The case study in this lecture is an internal memo from Ford that assigns a dollar value to a human life in deciding whether or not to issue a recall of its Pinto cars. Most of the students in the class called this move objectionable, but the obvious objection to that position is: how else do you decide whether to do something? For example, we could certainly reduce the number of traffic deaths by imposing a mandatory 25 mph speed limit across the country. If the value of a human life were infinite, we would be compelled to take such an action. However, we don’t think that lives are infinitely valuable. An important point here is that no action can ever be guaranteed to save a life, i.e., we can only take actions that have some statistical probability of saving lives. This probability must enter into the likelihood of the calculation. Resources are scarce. We only have so many bags of rice or vaccines to ship around the world, so we have to make hard choices. I don’t think that we boost our ethical consciousness by ignoring the dollar value that we place on human lives. Rather, I think by talking about the value of a life we will become more aware of how tough ethical decisions have to be made. Also, I think it would expose the dramatically distorted value that we place on human lives in, for example, Congo compared to human lives in California.
Sandel offers a counter argument to the contention that we must assign a dollar value to human lives. He uses the example of the Roman coliseum: maybe the combined utility of all the people enjoying the show would outweigh the loss of life for the slave who gets tortured and murdered in the coliseum. Therefore: killing for sport is justifiable. Here’s another (imaginary) example: Jon Krakauer writes Under the Banner of Heaven, which offends millions of Mormons. Therefore, Krakauer’s book should not be published. In each of these examples, an individual right is overcome by the aggregate utility of a large number of people. How does the rule-based utilitarian face these cases? I think the answer is that we believe in individual rights because over the long run they lead to a maximization of utility. Though there may be some fluke cases in which aggregate utility is increased by violating individual rights, but overall we want to live in a society where we are free from murder or free to express ourselves. So we make those rights near-absolute. When individual rights are violated, as is done for criminals, we want this done by a body (the criminal justice system) that follows fair procedures.
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Justice Lecture 2: The case of the cabin boy
First, Sandel describes the distinction between consequentialist and categorical approaches to morality. As I see it, any moral code must be consequentialist at its most fundamental level. There are no absolute moral laws in the universe, that is, morality does not exist independently of sentient beings. In a world with no consciousness, there is no right or wrong. The is no way to morally differentiate between, say, Mercury and Pluto. However, once there is consciousness (even if rudimentary), then we can start to make moral evaluations. At this foundational level, what we care about is minimizing suffering and maximizing pleasure and happiness (broadly defined). Again, we do not make moral judgments about inanimate objects, unless they have an impact on the quality of life of living beings.
Thus any moral code must at its most fundamental be utilitarian, in the most general form of the definition. That is to say, a moral code is utilitarian if it is grounded in promoting the quality of life of living beings. I assert that this is the only thing we value. There is nothing else that we really care about. If a moral code is *not* utilitarian, then what does it value? The shape of rocks? The temperature? The periods of planetary revolution?
[ASIDE: Here I am ignoring any moral claims that are derived from religious dogma. The justification for any of these claims is an appeal to authority which is not widely accepted by all people. Even if such an appeal were accepted by a majority (say, a majority in a single nation), I reject any moral argument of the form “I believe X because Y tells me so,” where Y is Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, God, etc. The only defensible arguments that are valid are ones which all reasonable people can accept. Rawls has talked a lot about this (in Political Liberalism), but it’s been awhile since I read it, so I won’t want into it now.
[One might say, well, how are you going to live in a civil society with all those people who derive their morality from moral codes? My goal here is not to describe what morality actually is followed by most people. Instead, I want to lay out my own argument for a justifiable moral code. I think it’s right, and I think people ought to adopt it based on the reasons as I describe them. But I fully understand that many people will not follow this morality. Despite that fact, I still think that democracy is the best political structure, even if many members of the society do not have moral/political values that I subscribe to. Ultimately, I think my moral code—let’s call it limited liberalism for now—will be the one that societies converge toward. END ASIDE.]
