One of the things we don’t discuss much, when deciding what courses students should take, is the selection of core university requirements that our students are subjected to. The quality of these courses varies wildly, primarily dependent on their age since inception.
What does that mean? Having spent so much time in the academy (37 years as a professor at WSU) I’ve had more than one chance to witness the cycles of course development. The short version is that new courses roughly follow the demographics of Rogers’ Theory of Innovation. The Pioneers and Early Adopters show up and invent the courses. But, not surprisingly, they move on, becoming bored over time with any repetition in teaching. Early Majority does OK, but it’s not too long until any course, created with the best of intentions, ends up being taught by Late Majority or Laggards, with all the problems you might imagine as far as creativity goes. The worst classes are in the required core, which the Liberal Arts faculty largely have shifted to the contingent workforce, which are literally slaves on the plantation.
I hate to criticize the slaves directly, because some of them are obviously paying for bad karma in a past life they had no control over. And there is nothing more saintly than doing a reasonable job teaching Freshman English Composition. Students aren’t taught really how to write in high school, and they show up needing their papers bled red upon. It’s really a historic problem that’s gotten worse, and is likely to continue to decline. I owe my ability (or at least the trajectory) to write on my first community college professor, who taught the science fiction literature class I took. He had both the grace and temerity to tell me frankly that I sucked. And I am forever in his debt for that. Because I did.
I have far less sympathy for the other courses (various history, sociology and psychology courses) students are forced to take. Many of these are “woke”, and my white male students in particular suffer. They supposedly exist to teach students critical thinking, but it’s of the Cool Hand Luke variety. If the students don’t get their mind right, they are treated harshly until they do. To be fair, I have not gone up to these classes, and sat through them. But the students complain. And the advice I give the students also hasn’t wavered much. Sit tight, it’ll be over soon. Kind of like a root canal.
But it’s deeply problematic, as more and more students show up ungrounded with any sense of engineering outside of assembling a Lego kit. Fair or not, becoming an engineer comes with a pretty heavy set of ethical obligations. Most students have no idea, for example, that they are getting a professional degree, and that they have to take their studies seriously or they could get someone killed.
Getting changes in the core curriculum is also not easy. Major changes have to go to the Faculty Senate, which I used to preside over. In tightening budget circles, I guarantee you that there will be fights over any change in core, because core provides the biggest buck for the bang of all the classes. The contingent slave class of graduate students and clinical professors are paid poorly, but tuition per credit hour is the same. You do the math. And the faculty in those departments wear their victim cards on their sleeves. Outside a handful of them, what they’re doing inside those classrooms is not for polite company.
If we wanted to improve our engineering students, we’d teach two history classes dedicated to the History of Technology. The use of mathematics inside the class itself would be primarily disallowed, with the goal of students understanding the larger narrative structure of the history of science and technology as being the takeaway. I was recently at the Technical University in Munich, and the Germans do a great job with this. The halls of the Metro stop are painted with murals discussing all the greats that contributed to the march of both science and technology. Even as an American, I was inspired by thinking I was walking the same grounds as the German pioneers of engine and aviation science. Our students literally know nothing –even about our space program.
I would also reinstitute the language requirement, with a twist. Most language classes at the university focus heavily on grammar. The result is that students emerge with no knowledge of anything. All classes would be required to focus on conversation, so that students could actually relationally expand outside their limited circle.
All of this would displace the toxic narrative of despair that has replaced any actually critical analysis of history, or useful liberal arts-based skills. As it is, the university system exists primarily to depress our students. It’s got to stop. And the place to start is in the narrative structure of the modern liberal arts, earnestly dedicated as it is to collapse of Western civilization.
P.S. Needless to say, I’d have little problem expanding great books and classics. I refer to the Iliad and Odyssey all the time in my classroom. These classes have to be well-taught to be useful, though. An eye toward providing a foundation of Western moral principles would be key — with the expectation that professors could count on those concepts themselves in later classes. FWIW — I have few students that have even heard of great books. But the few that have actually are affected by them.
One of the things I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about is the role of money in memetics. Various “below the hood” analyses will inevitably tell you to “follow the money.” And while I’ve always given some hat tip to the concept, the reality is I’ve spent my neurogenic horsepower actually pondering how it’s NOT the money. It’s actually alignment of values, or meta-values, given by the social organization that is producing the information.
But the recent USAID scandal, where large sums of federal money went to liberal media outlets like the New York Times, Politico, and even the BBC, have caused me to rethink my position. I started to drift away from the espoused positions of the aforementioned because there were more factually wrong pieces that I actually had experience with over the last five years beforehand. There’s no question that BEFORE 2019, the media was biased, it was liberal, and conservatives had some right to complain. But with the COVID pandemic, the disinformation/misinformation from journalistic outlets went into overdrive.
Some of that was undoubtedly attributable to Elite Risk Minimization — where elites inflict policies on the Poors to minimize any potential risk they might believe they’re going to encounter in their life. I’ve written about this here, and while it is usually negative for the Poors, it can be a mixed bag (including some benefits) for everyone. But the memetic polarization (for those that don’t know, polarization is the phenomenon where light is aligned from specific directions and wavelengths — it’s how your sunglasses work) increased to the point where it was painfully obvious that something else was going on, to manufacture consent among the media outlets.
And that thing was money. So much of the writing was so contrived, it violated the various differentiators of v-Meme sets. Something else was involved that was creating ungrounded propaganda.
I tell my engineering students regularly that “money is NOT the root of all evil.” Money is actually a tool for goal coherence. If you’re not minding the time, for example, that you’re burning on a project, you’re screwing up. Because time is money. And normie, Aspie, or psychopath — the buck stops here. If your company doesn’t make money, it won’t be in business long.
It could be that the root of the disinformation crisis in contemporary journalism arose when Craigslist became ascendant, and eliminated the warming, diffuse glow of money from classified ads. Do any young people even KNOW what a classified ad is? So the larger outlets may not have gone seeking, but they were discovered by forces like USAID, that could buy message coherence at bargain basement prices. This also had to affect the feeder networks, and in the end even broke the prestige awards that also status-fueled honest journalism. After Ed Yong’s Pulitzer, who can look at those awards as a north star ever again?
Here’s what I’ve figured out about how you can detect money in the information stream — when across multiple platforms, the reportage is very v-Meme limited (only one dominant meta-view, which is usually propping up Authoritarians/Experts that inevitably support institutions.) In a large society like ours, it is simply impossible to not have some contribution across the v-Meme spectra without monetary forcing.
So follow the money. And be suspicious when the funnel of ideas narrows into chronic repetition. You think they’re attempting to brainwash you because, well, they are.
P.S. I’ve become a huge Mike Benz fan. Highly recommend following him on X and throwing some shekels his way. I hope the Deep State doesn’t whack him. I was lucky enough to have about an hour-long conversation on an X Spaces format a couple of weeks ago.
Braden with a nice Dorado, Ensenada dos Muertos, Baja California Sur, MX
One of the things that is rarely discussed in any meaningful way is the change in the student stream coming into contemporary engineering programs. Historically, when I was an undergraduate (I graduated from Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland, OH in 1982) engineering students were a mix of middle-class kids, along with the sons (there were basically no girls) of the unionized class of auto and steel workers whose parents were blue collar and employed in regional factories. There were some outliers. But mostly, my graduating class came from places like the Jersey Shore, or Brookpark, OH. What we had in common was working on cars, building model rockets, and drinking beer. One of our most memorable projects involved pirating the new-tech (for then) satellite TV signal off the Terminal Tower in downtown Cleveland. I was in a functional engineering fraternity, and we assembled a satellite receiver dish from a metal snow saucer, complete with tin can collector, and a 4.2 GHz downconverter. The picture was fuzzy. But it worked.
By the time I had graduated with my Ph.D., though, the picture of the standard engineering student had started to shift. The students that I taught at my first years at Washington State University (WSU) had metamorphosed from those hands-on students that we were, to more professional replacement. Now it was kids that likely had parents who were professionals, but were likely good at math, and were looking for a comfortable career at Boeing. My guess is that I’ve educated at least 500 students who have ended up at Boeing, and likely more. It’s honestly challenging for me to walk into any division over there and not have at least one (usually more) of the engineers being a legacy from my classroom.
Times changed yet again, to the almost-current students we have now. Before it was the “in” thing to focus on recruiting underrepresented minorities into our program, I was hard at work mainstreaming kids whose parents were primarily Mexican, who were farmworkers in the Yakima Valley. We are now approaching something like 33% of our current student population as being from “underrepresented” minorities. Except, by any demographic measure, they are NOT underrepresented. There is still academic cultural pressure to increase these numbers, but it is likely not possible. We have reached some psychosocial thermodynamic efficiency with this percentage (the population of minority students is now overrepresented for their demographic in the state) and any effort to do so will profoundly come at the expense of other students in the program, in a world of diminishing dollars. Compound that with the election of Donald Trump is the lightning-fast dismantling of DEI, we have the current mix from a race/ethnicity perspective that will continue.
