reflects that change. When a racist demagogue troll was elected president, I found I could no longer enjoy my lifetime passion of watching sports. 

My reaction to a troll being elected to the highest level of office was visceral alarm and disgust. I listened to people smarter than I am articulate what happened and what likely outcomes we could expect. 

I waited for others to see the horror that many of us saw, but for two years I waited in vain. 

Moving the needle therefore is about persuading people who are diametrically opposed to what we value. Most people, even the brightest of us cannot do this. Most smart people can find an audience of the like-minded, the Kool-Aid drinkers who already exist in our chosen bubble sealed with our cognitive biases and virtue signaling. 

But it is the rare person who punctures the bubble of the opposition and makes a persuasive case that the people in that opposing bubble are intellectually and morally wrong in a deep fundamental way that makes them so uncomfortable they feel compelled to get out of their bubble and start their lives over from scratch. 

Self-interest bordering on the pathological condition of narcissism seems to be the main reason it so impossible to persuade people. A salient example is the aftermath of the Civil War. The Southern whites had to give up slavery, which by all accounts was a moral abomination, but those whites were not focused on the depth of their sins. Rather, they were focused on their wounded self-esteem, which compelled them to rewrite the historical narrative so that the Civil War was about state rights and Northern aggression. The cruelty of slavery was replaced with the Lost Cause narrative, which says whites were engaged in a noble quest to rule over other races, but their quest was crushed by a corrupt world. 

This narrative informed by narcissism allows champions of Jim Crow and segregation to be erected into venerated statues. Public schools and street signs are named after these same figures. Championing racism, the Confederate flag is brandished atop people’s homes. There is no shame in the history of slavery, only pride and unrepentance. Rather than see slavery for the evil that it is, the narrative is about “family honor,” which is code for narcissism.

We see this same narcissism in the election of a racist troll to the presidency. This racist troll locks up children in cages where the children, separated from their parents, are mired in filth. The troll and his followers feel no shame for this human rights violation. To the contrary, they are proud that their policy “makes America great again.” 

In the face of such evil and human degradation, we can see that narcissism is an effective repellent to moving the needle. 

Narcissism of course isn’t only a repellent in moving the needle in the realm of politics and civil rights. Narcissism repels personal change. So many of our attempts at self-improvement are not really self-improvement at all, but manifestations of narcissism. Fame, a book deal, a high profile on TV, being deemed important, feeling relevant--all these desires stem from a broken insecure self. Ironically enough, when we stop trying to move the needle in the realms for wealth and fame is when we’ve actually moved the needle. 

 

Pros & Cons of Scaffolding Essays in a College Composition Class

One of the choices I have to make as a college writing instructor is how I decide to spend time in class. My classes are two hours twice a week for my freshman composition classes and  90 minutes twice a week for my critical thinking classes.

The traditional way to spend class time is through lecture and have students write their 5 typed essay out of class.

However, we have computer labs and Chromebook carts so that if we want to, we can have students type their essays, piece by piece, in the classroom.

Having the students write their essay in steps: Introduction paragraph, thesis paragraph, body paragraphs, counterargument paragraphs, and conclusion, is called scaffolding.

You scaffold your essay. As a noun, scaffold is a framework for a stage or a platform. As a verb, you’re building something piece by piece.

There are compelling reasons to have my students scaffold their essays in class.

One, most students are not experienced in composing essays, and they are overwhelmed at the task of writing an essay from scratch. It’s more helpful if they build the essay brick by brick with my supervision.

Two, most of my students work, get very little sleep, and have very little free time. Having the opportunity to write their essays in class is almost necessary.

Three, many of my students lack a quiet place to write.

Four, many of my students lack the time management skills to write the essay in stages. Too many, if left to their own devices, will procrastinate and type something in a rush just to turn it in. This whipping something up at the last minute is contrary to the main purpose of a college composition class: to learn how to labor over the writing method piece by piece.