So let’s start from the assertion that all reasonable moral codes must be at their most fundamental level motivated by utilitarian values. Now, the question is how to best achieve this. One extreme approach, let’s call it “OCD Utilitarianism,” says that to make a moral judgment, one must perform an extended calculation of all the ramifications of your decision. For example, if I am a doctor and two patients arrive in the ER, I need to do a full background check—family members, career history, resume, etc.—in order to evaluate which one to save. Taken to this logical extreme, OCD utilitarianism is obviously unrealistic. We simply have too many decisions to make every day for this to be realistic. My point is proposing this ridiculous moral code is to demonstrate that we live in a world of complexity, uncertainty, and scarcity (of time and resources). To make decisions, we need to have simplifying rules of thumb. These are not absolute moral laws, but rather moral guidelines.
For example, one moral rule of thumb is to feed kids milk. We break this rule commonly, whenever a child is lactose-intolerant. Another moral rule of thumb that is less commonly broken is to stop at red lights. However, there are certainly some rare cases when it is morally justifiable to violate this rule, e.g., if a passenger is dying of a gunshot wound in the backseat and you’re trying to get to the hospital. Given that we need to make decisions quickly, we need moral rules of thumb to help us make moral decisions. Since we live in a world of uncertainty, sometimes following these rules of thumb will lead us to make decisions that, in hindsight, we regret. Many laws of the state are based on these kinds of moral rules of thumb: do not kill, do not steal, do not prevent people from worshiping as they choose, etc. These are not absolute moral laws but rather very strong rules of thumb which may be justifiably broken only under very rare circumstances.
So any moral code will need a way of deriving moral rules of thumb; OCD utilitarianism is simply untenable. The moral codes which claim to be alternatives to utilitarianism (such as the categorical imperative, or contractualism) really just disagree about how to generate the rules of thumb. The end goal is to create a set of laws that maximizes quality of living.
Now, one of the big outstanding questions to resolve is the distribution question: given scarce resources, the opportunity cost of a marginal addition to my utility is an incremental utility for someone else. This is one of the big questions that Rawls tries to tackle in Theory of Justice. It’s been awhile since I read it, so I can’t describe the argument in detail. But the thrust is that the veil of ignorance is a powerful thought experiment which helps motivate his two basic principles: maximal liberty without infringing on others’ liberty, and supporting differences in income only to the extent that all people benefit. I won’t go into these in any depth now, but I think they’re fundamentally on the right track.
Now (finally!), let’s turn to the case of the cabin boy, described by Sandel in this lecture. As a brief recap, the story is that in the 17th or 18th century a ship sinks and some crew survive in a lifeboat, with almost no provisions. After 19 days, they realize they will die unless they kill someone. So the older guys decide to kill the cabin boy who is in his teens. They kill him with a pen, eat his remains, and several days later are rescued. They are then taken to court and tried for murder.
I think this is a very interesting case because it is an example of humans acting not as moral agents but as animals designed to survive. In the animal world, there is no such thing as moral judgments. We don’t say that a male bird is amoral for abandoning its offspring. We don’t say that a male sea lion is amoral for fighting off other male sea lions. We don’t say a praying mantis is amoral for eating her mate after he fertilizes her. We don’t say pandas are amoral for only wanting to have sex once per year—even if it’s not very good for the survival of their species. Animals are designed in many different ways to propagate their genes. Some strategies are more successful than others, but we don’t attribute moral value to any of their actions. Animals are not moral agents. Humans, by contrast, are not only motivated by survival. We have the capacity to overcome the design of our genes, and thank goodness we do—otherwise our society would be filled with plundering rapists.