And to make matters worse, we are still recovering from the dramatic de-socialization of the COVID years — the true “Long COVID” epidemic — as well as the transformation of all schools to functional prisons because of the ongoing fears of school shootings. To sum it up, the kids I teach now know little to nothing about engineering before they arrive at WSU, they are pathologically obedient, which means they suffer from extreme agency problems, and they simply have no conceptualization of what a functional mentor/mentee relationship might entail. They don’t even hit me until their senior year, which is a mind-blowing experience for them, with my radical expectations for self-motivation and actual production of results. I would love to tell you that kids come to my classroom knowing what to expect in my design clinic. But most, unless they’ve been informed in the pre-class, walk into the clinic program having no idea what the program is, how they might benefit, or even who I am. I’ve worked on all these things — part of my ‘brand’ is my title — Dr. Chuck. But even though I am a functional “institution at the institution”, the students really are oblivious. Forced through infinite cascades of fractalization, and unknowing due to the dismantling of authority in the modern university, they arrive in front of me poorly prepared for their capstone experience, which is supposed to be their transitional experience into the work world. It is a burdensome experience for me emotionally, and a “lift” I find that I do with increasing trepidation. Students have emerged from the Longhouse with some modest expectation of being coddled. Needless to say, that doesn’t happen with me.
And while I don’t coddle them, I often find that I am one of the first people to explain to them the fundamental virtues of a successful career. I do tell them that I am world-class, which initially makes them blanch. And then I tell them I have no intention of teaching students who do not have equivalent aspirations. They have been told for most of their career at WSU that they are second-rate, and even at this land grant university, suffer from a pandemic of low expectations. A range of companies, regional, national and international sponsor my program. I tell them that I will not tolerate them being second-rate — but I also give them the motivational structure on how to be world-class themselves.
Almost all of my students are in the 20-23 year old age group, and the good news is that their neuroplasticity saves most of them. But I have no expectation that the students showing up at my door will improve over time. It’s not a matter of SAT scores. It’s a direct consequence of grounding validity — that internal sense of a reality that comes from making direct stories inside their brain through interaction with their own hands and a problem. And this is a neurobiological evolution. Kids raised in a bubble, whether that bubble is in suburban Redmond, or Toppenish, WA, have little idea how to conceive of a life as an engineer at a factory. Those from poorer parts of the state are obviously far more disadvantaged than students from more wealthy areas. At least those students from middle class neighborhoods can conceive of a potential lifestyle. But you might as well be talking about life on the Moon to many. And for the kids in places like the Yakima Valley, their ambitions are to return back to that same place, whether there’s a job there or not. I have a hard time arguing for the current migratory lifestyle and “making it” with many young people, just FYI. But it’s deeper than that. There are actual different cultural patterns that play a role — virtually all of my male Mexican students are engaged by their senior year. Their fiancees are expecting marriage and children soon. So the “return to Mama” urge, which hits at 5-10 years for my white kids, for them is immediate.
The good news is that, regardless of the roughness of their preparation, most of the students go on to productive careers. The ending of the various DEI mandates will actually help the minority kids the most, as these things provide counterintuitive incentives to many hiring managers. Managers look at ALL new hires as a gamble. But a minority is an especially large gamble, because it will be very difficult, if not impossible to fire them if they don’t work out. My students from minority populations are absolutely not distinct in performance from my majority white/Asian populations. So DEI has created a burden on the minority kids for hiring that is exacerbated by a lack of what I call “social coding” — them not coming from the dominant engineering culture — that will be eliminated.
All this said, what should the future of engineering education look like, considering these generalized student demographics?
Engineering programs will always have a bias toward kids on the autism spectrum, as most early engineering consists of Legalistic/Absolutistic v-Meme rule following. I think that all potential students in high schools should practice more in team-based collaborative environments, with less emphasis on grades and more on production.
Math will remain a weakness, but the way we teach math currently is wildly atrocious. If we would take a socialized approach toward teaching math, we’d likely see far more comprehension. A revolution is required in our pedagogy, based on students co-teaching students.
One of the things that seems to be very difficult for people involved in educational development to understand is that young people lack the ability to engage in cross-paradigmatic and analogic thinking. The real fix for this is more interaction where students are shown manufacturing and engineering environments, as well as meaningful examples of how technology uses the various classical disciplines (math, physics, social sciences) early on.
There should be far more summer camps for engineering and pre-engineering students. There will be no transformation of local educational systems in the near future. Some level of compensation could be achieved with these camps.
Design and problem-solving methodologies should be included in all college levels of engineering. It would amaze people if they knew the proportion of analysis vs. synthesis/design in a contemporary engineering curriculum. We don’t have students build anything except nonsense simulacra of physical principles in most of our lower-level classes. Such a deficit must come to an end.
We are going to have to have some classes on social skills and behaviors. Kids do not know how to manage mentoring relationships, or basic public etiquette. It’s not that they’re running down the block naked. But performance environments very quickly pick up on cues for like-minded individuals, and will exclude those that cannot deliver those cues. We can practice some of this in labs. At the same time, they would also benefit from being directly addressed.
It may surprise some subset of individuals outside the Sausage Factory that these obvious things (they seem obvious to me, at least) are not being done. But they aren’t. And if we have any intention of fixing our technical education pipeline, we are going to have to become student-focused. Right now, we sure aren’t.
Baby Coho, Windblown, Salmon River outside White Bird, ID
“Manufacturing is insanely difficult.It’s under appreciated in its difficulty.” Elon Musk
One of the things I’ve found to be profoundly curious about the debate regarding fixing our educational systems is how so little discussion occurs around the people delivering the educational content to students. Sure — we’ll argue about topical lists, appropriateness of grade level with material, and such. And then things will then diverge into polemics on the various politics of universities in general (almost always very liberal) or perhaps the politics of individual faculty members.
It’s not that those conversations shouldn’t be occurring — but they will not get at the root cause of the deep problems inside our modern educational systems — especially those in higher education. At some level, we just assume that students are going to get trained, somewhat correctly, with various holes in their knowledge because they did, or did not, take a pedagogy class. FWIW — our Colleges of Education are largely train wrecks, so if you think you’re going to fix the problems in higher education’s pipeline by having everyone take a pedagogy class, I’ve got news for you. My favorite story at my own university happened a while back — there was an “active learning” class — where students were supposed to do exercises themselves, and the classroom would be run by the professor from “the back of the room” (as opposed to the “lecture/sage on the stage” model.)
The class was delivered by lecture.
And I can tell you as well, as the former President/Chair/whatever of the President’s Teaching Academy, no young professor ever called me to ask for advice, nor sit in their classroom. Education is simply an arbitrary venture at the contemporary academy, though I think it’s also fair to say that occasionally, a charismatic individual passes through and makes a temporary difference in how education is structured.
But trust me — nothing sticks. The REASON nothing sticks is that, unless there is a conscious intervention by an individual, Conway’s Law must hold. And universities are inherently rigid hierarchies, with an obsession with titles, and there is a chronic ‘regression to the mean’ phenomenon that goes on in the vast majority of the curriculum. How you lecture can matter, and of course, with the various physical sciences and engineering, you do have labs. But overall, it’s not just the elephant in the living room. That elephant is out roaming on the savannah, eight thousand miles away.
Bottom line — if you want to really change education in general, and engineering education in particular (what this piece is about) you really have to re-think what are the guiding principles that undergird your educational factory. Students are the pieces of work that are being programmed, and at least as much thought has to go into how you are going to create the machines that make those pieces of work as you do arguing about the list of topics. Right now, we don’t do much at all. I find it pathologically fascinating that even at my own university, I have yet to be asked to give a single guest lecture on education, even though I a.) have received university-system-level awards, b.) bring in healthy amounts of money from external sources, and c.) even headed up institutional level organs for improving teaching. My passing is literally a hole in the fossil record.
The problem with even saying that is from an academic perspective, from the primary Authoritarian/Legalistic v-Meme that the academy operates under, even making that statement is some kind of narcissistic sour grapes. I must be butt-hurt over all of this. Honestly, I’m not. What I do in my Industrial Design Clinic, where students work with real sponsors, on real work, with real deliverables, and real expectations, is more rightly called World Creation. The idea is more like a Live Action Role-Playing game (LARP), except the participants (the students) have no real idea that they’re in a LARP. They do know it’s a class, and they do know they have to accomplish real work or they won’t graduate. At least that’s what I tell them. The reality is that I create the motivational environment, buttressed by sufficient and plentiful resources, and a customer/mentor WITH appropriate process that they are cattle-chuted through the game, learning skills and finding appropriate partners, that the statistics of them NOT getting it done are extremely low.
But I got to this very evolved form of education after serious study AND soul-searching after a ton of work. The principal ethos evolved early. But I’ve been doing this for some 29 years — longer than virtually all my students (and some of the younger professors) have been alive.