In spite of these compelling reasons to have students scaffold their essays in the classroom, there are some challenges:

One, a lot of students lack the maturity to focus on the task at hand; they’ll text on their phones, they’ll gossip with classmates, they’ll leave the classroom to use their phones; they’ll stay in class for twenty minutes and then leave; essentially they will abuse the time I’ve allotted to help them be more productive.

As a counter to that, I have to make the students print out a hard copy of the writing task for every day in class and have them turn in that hard copy in a portfolio the next class day. I cannot accept late work for the portfolio because many students will simply print out everything at the end of the semester and thereby curtail the mission of learning the writing process piece by piece.  

Two, some students, about 10-20%, will be too advanced for this scaffolding process, and they’ll get bored. I have to apply the utilitarian principle for this one: The greatest good for the greatest number of people. Since 80-90% of my students will benefit more from scaffolding, I need to move my classroom method in that direction.

Three, another challenge from scaffolding is that I’m not so much a lecturer as I am a curator of writing. I’m walking around the class and helping students one by one. I’m no longer the ham, the performer.

My answer to that challenge is that the class isn’t about me, it’s not about my ego, it’s not about my wish-fulfillment fantasy to be a comedian or whatever. It’s about helping my students. I’m willing to cut down on the performance if the class can be more beneficial to my students.

Imagine yourself taking a composition class. Would you rather be lectured twice a week for two hours or would you rather scaffold your essays brick by brick?

My guess is that most of you would prefer to skip the lecture, roll up your sleeves, and get into the writing.

Do We Really Need English Professors?

Artificial Intelligence Presents Existential Threat to English Professors

Recently, I attended an English meeting where one of my colleagues showed us three websites that use algorithms that can paraphrase passages that are not detected by plagiarism-detection software such as turnitin. This same colleague said he had seen a spike in students who were cobbling together essays by pasting these paraphrased passages together and presenting them as original essays.

Even though they passed detection at turnitin, these essays had telltale signs of being plagiarized; the word choice and writing style were “fishy,” and under questioning, the students confessed for their crime of intellectual thievery.

Some students claimed they didn’t know they were committing plagiarism because the websites advertise themselves as being “anti-plagiarism” so that the students believed they were using a writing aid that helped them not commit plagiaristic offenses.

At the meeting, we all agreed that our anti-plagiarism software is becoming worthless as A.I. is getting better and better.

In fact, A.I. is getting so effective, it’s not long before students can take any essay prompt and A.I. will write an “original” essay for them.

Let us for a moment imagine that such A.I exists. A student can have any essay prompt, no matter how complexly written, and compose an essay that will be received as an original student essay even when it is not.

Now let us also imagine that A.I. exists so that professors don’t need to grade essays. A.I. can do a far better job, and do so in a way that is more beneficial to the student.

If A.I. reaches this level of sophistication in the realm of writing and grading, then suddenly English instructors like myself have to face the existential question: Why do I exist?

I ask this because it seems that technology is threatening the very existence of English instructors in three major ways.

First, technology is creating an environment in which Artificial Intelligence-generated writing will be preferred over human writing because speed and efficiency will prove more valuable than a human laboring over a text. This type of labor will be time-consuming and reduce productivity compared to the speed of A.I.

Second, technology is shortening our attention span so that the kind of longer texts that writing professors teach are becoming less and less relevant.

And third, technology creates a metric such as Rate My Professor that modifies professors’ behavior in ways that deviates from traditional teaching methods.

Let us first look at Artificial Intelligence-generated writing. We have reached a point in technology where people don’t need to learn the craft of writing because A.I. can do it for them.

Let’s take the example of students graduating college and going off to work in business or advertising. Their boss gives them a memo; these employees can use A.I. to both interpret the text they are given and have A.I. produce a written response to that memo.

Most likely, A.I. would reduce longer memos and texts to bullet points, simplified versions. These simplified responses will be encouraged because A.I. will expedite both the speed and accuracy of getting these tasks completed.  

As human beings, we adapt to our environment. If A.I. is more efficient and accurate for interpreting and writing business memos and other types of writing, then the craft of writing won’t be needed as it has been traditionally believed.