Just because we have the capacity to act as moral agents does mean that we always do. When threatened by death, we revert to our instincts for survival. As proof of this fact, we may ponder whether the sailors would have acted differently if they had known they would be convicted guilty of murder. On the brink of starvation, I think most people would act in whatever way necessary to save their own lives. Thus, I don’t think it’s very useful to ponder the morality or even the legality of people’s actions in such a circumstance. What is the use of a moral code for a non-moral agent? I think this example has a lot of lessons. Let me give just two examples. Consider the drug addict who values a high over his family’s and his own safety, security, and comfort. For such an addict, the force of law holds little power of persuasion. There may be reasons to have laws against the use of such powerful drugs, but deterring the hardened addict should not be one of them.
As another example, let us consider the plight of someone like Ishmael Beah, the child in Sierra Leone whose parents were killed by rebels and who was then forced to fight with the rebels. Twelve-year-old Beah may have performed actions (murder, to start with) that would be amoral for most people to commit, but he was doing them in order to survive. Thus he cannot be held morally responsible for those actions.
Thus any moral code must at its most fundamental be utilitarian, in the most general form of the definition. That is to say, a moral code is utilitarian if it is grounded in promoting the quality of life of living beings. I assert that this is the only thing we value. There is nothing else that we really care about. If a moral code is *not* utilitarian, then what does it value? The shape of rocks? The temperature? The periods of planetary revolution?
[ASIDE: Here I am ignoring any moral claims that are derived from religious dogma. The justification for any of these claims is an appeal to authority which is not widely accepted by all people. Even if such an appeal were accepted by a majority (say, a majority in a single nation), I reject any moral argument of the form “I believe X because Y tells me so,” where Y is Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, God, etc. The only defensible arguments that are valid are ones which all reasonable people can accept. Rawls has talked a lot about this (in Political Liberalism), but it’s been awhile since I read it, so I won’t want into it now.
[One might say, well, how are you going to live in a civil society with all those people who derive their morality from moral codes? My goal here is not to describe what morality actually is followed by most people. Instead, I want to lay out my own argument for a justifiable moral code. I think it’s right, and I think people ought to adopt it based on the reasons as I describe them. But I fully understand that many people will not follow this morality. Despite that fact, I still think that democracy is the best political structure, even if many members of the society do not have moral/political values that I subscribe to. Ultimately, I think my moral code—let’s call it limited liberalism for now—will be the one that societies converge toward. END ASIDE.]
So let’s start from the assertion that all reasonable moral codes must be at their most fundamental level motivated by utilitarian values. Now, the question is how to best achieve this. One extreme approach, let’s call it “OCD Utilitarianism,” says that to make a moral judgment, one must perform an extended calculation of all the ramifications of your decision. For example, if I am a doctor and two patients arrive in the ER, I need to do a full background check—family members, career history, resume, etc.—in order to evaluate which one to save. Taken to this logical extreme, OCD utilitarianism is obviously unrealistic. We simply have too many decisions to make every day for this to be realistic. My point is proposing this ridiculous moral code is to demonstrate that we live in a world of complexity, uncertainty, and scarcity (of time and resources). To make decisions, we need to have simplifying rules of thumb. These are not absolute moral laws, but rather moral guidelines.
For example, one moral rule of thumb is to feed kids milk. We break this rule commonly, whenever a child is lactose-intolerant. Another moral rule of thumb that is less commonly broken is to stop at red lights. However, there are certainly some rare cases when it is morally justifiable to violate this rule, e.g., if a passenger is dying of a gunshot wound in the backseat and you’re trying to get to the hospital. Given that we need to make decisions quickly, we need moral rules of thumb to help us make moral decisions. Since we live in a world of uncertainty, sometimes following these rules of thumb will lead us to make decisions that, in hindsight, we regret. Many laws of the state are based on these kinds of moral rules of thumb: do not kill, do not steal, do not prevent people from worshiping as they choose, etc. These are not absolute moral laws but rather very strong rules of thumb which may be justifiably broken only under very rare circumstances.