So what are we doing now? When we hire new faculty, there are really only two primary criteria we apply before we hire. First is that they have “research” prowess and specificity of the area, and secondly, that they stand out from whoever is in the pool that they’re competing with. Occasionally, there might be a nod to some DEI concerns — but honestly, not much. The faculty in my department are mostly foreign born (Chinese/E. Asian, Indian/S. Asian, and from the Middle East) and we really don’t care much at the time of hiring if they have any industrial experience. We hardly bias anything to folks being American-born. We do think about their ability (it is discussed) to bring in research funding, because without money, they will not make tenure. And then we’ll have to start the process all over again. All things considered, I feel like we’ve been pretty lucky. I like our young faculty. But if there’s any illusion that we have anything other than superficial concerns about classes they can teach, when it comes to education, let me disabuse you of that notion.
What that means is we end up with the v-Meme-NA of our own social structure deeply embedded in our activities. How that manifests itself is shown with the basic characteristics of how Legalistic/Absolutistic systems produce knowledge. It’s Completeness uber alles. One of the most obvious is the number of credit hours we require students to take. I think we’re currently at about 131 hours, whereas our accrediting body only requires something around 95. We don’t teach meaningful synthesis/design until the senior year. Teaching early in the curriculum is almost all lectures, and considered a booby prize by all faculty. What that means is excellence in education early on is highly dependent on the instructor and their own independent ethos on how they deal with a classroom, which in the first two years is very likely to be large. A class in Dynamics, which is a very difficult subject for most students, will likely have 200 students in it.
How to sum this up? We really don’t care about the most difficult part of what we do — building and staffing the factory. Especially at the undergraduate level. And because of this, our reject rate (the number of students that do not persist) is phenomenally high — often, in various classes, over 50%. Imagine a factory whose waste was 50% of the raw material brought through the door. The mind reels.
And the research on all this is appalling. One of the things I absolutely do know about student retention is that if students feel like they are connected to the program, then they’ll likely stay and finish. But instead of meaningfully and deliberately constructing environments so that students are connected, we fractionalize ad infinitum. Working together is called cheating. And the various DEI excuses now definitely come to the fore, though the reality of my classroom, where students actually befriend each other and work together, belies this. Stupid research is historically done on team size, for example, where it’s decided that four is the optimal number of members. But if you look at the actual research where that number was generated from, it was from building marshmallow straw towers in the course of an hour, between strangers. It is literally insane (see earlier comment about how educational research is largely garbage.)
If we want to build an environment that actually links industry and the university in a meaningful way, we are going to have to hire with a very different set of expectations than any current Carnegie R1 institution (the categorization for top research institutions in the US) does. In order to run my clinic, I need on any given week the following skills:
Knowledge of a broad range of topics, at a level where I can sort complexity quickly.
The ability to negotiate contracts and conflicts.
Some knowledge of adolescent/post-adolescent psychology, and the ability to identify the symptoms of various mild pathologies so I don’t over-react if someone’s having a bad day.
Actual knowledge of developmental behaviors and goals for a range of both students AND collaborators. Anyone proposing creation of an educational environment that doesn’t understand what partners need, as well as students, cannot create anything that lasts.
Sales ability to continue to recruit outside collaborators into the fold.
Ability to map procedural steps to educational outcomes.
The biggest has to be to think consequentially. What this means is that one must own a large sense of responsibility if students in your LARP don’t advance past a certain level in an appropriate amount of time. It means you’ve built the game poorly, and you have to own it. We’ve constructed education as a very low responsibility endeavor for teachers. If the students don’t learn it, and it’s an accepted part of the curriculum, it’s the students’ problem, and they will be graded/punished appropriately. The beats will continue until morale improves. This is absolutely counter to the high performance environment one MUST establish if you want students to move through the game over the course of a semester. Further, the more fear you use, the less likely students are to come forward quickly with what’s actually wrong with your creation. At round one, it’s your version of reality you’re creating.
If I had to hire a faculty for starting something like Elon’s Texas Institute of Technology and Science (TITS), I’d probably split the percentages of people with industry experience and Ph.Ds about 50/50. I’d teach people how to construct meaningful customer relationships, because everywhere you look in making a true paradigm-shifting institution, your primary job is building and maintaining a large social network that has as its priority transfer of information across all its nodes. I’d train directly to these goals as well — and at least some of this is salesmanship and deal creation on an individual level. If you want to pull something like this off, you must have people who have profound, place-taking empathy. A heavy lift. I also don’t think I’d hire all but a few under the age of 35. Younger people developmentally are simply not at the stage where they could be expected to master some of the more complex social dynamics.
There’s more, of course. And there would be coffee. Because coffee is for closers.
The LA fires are burning, and while I should be writing something about that, I just can’t yet. Yes, it is a memetic shitshow. Yes, DEI is a problem (though only for a mix of reasons that most people are unaware of) and yes, I think most of it could have been avoided.
But I feel like a little positive writing today. And hey — you get what you pay for!
One of the more positive snippets of news in the last couple of weeks is Elon Musk’s interest in starting the Texas Institute of Technology and Science (TITS). He was prompted to discuss this (seems like it was before the latest rape ring scandal in Great Britain) before excrement hit the ventilator. The protagonist was one of Marc Andreessen’s (of a16z fame) General Partners, Katherine Boyle, who daylighted the topic. I proposed myself (still will) to be the founding President of the institution, and if Elon had seen any of my comments, my phone would be ringing. People fundamentally miscast the problem with engineering education and our young people by assuming somehow we have DEI problems, and if we would just double down on higher SAT scores, with maybe a little industrial experience thrown in, we’d fix what ails us. As an engineering educator for nigh on 41 years, eh, not so much.
It’s not that excellence in technical education isn’t needed. It absolutely is. It’s just a classic “and” problem. We need that. We just also need a list of other “ands”. Some of these include exposure to industry practice, including participation in industry throughout their education. No engineering school can reproduce a real factory floor for a lab. Which is why I directly partner with companies like Schweitzer Engineering Labs here in Pullman, running mass collaborations with their factory floor, through the generosity and assistance of plant managers there. I am lucky. Those connections come naturally in my world because many of these individuals are my former students. It helps to have an actor at the VP level when someone will open up their facility for a morning just to have students confront actual problems folks on the manufacturing floor are having. And I’m very clear with the messaging to my students about their obligation to return value to the sponsors. If it costs the company $70K to shut the floor down for a morning so the students can participate, they better deliver somewhere north of that $70K with the completion of their projects in value for the company’s trouble.
What is also important, though, are what people in the education business call the “soft skills” lessons. This is a stupid term, because these skills, such as high agency, data-driven decision making, merging opinions from successful collaborations, and on and on, are far more than just an isolated list of skills. They’re actually the function of psychosocial development and maturity, which needs to be just as deliberate as teaching someone vector calculus. The problem, though, is that these types of skills cannot be taught with a PowerPoint presentation. You have to create experiences that are profoundly disinter mediated (you, the professor, are not in the middle) so that students can act within the confines of their own brains. As my mom used to say “Son, the life will teach you.” Absolutely.
But these spaces and lessons need to at least 80% be intentional out of the environment and situation. That means, just like a really great video game, someone has to know what they are doing. The magic just doesn’t happen. An important tool I use is what I call “meaning matching” — understanding how the different ages — both students and sponsors — find meaning. And then you, as the environment designer, create the interaction scenarios so that both sides remain enfranchised around particular goals, and both develop and get work done. For example, 22 year olds want to demonstrate performance and mastery of engineering, whereas 35 year olds are looking for community. Weaving both these developmental goals around a common objective is the ticket, and is your best ticket to success.
One of the principles which absolutely scares academics is that I will only permit REAL work in our exercises. I want students to solve real problems that people are having. No make-believe. And while these are often more complicated than just canned exercises (I like to make fun of the various competitions we have, like mousetrap cars) they also are vastly more rich from an information richness perspective. The boundaries are fuzzy. And that encourages both exploration — going out and finding things one didn’t know — as well as metacognition — the realization that you’re not going to know everything about a space, but you still have to solve a problem.
Someone’s inherent capacity for this is NOT something any standardized test measures. Nor is likely to do so in the future. That doesn’t mean one should throw all standardized tests into the garbage. It’s not a “but” kind of problem. But one must be open to the broader space if you actually intend to revolutionize engineering education.
Another big one that is chronically neglected is peer-level collaboration with students. We are very comfortable with mentor/mentee relationships, and prioritizing them. And these are very important. Complex behaviors in this environment are often directly passed through emulation (think mimicking) of more sophisticated actors. But that does not teach students one of the most important lessons they must also learn — how to assess their colleagues, as well as their efficacy and veracity of their work. You gotta know who you can trust.
The end product that everyone wants is almost meta-the same — a mature, aware, independent individual that can act in the context of group benefit, while also working alone when need be. The term for that is agency, and as I’ve written elsewhere on this blog, agency is self-empathy — being connected on multiple levels with oneself. Which then manifests as actual connections with others, in a high-coherence information transfer mode. Short version — you’re being honest and reflective with yourself, as well as assessing what others told you. That’s how you make complex systems with millions of parts fit together and actually work.
