Tuesday, September 26, 2017

Nothing Human Is Just Biology: Kid And Food Edition

About a year and a half ago, the New York Times ran this story by a mother whose baby girl Violet was born with a heart defect and who, as a result of complex treatments for that, ended up with another problem: she didn't eat.

You should read the whole story, because it is emotionally moving, intellectually sophisticated, and philosophically interesting. Basically, her daughter needed a temporary nasogastral feeding tube, and after that were various struggles to get her to eat. But she was so weak, she never could get more calories than she spent, and she grew to associate eating with pain and suffering. This aversion to eating was so severe that they had to continue with the tube.

Heartbreakingly, the tube intensified Violet's aversion to eating. Once a week it had to be changed; her parents had to hold her down while she screamed and cried and then they had to wait til she stopped to breath to try to get it down her throat. Horrible. Of course, after that, Violet didn't want anything near her mouth, ever. When Violet was around six months old, they put in a permanent tube directly into her stomach. As her mother says, "devastating." And also "a relief."

Not surprisingly, given modern medicine, Violet's story is common, and the essay discusses the various approaches experts take to try to reintroduce children to the feeling that eating is something they can and want to do. Many take a behavioral approach. Because a big part of "oral aversion" is the association between pain and food, a lot of this involves creating positive external associations with foods -- for example, associating successful eating with toys -- and reinforcement that eating is going to happen. When another child in treatment eats she gets rewarded; but when she spits out her food, the therapist feeds it back to her.

A slightly different approach involves trying to reconnect the child with the internal cues of hunger and pleasure. Of course, this is tricky and potentially dangerous, since you have to let the child feel hunger, which means you have to feed them, through the tube, less food than they need, which must be terrifying with a child whose health is already a bit shaky.

One of the interesting aspects of the latter approach is the idea that to associate food with pleasure, you have to let kids spit out food and not worry about it. Violet's mother describes how, when they were beginning, Violet would put a bit of food, and then eventually more food, into her mouth, and then -- instead of swallowing, she'd spit it all out. Frustrating! but the therapist says that spitting is an essential part of the process: it lets Violet know that she can spit it out, so it is safe to experiment with another bite.

The first time through, at this point in the story, I didn't really know how it was all going to turn out. Was Violet going to be able to eat? Before I got to the textual resolution of this question, I came across a photo accompanying the story. The photos before had all been of Violet with her tubes. But in this one, she had chocolate avocado pudding all over her face, with a huge smile because -- yes, she was eating it! The image brought tears to my eyes the first time, and then it did again an hour ago when I reread the story.

After getting Violet to disassociate food and pain and associate food with pleasure -- or, at least, curiosity -- they had to let Violet get hungrier and hungrier. But in the end, it worked. Like a month later, they're all out at a diner and Violet is scarfing down a grilled cheese sandwich.

This story came out in early 2016 but I think about it regularly, even now. Partly I guess it's because it's interesting and happy, which so few things are these days. But partly I think it's because it shows something important about human nature. That everything -- even something so seemingly straightforward as eating, transcends biology. Everything is social and environmental.

In some philosophy I was doing with a student recently we were talking about the idea of idealizing people as if they were "mushroom men" -- people who sprang from the earth as fully formed adults, ready to make decisions, form goals, and negotiate with others for what they need. This was in the context of talking about economics, where sometimes the metaphor is used to explicate models of economic rationality and exchange. But of course it's long been central to philosophy as well, for example in the contractarian and contractualist traditions in historical philosophers like Hobbes and, to a certain extent, in more contemporary ones like Rawls.

Like all idealizations, this one might work better in some contexts and worse in others, it might capture or obscure what we want to see in certain settings, it might be more or less of a misrepresentation depending on what we're using it for.

Still, I found the story a great reminder of how far from that we really are. It's not just that when we're small, we're temporarily unable to forage for food or work at jobs. It's also that everything we do -- even something like eating! -- depends on a fragile and contingent network of things happening and people who love us there to make sure those things work the way they're supposed to.

Tuesday, September 19, 2017

Selective Implementation Of The Algorithmic Ideal Is Intellectually Dishonest: Hillary Clinton Book Review Edition

The thing that got me wildly, disproportionately pissed off this week was the news that Amazon had been deleting one-star reviews of Hillary Clinton's new book. What the actual fuck?

The reason this enraged me so much didn't have anything to do with Hillary Clinton or the content of her book, but rather the way it laid bare the depth of intellectual dishonesty and cynicism of the tech-retail industry. I used to think the algorithmic approach to the world was coherent and reasonably well-intentioned, while also massively and dangerously flawed. But this episode shows that "coherent and reasonably well-intentioned" may have been giving people too much credit.

