Information Dynamics and Memetics in Laggard Organizations

December 7, 2025December 7, 2025 ~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

Son Conor wrapping up his first ultra-marathon — the 50 mile Bryce Canyon Ultra.

One of the more pathologically interesting facets of institutional evolution is how institutions who are behind, stay behind. Business analysts toss around the word ‘culture’ constantly. But what is Laggard culture? And how, if we inherit such an institution, do we do a meaningful turn-around?

In order to understand where to start, you have to understand what are the primary characteristics of a Laggard organization. A Laggard organization is one that consistently falls behind its peers, and seemingly is inured to meaningful change that would alter its status-based relationships with its peers. What this means that, especially in its upper-level administrative ranks, decisions are only made after other, more intellectually progressive orgs. have moved on from past historical patterns that may have provided success. It’s only when those other leaders have established a pattern of accomplishment that laggard organizations will then move in behind the leaders and adopt the ostensibly new successful patterns of operation.

There is no better place to observe this pattern of behavior than in academic institutions in the new milieu established by Donald Trump. With a series of Executive Orders, the Trump administration established, under no uncertain terms that the vast Diversity, Equity and Inclusion apparatuses built up to enshrine Woke Doctrine across all aspects of university life was to be dismantled, or lose all federal funding. This was actually affirmed, pre-Trump 2, by the Supreme Court in 2023, with the case Students for Fair Admissions vs. Harvard.

But the universities “fought back” — some kind of idiot euphemism that they weren’t going to dismantle their various DEI kingdoms, and “somehow” the public was going to rise up to defend the various machinations the universities had developed in the name of the various terms over the years. Academics screamed “academic freedom!” as well. But academic freedom, for the unwashed, means the ability to pursue intellectual paths inside the university, as long as it was a.) scholarly, and b.) somewhat defensible as far as being related to one’s focus of the home department, or related to a collaborative effort across the university, in pursuit of knowledge. Being one of the few that has actually exercised academic freedom (this blog is just the latest instantiation) I can tell you that most academics never come up against any boundaries where one would need to play that card.

At any rate, many of the leading universities soon settled with the feds (Columbia, Brown, Cornell, Virginia) seeing the handwriting on the wall really NOT that early, but enough to be in front of a pack of very slow donkeys. Many of the others reacted almost immediately with shock — basically changing title names to conform with federal grant applications. But they mostly regrouped, except now those same bureaucracies were doing even less than they were doing before the EOs. If you do some comparison of before/after org charts in most universities, you’ll see all the usual suspects.

This is actually a key identifying element of Laggard institutions — the obvious inability to change in the face of larger societal forces, while turning the entire apparatus of sophistication present in the organization into justifying the status quo. Inevitably, it’s wrapped in some kind of Communitarian v-Meme banner (“we CARE about our people.”). But the reality is it is a deeply tribal response that more maps to the Tribal/Authoritarian v-Meme structures most universities operate under.

What does this mean in terms of information flow and memetics? Laggard institutions exist, with both their members and their chieftains, in a closed information ecosystem. The minute that an institution enters that state, it becomes very difficult to even get leadership to develop larger-scale consequential thinking. Prior change, often due to arbitrary whims of fashion, could easily be managed as long as that information did not provide disruption for the dominant org. chart. And once some paradigmatic comet outside streaked across the sky, while it may have startled at least some of the denizens, everyone immediately put their heads back down and started chomping away. Dinosaurs have to eat.

The other problem with closed information structures, especially when manifested at the Tribal/Authoritarian v-Meme level, is that there is little information exchanged in terms of rational argument, or predictive models. Information discussed is primarily represented as long time myths. And those long-time myths are very prone to institutional parthenogenesis — the analogous process to where bacteria, unable to find other bacteria with which to conjugate, start self-replicating off their original pattern. This would be fine if the old Second Law of Thermodynamics — the tendency of entropy to create increased disorder — wasn’t in play. But trust me — there’s no better place to witness this than in anyone’s faculty meeting. Inevitably, the same memetic restructuring will be brought up again to be debated — again. And instead of new data (or any data) adding to most of the decision making, there will be some tweaking of dominant myths, which further reinforces the notion that fundamental change is not necessary.

If one considers the various developmental stages of universities, much as one might human societies, it’s easy to see that while ALL universities are slow donkeys, at least some have ingratiated outreach and faculty borrowing and lending to modestly prevent the natural tendencies of the social structures they all functionally operate under. For example, MIT doesn’t feel constrained to always follow the pack, and while they are still in thrall to many of the vicissitudes of the entire academic structure, if they want to try something different, there’s no one in the wings saying “well, XXX university hasn’t done that yet.” As part of their fundamental ethos, they’re SUPPOSED to try new things.

That’s not true for any laggard institution. In these, the dominant information transfer always has to be mirroring of whom the institution perceives is in front of it. And while the superficial take is indeed problematic, what’s even worse is that decay in consequential thinking that also happens in the context of the thinking of their leadership. In the case of universities, any change often takes something like 3-4 years to be implemented. Once even a relevant curriculum change might be proposed inside a department, the timescales mean that it won’t end up as a permanent change, an incorporation into the official university catalog for at least two years. Extremely problematic in a world where the major news cycle churns weekly.

All laggard institutions, and universities, with no exception, were hit memetically very hard during COVID. If one believes the memetic principles laid out in this blog, aggregate collective intelligence is very dependent not just on social structure of a given institution, but the frequency and velocity of relational transactions between agents in that system. And there’s no question — high trust societies and businesses maintain their ability to have high information coherence through face-to-face interactions. By sending everyone home to “work from home”, especially with laggard institutions, a new, low baseline of performance was established. Most people simply do not possess the discipline to “work from home.” They require both the encouragement as well as the policing that comes from co-location with other humans. Being who I am and having the ability to talk across Pacific Northwest industry with my former students, my guess is that north of 60-70% of people really are incapable of the self-motivation necessary to do so.

The problem was exacerbated in Laggard institutions because there was a memetic sorting mechanism that also occurred. Those who were actually able to maintain a reasonable work output during the isolation proved that their job talents were NOT tied to geography. And progressive institutions further up on the developmental scale could then scoop up these performers and add them to their staff. They didn’t have to move, and they would get paid more money.