The problem with education like this is that this has basically nothing to do with the current psychosocial DNA of our current university system. Students aren’t just told how to think. They are told how to relate to others (the whole DEI scam) and are hobbled in having productive experiences where they discover stuff on their own. Students now are more obedient than they have ever been. But the end result of such obedience is that students only trade their agency for a lack of responsibility. It’s the natural bargain. And you end up with entire institutions of compromised young folks. And the ones with natural victim/psychopathic tendencies? They float to the top, ready to be waved as flags of dysfunction by those that want our young people to fail. Most young people really are not the problem one sees in the press. But we, as a larger set of institutions, have failed in understanding the challenges involved in raising responsible young people. Instead, we’ve devolved to leading with fatuous efforts about declaring one’s pronouns.
Getting to people wanting to shatter the paradigm (like Elon) is also challenging. Outside-the-box thinkers like me really don’t have any meaningful access to reform-minded individuals, who are largely trapped inside a box of people who are status-driven. No one really wants to change the order of the status line-up, while at the same time, people expect these leaders to be the best. They aren’t — they’re a function of their v-Meme NA more than anyone. So it’s a self-reinforcing trap. It is very frustrating to listen to these people, trapped in their high-status bubble, wondering out loud on social media about problems that they believe haven’t been confronted, largely because the elites haven’t confronted them. Just a word, both Kathryn and Elon — we ain’t many. But there are a handful of us that have been thinking outside the box — and have a success portfolio to prove it works.
Which brings me to developing agency in young people. My X pal, A.J. Kay, just last week, proposed pondering the two categories of Discipline and Control, as a way of doing a self-reflection on one’s growth as a person. I thought this was great. The definition of level of Discipline is the ability to force one to do an activity that is prosocial/beneficial, even when you don’t want to. And Control is just the direct opposite — your ability to not execute behaviors that your brain wants to do for self-satisfaction. I had the students make the two columns and list theirs, then share with the group of students at their table (usually 4-5).
There is only good news here — the students almost uniformly tagged their eating, exercise, sleep and screen time as things they needed to practice. Things like “getting to bed on time” and “not sleeping in” figured prominently, as well as “cooking at home four times a week” (kinda scary when you think about it.) Exercise was almost included at a particular tempo (many students said 4-5 times a week) and certainly justified the expense we’ve put into recreational facilities for fitness. There was a little more advanced behavior as far as assignment completion as well. Overall, I left a little more hopeful. We didn’t quite get to eliminating sugary drinks. But I’ll take it.
The class I performed this exercise in was our introductory design class, where we will cover things like empathy interviews with customers as well as structured problem solving design processes (we are a big LEAN shop.) If you ask how this fits into engineering education, I myself believe in a bildung approach to education. We cannot expect our engineering students to be high performance individuals, while at the same time to act ethically without appropriate internal development. I plan on doing this exact exercise at the end of the semester to see how their personal goals evolve.
Stay tuned!
P.S. For those interested in a deeper dive on how the brain actually learns and retains complex information, read this piece.
Countryside in Winter, outside Milton-Freewater, OR
One of the more interesting plot lines of stories, along the lines of musing about the Multiverse, is the alternate timeline idea. Of course, “what ifs” along historical perspectives are nothing really new. And as far as literature goes, my intellectual engagement with the idea probably goes back to Michael Moorcock and the Elric series. But more recently, I’m a fan of the TV series Community, which has lots of fun with this particular literary trope. Community is a show about the producer’s idealized community college experience, which seems fantastical in all ways as someone who has worked in academia for most of their lives. There are study groups, engaged individuals, and of course, hot women and men who occasionally sleep with each other. This does not resemble in any way, shape or form, the modern university, which is more akin to a modern gulag, where students stare disinterestedly at professors, work 40 hours/week outside their classes, and the only community-building ritual is football.
But that brings one to the notion of an alternate timeline. Community has lots of shows contained therein where characters step outside of themselves at various branching points, with dramatically different outcomes dependent on varying choices the cast members make in their lives.
And as go the cast members, one can draw parallels to nations. Across Western civilization right now, there are all sorts of nations, making all sorts of timeline choices regarding civilizational outcomes, that are far more likely to yield unpleasant ends, or civil wars, than a make-out session in a car in the community college parking lot.
In the most recent election in the U.S., Kamala Harris, VP under Joe Biden, ran a strong negative campaign based on turning the country more Woke, and lost to Donald Trump, who, with a preselected “dream team” of counter-elites, managed a modest win in the national elections. While Donald Trump, an elite himself, runs as a counter-elite, officially aligning himself with the Republican Party, a firm majority in that party still identifies itself with an elite globalist agenda. Make no mistake.
More importantly, Elon Musk, billionaire and owner of multiple paradigm-busting companies himself, maneuvered himself into a key role, along with fellow billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, as chief advisor to Trump. Even before Trump’s election, Musk had spoken out against many of the Woke issues of the day, such as continued support of the war in Ukraine, Internet censorship, and the elevation of transgender rights. And consistently, both Trump and Musk have spoken out against the key Immiserators in contemporary society, which Harris had passionately embraced.
When Harris lost, it was a profound fork in the timeline for the US. Harris had promised more Internet and social media censorship, under the mask of fighting “disinformation” and “misinformation”, more enforcement of DEI policies, as well as control of AI development. The press had (and still is) lined up behind Harris. Even as I write this, a moribund economy is being billed by the mainstream media as the strongest in the last 20 years. It’s easy to get paranoid and assume that the financial press believes there will be a fall, and that will be blamed on Trump, even though the lag times for any economic policy implementation is at least a year or two. But regardless, Musk and others have been running numerous moments of grounding validity across the political landscape, from buying Twitter (now X) and wading into the various culture war agenda items like transgenderism, and DEI policies that I’ve explained are prime tools of the Immiserators. At least for the present, the United States is on the upward path toward increased personal agency, and less government. As an example, Trump himself announced the creation of the Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE), eponymously named after a meme based on a Shiba Inu dog. DOGE’s job will be elimination of government regulations — a subject of a post in itself.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic in Great Britain, an entire nation is in the middle of a horrific branch in their timeline involving a sex scandal where primarily Pakistani immigrants ran large rape rings targeting white, underage girls in a variety of towns, including Rotherham, Telford, and other towns in the north of England. Authorities from both the local communities, and all the way up to the top ranks of British governance suppressed the scandal on the basis of maintaining racial harmony by not naming or prosecuting the Pakistani perps. The magnitude of the numbers involved is mind-boggling. Some 7000+ rapes were documented through these rape rings even this year, with basically no law enforcement efforts to stop the crimes, as well as plenty of victim-blaming.
Initially, when I heard about these crimes, I was very suspicious of a mass hysteria event, similar to the early ’80s McMartin pre-school trials in the U.S. In that situation, children had been interviewed for ostensibly repressed memories of devil worship inside of daycare centers. All of it turned out to be false, and you can read about it at this link. Instead, what the rape rings are shaping up to be is a civilization-ending event. Musk is tweeting about it on X even as I write this, and the British high command is condemning him for bringing up the unpleasantness. Apparently, the behavior has been historic, and tracks with surges in immigration in Britain — even dating back to the early 2000s.
Both these events — Trump’s ascendancy, as well as Britain’s collapse, would be worthy of a book. But what they show in the context of this blog is how during times of Elite Overproduction, which manifests itself in multiple ways, where the number of chairs available for both elites and their children shrink, and the number of elites themselves grow, there is profound societal pressure on immiserating the larger populace. As I wrote in a previous piece, in the US, the trans issue quickly gained ground as an elite signaling device, and luxury belief that elites could communicate with each other that they deserved to win the game of Musical Chairs.
The fact they were creating a more oppressive, authoritarian social environment for the larger population they believed to be in their favor. But fortunately, the votes and the governance system was in place in the U.S. that hopefully this will stop peacefully. We were simply not that far gone. While the immiseration of the populace was indeed real, what was also true was that the actual grounding of the entire trans issue involved a minute number of people. The number of trans male->female athletes, while high profile, were/are still relatively small. It’s wrong and vexatious, but it’s not civilization-ending if a man posing as a woman wins a bicycle race. And DEI has been noxious, but once again, not civilization-ending.
Nothing gives that impression of the rape rings in Great Britain. There have been massive numbers of British girls raped in a systematic fashion, by primarily Pakistani immigrants. Incredible system failure, under the guise of Woke policies and ostensible racial harmony, has been covered up. And Musk, and the entire X platform, has given voices to both the advocates for the victims, as well, incredibly enough, to the proponents of the coverup. Predictable elites have called the non-prosecution of these heinous crimes a “noble cause” and any notion that the people responsible, such as Jess Phillips, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls, should be held to account as immodest and unfair. As I write this, the British press is in alignment against Musk, protecting obvious Immiserators. It can be argued that Britain, for all of its history, has a far more comprehensive culture of elites getting away with literal murder. So it’s no surprise that Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and even King Charles, have lined up with fellow elites to defend the mass immiseration scheme. The problem with all authoritarian regimes, de facto or official, is that the people under them can only take so much. Then, psychopathic revolution becomes the stock in trade. Talk about a grounding validity moment.