So any moral code will need a way of deriving moral rules of thumb; OCD utilitarianism is simply untenable. The moral codes which claim to be alternatives to utilitarianism (such as the categorical imperative, or contractualism) really just disagree about how to generate the rules of thumb. The end goal is to create a set of laws that maximizes quality of living.
Now, one of the big outstanding questions to resolve is the distribution question: given scarce resources, the opportunity cost of a marginal addition to my utility is an incremental utility for someone else. This is one of the big questions that Rawls tries to tackle in Theory of Justice. It’s been awhile since I read it, so I can’t describe the argument in detail. But the thrust is that the veil of ignorance is a powerful thought experiment which helps motivate his two basic principles: maximal liberty without infringing on others’ liberty, and supporting differences in income only to the extent that all people benefit. I won’t go into these in any depth now, but I think they’re fundamentally on the right track.
Now (finally!), let’s turn to the case of the cabin boy, described by Sandel in this lecture. As a brief recap, the story is that in the 17th or 18th century a ship sinks and some crew survive in a lifeboat, with almost no provisions. After 19 days, they realize they will die unless they kill someone. So the older guys decide to kill the cabin boy who is in his teens. They kill him with a pen, eat his remains, and several days later are rescued. They are then taken to court and tried for murder.
I think this is a very interesting case because it is an example of humans acting not as moral agents but as animals designed to survive. In the animal world, there is no such thing as moral judgments. We don’t say that a male bird is amoral for abandoning its offspring. We don’t say that a male sea lion is amoral for fighting off other male sea lions. We don’t say a praying mantis is amoral for eating her mate after he fertilizes her. We don’t say pandas are amoral for only wanting to have sex once per year—even if it’s not very good for the survival of their species. Animals are designed in many different ways to propagate their genes. Some strategies are more successful than others, but we don’t attribute moral value to any of their actions. Animals are not moral agents. Humans, by contrast, are not only motivated by survival. We have the capacity to overcome the design of our genes, and thank goodness we do—otherwise our society would be filled with plundering rapists.
Just because we have the capacity to act as moral agents does mean that we always do. When threatened by death, we revert to our instincts for survival. As proof of this fact, we may ponder whether the sailors would have acted differently if they had known they would be convicted guilty of murder. On the brink of starvation, I think most people would act in whatever way necessary to save their own lives. Thus, I don’t think it’s very useful to ponder the morality or even the legality of people’s actions in such a circumstance. What is the use of a moral code for a non-moral agent? I think this example has a lot of lessons. Let me give just two examples. Consider the drug addict who values a high over his family’s and his own safety, security, and comfort. For such an addict, the force of law holds little power of persuasion. There may be reasons to have laws against the use of such powerful drugs, but deterring the hardened addict should not be one of them.
As another example, let us consider the plight of someone like Ishmael Beah, the child in Sierra Leone whose parents were killed by rebels and who was then forced to fight with the rebels. Twelve-year-old Beah may have performed actions (murder, to start with) that would be amoral for most people to commit, but he was doing them in order to survive. Thus he cannot be held morally responsible for those actions.
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Tweaking nature's laws
Dennett's main point in Freedom Evolves is that assuming we live in a deterministic universe, then the interesting question is: how different would things have to be in order to produce a different outcome? I know that I can't run a 2 minute mile--that would require deep physiological changes. I know that I can't speak Mandarin right now--that would require deep neural changes. But I might be able to calculate the differential cross-section for some scattering process. That's within the bounds of my capability, though I may fall short.
I think this approach is also valuable in thinking about science. It's useful to ask the question: "How different would the universe have to be in order for X to be the case?" In biology, we could imagine primates evolving to have 6 limbs. It's harder to imagine them evolving to have 2 on one side and 3 on the other, but not impossible.
In physics, we could imagine the value of G being different (even if it would create a universe that could not support life). It's harder to imagine a universe in which the small oscillations around a point of equilibrium is described by a triangle wave rather than a sinusoidal wave. I think that's about like trying to imagine a universe in which 2 + 2 = 5. You sort of can, but it's very hard to do.