That further separated workforces in Laggard institutions to people who were now testing the bottom of the work output pile. People actively were finding out how little they had to do to keep their job. And with the inherent social fragmentation imposed when entire institutions went home, there were no lateral feedbacks in the social structure. There was no one beating the drum on the slave ship, and worse — you were locked into the oars with no one. Many just quit rowing. Or rather, rediscovered gardening – and I’m not talking figuratively.

And to add even more difficulty to the problem, laggard institutions tend to index their performance relative to “close” peers. The dominant myth assumes stasis of position. And if you’re second rate, that’s where you’re going to stay. And then that turns into a major status myth that impedes any improvement in performance. “Well, we’re just not that good” turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Not surprisingly, especially when there are umbrella excuses like COVID lockdowns, any break from low performance, and return to a high performance mindset, is not greeted well by the broader members of the parthenogenic community. Now moral rackets come into play (“she has Long COVID, and you’re making her look bad!”) as well as negative targeting of higher performance individuals. There’s a natural regression downward in all institutions, from Performance-based Communities, back down into complicated Tribalism. High performing institutions, not surprisingly, attempt to have some mechanisms for rewarding innovation. Moderately performing institutions end up having praise mechanisms for the hierarchy itself, which inevitably involves praise for the non-involved. You can’t disrupt the narcissistic supply a normal hierarchy typically has for ranked actors.

But Laggard institutions are the worst of all, in that any activity outside the memetic box the institution has drawn for a given department becomes a threat to the institution itself. This is enshrined in the famous, but apocryphal “Five Monkeys and a banana” story, where a reward (a banana) is hung on a string below a ladder, and one of the monkeys attempts to get the banana, while the others are sprayed with ice cold water by the supervising researcher. Needless to say, it doesn’t take too many rounds of the experiment for all the monkeys to either a.) figure out such behavior is going to result in punishment, or b.) they better do whatever the other monkeys are doing or they’re gonna get the living daylights beat out of them as well.

The key takeaway is that once a given performance level is lowered and found permissible, and is coupled with absence from larger social forcing (as in work-from-home situations) one sinks into a very deep well that is difficult to recover. Even a visionary leader is going to have a difficult time fixing such an organization, primarily because the circumstances that caused them to assume a visionary perspective in the first place probably didn’t involve layoffs or lots of coercive Survival v-Meme thinking. The integration of an entirely different v-Meme set (“we take care of our people, no matter what!”) based along Tribal values makes it almost impossible. The moral racket turns into the Perfect Racket.

But the problem with being a Laggard organization is that you’re still the last zebra in the herd. And while herds offer substantial protection, when the going gets tough and the lion finally shows up, he’s not going to pick off the one in the front.

I shouldn’t have to state this, but Laggard institutions thrive on “work from home” or “remote work.” End it.

What can be done?

The key to fixing Laggard organizations is to realize where they are in the information space. Typically, they are grounded only weakly to organizations around them, and often not grounded to any reality at all. While all organizations operate in some public context, that does not mean that the appropriate signals actively being generated trigger any behavior modification — especially if people at the top of the organization don’t see anything like reduction in pay, or a lack of raises. One of the classic lines in Laggard organizations in decline is “we’re just not getting our message out,” or “they simply don’t understand our situation.” This is classic low empathy drumbeating — focus on one’s own victimhood, instead of doing any kind of real reflection on how the circumstances causing pain arose in the first place. And forget that connection and processing the views of the larger community. Those Deplorables have no right to judge us. They are deplorable, after all.

There are a couple of primary strategies, though, that can be executed. First and foremost is to make hard targets matter. If someone says they are going to increase enrollment by 50%, then NOT hitting enrollment should result in some physical penalty that is not just passed down the authority structure chain, but hits at the top level. Gaslighting is heavily rewarded in Laggard institutions, and rarely felt by those at the top. Readjustment strategies for targets can rapidly eliminate inflated estimates, without catastrophic measures like “if you don’t hit your target, you’re fired.” Cross-institutional transparency helps as well. Make it clear that failures will be publicized.

One of the most effective strategies for leadership for moving Laggard institutions off the dime once they’ve been told they have to move is to force yet another numbers-oriented version of “what are the deliberate, measurable steps you intend to take in order to do that?” The goal is to ground every piece of the process in reality, so that people cannot wiggle off the hook.

Since Laggard institutions work primarily on mirroring as a learning tool, setting up opportunities to visit known institutional leaders can also help. When someone is also actually doing something difficult, the excuses can vanish. Leadership has to also prepare for the inevitable “we could never do that here!” line of reasoning. Demanding some numerical number of changes after an aggregate set of visits would be a way to ground that process.

Finally, leaders in Laggard institutions must realize that they must lead from the front, with example. This is not easy in a large organization — but can be very meaningful. Volunteering budget reallocations and some number of experiments at the top sends a loud message to the rank and file that there will be no business as usual around here. Remember that mirroring matters. You are not going to evolve people to be data-driven, consequence estimators overnight.

And never forget it is authentic relationships that drive internal growth. When people are connected to other people in real ways, larger loci of responsibilities follow. The number of solutions to be generated for any problem will always be related to the interconnectedness of the social topology of your organization. That one is just the law — because it’s in the memetics.

Back to Basics — Metacognition as Dark Matter

August 10, 2025August 10, 2025 ~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

Two therapy dogs, Ghillie and Cecilia, getting ready for a child client

One of the most frustrating parts of what I write about is getting people to realize that they don’t know stuff, and the real solution when you don’t know stuff — at least to start — is to realize you don’t know stuff. You can’t effectively harness new modes of understanding until you get to the point where you realize that all the old answers you used to think might explain stuff just aren’t going to cut the mustard. Too many contradictions, and such, means you have to accept your ignorance and move on. It is only then that enlightenment can occur.

This is hardly a new idea, and the Zen masters — my favorite go-tos — were big on this. One of my favorite stories from Paul Reps’ collection, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, is below, and deals directly with my line of employment.

Once, a university professor went to visit a well-respected Zen Master to learn about Zen. The Master first invited him to sit for a cup of tea. The professor sat down and started talking about Zen. The Master quietly prepared and poured the tea. When the tea was filled to the cup’s brim, he kept pouring. The professor watched the overflowing cup until he could no longer restrain himself. “It’s full! No more will go in!” blurted the professor. “The same with your mind. How can I teach you Zen unless you first empty your cup?”