The other key element to note here is that both large scandals, in both the US and Great Britain, are at their core sex scandals involving sexual abuse of minors. Transgender surgery on youth is the one thing that has profoundly fired up the larger population, as well as access of grown men to women’s spaces so that sexual violence can more easily occur. In Great Britain, the massive size of the rape ring scandal, once again directed at children, is emergent out of elite desires for immiseration in this latest regime of Elite Overproduction. As I’ve written before, sexual abuse of children is psychopathic in nature. But worse, it has the growth effect of producing even more psychopaths. And those relational disruptors go on to create broader psychosocial devolution across societies. You want to destroy the collective conscience of a culture? Rape a significant number of its young people. That train is never late. And it arrives at the station hosting the Tribal/Magical v-Meme. Which is no way to run a large, multi-cultural contemporary society.
This plays into larger psychosocial trends in the collective psyche of all of Western society. We are at a point where we have not kept up the agency-driven developmental needs of our societies. As such, we see elites establish elite coding to sort their kids into the winners’ circle, and everyone else into the loser’s category. How we reverse this, and prompt what in the short term will likely manifest itself as decentralization is an open question. But at the U.S. has some breathing room.
In the U.K., it’s going to be decentralization, followed by relational devolution. Stay tuned.
One of the better pieces I’ve read recently is this one: titled Rapid Onset Political Enlightenment, by David Samuels in Tablet Magazine. Samuels is obviously an Old Dog, and describes in detail the head game that the combo of David Axelrod, a communication specialist and marketing guru, and Barack Obama played on the American people — especially the American tech. elite, that led to the incredibly destructive political climate of the last 16 years.
The short version of Samuels’ thesis is that Obama, with Axelrod’s help, took Axelrod’s strategy utilizing permission structures,(the linked piece is pretty good!) that Axelrod had successfully used in various Chicago races (Harold Washington’s mayoral success is highlighted) to get white folks to vote for black candidates, often against their own interests. They did this by creating a false morality inside people’s value structures to make them believe that morally it was a greater good to vote against both their own interests, and their own grounded intuition. The closest analogy I can come up with essentially Obama’s and Axelrod strategy was the equivalent of unleashing an HIV virus on the natural belief immune systems that any cohort develops, that insures long-term cultural continuity. Once convinced that moral posturing and virtue signaling was somehow in their long-term interest. And it worked — something like 80% of white folks voted for Washington in the mayoral contest, as opposed to only 35% of African-Americans.
The problem with completely disconnecting any group of humans from what I call grounding validity — making sure what you believe has some actual, observable data to back it up– is that it has unintended consequences. My favorite go-to of an entire civilizational collapse due to a lack of it is the parable of the Aztecs, who obsessed on raiding neighboring tribes for human sacrificial tribute to make sure the Sun would rise by cutting out their hearts on the Pyramid of the Sun. Once you believe that level of bullshit, your civilization is uniquely fragile. And 500 badass Spaniards, led by Hernan Cortes, and accompanied by his translator and personal consort Malinche, proved the point. The consequences for ungrounding are wildly tragic. My fun statistic is that 95% of the Aztec genome is carried on the X chromosome. Which mean those conquistadores killed all the men and literally raped all the women.
What is great about this piece is it is obviously written by a pro, who can describe the ins and outs of how they actually did it, as well as the consequences of it coming undone. My analogy of why when these systems fail, they fail rapidly, is that ungrounded systems are prone to what we call signal drift — the difference between a signal with appropriate ground, and whatever the rest of systems and society decide to make up as true. This seems to have a pernicious effect on human brains. When you practice unreality, your brain gets worse and worse detecting reality. It simply doesn’t practice it. And what THAT means is that it is far easier for a cult (or national) leader to seize control and program people with whatever beliefs they want. Like 50 year old men wearing a wig have a right to enter women’s spaces. Or if you want to get into a women’s prison, and you’re a man, just tell the guard you’re a woman. But I digress.
The other thing that happens when you practice unreality, is that your belief system for navigating the actual world is prone, just like an electrical circuit, to arcing when it has to ground itself against actual reality. Arcing is inherently destructive (it’s how we weld metal) and there are sparks. I think it’s a worthy analogy — and we’re witnessing it right now in the aftermath of the Trump election. Samuels makes the point in the piece (and I agree with him wholeheartedly) that Kamala Harris was perhaps the worst presidential candidate in the last 100 years, and the permission structuring around attempting to force people to vote for her using racial and misogynistic guilt (she’s a woman! She’s African-American even though she’s not!) just couldn’t work. It was so unbelievable that enough of the electorate couldn’t just party line NPC it in. And she lost to a candidate who was widely reviled, and the entire press corps had fallen into lockstep of chronically attacking. The result was truly a silent revolution. Because of social shaming, you couldn’t even admit that you might consider voting for Trump without public ostracism. I voted for Trump myself, and still can’t bring up that issue with the majority of liberal friends I still hold. That’s majorly fucked up.
Where Samuels’ analogy falls apart, though, is that these types of outcomes and conflicts are literally occurring across Western civilization. The tendency that Samuels exhibits is to attribute the temporary success of Obama’s campaign to an amalgamation of old and new cunning, and particular individuals. If that were the case, though, we would not be seeing similar types of conflicts across a spectrum of countries, with different outcomes across a variety of countries. One might rack up conservative victories in Hungary/Orban and Italy/Meloni to nations that are in the process of re-grounding toward more appropriate national self-interest. As well, one might consider nations like France, Britain and Canada still in flux.
What is far more likely the overriding dynamic is that we are seeing Turchin’s Elite Overproduction in action across the globalist landscape. Elite Overproduction comes once every 150 years or so (do read Turchin’s book linked here) and happens when there just are too many elites’ kids, and not enough spots for them to assume the same social position as their parents. Why does that matter? If you look out across the political landscape, what we’re actually witnessing is emergent behavior, with the tools of elite manipulation being pulled out of the last century’s toolbox, and finally having the appropriate environmental conditions that they proved to be useful. And it’s U.S. – agnostic. Obama and Axelrod may be clever. But they are just men of their time.
Further, this also gives potential insights into how wider wars get started through Elite Overproduction. When you have too many people competing for too few chairs, then what’s not to like about a Crusade to seize Jerusalem back from the Turks? And the worst conditions for this kind of social virus are when you have an In-group and Out-group that hit the same point of Elite Overproduction at the same time. Then everyone’s raring to go.
If there’s a bigger lesson here, it’s that you’ve got to ground your kids — especially the elite ones — in reality. Or there’s a proclivity for elites to make up self-serving fantasies, and use lots of fancy words to project a preferred image of reality that has nothing to do with it. In our case, I feel like we got lucky by having a robust enough electoral system to elect Donald Trump, and his A-team level staff of advisors. Because the current crop of elites were converging on burning it all down. Or make us vulnerable to a modern day Cortes burning the ships at Veracruz.
P.S. — one thing that is interesting about Samuels’ take on all this is it links Turchin’s book, End Times, that I’ve written about with Rob Henderson’s Troubled — in particular his concept of ‘luxury beliefs’ — with the actual modality — permission structures — that’s a how-to for generating political anarchy. But the circumstances have to be right. Otherwise, the virality you need just ain’t there.
P.P.S. I’ve also recently been taken by Mike Benz. His Joe Rogan podcast lays it out. Another post-mortem way worth listening to.
If you try to immiserate Cecilia, she’ll let you know what she thinks of that.
I’m writing this on the eve of our Nov. 2024 election. It took me a while, but I think I’ve finally figured out what’s going on in the US, as well as around the world. One of the things I’ve spent a lot of time pondering (too much, actually) is how, after the end of the Cold War, when we were literally on the edge of blowing the planet up, we ended up, instead of seeing a flourishing and evolution of the human spirit, we ended up being probably as miserable in society and culture as any time in my lifetime.
Let me give a little background. For those that don’t know, I live in a small college town (Pullman, WA) adjacent to yet another small college town, just six miles away (Moscow, ID). Both towns are simultaneously adjacent to some of the most magnificent mountains, wild rivers and forests in the Lower 48, which most of the residents have no inkling exist at all. You have to drive a little ways to get to them (2.5 hrs) but a sizable hunk of folks that have any interest in that kind of thing will get in the car and literally drive seven or so hours to a National Park for their yearly fix. That’s how insular they are.
People fantasize about retiring in a small college town — the theatre! An almost pro- sports experience! Concerts! Young people! But they don’t realize that the two communities, while great places to visit, are, at best mediocre places to live. It’s the reason they don’t really grow. And they’re not particularly cheap, either, for small town living. The residents running the show are a mix of locals from the conjoint farm community (we live in the most productive wheat country in the world) some strong church affiliates, as well as some professors.
But there’s no question what runs the culture. It’s the university, and the people associated with it. And as university culture either rises or falls, so do the fortunes of the culture. You may have noted that universities are on the wane in our society — declining demographics certainly play a part. But Woke politics have become so obnoxious, it’s intolerable for anyone who is remotely “normal” in today’s contemporary culture.