This tendency to reduce everything to bullet points is contrary to the writing instructor’s desire to teach students how to interpret long texts. For example, is difficult to conceive teaching the 500-page Autobiography of Malcolm X or Charles Dickens’ 700-page masterpiece Bleak House or the 700-page unabridged Norton edition of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick in a world where everything is being reduced to bullet points.

Some may argue that a college graduate should be more than someone who is just a worker bot manipulating A.I. As a college English instructor, I’m supposed to help college students reach a baseline of linguistic acquisition, communication, and argumentative skills. These are supposed to be essential assets for a valuable employee. But if an employee can show his value by managing A.I. and achieving success based on metrics, speed, and accuracy, then most likely we will radically alter our definition of what it means to be literate for the job.

Literacy will no longer be showing the skills to interpret a long text and to write a cogent report of that text, but to implement A.I. when necessary to get comprehend and write texts as efficiently as possible.

Expedience and technological currency, not literacy, will be the premium at work.

The second existential threat to college writing instructors is the tendency In the last decade or so, to shorten our attention span by presenting everything in an abbreviated form. Often, longer material is  reduced to bullet points.

Take The Daily Beast online news magazine. It takes long news pieces and condenses them into a list of top trending news stories. You can click on the original news site if you want to, but most people are content with The Daily Beast’s abbreviated or condensed paraphrase of the longer article.

Take Twitter. We can scroll through a series of headlines and soundbites without reading the actual article. In fact, over time our brain prefers to skim than to read because the human brain’s default setting is always set on the path to least resistance.

Some will argue that the value of a professor and an employee is beyond some metric that you will find on a popular website for students, Rate My Professor. Those metrics, some would argue, pale in comparison to the  intangibles: charisma, humor, story-telling, historical context, irony, and so on, and these things enrich others.

Of course, this is true.

But in an age of algorithms, we place less value on intangibles and more value on metrics.

My self-worth is now tied to how many followers I have on this or that social media.

My social and professional status are likewise connected to some kind of metric.

For example, I am a college teacher. My boss told us at a meeting that the number one mechanism students use to sign up for a class is Rate My Professor.

The easier you are with your grading and the less homework you give, the higher your ratings will be. Classes fill up based on positive Rate My Professor rankings. Classes fail to make the mandatory minimum of 20 students based on those ratings as well. We can be certain that over time that Rate My Professor is an effective form of behavior modification. Professors won’t wake up and suddenly be easy graders. But compromises in their grading and teaching standards will happen gradually.

We are now at a crossroads at college writing. Soon Artificial Intelligence will be able to write any essay, interpret any long, legal text, and grade any paper.

Soon Artificial Intelligence will be able to navigate a thorny legal problem better than any attorney.

We don’t have Rate My Attorney yet. But we do have attorney Yelp reviews.

These online metric systems influence our behavior and define what it means to be successful.

College writing instructors are going to have to stay current with the technology; otherwise, we will be be fossilized skeletons of some lost era when the craft of reading and writing existed without the aid of Artificial Intelligence.  

7 Takeaways About My College Students:

 

1. Most of my students are decent people trying to play by society’s rules so they can climb the economic ladder.
2. Most of my students show up to class with a chronic sleep deficit.
3. Most of my students don’t have big chunks of time to flourish in college so much as grit their teeth and squeeze in college with the rest of their frantic schedule.
4. Most of my students live in a state of constant financial insecurity.
5. Most of my students are playing academic catch-up to make up for wasted time in high school.
6. The cumulative effect of the above pressure points makes most of my students feel constantly stressed and exhausted, a condition they face with a mix of stoicism and depression. 
7. The state of affairs described above has gotten progressively worse since I started teaching college in the 1980s.

Is the Future a Doomsday Scenario, Or Am I Being Chicken Little?

Chicken Little said, "The Sky Is Falling" and became a symbol of the pessimist who creates self-fulfilling prophecies. On one hand, I don't want to be Chicken Little; on the other hand, I should unleash my angst and not pent it up, right?