But changing adapted mental models is hard. Why, for example, would you bother to learn what I talk about on this blog? You really have to be tortured by your own confusion to sit down and spend the time to instantiate all this stuff. And you’re likely not going to get much community support dwelling on what some rando on the Internet says might change your life. (That Rando would be me, of course.)

In short, you have to possess the developed ability of metacognition — knowing what you don’t know, and having a sense that there is stuff out there that you’re not even aware of.

Why is this so challenging? As I said in this piece, once you open your mind to the notion that maybe the truth is really shared information that different, active sentient agents use for inter-agent coordination (read the piece for details — it’s a little complicated) you realize that if you adopt a different mental model than your friends, you risk alienation and loneliness from your cohort group. And humans no likey that kind of thing, at all. Being alone means that tigers are gonna eat ya. And if you think you’re going to retreat from some likely 10M years of evolution just to figure out how to help pilot our society out of its current mess, I’ve got news for you.

Metacognition — or admitting that you don’t know — in a group is going to have also other active agents rush in to fill you up with their views, which probably aren’t any better, and likely worse than your own. It’s how we get those mass psychoses we’ve got going. And the more externally defined/emotionally available you are to what others think, it’s going to get ugly fast. Corrections in this kind of peer pressure are long-term. People just don’t want to hear your bullshit confusion.

Some things we don’t know are also profoundly comforting in not knowing, especially if you already have a narrative figured out that makes sense with the surrounding sensory inputs in your environment. I used to be a big Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) advocate. But as time went by, and, well, the seas didn’t swallow New York City, I became more and more of a skeptic. And then when people in the IPCC threatened something I happen to love very much — in this case, vast swaths of native forest, which at least some of them wanted to cut down to make the planet more shiny (that’s the albedo thing) I woke up. There are more things in heaven and Earth than my philosophy can know, Horatio.

And then I continued my journey with meeting people like Judy Curry, the former chair of atmospheric sciences at Georgia Tech, and someone that had made the jump herself a couple of decades ago. Judy’s book, Climate Uncertainty and Risk, is dense — but a classic. Only someone like Judy could go through the probabilistic analyses of what actually is going to happen in the climate space, as a risk management and probability expert. It was one piece in the puzzle that convinced me we actually have a memetic problem with climate science — not so much a scientific one. Status elevation in the field was (and still is) tied to how catastrophic the narrative one creates, instead of anything resembling a grounded reality. Those louder voices have seized the megaphone, and they’re screaming. And if you don’t fall in line, it’s only tigers for you.

And what do those loud voices do? That’s where my expertise kicks in. Some very famous loud voices in the climate science community are also connected in a very closed-loop feedback modality to the insurance industry. If they’re all saying we’re gonna wash away in the next big storm, someone has to sell us insurance so we can rebuild back in the same place. That’s what insurance is all about. And that means they have to raise their rates, because business is business, don’tchaknow? Or the government has to cover the house. Or something. Short answer — the real problem is brain worms in the scientific climate community.

So to understand all of how this might be connected, you gotta start admitting you don’t know stuff, and looking for other signals that people are lying to you. The biggest would be insurance company profits. Which is downright metacognitive-y. Because now people are paying increased premiums for things that didn’t happen. And our news media stream is not about reporting things that didn’t happen. You didn’t read a piece recently “China didn’t invade Mongolia this week,” because that wouldn’t have much signal value. Or emotional value either.

But just because I wasn’t aware of insurance profits, didn’t mean that the signal wasn’t there. That’s the whole Dark Matter part of metacognition. Dark Matter is the stuff in the universe that doesn’t reflect light, but it’s still there tugging on all sorts of other stuff through gravity. Considering that it makes up 85% of the matter in the universe, though, you can’t just ignore it. And that’s what is happening in the memetic-sphere with our thoughts. Metacognition is accepting that it really does exist, and then starting the process of adjusting our worldview to understand it.

My friend, and atmospheric scientist at UC-Davis Joe Biello sent me this picture. Once you understand where that Dark Matter is, it’s not surprising that the picture it gives of what’s going on starts becoming more coherent, or in the colloquial, making more sense. Here’s insurance industry profits.

I used to use the signal that the insurance industry was raising their rates as proof that AGW was real. But it turns out not so much. It turns out the same people spreading the AGW hysteria are also looped into the money-making machine. And it’s not that some level of GW is happening (and some is caused by humans) it’s that the hysteria signal prevents more reasoned debates from occurring on what actual solutions might be. Or on what scale we should respond. I’m extremely pro-environment (spent my entire life working on various issues) and totally believe humans can fuck up stuff locally, as well as regionally. Big time. Anyone can see a clearcut. Or an urban heat island. But actually grounding yourself to changes in the global system needs lots more research.

Which we should be doing. But when the hysteria meter is off the charts, instead of understanding how our natural systems, which are obviously complex, modulate the climate, through vegetation, circulation and growth (see my buddies Anastassia’s and Andrei’s work on the biotic pump) we end up with people demanding we turn Siberia into a parking lot. We still don’t know exactly how all this works. But we won’t even study it if all the money is diverted into computer time and large models. It’s like sticking our fingers in our ears and saying “Nyah nyah nyah!” Not very metacognitive-y. Nor wise.

It’s no surprise that human brains work like this. Yeah, I like my work on knowledge complexity. But you’ll also find me recognizing Michael L. Commons’ work on hierarchical complexity as well. Not quite as system-y as mine is but spot on as far as understanding what humans are capable of knowing. And here’s the key. One of the hardest things for humans to process is cross-paradigmatic complexity. In our example case here, the cross-paradigmatic complexity is how AGW research feeds into insurance industry profits. There are at least three jumps across physical to social systems that reveal the relative truth of a lot of this stuff. Most human brains no likey. And even if your brain DOES like it, you’re likely to be missing something. I know I certainly was. The easiest immediate proof that storm intensity and frequency are NOT increasing is found in insurance industry profits. Because if it actually was, you better believe the insurance industry would be howling more than they already are. And there’s also ancillary cause-and-effect (like building more cheap houses in places like Florida) that are also potentially causal in insurance industry profits going down, if there actually were a hurricane. It’s all part of the metacognitive puzzle — not just looking at the connections, but also looking at how, and which are the connections that matter.