What does “normal” even mean any more? It used to mean a reasonable level of independently generated relationships (friends) with institutions to live your life and raise your kids with. I do realize that this hardly exists anywhere any more, especially if you compare it with where I grew up — a dysfunctional steel town on the Ohio River. But it’s saying something that there was a much more profound sense of community in a town in economic freefall than there is in a cosseted island of privilege, funded solely by outside revenue.
People think about retiring here because they come here to become educated, and that produces a lot of memories. They return here because of those memories are powerful, and they want to watch football, get drunk with old friends, and tailgate. It’s a powerful tribal alignment. In a time when the Immiserators (we’ll get to a more precise definition of them in a moment) have destroyed anyone’s desire to affiliate with state or nation, folks migrate to the university to recover that sense of community. But then, after the game, they leave. And leave this community, dominated by the ethos of the current academy, which is relationally disruptive, and inherently elitist, to its own devices. Which is not in the community’s favor.
One of the interesting things about being a professor for my entire career (north of 37 years) is that I’ve seen exactly every different stereotype of what the rest of the world think a professor is. I’m a Renaissance Man with a potty mouth — I write, I craft, play musical instruments, and talk about politics as well as engineering. Blah, blah, blah. People say “hey — you’re what we always thought a professor should be!” Because they know, from their own experience, what professors actually are. If you think, in the modern academy, you can succeed by NOT being neurodivergent in some form or another, I’ve got news for you. You’ve got to have some form of OCD to study flea anuses, or squirrel penises (I had a friend that actually did that, and was wildly successful – he was/is a decent human being, so don’t get carried away with that) for your entire life. But you have to be different.
And inside that difference, the majority become anti-rational. They might apply logic or complicated methods in their research. But when it comes to human relations, they sit in a rigid, hierarchical system that heavily penalizes any developmental nonconformity — such as actually evolving as a human being. University towns are filled with functional adult toddlers with some form of oppositional defiant disorder. It might move the science of squirrel penises forward. But it’s hell to live here.
Before we move forward, let’s define what an ‘Immiserator’ is. An Immiserator is any individual whose primary (or even secondary) function in life is to make other people miserable and deprive them of joy. There are lots of tools in the toolbox to do that, but the primary one is rules. Any time an exception happens, that can produce any kind of negative outcome, a rule must be propagated. (Big Hat Tip to Peter Turchin and his book, ‘End Times’ — credit where credit is due.)
And those rules must be enforced. The joy is in the enforcement! At least for the Immiserator. You may be miserable, and the exception may never occur again. But rules allow immiseration to be applied across-the-board. Everyone gets to be miserable! Which is, of course, the point.
Immiseration is a primary tool of relational disruption. No one wants to talk to anyone when they’re miserable. They might say the wrong thing, or blow up. That would lead to more enforcement of more rules, and more emotional flow to the Immiserators. So people start shutting down. That doesn’t really suit the Immiserators either — if everyone is quiet then there’s no one to punish. So instead of just letting people re-form social networks outside the Immiserators, they want to send you to talk therapy. Or Healing Circles. Or other such icks.
As we’ve seen in the last 10 years, Immiserators are very often female. Immiseration profoundly fits inside the foundational elements of women’s personae of Nurture and Social Control. When Nurture is minimized, then that energy has to go somewhere, and Social Control is where it goes. Whole societies are built on this. Who enforces the Taliban’s anti-woman edicts? It’s the Taliban grandmothers. Who are at war over the increasingly confusing rules governing access to young women’s uterine real estate? Middle-aged white women.
But if you think men are off the hook, you’re also wrong. Men pivot around the dyad of Protect and Provide. We see this on the Right side of the political spectrum. Increasingly hostile edicts for Protect also provide immiseration – we can get back to the extreme example of the Taliban preventing young girls from attending school. And Provide, at some level in recession because of failing differences in M/F incomes and job positions (note — women get more college degrees, more promotions, and lots of other stuff) still has the ability to hold hostage and immiserate people dependent on that good old Do-Re-Mi.
But back to my university town. In my town(s) we have a local newspaper, the Moscow-Pullman Daily News. For over 20 years, I’ve written for the newspaper as an op-ed columnist. It was a biweekly gig, paying the handsome sum of $25/column, which NEVER changed over the time . But I was happy to write. I figured it was my charitable donation to news in the area. I’m an educated man, with broad, international experience. By sharing my insights, I’d improve the information level of my community. I did try to write about local issues, as well as the larger ones more in my expertise.
Sometime in the last 15 years, the newspaper made a decision to go every day with op-eds from people like me. Well, at least ‘like me’ in the community. This was relatively innocuous, until the community (especially the folks in Moscow) decided to double down on religious persecution of a fundamentalist, Full Bible Church in their community. Their pastor, Doug Wilson, has even appeared on the Tucker Carlson show. The paper’s op-ed columnists would regularly scream and wail about Doug, and his congregation, which interestingly enough, are maybe a little older than the college kids, but far younger than the liberal/progressive elite that believed they ran the community. Doug is indeed an asshole, and he DID make it easy. We have (believe it or not) about 6 mega-churches in our combined towns, population of 65K. Doug is that nail sticking out begging to be hammered down by the Immiserators. He may or may not have had it coming. But as Clint Eastwood said famously, when it comes to the Immiserators, we’ve all got it coming.
But if you’re not growing, you’re dying. And those progressive didn’t have kids. And now they’re old. They’re almost entirely composed of people that perceive themselves as the intelligentsia. But in reality, they’re idiots. Screaming idiots.
The Moscow/Pullman Immiserati.
During COVID, they screamed so much at me, as I made my steady progression toward the truth of COVID, and ended up profoundly on the ‘defending young people’ side of the non-issue for them, I finally quit. They would write their op-ed columns about me and my op-eds — what I would consider an op-ed journalistic violation. When you have a column, you have an obligation to inform your readers. You get the bully pulpit. And the first word. But your readership gets the last word — in the letters. Instead, they wrote columns that would probably be considered libelous about me. They would dance and holler. And so I finally just gave up.
This cadre definitely immiserated me. And when I left, they went back to the standard themes. We are all racists. Donald Trump is a fascist. If you’re not hanging your head in shame for living in our little isolated enclave, you’re a member of the KKK. And so on. A lot of people in that caste (as well as the letter writers) had done yeoman work in the past, when we actually had problems, at least regionally. Coeur D’Alene, and Hayden Lake, ID are not that far away. Who can forget Richard Butler and the Aryan Nations? But that ship has sailed, or at a minimum, burrowed underground. Escalating real estate prices are never good for true believers.
It’s too painful to count, but at least in the last year, every op-ed that runs from the ostensible Left side, is about Donald Trump, or Christ Church, and how their supporters/followers are evil racists. Folks, we don’t functionally have an African-American community in this middle-of-nowhere burg. There are no reported instances of racism, though we have had black-on-black gang violence. Every now and then, we do see something directed against the Native American community, the Nez Perce. But even that is literally a once-in-two-years episode. If that. Hell, we don’t even have a Hispanic community outside the university.
But Immiserators gonna immiserate. And well-meaning people who are NOT the members of the Immiserati line up behind them. When you have a community where a fair share of the members have OCD or OCPD, and you stand up and say surgical masks don’t work to stop COVID, and we should stop torturing our students in grade school with this crazy bullshit, you should expect to take some heat. In the fragmented world of Pullman/Moscow, they managed to completely isolate me. I literally was screamed at in the street. No shit.
How do these Immiserators immiserate? They take the issue of the day, and scream. Over and over. Take the trans issue. You don’t want a 50 year old man, dressed up as a woman in your daughter’s locker room? You bigoted transphobe. Let’s talk about how you don’t know about “the science.” You don’t want to castrate a confused young child being bombarded by social media that the only way they’ll fit in is with body-altering hormones, and complete loss of sexual function, as well as an inability to easily urinate the rest of their lives? You’re promoting child suicide. You don’t want your daughter playing volleyball against boys wearing pony tails and claiming they’re girls? There is no one worse than you.
And they’ll let you know it. It’s the beauty of immiseration. In the parlance of this blog, I call this “emotional state matching.” They want you to be as miserable as they are. And they’re going to double down with some mix of social pressure, rules and generalized screaming until you do. It doesn’t make any difference how preposterous it is — how crazy is it, really, that anyone would advocate for middle-aged men sporting a euphoria boner in a girls’ high school locker rooms, or how rare it is (if this was happening all the time, I guarantee there would be dead bodies in the street.) That’s NOT the point. The point is misery. Yours. Oh, and the self-righteous screaming.
Which brings us around to Donald Trump. I’ve written extensively about Trump on this blog (you can Google it) and none of it is complimentary. I’ve called him a narcissistic psychopath, among other things. But I’ve attempted to keep it real. Trump was, and is a moderate Republican in policy. He is not a fascist. He has a big mouth, and he violates institutional social codes of speech by saying the quiet part out loud. We have been seized by an institutional class that has, in league with the Immiserators, figured out how to successfully loot the Treasury, on every level of American society. Does he care about the American people? I think at some level he does. But he cares far more about his own personal image. I’m not as sure as I used to be that he is a narcissistic psychopath. But he’s still definitely a narcissist.