As we've discussed before, and as you can learn much more about from the master herself, Cathy O'Neill, the algorithmic approach to the world is massively and dangerously flawed along several dimensions. There's a pernicious illusion that algorithms are "neutral," when they're anything but. The problems of legitimacy are problems of trust, not data. The attempt to draw lines while avoiding ethical judgment leads to policies that disproportionately target people who are already oppressed.

Still, I was able to sort of see the inner logic of the thing. I mean, I believe algorithms are problematic. But I could see how someone who didn't believe that might push forward toward more data and more rules and less judgment and so on. I think they'd be wrong, but they'd have a coherent position on the world, and might be acting with integrity.

But then going on and making an exception ... for Hillary Clinton? Are you kidding?

As I understand it, the main reason was that they thought the reviews were posted by people who hadn't read the book. As the publisher is quoted saying here, “It seems highly unlikely that approximately 1,500 people read Hillary Clinton’s book overnight and came to the stark conclusion that it is either brilliant or awful.”

But ... this a problem for all Amazon reviews. Admittedly, it's usually a less dramatic problem. But there are plenty of stories of people trying to sandbag other people's books for all kinds of reasons, there's sock-puppetry, and there are all kinds of other problems with the review system.

While yes, Hillary Clinton's book prompted a dramatic showcase of some of these issues, she's also like one of the most powerful people on the planet. She hardly needs protection from her critics to get people interested in reading her book. It's bizarre to me that it would be like, well, when it's everyone else, sorry, but when it's a power player politician, oh, then we have to do something.

When things like this happen, I always try to imagine how these decisions get made. Does Amazon have a hundred meetings in a row where someone brings up fake reviews and blah blah blah, and then on the 101st they bring up Hillary Clinton and people suddenly say OMG we have to do something? Is it that the issue doesn't come up those 100 previous times because the incentive structure of power players at places like Amazon discourages it?

Or is the ultra cynical interpretation the right one: that PR with prospective customers will work best when they intervene selectively in only the most high-profile situations -- i. e., just when it is the power players of the world?

In any case, I'd just like to remind everyone that they can shop for books at Indigo, Kobo, Barnes and Noble, and Powell's. I'm not saying these are some kind of do-gooder organizations: in a dog-eat-dog capitalist society, being less than ruthless than your competitors is death, so bad behavior is kind of baked into the system. But isn't it better to have several flawed tech-retail companies than just one flawed tech company, which can then go ahead and rule the world?

Monday, September 11, 2017

Can The Pursuit Of Pleasure Be An Addiction If It's Also Normal Human Life?

When I saw this headline -- "The pursuit of pleasure is a modern-day addiction -- I thought the piece might be some kind of joke or parody.

I mean, I know some people have expanded the scope of "addition" so that it includes things like shopping and carbohydrates, and I know other people can get agitated about that expansion, as if it implies that a chocolate habit and a cocaine habit are somehow on a par. But at least shopping and carbohydrates are actual specific things. And there's no question that these things can be "addictive" in the sense that the more you get the get the more you want.

But pleasure? I mean, that's not a thing you do or ingest, it's more a part of the human experience. How can you be addicted to a part of the human experience? Plus, isn't pleasure the mechanism through which those other things become so habit-forming? What does it mean to reduce the addiction to the very mechanism that makes them work?

I'm no expert on human psychobiology, but isn't pleasure supposed to be one of the main motivating forces of life? Isn't the pursuit of pleasure one of the central reasons people do things? How could it also be a pathological addiction?

And finally, what's a life without pleasure? The author of the piece, Robert Lustig is famous for his view that sugar is a poison. So is the idea that anything pleasurable is also bad? So .. even healthy food shouldn't be consumed because it is enjoyable to eat? WTF?

When I read the piece, it didn't seem quite as absurd as I thought it would be. When you get past the headline, there are more specific examples of ways in which particular pleasures are out of control. A fondness for soda leads to the "big gulp"; the love of likes leads to chronic Instagram checking. Constant stress and anxiety create the backdrop in which we're in constant need of the feel good chemicals in our brain, just to feel OK. To get the feel good chemicals, we do more and more of the "pleasure things," and get less and less out of them, and so on and so on. I guess you could describe that as being addicted to pleasure.

As regular readers of this blog may expect, I can never read things like this without thinking of the ways that these effects are sort of built into the whole capitalist system. What's more successful in capitalism than a commodity that the more people have of them the more they want? Armies of food technologists work day and night to bring about exactly this state of affairs. Whole university departments exist to train people how to do it. How is it surprising that this is where we've ended up?