Well, here's my rumination on a question my brother asked me, about why E=mc^2 and not E=m(kc)^2. I imagine that this falls closer to the 2+2=5 case than the different G case, but i'm not fully convinced by my explanation. I haven't seen a more complete explanation anywhere else though.
Hey Stu,
Let me try to do a better job answering your question about why E=mc^2 and not E=m(kc)^2.
I think it really centers on frame-invariant quantities. If you want something to be frame-invariant, it needs to be represented in an appropriate 4-vector. An example is the position 4-vector (t, x, y, z), for which s^2 = t^2 - x^2 - y^2 - z^2 is invariant. If you're on a train and I'm on a platform, we may disagree about the time between 2 events or the space between 2 events, but we'll always agree on the s^2 of the 2 events.
Well, rest-mass is something that is also invariant. You and I will always agree on the rest-mass of an object, even if we disagree on its momentum and energy. We can make a 4-vector that obeys these
properties [is this the only way to get a frame-invariant rest-mass?]: (A/c, px, py, pz), where
m^2*c^2 = A^2/c^2 - px^2 - py^2 - pz^2
= A^2/c^2 - p^2.
What is A? Well, note that p = gamma * m * v, with gamma = (1-v^2/c^2)^(-1/2). [You need the gamma if you want conservation of momentum to hold in different reference frames.] Now, let's take an enlightened guess about what A is:
A = gamma * m * (kc)^2.
Then, we can expand the gamma with a Taylor series (trust me if you forget how to do this):
A = m*(kc)^2 * (1 + v^2/2c^2 + 3v^4/8c^4 + ...)
= m*(kc)^2 + (1/2)m(kv)^2 + (3/8)mv^4(k/c)^2 + ...
The third and higher terms are negligibly small, so let's drop those.
Then if we set k=1, we get
A = mc^2 + (1/2)mv^2
All that we can measure are changes in energy. So what we will measure are changes in (1/2)mv^2, which just happens to be the same as the expression for kinetic energy that we're familiar with. If, however, we had left k not equal to 1 then changes in A would not correspond to changes in Newtonian kinetic energy. And we would not be able to set A = E.
Not sure if that helps. It's a good question, one that hits at some subtle issues in relativity. Most of the time we just use it because we know that it works! :)
I think this approach is also valuable in thinking about science. It's useful to ask the question: "How different would the universe have to be in order for X to be the case?" In biology, we could imagine primates evolving to have 6 limbs. It's harder to imagine them evolving to have 2 on one side and 3 on the other, but not impossible.
In physics, we could imagine the value of G being different (even if it would create a universe that could not support life). It's harder to imagine a universe in which the small oscillations around a point of equilibrium is described by a triangle wave rather than a sinusoidal wave. I think that's about like trying to imagine a universe in which 2 + 2 = 5. You sort of can, but it's very hard to do.
Well, here's my rumination on a question my brother asked me, about why E=mc^2 and not E=m(kc)^2. I imagine that this falls closer to the 2+2=5 case than the different G case, but i'm not fully convinced by my explanation. I haven't seen a more complete explanation anywhere else though.
Hey Stu,
Let me try to do a better job answering your question about why E=mc^2 and not E=m(kc)^2.
I think it really centers on frame-invariant quantities. If you want something to be frame-invariant, it needs to be represented in an appropriate 4-vector. An example is the position 4-vector (t, x, y, z), for which s^2 = t^2 - x^2 - y^2 - z^2 is invariant. If you're on a train and I'm on a platform, we may disagree about the time between 2 events or the space between 2 events, but we'll always agree on the s^2 of the 2 events.
Well, rest-mass is something that is also invariant. You and I will always agree on the rest-mass of an object, even if we disagree on its momentum and energy. We can make a 4-vector that obeys these
properties [is this the only way to get a frame-invariant rest-mass?]: (A/c, px, py, pz), where
m^2*c^2 = A^2/c^2 - px^2 - py^2 - pz^2
= A^2/c^2 - p^2.