This kind of analysis (or really, meta-analysis) can leap all over the map. I’ve been going back-and-forth on the risks of AI tech, for example. And one ALWAYS ends up with the “correlation is not causation” tropes, like increasing ice cream prices are tied to tiger predation, or some such icks. You can look those up yourself.

If there is any answer to all this, it is awareness and your agency. So walk around and think about stuff you really don’t know much about. And then investigate. The worst thing that can happen is you become a more interesting cocktail party guest. Even if no one wants to invite you.

P.S. Judy’s latest contribution to the DOE’s climate report is here. They did a great job in pulling apart a very confounded body of work that is mostly nonsensical. You’ll hear the usual hue and cry about the oil industry blah blah blah, but I really encourage you to read it. It’s good mental exercise.

On Immigration

July 18, 2025 ~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

Yosemite North Country, headwaters of the Tuolumne River

Immigration has turned into one of the most controversial issues of our day. Why? Because we are in the days of what I would call the Great Validity Grounding — where our elites have carried population manipulation through propaganda to such a level, there is no way we can swallow the various fictions and not get hit over the head by reality.

And immigration is far from the only issue. We are told that boys are girls, and there is no harm in pumping teenagers full of cross-sex hormones. We are told that our very agencies responsible for subversive activity around the world are only the positive narcissistic storefronts for saving lives around the globe. That Americans really aren’t owed any reasonable egalitarian trade policies. That we should be involved in endless, historic wars around the world. The list goes on and on.

Most Americans want to retreat from all this — and have. Being hyper-informed (I am the worst when it comes to digesting the constant stream of news out of the Internet and social media) AND being a teacher who actually engages my students — I sit with them and nonjudgmentally ask them what they know — it is stunning how little most of them are aware of what is going on, nor how they are being manipulated 24/7. But the crunch is coming for the population, and certainly no one has championed the re-grounding effort in common-sense reality than Donald Trump. I’ve been very critical of Trump in the past. But as I wrote in a recent piece, maybe we needed an inveterate narcissist to play-act the role of national father to shake us out of our shared cognitive delusion.

When it comes to immigration, I am profoundly against illegal immigration of any sort. What happened during the Biden administration was an appalling betrayal of the national interest. And the accounting of the damage is yet to be reckoned with. And assembling coherent narratives of that damage is nearly impossible – because by and large, the elites in our society have benefited. And our press will simply not report in any coherent manner on the actual effects of the past 20M (or more) illegal immigrants coming into our country in the past four years.

But such a tidal wave of humanity had to have mechanisms that supported it. That led to growth of large-scale Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and the gaslighting machinations to hide from and defraud the American people, who paid for all of it. But there is more — if you need more proof of the size of the effort, go to Youtube and search for “migrants – Darien Gap”. You’ll see the encampments set up in Colombia — often nation- or language-specific that shepherded the mass of humanity (mostly 20-30 something males) up through some of the most remote jungle on the planet, and onto buses and trains into the United States. Bret Weinstein on Tucker Carlson gives insights on the darker part of all this — Chinese migration into the US.

The other dark side of all this is that Sinaloan gangs from Mexico form a huge part of the infrastructure for getting illegal migrants from around the globe into the U.S. There are no clear numbers on the money involved with the cartels, but it is clear that it ranges in the tens of billions, to potentially hundreds of billions of dollars. The idea that peasants or lower caste individuals from African countries could figure out how to get to Ecuador or Colombia and then traverse the Darien Gap, purely on their own gumption, is laughably ridiculous. The cartels get the cash, and then provide the services. And any deficits are made up in the sex slave trade.

Further, the travesty of the border then fuels huge monetary reserves for those same cartels to buy politicians on the border, as well as along the route. If you expect these same cartels, with their violent economic morality to suddenly acquiesce to the federal government shutting down a primary revenue stream, you are deluded.

But that is not the main point of this piece. My experience is primarily with the connected consequences of our legal immigration policy — which involves the evolution and development of our technical workforce. That is something we must address as well, because how we approach this already has, and will continue to dictate our own economic composition of our own country.

To start, I think it’s important to remember that there are phases behind any social policy. While social policy is always going to be heavily biased towards elite interests (Peter Turchin in his book, End Times, notes that there’s basically no period in a society’s life where this ISN’T true) that doesn’t mean that every policy propagated will necessarily damage those not high-status. Policies, however, run their course, and inevitably, as they get hacked and manipulated by sophisticated individuals, who have some psychopathic members as part of their cohort, must be revisited before the disparate impact becomes so damaging they threaten the fabric of that same society.

Let’s get to the basics. Folks have been gaslit for so long on this issue they deny basic realities.

1. Increased competition drives down wages at the bottom of the wage scale.

2. Same makes housing more unaffordable for poor folks.

3. Labor surpluses leave little incentive for politicians to fix deficits in training and education for people on the lower part of the wage scale.

4. H1B visas gut the demand drivers for improving technical education for high school and undergraduate students.

5. Lack of a society that generates good jobs mean more “culture of poverty” problems for society, as poverty and single-parent homelessness drive crime rates and violence.

What one realizes is that these policies directly fuel the Wealth Pump — the social mechanisms that Turchin describes that moves money from the lower classes into the upper classes. This then exacerbates the income gap problem the country has been experiencing since the early ’70s. Which then drives an empathy gap, as the country moves away from egalitarian, high social contact lifestyles that might lead to emergent levels of compassion, as well as compensatory policies that actually make sense.

But what is NOT discussed is that immigration also serves as a metacognitive drag. I’m an engineering professor, and one of the drumbeats in the background of my entire career has been the need to educate more engineers. Or recruit them. Or whatever.

But around 1996, I noticed a new phenomenon. Engineering students, who a priori had typically received two offers at graduation, suddenly only were receiving one. And salaries had also gotten stuck. Neither of these phenomena indicate a starving job market. In fact, the opposite. And this has not changed. In fact, what HAS happened is there have been an increase required in experience for someone to get a job as an engineer. 30 years ago, maybe 50% of all students had an internship, which then did facilitate them getting a job. Now, my guess is that 90% of students have internships. And jobs are not really available for students who have below a 3.0/4.0 GPA. We in the university have compensated for these pressures as far as facilitating some of these requirements. But the pressure on the universities themselves to improve their own curricula has been non-existent. Instead, universities, contaminated by status-seeking behaviors, have doubled down on “research productivity.” Most research produced by universities is garbage — but then again, most new thought is garbage. You’d never know from watching how universities sell themselves, though. And it’s also true you have to have some area of inquiry for faculty to pursue — especially in rapidly changing fields like engineering. Without it, it is far too easy for faculty to stagnate. But, as with all things, there are limits. And universities, with their meta-linear metrics, fuel nonsensical creep of numbers rather than looking at actual advancement.