Let us proceed then. Here are my concerns about the future, especially as the future pertains to technology:

Loss Free Will: When AI does the job better than we do in terms of making decisions for career, entertainment, going to college, dating, romance, marriage, health, diet, etc. We will lose our free will.

 

Loss of Individual Relevance: When AI creates cognitive machines that can replace highly trained people resulting in mass unemployment, will we lose our relevance as individuals?

 

Loss of Truth and Shared Reality: When trolls who have learned to weaponize misinformation can create false realities that get more traction than the truth so that when we try to counter lies with the truth we feel like we’re shouting in a hurricane.

 

Loss of Civil Discourse and Critical Thinking: When weaponized misinformation takes over as in the case of Anti-Vaxxers, will we just join our political tribes and war against each other with no critical thinking skills or civic discourse?

11 Challenges to Our Happiness for 2019

One. Structural inequality continues to grow in areas of education, housing, healthcare leading to a shrinking middle class.

Two. A shrinking middle class leads to a kind of anxiety that makes populations elect nationalist demagogues in high political positions, which exacerbates class and political warfare.

Three. Young people have a gun to their head to go into college debt with fewer good job prospects and a high probability of having to live with their parents well into their thirties.

Four. Constant schooling and working overtime makes people too tired for friendship and romance so they capitulate to posting a few pics on Instagram.

Five. Constant schooling and working overtime just to stay afloat makes people sleep deprived.

Six. Because of the rising cost of housing, having a college degree may not be enough protection from homelessness and a dangerous lack of medical coverage.

Seven. Because of rising automation, more and more jobs are disappearing, which may usher UBI (Universal Basic Income) and render individuals meaningless and irrelevant to society.

Eight. Due to time constraints, more and more people rely on social media to build a sense of connection and self-esteem when studies show that social media activity can actually cause serious disconnection and fragmentation of self.

Nine. Society is becoming more polarized with fake news being embraced as real news and people becoming polarized and siloed in their social media groups, resulting in distrust and possible violence.

Ten. Yuval Noah Harari in his book Sapiens cites studies that show a link between money and happiness (381) and if fewer and fewer people have money, then there will be less happiness, not because money is intrinsically good, but because having money can create a buffer between people and fear and anxiety.

Eleven. Social media, TV, movies, and consumerism create inflated expectations for happiness and an unrealistic portrait of what defines the Perfect Self. When we fall short of this perfection, be it making money or achieving physical beauty, we may fall to self-loathing, self-hatred, self-rejection and feel like we are failures. Unrealistic expectations lead to unhappiness. This problem is explained in Will Storr’s book Selfie.

Institutional depravity has become a persistent pestilence in American politics

George Packer in The Atlantic makes a convincing case that the Republican Party has become the party of institutionalized depravity, and this explains why we are in such a crisis and have a criminal in the White House:

The corruption I mean has less to do with individual perfidy than institutional depravity. It isn’t an occasional failure to uphold norms, but a consistent repudiation of them. It isn’t about dirty money so much as the pursuit and abuse of power—power as an end in itself, justifying almost any means. Political corruption usually trails financial scandals in its wake—the foam is scummy with self-dealing—but it’s far more dangerous than graft. There are legal remedies for Duncan Hunter, the representative from California, who will stand trial next year for using campaign funds to pay for family luxuries.* But there’s no obvious remedy for what the state legislatures of Wisconsin and Michigan, following the example of North Carolina in 2016, are now doing.

Packer explains how the GOP is destroying democracy in Wisconsin before our very eyes:

Republican majorities are rushing to pass laws that strip away the legitimate powers of newly elected Democratic governors while defeated or outgoing Republican incumbents are still around to sign the bills. Even if the courts overturn some of these power grabs, as they have in North Carolina, Republicans will remain securely entrenched in the legislative majority through their own hyper-gerrymandering—in Wisconsin last month, 54 percent of the total votes cast for major-party candidates gave Democrats just 36 of 99 assembly seats—so they will go on passing laws to thwart election results. Nothing can stop these abuses short of an electoral landslide. In Wisconsin, a purple state, that means close to 60 percent of the total vote.

