I believe the death of Aaron Swartz will one day (100 years?) be seen in the same way as the death of Alan Turing and a pardon and an apology from the American government are overdue.
Here he is talking about education, schools, teachers and society. As with Feynman at NASA, the problem is people thinking they have to do the bad thing. “They are perfectly reasonable people accomplishing evil things, blowing out the workers’ eardrums and poisoning the lakes and lagoons.”
“Not because they were bad people, but because of the logic of the situation they were in.”
What is our situation?
What is the logic of our situation?
“They are in structures which cause them to continually do evil.”
How can we change these structures?
What does he mean by “busy work”?
Why does he use the verb “penning” to describe students?
He mentions 2 books, Noam Chomsky’s Understanding Power and Robert Jackall’s Moral Mazes. How did these books change his thinking?
Raw Nerve (August 18, 2012)
Confront reality (September 9, 2012)
Lean into the pain (September 1, 2012)
What are the optimal biases to overcome? (August 29, 2012)
Look at yourself objectively (August 18, 2012)
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/03/11/requiem-for-a-dream
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/archive
My favourite bits: 7 minutes, “How did you ever have such a terrible idea?”
7.38 winning the prize
1.20.39 the list of organizations he founded or co-founded
part 1 here https://stuartwiffin.substack.com/p/aaron-swartz-on-education
Aaron’s writing from his website
Archives
politics and parody
Comprehensive Response to All Arguments Against Gay Marriage
Gerrymandering: How Politicans Steal Votes and You Can Return Them
thought
reviews
diary
tech
administrivia
Even more: Full archives
Yes, these are the same people who would die at 27, great example.
posted by Ajay on August 10, 2006 #
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Lean in
In the 1840s, hospitals were dangerous places. Mothers who went in to give birth often didn’t make it out. For example, at Vienna General Hospital’s First Obstetrical Clinic, as many as 10% of mothers died of puerperal fever after giving birth. But there was some good news: at the Second Clinic, the number was just 4%. Expectant mothers noticed this — some would get down on their knees and beg to be admitted to the Second Clinic. Others, hearing new patients were being admitted to the First Clinic that day, decided they’d rather give birth in the streets.
Ignaz Semmelweis, an assistant at the First Clinic, couldn’t bear it. He began desperately searching for some kind of explanation for the difference. He tested many things without success. Then, in 1847, Semmelweis’s friend Jakob Kolletschka was performing an autopsy when a student accidentally poked him with a scalpel. It was a minor injury, but Kolletschka got terribly sick and ultimately passed away, with symptoms rather like what the mothers had. Which got Semmelweis wondering: was some “deathly material” on the corpses responsible for the deaths?
To test this, he insisted the doctors begin washing their hands with chlorinated lime (which he found best removed the stink of death) before handling the pregnant women. The results were shocking. In April 1847, the mortality rate was 18.3%. Semmelweis instituted handwashing in mid-May and by June the mortality rate had crashed to 2.2%. The next month it was even less and later that year it reached zero — for the first time ever.
You’d think doctors would be thrilled by this incredible discovery. Instead, Semmelweis was ridiculed and attacked. He was fired from the hospital and forced out of Vienna. “In published medical works my teachings are either ignored or attacked,” he complained. “The medical faculty at Würzburg awarded a prize to a monograph written in 1859 in which my teachings were rejected.” Even in his native Vienna, hundreds of mothers continued to die every year.
Semmelweis turned to alcohol and his behavior became increasingly erratic. In 1865, he was committed to a mental institution. There he was beaten by the guards, placed in a straitjacket, and locked in a dark cell. He died shortly thereafter, at the age of 47, from an infected wound.1
Why did doctors so stubbornly reject Ignaz Semmelweis? Well, imagine being told you were responsible for the deaths of thousands of your patients. That you had been killing the people you were supposed to be protecting. That you were so bad at your job that you were actually worse than just giving birth in the street.
Part three of the series Raw Nerve.
Semmelweis was defeated about as much as a man can be defeated. But nothing the other doctors could do to him would change the facts. Eventually scientists proved the germ theory of disease and Semmelweis was vindicated.
In moments of great emotional stress, we revert to our worst habits: we dig in and fight harder. The real trick is not to get better at fighting — it’s to get better at stopping ourselves: at taking a deep breath, calming down, and letting our better natures take over from our worst instincts.
Aaron Swartz
The problem is that the topics that are most painful also tend to be the topics that are most important for us: they’re the projects we most want to do, the relationships we care most about, the decisions that have the biggest consequences for our future, the most dangerous risks that we run. We’re scared of them because we know the stakes are so high. But if we never think about them, then we can never do anything about them.