Like it or not, one starts to realize the key lever to forcing this society to fix its problems is to radically cut back on the number of H1-B visas currently issued. Then elites will have to start applying pressure to political systems to fix the educational system. Yes — there will be some pressure to offshore some of the work. But that is not without its costs. And I’d argue it would be far easier to just to fix our own educational systems.

And, as Americans, we would all be better off.

The Kids Are Not Alright – the Aftermath of COVID Restrictions

May 12, 2025 ~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 4 Comments

Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica

This is a hard post for me to write. Why? Because I am an inveterate fan of the age group I teach — 18-24 year olds. I’ve spent my entire career advocating for them, and threw down with our idiot Provost (you can find out who she is if you’re really interested — do note she showed the max salary one could earn with an anthropology degree) but my efforts did not succeed in any meaningful lifting of COVID restrictions during the pandemic.

As we ethereally float through the subsequent years from 2023, when I would consider the pandemic officially “over” (whatever that means) it becomes increasingly obvious that young folks, in critical developmental stages, took major damage to their psychosocial development. The fact that it’s not discussed, other than with the occasional “tsk, tsk” is a societal failure. You cannot fix what you don’t acknowledge, and you can’t acknowledge what one’s flaccid institutional philosophy won’t even recognize. It makes you wonder what all the human development people are doing. So this is my take. Make of it what you will.

For the record, I run a large engineering design program, that fulfills the capstone (last class) requirement for a moderately large undergraduate university mechanical engineering program. My program is profoundly different from most programs, though, in that I seek out sponsored work from corporate elements, with real deliverables. The money allows my students to participate in a real trial run in being a practicing engineer, as well as practice basic business travel skills. Because I’m located in Pullman, WA (the functional ends of the Earth) almost all the clients for the program are somewhere across the state, and occasionally across the nation or the planet. Most kids drive back to the west side of Washington to visit their sponsors, but some get on planes. Almost all stay in hotels (it’s often the first time where they’re completely responsible for reservations, etc.) and they must deal with their client as a real customer. All of this is intentional.

Young people’s brains are relatively soft at 22, but they are on a trajectory to adulthood that for most will occur around 26 years. It’s my job to make sure they are on the right trajectory. Most of my students are young men, though I have a modest percentage of young women as well. There are developmental differences between the two sexes, but it’s not significant in the context of my class. What the students are really working forward to is establishing an independent professional identity as an engineer. The real work, and the real deliverables, buttress this path. Students simply cannot argue with me that the work is somehow irrelevant, or “jumping through hoops.” Someone they might want to work for has given the work to me, and paid for it. And my sponsors are not allowed to exclusively mentor the students. The clients are supposed to act like customers (they have a script.) I’ve educated somewhere north of 3800 students, with over 550 projects. As a friend of mine once said “Chuck — no one has turned more design cycles than you.” I think that’s a bit much, but not by much.

During the pandemic, we carried on as best we could. When students were sent home in March 2020, our remote work practice game was already strong — we live in Pullman, after all, and all the work was completed on time. My clients were amazed, but I was not surprised. And we held up through the isolation of Fall 2020. Projects were still on Zoom, but I had demanded one of our best classrooms for it (it looks like the War Room in Dr. Strangelove) and we did OK. In Spring 2021, I forcefully lobbied for face-to-face classes (many students were already in Pullman, since they had rental agreements) but allowed kids to decide if they wanted to Zoom in or sit in the classroom. About half did. But their faces were masked.

People cannot understand how absolutely destructive masking is in the educational process until you have to teach a roomful of masked kids, that have to collaborate together. A big part of my class is getting kids to form high-performance teams, as well as get to know others in the class. Our situation at WSU is not particularly unique. The students after they graduate will go over to the Puget Sound area and work with each other. It’s a small world. But if you don’t have an opportunity to get to know your alumni peer group, it hurts. On top of that, it also makes it impossible for me to remember individuals in my class. Masks destroy individual identity — that’s the point. And this matters as far as placement goes. Lots of alums count on me for recommendations, and I can’t give them if I don’t know the students.

The downstream result, though, is that instead of having 50 friends, the students mostly ended up with one or two. If there was a pattern, it seemed that students never exceeded a peer group of over four. No cross-group relationships really formed up. So any kind of scaling management of friends at appropriate distances also did not develop.

We were all back in person in Fall 2021, but still masked. The students held up pretty well until November. And then there was kind of a cascading collapse of spirit. Students stopped looking for jobs, we had an increase in predatory hiring from low level companies, and initiative fell through the floor. Spring 2022 was the weirdest vibe (everyone was still in masks for most of the semester) I’ve ever experienced. No one could seem to connect with anyone outside the 3-4 person affinity groups. We all shipped product — one thing that has been interesting is that students’ ability to design things (somewhat a function of individual creativity) did not decline.

But the social scaffolding started falling away. Knowing how to act took a hit. The construction of their social framework, both internally and externally, was not sufficient. And to this day, they still suffer.

But what does that really mean? For a more structured view of deficiencies, we have to go back to our canonical Knowledge Structures. From my experience, students start developing Tribal knowledge around 4 (think birthday parties, Christmas and Santa Claus) and then lean into Authority-driven codes around 6. These continue to be embellished and expand as students get older. Legal behavioral coding (rule following) starts in earnest around 10, and by the time they’re about 20 they learn to trust their own judgment, and focus on goal-based behavior. During their entire youth/young adulthood, though, they continue developing all these modes and structures.

This leads to important social coding development — which directly influences how they will get jobs. People interviewing engineering students are looking for mature actors. Engineering is not like most jobs where decisions are inconsequential. Bad decisions can kill people. And while every engineering firm has a process of check and cross-check on major decisions, most importantly you want your young engineer to recognize they might NOT know something, and backtrack and find a more experienced engineer to help them.