Nothing democratic exists in the current GOP:

Republicans have chosen contraction and authoritarianism because, unlike the Democrats, their party isn’t a coalition of interests in search of a majority. Its character is ideological. The Republican Party we know is a product of the modern conservative movement, and that movement is a series of insurgencies against the established order. Several of its intellectual founders—Whittaker Chambers and James Burnham, among others—were shaped early on by Communist ideology and practice, and their Manichean thinking, their conviction that the salvation of Western civilization depended on the devoted work of a small group of illuminati, marked the movement at its birth.

The fact that no plausible election outcome can check the abuse of power is what makes political corruption so dangerous. It strikes at the heart of democracy. It destroys the compact between the people and the government. In rendering voters voiceless, it pushes everyone closer to the use of undemocratic means.

Snowflake College Students May be Partly True, But Mainly It's a Red Herring Fallacy

Reasonable people can concede with authors Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Hadit, authors of The Coddling of the American Mind, that middle-class helicopter parents and indulging professors have turned students into snowflakes to the students' detriment, but as Moira Weigel, writing in her Guardian book review correctly points out that the snowflake problem is tiny compared to structural inequality that is so glaring that since 2008 student debt has tripled in the face of shrinking job prospects. Weigel correctly points out that emphasizing the snowflaking of American college students is a "bait and switch," or what I would call a red herring.

For my critical thinking class, I am not inclined to teach The Coddling of the American Mind. Rather, I would rather teach a bigger problem: lost jobs, which are analyzed in Louis Hyman's new book: Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary. 

I heard Hyman on the most recent On the Media, and he gave a fascinating talk on the way Sears helped fight Jim Crow by providing products to African Americans who were not allowed to shop in "white" stores.

Income Distribution Favoring 1% Would be a Good Place to Start to Unify This Country

Writing in The Atlantic, Joan C. Williams shows how class anger for working-class white people is the impetus for supporting our current President. The opposing party has had huge messaging problems with white working-class people.

Yesterday I was talking to my wife about a message that could unite the division between "Whole Foods and Piggly Wiggly America," and my wife told me it's not that complicated:

Both parties, she said, should be united in the way the 1% is redistributing the money in their favor while leaving the Majority Bottom in the dust. Why can't that be a unifying message?

Williams correctly observes that if opponents to this current President think they can wait for working-class whites to die off, they will have to wait too long, to at least 2045:

As the United States moves toward becoming a majority-minority nation, some on the left have come to believe that Democrats will be rescued by demography—that the party can ignore the white working class and focus instead on communities of color and on young people and single women of all races. This is wishful thinking. First, the U.S. won’t be majority-minority until about 2045. If you think Democrats—or the country—can survive this degree of political chaos for a quarter century, I don’t know what to tell you.

 

How Do You Wrap Your Brain Around the "Adam Schitt" Tweet?

When a bad actor, someone whose malevolence cannot be checked, rises to political power and has a cult-like following that enjoys electorate advantage, that country is in crisis, as we read that this bad actor is doubling down in his lies and malevolent behavior in this CNN Stephen Collinson analysis today.

It's almost impossible to believe that someone whose pathological lying, ignorance, and malevolence enjoys so much power. We are talking cartoon villain levels of evil here.

This same cartoon villain, as reported in The Washington Post, can't be bothered by the "suffering tape," evidence that his own CIA says makes the Saudi family culpable for the brutal torture and murder of  Jamal Khashoggi. 

This cartoon villain doesn't disappoint. Acting like third-world dictator, he has hired a stooge to do his bidding as Attorney General, a travesty explained in all its grotesquerie by Max Boot. 

Recently, this character has been as a "bottom feeder" and as "infantile" by those offended by his tweeting that Adam Schiff is "Adam Schitt" in the context of his White House calling for "more decorum." I could go on. 

So far I see some good news: Lots of Americans are not becoming numb to this cartoon level of evil. Lots of Americans are turned off.

But as many say, American democracy is currently undergoing a stress-test.