And he’s found his niche — fighting the Immiserati. He’s got some allies who actually have some policy sense on the misery — Vance, Kennedy, and especially Elon Musk. Elon Musk, who in any other time in America’s history would be a hero — putting people into space, creating WiFi for the world, electric cars, and the list goes on — is now chronically vilified by the Immiserati. One of Elon’s main messages is to young people — look forward to your life, there are not too many people on the planet, have children and families — the Immiserati beat the drum, and the sub-Immiserators chime in. Musk is bad. Evil, in fact. People are not nearly immiserated enough. Get ready for de-growth. They’re still functioning, aren’t they?
And a peace deal for Ukraine? Nothing is more immiserating than the threat of thermonuclear war hanging over everyone’s head. Lest you get carried away and think the Immiserators actually WANT nuclear war, I really don’t think that’s the case. But operating where they do, in the limbic zone, with its desire for depressive emotional state matching, they don’t care. It’s short term misery they seek, and damn the long-term consequences. I’ll still bet dollars to donuts that 95% of Americans can’t find Ukraine on the map. And Ukraine has its own Immiserators that are propagating policies that will annihilate their young male class. They’re emotional state-matching with our own US foreign policy Immiserators, that are watching the rivers of blood run while our own arms merchants get fat.
In order to fix this problem, we first have to recognize it. We have to dismantle the Immiserati, and their larger caste of Immiserators. That’s why the latest head of the Immiserati, a sock puppet as far as I call tell, Kamala Harris, tried to float the whole ‘Joy’ message. The fact that this whole campaign fell flat tells you that the public isn’t falling for it. Kamala went back to the drumbeat of the other side being Nazis, fascism, and the Handmaid’s Tale. They were more in form, and didn’t cause so much cognitive dissonance that people just tuned out.
We’ll see who wins. We’re still in a tight spot, regardless of who wins. But I’ve found that naming something is the first step in either saving something, or defeating. Let’s get out there and get busy.
Today, October 13, 2024, is truly a momentous day. Why? SpaceX successfully launched AND recovered Starship V — the whole configuration, which included the heavy booster, AND the top stage, which will be the working part of their spaceship that will carry humans to Mars. Recovery of the heavy booster was accomplished by Mechazilla, the giant chopsticks-like device, while the top stage splashed down in the Indian Ocean. It would have been great to have the top land on one of SpaceX’s recovery ships, but that will come in time.
There are lots of YouTube videos that portray the flight, and considering this was written in the AM of Oct. 13,, there will likely be more. Here’s one to get you started if you’re reading this early.
Launch and beginning recovery
Why were they able to do this? You have to go back to Conway’s Law and understand the memetic evolutionary step that SpaceX has taken — which is to launch full configurations, knowing that they could explode in full public view, to do what we call an All Up test. There is some complexity limit in such an advanced craft that there is no way to gain more insight nor understanding from component testing. Sooner or later, you gotta put it all on the line and Light That Candle.
But only a memetically advanced performance-based community can do this kind of testing. If Legalistic Authoritarian status-driven NASA blows up a ship on the pad, then heads inevitably will roll. The status blow to the operation is one that NASA simply won’t allow. Because the elites in the company look bad. So promotion of managers that will enforce that memetic standard end up getting promoted, as opposed to more enlightened and non-risk averse individuals. And in the current milieu, you end up with people who will NEVER get a rocket off the ground. Like this guy.
And people will fall into line under that kind of leadership. When status matters, and not performance, you might be able to make McKinsey happy. But you’ll never design the next generation of space flight. People know, for the most part, that they have to go along to get along. You get down to that “I gotta feed my babies” Survival v-Meme pretty damn quick.
It’s in the knowledge that an organization produces. Because that knowledge creates the design. You simply can’t bring in enough outside, or unknown knowledge to get your ship off the ground. It’s true for bacteria, and it’s true for spaceships.
If there’s a simple memetic takeaway, though, it’s this. Status-based companies will produce stasis, and incremental improvement, until capture by rule-gaming psychopaths. Performance-based companies will hit goals and design new things. Things can and will go wrong — but it’s your only hope of actually creating something new.
Starship is the result of a lot of hardcore, diligent work. Make no mistake about it. But it’s company culture, and importantly company structure that made today what it is. Congratulations, SpaceX. The future is starting to look like the future!
For those that don’t know, I have been a hard-core environmental activist my entire career. I wrote a book on my backyard (full of amazing forests) and was an activist participant, organizer and strategist for forest protection across the U.S. for a good 15 years. I’ve also, at the same time, worked with timber companies, as well as oil refineries, in the context of my Design Clinic as an engineering professor as well. So you don’t have any surprises here — as an engineering professor in the Pacific Northwest, I work with almost everyone.
But in the late 2010s, regarding Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), my ardor toward all of this started to cool. After three decades of catastrophic predictions regarding AGW, none were basically coming true. Sea levels weren’t rising in any particular way. Storm frequency, the same. Regional modification of climate? Yes. Glaciers were melting. But glaciers started their retreat, at least in a way I could observe (using interpretive trail signs!) far before the magic date of the mid 1930s for the impacts of human development. And in my own backyard of the Palouse, basically no change at all.
But even more than that — it was the matter of tying actual events, in a meaningful way, to human activities at a global scale. As I traveled the world, I did see effects of extreme weather. Storm cycles in the Philippines made a big impression — certain areas were seeing 30 year storms every seven years. And so on. Why not just tie that to CO2? “Models” said so.
Ah, those climate models. They’ve told us over and over the world is going to end. Sea level rises of 8′. Total inundation of coastal areas. On and on. I didn’t know much about models (except they’re large finite difference codes run on supercomputers — the Earth is a big place…) and didn’t really want to find out. I actually know a fair amount about these kinds of models, because in a way, they’re just an inversion of the same stuff we use on airplanes. And trust me — those ones used to fine-tune aerodynamics of airplanes are spot-on. (I am a bona-fide aerospace/rocket scientist.)
But they’re spot-on for a reason. You can take an airplane (or appropriately scaled facsimile) and put it in a wind tunnel. I worked at NASA Ames for a couple of summers, and watched them do it. Every finite difference model in the world has to be tuned to give a correct answer. You tune this for given flow regimes, with a real airplane in the wind tunnel, you’ll get amazing results inside the computer. But that’s because you have a physical object, appropriately instrumented, that you use as your baseline.
To say that you can do this with the world is ridiculous. And the stupid keeps piling up. Even using temperature profiles any time and assuming that they’re accurate, before a self-declared “Age of Satellites” or “Age of P-3 Orions” is just nuts. And when you combine the self-inflicted errors from bad measurement WITH the inarguable spread of people across the planet, which would inherently impact many of those temperature measurement sites, you start seeing you have a major grounding validity problem on your hands. Grounding validity is matching whatever model you have with reality, at the appropriate temporal and spatial scales.
But I kept my mouth shut, and deferred on it all. Saying anti-AGW statements would get me thrown out of MY tribe. And I noticed that stridency on this had only increased. If only it were supported by actual events.
It wasn’t until Anastassia Makarieva and Andrei Nefiodov, my Russian theoretical physicist friends, showed up on my doorstep, that I really woke up. Why? Because one of the recommendations to “solving” AGW, by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was logging the Siberian/boreal forest to increase reflectivity, called albedo, of the planet to stop it. We were going to destroy wild nature on a planetary scale to save it.
Both Anastassia’s and Andrei’s work on how forests actually work should be part of the larger discussion regarding AGW. They are, along with their advisor, Viktor Gorshkov, advocates of a theory known as the biotic pump. What the biotic pump says is that without forests, you can’t have internal continental moisture – you get deserts instead. The forest itself is the primary transport mechanism for moisture into the interior of continents. Chop down forests, things dry out, save on the coast. On top of this, there is another extremely important implication. Vegetation interacts with the atmosphere in a profound way, that feeds back into the cycle.
This turns out to be a huge conundrum in how atmospheric systems work. Scientists like Antonio and his brother Paolo Nobre, have written extensively about atmospheric rivers, that bring literal rivers of moisture over the mountains and from the seacoast, that create the wet conditions required for places like the Amazon jungle to flourish. Chop down the trees, the weather stops happening.
Contrast this to what we would call an open loop system. An open loop system is one that is pre-eminent in basically all current climate models, where climate happens, and vegetation either thrives or dies dependent on what the atmosphere is, and the model says. The notion that these planetary systems are actually coupled doesn’t enter into models. And aren’t likely to be included any time soon – think of the additional complexity. Water vapor itself — the primary greenhouse gas — isn’t even a factor in most climate models. It’s CO2 uber alles, like some magical dial that all global climate depends on.