What is A? Well, note that p = gamma * m * v, with gamma = (1-v^2/c^2)^(-1/2). [You need the gamma if you want conservation of momentum to hold in different reference frames.] Now, let's take an enlightened guess about what A is:
A = gamma * m * (kc)^2.
Then, we can expand the gamma with a Taylor series (trust me if you forget how to do this):
A = m*(kc)^2 * (1 + v^2/2c^2 + 3v^4/8c^4 + ...)
= m*(kc)^2 + (1/2)m(kv)^2 + (3/8)mv^4(k/c)^2 + ...
The third and higher terms are negligibly small, so let's drop those.
Then if we set k=1, we get
A = mc^2 + (1/2)mv^2
All that we can measure are changes in energy. So what we will measure are changes in (1/2)mv^2, which just happens to be the same as the expression for kinetic energy that we're familiar with. If, however, we had left k not equal to 1 then changes in A would not correspond to changes in Newtonian kinetic energy. And we would not be able to set A = E.
Not sure if that helps. It's a good question, one that hits at some subtle issues in relativity. Most of the time we just use it because we know that it works! :)
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Justice Lecture 1: Trolley Problems
The first in what I hope will become a series of posts based on Michael Sandel's Justice lectures at Harvard (which can be obtained as podcasts from justiceonline.harvard.edu).
In this lecture, Sandel sets up several “Trolley problems,” philosophical thought experiments to probe our moral intuitions.
1. Split track. A train with no brakes is coming down the track. The track splits; on one side is tied one person, while 5 people are tied to the other side. On its current course, the train will kill the 5 people. You can throw a switch to redirect the train so that it kills only the 1 person. Do you throw the switch?
a. A: Yes, you throw the switch. Killing 1 person is better than killing 5. However the rule “Always kill as many lives as possible” should not be followed universally. For example, would you rather save two 90-year-old people both suffering from terminal cancer or one 30 year old single mother who has three children? You save the mother. Do you save two mentally-retarded people or the president of the
2. The pusher. Now the only way to stop a train is to push a fat man (who is much fatter than you are) off a bridge so that he falls on the tracks, stopping the train and saving the 5 lives. Do you push him off?
a. A: No, you don’t push him. That’s what our moral intuition tells us, at least. It seems that it would be more unfair to push a man on the tracks than it would be in case 1 to throw a switch that ends up killing one man. Why does our moral intuition tell us this? Because our moral intuition is based on probable outcomes. We choose what is the right thing to do based on what will usually yield the optimum outcome (let’s say maximum utility), based on our limited knowledge in the real world. In the real world there are lots of ways to solve problems. If you want to stop a train, there are many things you can push into its path—a trash can, a hot dog stand, a car—besides a human being. Furthermore, there are other ways to save the 5 tied victims from a train besides pushing something in the way of it. Maybe there is some emergency braking system on the train or on the tracks. Maybe there is a switch to divert the train. In the real world, there are usually many options, and sacrificing an innocent person’s life hardly seems like the best one. The premise of the thought experiment is that the only way to save the 5 people’s lives is to push the one fat man, but in the real world we are rarely given such clarity of options. Maybe after the fact a careful analysis will reveal the only way to save these lives. But in the moment when we make a decision, we work with imperfect information and therefore have to follow rules that work (i.e., yield optimum outcomes) most of the time. We can explain the principle at work here as the Murder Rule: “Do not cause an innocent person to die unless you can be sure that the death of that one person will allow the saving of many more lives, and there are no other ways of saving those lives.” In this case, we are not sure that there is not another way to save the 5 lives. In the rare cases when it is very obvious in the moment that there are no other ways to save the 5 lives, then we are back to the split track situation of Case 1: Split Track.
