önyargıların kırılışı

Bir önyargının yokoluşu başka bir önyargıdan geçer. Sadece mantıkla önyargılar kazınamaz. İki farklı önyargı arasındaki çelişkinin gözler önüne serilmesi ve kişinin birinden birini terketmesi gerektiği gerçeğiyle yüzleşmesi gerekir.

Çivi çiviyi söker derler ama zayıf çivi sağlam çiviyi sökemez tabi. Operasyon öncesi, kazımak istediğiniz önyargıdan daha sağlam bir önyargıyı tespit etmeniz gerekir.

Evrensel değerler bin bir farklı ön yargıdan ötürü yok olmuşlar, tekrar canlanmaları da gene bin bir farklı ön yargı sayesinde olacaktır.

pedagogical constraints

Constrain yourself to slower methods of writing:

Just because they can type extremely fast, students with laptops end up writing down every word said by the lecturer. Those with physical notebooks have to first synthesize the information and decide what is worth writing down before actually recording anything. This makes them think and thinking increases their retention rates.


Constrain yourself to smaller notebooks:

The lesser the space a student has the more he will have to think and synthesize.


Constrain yourself to irreversible methods of writing:

Just because they can erase pencil marks, students with pencils can afford to be sloppy. Those with pens on the other hand have to be very careful. This makes them alert and being alert increases their retention rates.

group dynamics of hatred

Why does hatred last longer when it is between groups rather than individuals?

It is well-known that group dynamics can reinforce emotions. So that is one important factor... What is more interesting is that even when others try to soothe you with all the good intentions, they often end up prolonging the conflict. When they constantly take the steam off, there is never enough emotion built up to propel you to communicate with the subject of your hatred. Of course, when there is no dialogue, there can be no conflict resolution.

masculinized femininity

Since there is a innate need to preserve balance of power, masculine women are naturally inclined to marry feminine men. But such relationships eventually create positive feedback loops that make them even more masculine.

It is well-known that long experience in business life makes one more fierce, unforgiving and masculine. That is essentially why business women are over-represented in pole dancing lessons. They are desperately trying to restore their femininity.

My advice: Marry a man more masculine than yourself if you worry about your femininity.

search engine objectification

In financial markets, as the fund under your management grows bigger, it becomes increasingly harder to beat the market because you become the market itself. Of course, when you are the equation, analysis become impossible and loss of objectivity is immediate.

A similar observation holds for the search engine market. Google has become such a dominant player that now it is impossible to tell whether a site is inherently popular or popular due to Google itself. When internet browsing starts and ends with Google, Google ends up running its algorithms on itself and creates strong positive feedback loops.

There is another reason why search engine market is losing its objectivity. When you are as big as Google you can not keep anything secret. Google's search algorithms are under such an intense scrutiny that there is now a whole new industry that helps companies optimize their Google visibility. When you define success in a formulaic way, people will hire experts who engage in the dark art of fooling your metrics. There is no surprise in that...

There is only one hope to bring back objectivity to the search engine market: Give the power back to the people. Reputation and popularity are inherently social concepts... Just focus on the dynamics and semantics of social media exchanges, whoever does not will always be behind the curve.

where the ground breaks

There are four sources of groundbreaking ideas.

1. Following an interesting track of arguments and discovering where it leads
2. Revisiting the fundamental definitions and recasting them in a new light
3. Making new conjectures based on brand new experiment findings
4. Using an entirely different set of building blocks to make hard problems easier to attack

The first and second are possible in all fields of academia, the third is possibly only in experimental fields and the fourth only in mathematics.

the terminal broker

An arrow r from A to B indicates that B is in relation with A via the channel r.

Assume that our category is concrete. (i.e. each object is a structured set) Let the size of the set Hom(A,B) indicate the depth of the relationship B is in with A.

A broker has relationships with everyone. However, each of these relationships is as superficial as possible. (After all he only cares about business and has only a finite amount of time in his hands. Let us not forget that time is money!) Of course, client A may be delusional and thinking that his relationship with his broker B has some depth to it. In that case, the broker has done a very good job! (Is not the propagation of such a delusion the dream of every public relations person?)

Most successful broker is a person 1 such that Hom(A,1) is one element set and Hom(1,A) is bijective to A. In other words, he knows everyone "minimally" and is liked by everyone "maximally". Such a broker is not only a terminal object of our category, but also represents the forgetful functor from our category to the category of sets.

Such objects exist in categories like Set and Top, but algebraic categories have no tolerance for them. In algebraic categories, the terminal object is often the one-element algebra and the representing object for the forgetful functor is the free algebra generated on the one-element set. So these two objects differ... In some sense, algebraic categories have separation of powers: If you know everybody minimally, then you are not allowed to be liked by everyone maximally (and vice versa).

A jerk on the other hand is 1 such that both Hom(A,1) and Hom(1,A) are one-element sets. In other words, he knows everyone, but nobody really likes him. They avoid him as much as possible. Such a broker is called a zero object, a very suiting name indeed...

geometry and (co)limits

You can study geometry via analytical techniques and take the continuum as your unit of investigation. The continuum is of course a structure that is created by using set theoretical limit processes.

You can study geometry via algebraic techniques and take simplices as your unit of investigation. This time, not your unit of investigation, but your investigation techniques will involve categorical colimit processes.

The study of geometry can only be conducted via infinitary processes. You can not escape from this fact which stems from the inherent malleability of the notion of space.

Preferring the categorical colimit processes which work at the technique level has one important advantage though: It allows you to enlarge the scope of applicability of your investigations by keeping your unit of investigation as general as possible. If you are going to do something monstrous, do it on yourself not on your subject.

body as the first extension

"The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology."