But now, we come to a rub. Students are underdeveloped because of the pandemic in the primary understandings of both authority-driven and legalistic hierarchy. They can sullenly submit to Authority. But they don’t know why, and the false obedience they’ve been beat into them in grade school and high school turns into a liability. They’ve never been conditioned to understand the higher rationality of turning to your elders for knowledge. Older people, already severed from contact for 3+ years, are not viewed as a resource at all.

And young women suffer more than any. All the academy does is teach that men in general, and certainly older men in specific, are predators to be avoided at best. This is deeply problematic in engineering, because most of the people ANYONE deals with are older men. The dynamic became even more exacerbated during the pandemic – a distorted social compounding of alienation. And writing about it is taboo.

In the absence of any formal development, students will compensate, mostly through cultural borrowing. And in the modern university, that cultural borrowing is the ethos of the Longhouse. Everyone’s a victim, or potential victim. Always be nice, regardless of the circumstance. Empathy is sympathy. And who can really empathize when you can’t see someone’s face? You can’t read people. So at best you can struggle through indoctrination of codes about people’s ethnicities.

The lack of ability to follow simple rules really emerged during the pandemic, and continues through to this day. I had a situation this last semester where students from another section were barging into my classroom during lecture. My classroom is somewhat unique in that it has some lab construction space as well as a large set of tables. I also keep that classroom unlocked at all hours so students can congregate.

I finally got tired of the lecture time intrusions. I asked the students why they were in my classroom. “We want to work on our projects.” I said “No — now get out.” But instead of all of them leaving, three scurried out quickly. A large young man and a young woman proceed across the classroom to fetch some of their items, in obvious defiance of my mandate. The young man stood there and glowered at me. I sit on a couch at the front where I lecture from. I didn’t move. At the same time, I was rolling my eyes and thinking “what kind of gangsta shit is this??”

The students were admonished by my co-instructor later. But none came back to apologize for their behavior. Instead, a couple decided to play games with lecture time. And more than a few hung outside the door like feral raccoons, unsure of what to do. Insane. These are college seniors.

Now I’m an old dog — or as I like to refer to myself, an Old Bull Elephant. Most of my students are young men, and it’s the job of the Old Bull Elephant to civilize the younger bulls. It’s simply not a job for the faint of heart, and at 62, it’s about time for me to retire. So I decided to ask the Young Bull Elephants in my own section about what they thought about me throwing the other students out who had come in. They had very mixed, averse feelings. Most were along the lines of “they were just getting their stuff” or some such icks. I took it as an opportunity to explain to them that showing up in a restricted space at work, without permission, is generally a firing offense. You’ll be expected of a safety violation, or potentially industrial espionage. Not a good look. I asked one of the young women in the class, whom I’d had a good relationship with. Her comment? “It was more disruptive to do what you did.” It was obvious where her affinities lay. As well as her understanding of hierarchy and boundaries.

But what I did learn with the dialogue with the students was simple. They were four years behind. They couldn’t understand appropriate boundaries. They really couldn’t understand my position of authority. And they also couldn’t see why you might need rules or protocols to navigate a work environment. The ensemble of all these things turns into what I call social coding – that mix of communicated signals about how things work in an environment so a.) work gets done, and b.) conflict is minimized.

Even with my own sons (26 and 24) I see pandemic deficits. Their social circles are notoriously small. The younger son, a computer science major, went to college during the entire COVID cycle, and to say they were betrayed by the professoriate is an understatement. Most of his professors went back to countries of origin, to deliver lectures online, and often just published online. Billed as convenience for students, the reality is that both sides, students and faculty, played into a near-total collapse of expectations. It’s no surprise that both my sons are professionally successful, but are in a process of rebuilding socially. In the context of my kids, it’s with a large 3rd generation Mexican family who works with the younger boy. When you don’t have the scaffolding, the smart bet is build from the bottom up. I’m grateful. But it’s still a tremendous loss for them of that time.

I happened across a video some may find offensive (you’ve been warned) that completely captures the meta-problem. In the video, a young woman is being asked, in front of her boyfriend, what’s the most guys she ever slept with in one night. She said ‘ten’. He became extremely unhappy, and broke up with her on camera.

Learning lessons the hard way

Her rationalization is self-centered. In her morality, she had not been unfaithful during their relationship, so any actions she had decided to take before simply were irrelevant — to the point where she would disclose this on-camera. There were no real rules save those created in her brain, and the only thing that mattered was the “now”. She doesn’t seem to exhibit any particular neurodivergence or condition. Instead, it is a meta-constructed behavior of the age. And while it might be interesting to speculate on her state of mind, it’s more helpful to understand this, instead of the “kindness matters” solipsistic frame of mind, as a reversion to a more Tribal/Magical mindset of unregulated sex. It is indicative of where we are as a society, and not just in the context of some moral vacuum. As long as you’re nice, you can do what you want. And in true post-modern form, everyone else has to eat the sandwich.

People do ask me how, going forward, they should guide their own children. I tell them all the same thing — socialization is THE most important part of adolescence and post-adolescence. It used to be implicit (if sometimes mocked.) But now it has to become explicit.

And if you’re looking for guidance out of the contemporary academy, I’ve got some bad news. We’re chock-a-block full of neurodivergent individuals, and outright disruptors. They will produce no meaningful research to show that these things are important, and will only grudgingly come to any level of acceptance that we were enormous part of the problem during the pandemic. Trust me — I’m not going to receive any academic award for writing this piece.

But we have to recover. More socialization. More work ethic. More understanding of boundaries. And more fun. It’s the way forward. Because life is short. And our elaborate, complex society offers little time for this generation to start on the trajectory to create their own families.

We already robbed them of four years for our elite paranoia.

Decision Tempo and Performance

May 9, 2025May 9, 2025 ~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 1 Comment

Friends are where you find them – Ginger and Mike, Costa Rica

One of the biggest problems I’ve seen, in my long career as a university profession, is the total ungrounding in time and space that happens in university decision making. One of the most prized possessions inside any given department is space inside buildings, and this is only modestly divided rationally. Seniority matters, and as such, if you’ve occupied a given space for a really long time, it really is your kingdom — regardless if your kingdom is coming apart, or came apart years ago. As a professor, you literally get to hold onto this until you retire or die. A further extension of this is the constant construction cycle that also happens on university campuses. Find me a campus where a new building is not being built, and I’ll show you a campus on the edge of collapse.