Later in the essay, Lustig goes back to the more general idea that somehow it's pleasure itself that is the problem, and there he says that to live the right way we should seek "happiness" rather than pleasure. It's funny, because I was just getting ready to teach Mill, and we were going to talk about his "greatest happiness principle" where he says that "actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.  By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness pain, and the privation of pleasure.” So maybe Mill things happiness and pleasure are the same, or at least that he thinks we can use the words interchangeably. On the other hand, Mill famously distinguished between "higher" and "lower" pleasures so who knows.

Lustig says that "the more pleasure you seek, the more unhappy you get and the more likelihood you will slide into addiction or depression" and that "our ability to perceive happiness has been sabotaged by our modern incessant quest for pleasure, which our consumer culture has made all too easy to satisfy."

I see what he's getting at, but there seems to me something strange about the formulation. People have always sought pleasure, haven't they? So it's the world that's changing, not human nature. It seems to me like we just have a lot more easy sources of pleasure. As we've long said on this blog, easy sources of pleasure are difficult for humans: you think you want treats, but by definition a treat is a thing you don't get all the time. So.. how do you keep it in check? Before you know it, it you've cascaded into a misery of self-denial, living both as tyrant and supplicant, begging yourself for those treats that you yourself decided you can't have too much of.

But again, I think people have always been like that. It's OK to love pleasure. It's our modern surroundings that are the problem, not us.

Tuesday, September 5, 2017

How Many Awful Things Are In This One NYT Education Story?

The Times ran a story over the weekend about "teacher-influencers" -- elementary school teachers who are using technology in classrooms and connecting with Silicon Valley companies to trade influence for perks. The story focused on the potential conflicts of interest, which, sure, of course, but I was amazed how many other awful things there were.

The story starts off fine, talking about how this one teacher has reorganized her classroom into flexible-use space and has the class run social media accounts. When I was a kid I learned math in a flexible-use and flexible-time kind of way and it was awesome, so sure, if that's working for you and your students, great.

Then you get to the "teacher-influencer" business. The main teacher being profiled has a personal brand and makes deals with companies like Seesaw, which facilitates students sharing work in various forms electronically. Of Seesaw, she says, "I will embed it in my brand every day."

In return for promoting their products, teachers get personal perks like meals, travel, or Amazon gift cards, but also perks for their students and schools, like technology goodies. At a time when schools are so poor that "teachers shell out an average of $600 of their own money every year just to buy student supplies like pencils" (!!!), every little bit helps.

OK, how depressing is it that underfunded schools have to rely on brand ambassador teachers to get even basic things they need? I feel like if that were happening in a different country, people like Nicholas Kristof would be all over it with hand-wringing and "we have to take action now" because this crazy injustice and exploitation just can't continue.

Then I got to the part about the 3D printing. One teacher-influencer "used a $1,299 3-D printer" in conjunction with an assignment on the book To Kill a Mockingbird. One student used the printer to make a gavel in connection with their presentation, "representing the struggle for justice in the novel."

Wait, what? Are they seriously telling me that in the modern world, we're going to engage with the themes of a book about race, injustice, and culture in the American South by 3D printing a gavel? I don't care if it was meant to "supplement" a more substantive engagement with the book in the presentation. That time should be spent doing old fashioned things like talking with other people about the complicated ideas in the book. Plus, how non-creative is the idea of making a gavel to represent justice? Even the "innovative" part becomes dull and unoriginal!

I was also creeped out by the social media lessons, which focus on helping students "understand how to maintain an upbeat online image." One third-grader said "You don’t want to post something bad, because if you want a job, those people are probably going to look at your social media page and they are going to decide if they’ll let you have the job."A sign on the classroom wall says, "I am building my digital footprint every day."

WTF? If that was in a futuristic dystopian novel, you can imagine David Denby calling it a "fanciful" but unrealistic detail.

I really don't blame the teachers for any of this -- they're obviously super-committed and trying as hard as they can to teach students what they need to know. And maybe learning about an "upbeat" social media image is what they need to know. Just yesterday, Arwa Mahdawi was writing in the Guardian about how social media presence is becoming a must-have for getting a job, with one ad for an independent contractor requiring you to "identify, assign, edit and publish at least 10 articles per day" and also have an "amazing personal Twitter feed."

We're always hearing about "innovation" in education and how important it is, and people are always moaning about how teachers are reluctant to innovate because they're stuck in their ways. But often it's unclear how the good things in education can be protected and improved on, especially when it comes to technology. If you're trying to teach students to think about ideas and communicate verbally and in writing, there really isn't much better than the slow process of being in a room together, talking, and giving them individualized feedback. What teachers need to do that is support and proper funding. A 3D printing of a gavel, advertised later on Twitter, isn't really an important part of that process.