3. The triage doctor. You’re a doctor who gets 6 patients. Five of them can be saved relatively quickly, but saving one of them will take so much time that you will not be able to get to any of the others. Who do you save?
a. Of course, you save the 5 people. This is analogous to Case 1: Split Track. You can be relatively confident (assuming, for example, that you’re the only doctor) that there is no other way to save the 5 lives than by operating on them first.
4. The transplant doctor. You’re a doctor with 6 patients. Five need different organ transplants. One is getting his wisdom teeth removed (general anesthesia) but is otherwise healthy. Do you sacrifice the healthy one, take out his organs, and then transplant them to the other 5 patients to save their lives? This is the only way to save their lives.
a. No, you can’t do that because that would violate the fairness of the healthy person. It violates the Murder Rule because in fact, in real life, you would never know that there are no other ways to save these 5 lives. Maybe more organs will come from new organ donors—which could arrive at any minute. Maybe there are other ways to save those 5 lives. One student in class had a brilliant solution: take 4 organs from whichever of the 5 dies first to save the other 4. In real life, these are the kinds of options that have to be considered.
Friday, September 19, 2008
can she persuade them?
This is an interesting PBS piece on Michelle Rhee's drive to institute merit pay in the DC schools, along with ending tenure:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/education/july-dec08/dcschools_09-18.html
However, the comments of George Parker, the Union chief, suggest that he's not that interested. And given that the straw vote of teachers was 2 to 1 against the new 2-tier merit/no-tenure system, the prospects are not promising.
Fundamentally, I think this is the wrong way to go about it. Pay for performance is almost impossible to implement. I know of hardly any schools that pull it off. That's because there are lots of ways to be a good teacher, and boosting test scores is only one measure. Look at what independent schools do: they let principals make the decision.
So if I were Rhee, I would be taking the extra pot of cash that she has and telling teachers that they can get roughly a 20% boost in pay, if they give up their tenure. If they agree, then the principal gets control of the school budget. I think if you put that offer on the table, there would be a lot of pressure from teachers to sign on to that.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/education/july-dec08/dcschools_09-18.html
However, the comments of George Parker, the Union chief, suggest that he's not that interested. And given that the straw vote of teachers was 2 to 1 against the new 2-tier merit/no-tenure system, the prospects are not promising.
Fundamentally, I think this is the wrong way to go about it. Pay for performance is almost impossible to implement. I know of hardly any schools that pull it off. That's because there are lots of ways to be a good teacher, and boosting test scores is only one measure. Look at what independent schools do: they let principals make the decision.
So if I were Rhee, I would be taking the extra pot of cash that she has and telling teachers that they can get roughly a 20% boost in pay, if they give up their tenure. If they agree, then the principal gets control of the school budget. I think if you put that offer on the table, there would be a lot of pressure from teachers to sign on to that.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Ooops...
Well, Obama's already campaigning in Virginia...so that means it's not Kaine.
Based on this interview:
http://www.time-blog.com/swampland/2008/08/obamas_vp_the_candidate_drops.html
I think the favorite right now has to be Bayh. When he says that he's willing to take someone who complements him and sometimes disagrees with him, I think that refers to Bayh's executive experience and his decision on the Iraq war. Also, the talk of someone who's not into ego-boosting points to Bayh. Biden is too much of a loose cannon, and Obama has said before that he doesn't want extra foreign policy help.
So I'd give Bayh 80-20 odds right now.
Based on this interview:
http://www.time-blog.com/swampland/2008/08/obamas_vp_the_candidate_drops.html
I think the favorite right now has to be Bayh. When he says that he's willing to take someone who complements him and sometimes disagrees with him, I think that refers to Bayh's executive experience and his decision on the Iraq war. Also, the talk of someone who's not into ego-boosting points to Bayh. Biden is too much of a loose cannon, and Obama has said before that he doesn't want extra foreign policy help.
So I'd give Bayh 80-20 odds right now.