To be fair, universities must be modernized regularly, and lots have been around for over 100 years. But a lot of this is memetic construction of mindset that the entire social system feeds into. “Pharaohs need pyramids” is what I’ve told every person puzzled by the phenomenon. It’s deeply baked into the incentive structure as well. You’re not going to become a provost (head of many deans) from being a dean if you haven’t supervised a large-scale construction project.

And when it comes to making timely decisions, or having any sense of rationality in that decision making, good luck with that. You’d think in a fast-paced field like engineering, we’d be constantly updating our course curriculum. Not so fast. Even if we wanted to revise our curriculum in engineering, there are myriad committees that are university-wide that exist to review and approve various changes. Certainly, some review is warranted. Though every University president alive lies through their teeth about this, the university actually sells reliability — not innovation. But there are days when we fall increasingly behind, and for those of us attempting to stop the plane from crashing, it feels like we’re out on the wing of the B-29 with a wrench, desperately cranking away to fix an engine, and hoping we can hang on and not get blown into the propellor.

I’ve been attempting to put into words what this affects — to name something is to at least start to tame it. I came up with the term “Decision Tempo”. How long do we take to make a decision of particular scale? There is no official formula for any of it. Inside an academic department issues are topically assigned to various committees, who are supposed to ruminate on them and then bring them back to a faculty meeting for a vote. Faculty meetings are the butt of every joke in academia for reasons. They allow nit-pickers to, well, nit-pick. From a memetic perspective, what this means in a Legalistic v-Meme organization, where status matters, individuals can argue endless exceptions to generalized rules, to fix smaller and smaller problems, in the pursuit of completeness. What’s more interesting is that history in most of these decisions is only contained in an oral tradition – a true Tribal/Mythical v-Meme flex. We’ve cycled back, even in my department, which is modestly functional, to various overall curriculum changes multiple times. As now one of the two most senior faculty, I’m often the only person that can even remember where we were 20 years ago.

With Decision Tempo, the term, I can at least start the conversation with younger faculty about what theirs might be. Swimming in a static world without time, there isn’t even any consideration of how long most decisions take. There are tons of decision-making frameworks (of course) and if you can’t come up with your own, you can always use Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT). Google it.

If there’s a larger lesson, the first step of transitioning out of emergent, v-Meme, unconscious strategies is to name and make conscious something you’re attempting to optimize. As with Decision Tempo, you’ll find others have thought about it. Then you’re at least part way towards changing the memetic structure of our organization. Because once you confront Decision Tempo, you can then have a discussion on how you view trying new things, and the cost of failure. Which is THEN the root cause of innovation. As discussed in this article on SpaceX and the Boeing Starliner.

What Does IQ Mean, Anyway?

February 23, 2025 ~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 2 Comments

Evening at SeaTac – Days of Miracles and Wonder

One of the most vexatious arguments, to me at least, is this whole idea that “smart people should run the world.” As a certified Smart Person, I can tell you that the last thing you want is for smart people to COMPLETELY run the world. I do think smart people come in handy — we can do particular things very well, and some things that no one else can do that’s not a smart person. But having not just fallen off the turnip truck yesterday, I’ve known plenty of people that wouldn’t score so highly on something like an IQ test that have saved my bacon.

What’s worse, from an epistemological perspective, we have a very poor idea of what “smart” even means. Smart can often mean self-delusional, and that kind of BS leads to all sorts of sadness and death. I really do like this video by Gurwinder (the full credits are on the Youtube clip.) Gurwinder’s a pretty smart guy himself, and on the way to becoming wise.

The short version is that smart, or rather High IQ people can be very good at self-delusion, in that their brains can create false, self-justifying scenarios that they themselves can believe. And then because they often have more intellectual/memetic tools at their disposal, they can be very good at amplifying these beliefs. In status-driven hierarchies, they can rise to the top.

But then, if you actually study some of the concepts on this blog, you see how this can become very self-limiting. Why? That old concept of Grounding Validity. It’s not enough to have things that are complicated and sophisticated. Sooner or later, you’ve gotta ground your ideas (or at least try) in some kind of reality. Touch grass, as it were. Or else you’ll envision planets like Dune, and have spaceflight-sending psychopaths. Which is fine for entertainment. But hardly any way to build a rocket company. My favorite example of this kind of nonsense is Black Panther’s Wakanda. Here we have an advanced, technological society that’s basically hidden, that settles leadership through hand-to-hand combat. Give me a break. Conway’s Law just says “no”.

Back to IQ. My mother, socially dysfunctional as she was, drug me down to some testing center when I was 15, and put me through the various tests. My IQ came back — 164. She was already at her personal limits attempting to figure out how to deal with her home situation, and she had no real idea what to do with me. I obviously wasn’t autistic (though I have been called meta-autistic — one of my favorite compliments!) and had already passed through the typical calculus gauntlet at 13. So the following year, they packed me off to Case Western Reserve to engineering school. There were other bona-fide, award-winning mathematical geniuses at the school, but they were actually autistic, and I didn’t fall in with them. Instead, I practiced drinking a lot of beer quickly (I was a perennial beer chug contender) and worked on getting out of school, which I was going to have to compensate my parents for, as quickly as possible.

There’s a whole lot of academic “blah blah”, as well as a stint in the steel mill, in between there and here. Recently, I re-tested my IQ with one of those informal tests. It made my head hurt, but did remind me what goes on in an IQ test. My retested IQ at 60? About 115. Certainly, my friends and acquaintances will support the notion I’ve gotten much stupider. But maybe not that much.

What IQ DOES test is some version of pattern-matching ability. It is intrinsically algorithmic, which means that kids raised up in a stricter legalistic environment are far more likely to get a higher score than kids raised more loosey-goosy. People in the Survival v-Meme don’t stand a chance, and kids raised in neo-Tribal societies are gonna struggle as well. It’s no surprise that Asian-American kids do the best, at least to me. White kids come in second, on average, though if you understand that demographics are some form of Gaussian-distributed, once people are in a stable version of modern society, there’s going to be convergence. I don’t even want to get close to the question of “IQ as a genetic inheritance,” other than to say that if you’ve got smart parents, you’re gonna get a leg up on whatever processor architecture compared to the rest of the population. Both my own sons are wicked smart, though I say with no humility that at least some of this comes from their mother. And yes — they had some IQ advantage coming genetically from us. But a lot of their smarts come from them be raised in environments where grounded problem-solving was the norm. See below for that environment. Needless to say, you gotta think for yourself when you’re in a tight spot.