In agile software development, there’s a phrase: If it hurts, do it more often.2
But if you look at the average person and ask why they aren’t getting what they want, very rarely do you conclude their biggest problem is that they’re suffering from anchoring, framing effects, the planning fallacy, commitment bias, or any of the other stuff in these tests. Usually their biggest problems are far more quotidian and commonsensical, like procrastination and fear.
One of the things that struck me was watching Eliezer Yudkowsky, one of the most impressive writers on the topic of cognitive biases, try to start a new nonprofit. For years, the organization he founded struggled until recently, when Luke Muehlhauser was named executive director. Eliezer readily agrees that Luke has done more to achieve Eliezer’s own goals for the organization than Eliezer ever did.
But why? Why is Luke so much better at getting what Eliezer wants than Eliezer is? It’s surely not because Luke is so much better at avoiding the standard cognitive biases! Luke often talks about how he’s constantly learning new rationality techniques from Eliezer.
No, it’s because Luke did what seems like common sense: he bought a copy of Nonprofits for Dummies and did what it recommends. As Luke himself says, it wasn’t lack of intelligence or resources or willpower that kept Eliezer from doing these things, “it was a gap in general rationality.”
So if you’re interested in closing the gap, it seems like the skills to prioritize aren’t things like commitment effect and the sunk cost fallacy, but stuff like “figure out what your goals really are”, “look at your situation objectively and list the biggest problems”, “when you’re trying something new and risky, read the For Dummies book about it first”, etc. That’s the stuff I’m interested in writing about.
Even if seeing ourselves objectively is the best option, all our natural instincts all point the other direction. Not only do we try hard to avoid bad news about ourselves, we tend to exaggerate the good news. Imagine you and Jane are both up for a promotion. You want it bad, so you stay late, you work weekends. Sure, some things still slip through the cracks — but even those mistakes have really good reasons! Jane never does anything like that.
But if she did — would you even know? We see the world from our own perspective. When we have to cancel hanging out with friends to do extra work, we always see that — and feel the sacrifice. But when Jane does it, we see and feel nothing. You only get to see your own perspective. And even our mistakes make sense from our perspective — we see all of the context, everything that led up to it. It all makes sense because we saw it happen. When we screw up, it’s for a reason. When other people screw up, it’s because they’re screwups.
Looking at ourselves objectively isn’t easy. But it’s essential if we ever want to get better. And if we don’t do it, we leave ourselves open to con artists and ethical compromisers who prey on our desire to believe we’re perfect. There’s no one solution, but here are some tricks I use to get a more accurate sense of myself:
Embrace your failings. Be willing to believe the worst about yourself. Remember: it’s much better to accept that you’re a selfish, racist moron and try to improve, than to continue sleepwalking through life that way as the only one who doesn’t know it.
Studiously avoid euphemism. People try and sugarcoat the tough facts about themselves by putting them in the best light possible. They say “Well, I was going to get to it, but then there was that big news story today” and not “Yeah, I was procrastinating on it and started reading the news instead.” Stating things plainly makes it easier to confront the truth.
Reverse your projections. Every time you see yourself complaining about other groups or other people, stop yourself and think: “is it possible, is there any way, that someone out there might be making the same complaints about me?”
Look up, not down. It’s always easy to make yourself look good by finding people even worse than you. Yes, we agree, you’re not the worst person in the world. That’s not the question. The question is whether you can get better — and to do that you need to look at the people who are even better than you.
Criticize yourself. The main reason people don’t tell you what they really think of you is they’re afraid of your reaction. (If they’re right to be afraid, then you need to start by working on that.) But people will feel more comfortable telling you the truth if you start by criticizing yourself, showing them that it’s OK.
Find honest friends. There are some people who are just congenitally honest. For others, it’s possible to build a relationship of honesty over time. Either way, it’s important to find friends who you can trust to tell to tell you the harsh truths about yourself. This is really hard — most people don’t like telling harsh truths. Some people have had success providing an anonymous feedback form for people to submit their candid reactions.
Listen to the criticism. Since it’s so rare to find friends who will honestly criticize you, you need to listen extra-carefully when they do. It’s tempting to check what they say against your other friends. For example, if one friend says the short story you wrote isn’t very good, you might show it to some other friends and ask them what they think. Wow, they all think it’s great! Guess that one friend was just an outlier. But the fact is that most of your friends are going to say it’s great because they’re your friend; by just taking their word for it, you end up ignoring the one person who’s actually being honest with you.
Take the outside view. As I said before, we’re always locked in our own heads, where everything we do makes sense. So try seeing what you look like from the outside for a bit, assuming you don’t know any of those details. Sure, your big money-making plan sounds like a great idea when you explain it, but if you throw that away, is there any external evidence that it will work?
Next in this series: Lean into the pain