- Marshall McLuhan

Sometimes we forget that information is a physical phenomenon obeying physical laws. For instance, it is subject to degeneration over time and its transfer speed is limited by the speed of light. Think of the photons in fiber optic cables, vibrations in the air, bits on a hard disk, ink on a paper... These are all real things that your senses can interact with in complex ways.

HUMAN BODY IS A MEDIUM

Our body is also a physical extension. It is the first "technology" we have learned to utilize for transferring information. Yes, we use our vocal chords to transfer verbal information, but most of the information transfer occurs non-verbally via body language. We can convey danger, fear, love, sadness through our facial expressions alone.

So the human body is the most primitive medium, but even at that stage we see how medium can shape the message in complicated ways. For instance, encoding is not universal or one-to-one. (My angry face could be your very angry face. Expression of two different emotions could look similar.) This of course opens door to miscommunication. Moreover, you do not have complete control over your body. You make involuntary mimics which can sometimes conflict with your intentions. (Psychologist Paul Ekman has revealed that certain facial expressions can trigger the emotions they are associated with. In other words, your body can control you as well.)

MASTERING REQUIRING INTERNALIZATION

Saying that body is the first extension of ourselves may sound paradoxical, but it really is not. Your mind has a map of where your body parts are. The presence of this mapping becomes apparent when it goes haywire. For instance, most people feel the presence of their arm even after it is amputated. In a similar way, when you drive a car, the contours of the mind map of yourself enlarges. The end points of the car literally become end points you in your brain. In fact, mastering control over any tool requires internalization of the tool itself. It can be disastrous for a pro-tennis player to become conscious of the fact that the racket is a tool separate from his body.

LANGUAGE IS A MEDIUM

Language is a fairly recent phenomenon in our evolutionary history. Its birth introduced for the first time the possibility of message to transcend the medium. You can carve "Be happy!" on a stone or write it on a paper. It will mean the same thing, or does it? I think it is this confusion that has undermined the importance of medium in education technology design.

In education, the goal is to transfer knowledge which is often transcribed in words. The word "transcribed" here is very important because language itself is a medium. The tendency to confuse words with the actual thoughts themselves is a very deep one. (Look at history of philosophy, even very eminent minds got it wrong.) So when a teacher reads out loud a story in class, the message goes through three mediums before reaching the students. The author's message is encoded in words which are then encoded in print which are then encoded into vocalizations by the teacher.

A cold looking "Be Happy!" carved into a stone in Times New Roman will not create the same effect as a colorful "Be Happy!" hand drawn on a paper.

LESSONS FOR EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY

Students can not interact directly with the message. They always interact with the medium-message complex. For instance, all elements involved in the formatting of a page should be chosen to make reading easier. A video should not be out-of-sync with its narration etc.

Teachers also tend to forget that their body is a medium as well. A teacher should utilize his body in a way that makes students more comfortable and open. His body language should not be too domineering or too timid, his voice should not be too low or too loud etc. These are all important factors that he can learn to control.

The body of the teacher is the most fundamental educational technology at work in all classes around the world today. Especially young students have such an hard time cutting through all the messy socio-psychological aspects of human-to-human communication that they can not clearly see the message that is trying to be delivered. Part of the success of online learning is probably due to the fact that texting/chatting make it easier for students to focus on the message.

digitally native minds

First let us note that, in education theory, we are more concerned about transfer of knowledge rather than mere information. The digitally native students probably have no greater capacity than the previous generations when it comes to memorizing strings of digits or meaningless shapes. But they may have greater capacity of understanding.

Second let us note that any information transfer requires a medium of delivery and an efficient delivery requires compression/decompression tools. In machine-to-machine communications, these tools operate algorithmically. In a human-to-human verbal communication, the language itself is the compression tool. Of course, depending on the subject involved, language can be a very lossy transmission tool. For instance, it is particularly ill-suited to for transferring emotional states across. (Hence the reason why not all of us can become poets, and why a hug can mean a lot more than a thousand word.) In machine-to-machine communications, a bad choice of medium can cause a decrease in bandwidth or an increase in noise or information loss. In human-to-human communications, the choice is even more important, since the dynamics are infinitely more complex. (For instance, we are effected by things such as our mood, habits, previous memories etc.)

Cognitive limits of digitally native students are different because their minds employ different metaphors and are used to different mediums of delivery. Let me explain what I mean.

MEDIUMS

There is no fundamental litmus test for cognitive limits. The experiments are always defined by the experimental tools involved. The digitally native students find certain mediums more engaging than others and engagement definitely increases the learning capacity. If you test their cognitive limits with printed books, they will score less. If you test their cognitive limits with iPad, they will score more.

METAPHORS

Since we understand the world in terms of metaphors, the extent and character of our metaphors define how much we can understand. Scientists once thought that the mind operated like a steam engine, now they think it operates more like a computer. The metaphor they employ will change in the future as new technologies emerge and we become very acquainted with them (so that they can become units of our understanding.)

As our set of metaphors become more complex, our cognitive limits are enhanced. Think of this phenomenon as coding in a higher level language, or like zipping a large batch of files into a single small one. A single word "computer" has so much meaning embedded in it.

Digitally native students may be capable of employing metaphors with greater compression power than the previous generations. Think of Facebook or the extremely versatile game called Minecraft. These are powerful metaphors. The teachers should embrace them in their professions, rather than dismissing them as just another trending phenomena.

Do not forget that, during the black-and-white TV era, a lot of people thought they saw their dreams in black and white. Whether this was misreporting of otherwise colorful dreams is irrelevant... We shape technology and technology in turn shapes us.

As a side note, I do not find this depressing at all. On the contrary, it give me hope. The next generation with their different minds and metaphors may be able to tackle scientific problems that we could not.