All these systems operate in some homeostatic form — meaning a process of self-regulation on the internal system — that all living creatures function in order to survive. Exactly where that internal/external system boundary is can obviously be an area of debate. Is a forest 10K acres? 100K? 20? The answers are often fluid. But the notion of the alternative — a one-way system, isn’t borne out by reality. If you doubt this, visit the coastal redwoods in Northern California. Redwoods are a microcosm of the biotic pump, living on seaborne moisture, and in turn preventing the desert that one can see further down the California coast.
It was then I realized I was in The Matrix. What is going on with suspected AGW has little to do with the science. Or at least the grounded science. But it has a ton to do with the memetics of climate science, which are often psychopathic in their direction. The current state of the accepted field, that lines up with the Mainstream Media, is Authority-driven, with the atmosphere playing the proxy of the boss, with the rest of the complexity absent from time and spatial variance, as well as flaws in measurement.
And Conway’s Law was still in play. The design of the system must fundamentally represent the social system that created it could not be more evident. The knowledge regarding that design of understanding is stuck there in the middle. Those with tremendous status and sophistication — the modelers — were controlling the debate on what was actually happening, armed with prestigious lab and university affiliations. And like the climate system model themselves, it was top-down.
Had we not just come off the catastrophe of listening to the Expert Class in COVID mitigation, I also don’t know if I would have paid much attention. Getting banished from one’s tribe (and I, as a forest activist, and definitely a fan and defender of the natural world) is no fun. But when your tribe has been hijacked, as has most certainly happened with climate science, and the main thing I love — the natural world — is on the literal chopping block, I had to gird my loins for battle one more time.
While AGW has been an issue for the last 20 years, I believe that COVID has made the passion for intervention even worse — regardless how crazy the intervention is. I’ve seen it said that a single billionaire, Lex Luthor-like, could set themselves up on an island with a huge sulfur atomization gun and spray sulfur into the atmosphere. The same principle I’ve maintained — that humans will, barring a major technological revolution (think paradigm-shifting like nuclear explosions) means that such actions will likely have little effect with their efforts. A major volcanic eruption can cause climate disruption for a couple of years (think 1883 Krakatoa). But most of what happens, damage-wise, happens to regional systems, including the people living adjacent. It’s a narcissistic fiction to think otherwise, and it’s also supported by Andrei’s scale analysis of energetics on the planet (see Part 1.) But that won’t stop the narcissistic billionaire. After all, they’re doing the brutal work of saving the world by destroying the atmosphere. It’s for our own good. Sound familiar?
But what happened with COVID — whether you were a COVID elite winner, and coasted through the pandemic with DoorDash, or suffered through losing your business because of lockdowns, the message of social and spiritual isolation was clear. In my adjacent town of Moscow, ID, the city government attempted to prosecute a group of singers from the full bible church, Christ Church, for holding a protest singalong. This was elite memetic prosecution and immiseration at its finest. The older progressive community, who are probably a good 30 years in age older than the younger Christ Church community, used their proxies to arrest the leader of the protest event. I’m not endorsing all the activities of Christ Church, and there’s a lot to talk about in the context of their minister, Doug Wilson. But clearly we’re moving toward late-stage liberalism. And it’s not bringing together its own membership with any degree of personal agency allowed for its members. Though the city government ended up paying out $300K for violation of Christ Church members’ civil rights, the diatribes in the local newspaper never relented.
Various social scientists have called this kind of hysteria “mass formation psychosis” and that may be accurate. But it is worth a minute to consider the causal path of how we got to a population susceptible to such behavior. People isolated, even with advanced development, need other people to maintain an open mind toward life circumstances of others. When humans are isolated, there is a process of depression that inherently occurs. And as I’ve written about before, depression of a population is a necessary precursor to Authoritarianism, which then (tri)dichotomize themselves into either Followers, True Believers, or the Unclean. Short version — the Followers/NPCs are low energy. And the True Believers are profoundly coherent, and undifferentiated, inside their In-group within an In-group. And the Out-group is, well, the Out-group. They can be disposed of.
What happens in the context of that spiritual devolution inside the movement is very similar to atomized gasoline presented with a match. Old people might just go to sleep. But young people, presented with an opportunity to connect with like minded people, rapidly become explosive. Google ‘Extinction Rebellion’ if you need to witness the various climate protests.
A similar behavior was witnessed among the masses protesting the Israeli invasion of Gaza this past year. The precipitating act by Hamas on October 7 has long been forgotten. But the profound need for belonging by young people, post-pandemic, finally found its catalyst in mirroring empathy for the Palestinian people. Hamas’ attack was only a day, whereas Israel’s invasion is still, as of this writing, ongoing. The fact of the complicated history of the region, as well as ostensible cultural proclivities (it is extremely challenging to understand how queer people would rally for a culture that would likely kill them, were they living there) all were subsumed in the human need to connect.
And it’s the same for AGW. It is precisely these dynamics why I’m writing this piece. Short term, Authoritarian coherence for a long-standing problem is a false god if there ever was one. And has the potential to lead a population to far greater atrocities than the original sin. The reality of banning fossil fuels, whose role in GW is far from clear (and potentially insignificant) will be the death of billions of the planet’s human residents. And the chaos unleashed will very likely affect the natural world worst of all.
If we were even remotely operating in a world where wisdom, which depends profoundly on metacognition (knowing what we don’t know) were the rule, you’d think we’d at least see solutions floated about preserving and restoring native ecosystems, regardless of their content, across the globe — and especially in ocean systems where our core knowledge of functioning is exceptionally poor. As well as dedication to rapid development of nuclear energy.
But we’re not seeing nor hearing this. Such a world connection perspective barely exists. What we hear are more monomaniacal calls for destruction of the natural world in the context of saving it. Nothing could be more emblematic of this than the razing of 4000 acres of Joshua trees for a solar farm. As with all things, it’s the dialog not being had which is the most interesting. If it really were about solar panel siting, how many acres exist across the tops of buildings in L.A. that can’t be placed there because of building code restrictions?
And it keeps piling up. In the lee of two moderate-sized hurricanes, Helene and Milton, that just hit the Gulf Coast of Florida, there is basically no headlines saying that these two storms were NOT caused by AGW. Every headline fingers CO2. What is really pathologically interesting is that only 20 years ago, the script that no one single storm could be traced back to AGW was an orthodoxy among climate scientists and meteorologists alike. But that was simply not providing the messaging coherence the current apocalyptic cult behind AGW needs to thrive, nor provide the spiritual connection. You’ve got to get down deeper in the limbic stack. And that means greater fear, as well as more profound threats to apostates like myself. There will be no debate. If your message isn’t The End Is Near, they don’t want to hear it.
What’s happened to the environmental activist community in particular, and the Left in general, is they’ve anointed CO2 and AGW as their One Ring — the magic talisman that they are going to use across-the-board to fix all our woes. But it fails to understand that the singular devotion to such a notion makes the entire movement perilously open to kidnap by far darker forces. J.R.R. Tolkien remains one of my favorite authors of all time, and the comparison between Sauron’s re-creation as Annatar, the Lord of the Gifts, and the singular focus on CO2 is particularly apt. The environmental community is participating in forging its own One Ring, just as the elves did on the sidelines in the Second Age of Middle Earth. And when it gets used against those of us that believe in protecting the natural world, as it inevitably will be (look no further than forest fire “prevention” if you need a simple example) don’t say a couple of us didn’t see it coming. If you’re not on the side of what J.R.R. Tolkien referred to as the Free Peoples, then you’re against ’em. That means being comfortable with the notion of freedom — which the Left seems to have totally abandoned. What would Galadriel do, indeed?
We are going to have to come to terms with our core humanity, and our predilection with profound fear of abandonment being sown by our current group of narcissistic psychopaths. But this fear is deeply rooted, for reasons. I close with a short parable.
About 15 years ago, I was on safari in the Greater Kruger Park in South Africa. I was lucky, and ended up with only me and the guide in the open-top Land Rover for most of my stay. One day, we were driving around, and happened upon a herd of Cape Horn buffalo moving down to the watering hole mid-afternoon. Two lions, an old one and a young one, were sitting on the side of the road, about 20′ away from our rig, watching the buffalo move.
A female cape buffalo, from that moment
The younger one
When driving in a safari wagon, usually one person does the driving, and the other person holds an elephant gun. I think ours was a classic 450 caliber Rigby, typical for use in hunting large game animals. We were only taking pictures, but I got to hold the gun because the driver couldn’t. Once we stopped, I stood up to take pictures of the lions. Immediately, the lions’ heads snapped around. Though lions won’t mess with bands of humans (you can take walking tours with groups of 10, though there are still guns involved) a solitary human is a prey species. The guide yelled at me to “drop” and went for the gun. The minute I vanished, the lions went back to watching the buffalo. We later heard from a ranger that a refugee from Mozambique had been treed for three days by three lions, before he had finally been rescued. And that lions had eaten something like 300 people fleeing the civil strife in Mozambique just that summer.
We have to confront the fundamental spiritual isolation of our current society, as well. It directs the psychopaths to use our fears against us, for what will be terrible ends. And like it or not, at this moment in time, it is FAR worse on the Left than the Right. If we cannot, the voice of the lion will be all that we hear.
It's About Empathy - Connection Ties Us Together 