Conor at 12, dropping in. He wanted it — bad.

What IQ means cannot be decontextualized outside canonical knowledge structures. And young people’s affinity for future learning also cannot be separated from the dominant culture they come from, as well the developmental stage most young people are in at any given time. IQ testing comes along right when kids, in advanced, legalistic cultures, are passing through the gate of evolved algorithmic thinking. And so it’s no surprise that kids that likely have genetic affinity, along with reinforcing culture, and developmental tracking are going to do better on IQ and other tests, like the SAT. Of course.

And if there’s any understanding of how that plays out, it’s that the kids, relative to others in their age cohort, are going to be more SOPHISTICATED thinkers than others in their cohort. But now societal trade-offs come into play. You’re also going to be pre-biasing the educational system, especially for professions that have complicated hierarchical social structures, like medicine, or even programming, for kids that at this point in time are optimal. Certain types of neurodivergent kids are going to win this competition every time.

But down the road, they may NOT be the kinds of people who you really want that have the ability to cross-fertilize with others. Who are more evolved and empathetic thinkers. Who may indeed be the kinds of people who can integrate disruptive paradigms into innovative strategies that move society forward. Let’s review quickly Evolution vs. Sophistication with this graphic:

What this means is that you are selecting young people for tracking into institutions (like universities) where the be-all and end-all actually IS status. And you’re not leaving the door open for those that might be superior not so much in ANALYSIS – but actual SYNTHESIS. Because successful designers require agency, and the ability to make choices, which inherently is a very different set of neurogenic pathways. And THOSE people have to be able to listen to others, and synthesize their viewpoints into a larger, aggregate understanding. There are decisions being made when one solely considers IQ that inherently can close off those future paths to career success.

Long-term, from a societal perspective, this ain’t so hot. Without some understanding of how disruptive innovation works, which often involves folks taking a Hail Mary moonshot, in a different field, you’re only going to end up with incremental innovation inside a particular type of legalistic/algorithmic knowledge structure. That is, of course, what is happening inside academia. I got tenure with (I think) ten papers. Now, all our young faculty better have about 20, or they don’t stand a chance. So the system is, from an incremental Darwinian perspective, selecting for rule-following neurodivergence and IQ. But this will not produce the people who will necessarily invent more profound ways of teaching the current crop of young people, which is going to require more understanding of others, in a different cultural milieu, and a different set of tools that they may have facility with, that the teachers do not (e.g. ‘digital natives’.) Which is especially problematic in engineering, with the huge turnover in relevant knowledge happening constantly.

Further, the people you want inventing ways of measuring these higher cognitive skills — academics! — also end up being v-Meme limited in how they even assess heuristic decision making ability, because these abilities are poorly evolved in their own context! One ends up with obvious complexity ceilings among the teachers. And that is problematic.

How? Over the years, we’ve had various “critical thinking” projects at my university. These are well-meaning. But it doesn’t take long (usually after the pioneers of said programs have moved away) to only reward and call things “critical thinking” that agree with the professors’ viewpoints. In the Woke World of the modern academy, this has been disastrous in stifling debate, as well as producing ideologues. And because the subject matter is often about societal interpretation, it attracts more than its fair share of psychopaths, interested in only power and control.

The path to answers I’ve followed, at least from an engineering perspective, is to open my classroom up. Lots of contact with the outside world of engineers, which means LOTS of validity grounding, for both the students AND myself. I’ve been very successful with this — there ARE answers.

But this does not get at the heart of people wanting testing protocols for K-12. And therein lies the rub. And because education is, inherently, at the lower levels, a status-sorting game, the interest in actually creating more enlightened young people is just oh so boring. I’m not the first to say that the system is functioning exactly as it’s been created to function.

The problem is that the asteroid of complexity in many fields, as well as how to run a multi-ethnic society, is approaching. We’ve done a pretty shitty job of creating a society where people can find meaning, as well as developing pathways for others to find it, as well as make sure the trains run on time and the grocery stores are full of food. The problem with NOT doing this is that you end up lots of elites working to find ways to tear it down, because that’s in their non-self-aware elitist interests during periods of Elite Overproduction.

Educators might consider what might happen to our shared future when it finally hits.

Summary

There’s a lot in this post. Summarizing:

We test for legalistic/algorithmic abilities and sort kids based on these at THE critical juncture in their lives — at 18 — with things like IQ tests and SAT tests.
Some cultures have a profound leg up because their kids are raised in orderly societies.
We don’t test at all for agency and empathy, nor do we particularly focus on raising young people to be independent. Yet these two things are critical for evolving our society as life conditions change.
Academia has little to no interest in persistently systemically confronting this failure.
We have no accepted epistemology for even looking at this problem in knowledge and decision making ability.
Without some enlightened sense of awareness, we’ll eventually converge on societal stasis and promotion of neurodivergence, which will not play out well in the long run.

Raising the Next Generation of High Agency Engineers -Part 4 – Filling in The Liberal Arts

February 13, 2025February 13, 2025 ~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

Boo Boo at the Dinner Table — Always Polite

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.

Raising the Next Generation of High Agency Engineers -Part 3 – Focus on Who our Students Actually Are

January 25, 2025January 25, 2025 ~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

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?

I strongly believe in promoting programs like First Robotics in high schools, as well as all sorts of shop classes. None of these programs are controversial, and a class in auto mechanics can offer that brain/hand integration I discuss in this piece on the Neurobiology of Education and Critical Thinking.
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.

Raising the Next Generation of High Agency Engineers (Part 2 of a bunch!)

January 18, 2025 ~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 1 Comment

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.

Quickie Post — Raising the Next Generation of High Agency Engineers

January 11, 2025January 11, 2025 ~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 2 Comments

Road Trip — outside Winnemucca, NV, December 2024

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.

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It's About Empathy – Connection Ties Us Together

"As we relate, so we think."

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