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
My Veep Pick
My money is on Kaine. I just watched him on Meet the Press, and he's confident, down-to-earth, and most of all, he looks like an all-American guy. He grew up in a blue-collar household (in Minnesota), did missionary work in Hondouras, went to Harvard Law. Similar in a lot of ways to Obama's biography, which I think is a sign that their values overlap.
There are two questions Obama has to consider in choosing his running mate: 1) who am I comfortable with and can work well with? and 2) who will help me win? On the first question, Kaine seems to be a good fit. He's a non-Washingtonian, which plays into Obama's change message.
On the second question, the key barrier Obama has to surmount to win is to convince middle-class whites that "he's a guy like me; a guy who understands me". And I think the image of Kaine and Obama next to each other does that better than any of the other short-list candidates (Biden, Bayh, Rendell, Sebelius). Kaine looks like he could be a wrestler, or a truck driver. He emblemizes regular mainstream America, and provides a counter to Obama's perceived exoticism.
Anyway, that's my bet. We'll see in a couple days who the pick is.
There are two questions Obama has to consider in choosing his running mate: 1) who am I comfortable with and can work well with? and 2) who will help me win? On the first question, Kaine seems to be a good fit. He's a non-Washingtonian, which plays into Obama's change message.
On the second question, the key barrier Obama has to surmount to win is to convince middle-class whites that "he's a guy like me; a guy who understands me". And I think the image of Kaine and Obama next to each other does that better than any of the other short-list candidates (Biden, Bayh, Rendell, Sebelius). Kaine looks like he could be a wrestler, or a truck driver. He emblemizes regular mainstream America, and provides a counter to Obama's perceived exoticism.
Anyway, that's my bet. We'll see in a couple days who the pick is.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
How much are you worth?
The value of an ounce of gold, if all of its mass were converted to energy (E=mc^2) in the form of electricity (with 100% efficiency), and then sold at market rates (~5cents/kWh = $1/72e6J), would be:
1 oz. * (1kg/36oz.) * (9e16J/1kg) * ($1/72e6J) = $35 million
The value of a 170-lb. person would be:
170lb * (1kg/2.2lb.) * (9e16J/1kg) * ($1/72e6J) = ~$100 billion
Point: you get a lot of energy from a little mass.
1 oz. * (1kg/36oz.) * (9e16J/1kg) * ($1/72e6J) = $35 million
The value of a 170-lb. person would be:
170lb * (1kg/2.2lb.) * (9e16J/1kg) * ($1/72e6J) = ~$100 billion
Point: you get a lot of energy from a little mass.
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Math with the Stars
So I read in an old copy of Business Week that Teach for America, since being founded in
1990, has reached approximately 2.5 million children. These days, TFA recruits about 3000 teachers every year. Let's assume that the average TFA teacher teaches 50 students per year (elementary teachers would teach less; high school teachers would teach more). And they last for two years, so that yields:
3000 teachers/year * 50 students/teacher * 2 years = 300000 students impacted every year
Over 20 years, that would yield about 6 million students impacted. But we can figure in the early days, TFA was a lot smaller than it is today. So I think the calculation is about on par.
So that got me thinking: how else would it be possible to have such a large impact on education quailty in this country? And the answer, which has been brewing in my head for a while, is that high-quality education software could radically transform the way that young people learn in this country, and around the world.
I think the biggest opportunity lies with math. So let's consider a basic Algebra I course. the U.S. 8th grade enrollment is ~3.5 million. So that means that if you got 10% market share of all algebra students, you would be reaching 350k students per year. Already more than TFA reaches each year. And that's just one course. You could imagine doing lots of math courses (arithmetic, transistion math, geometry, statistics, calculus, etc.), reading comprehension courses at many different levels (read a passage and then answer questions about it--basically standardized test prep for reading), some history courses (American history, world history, comparative religions), social science courses (psych, econ), science courses across the board, computer science, and even foreign language (though Rosetta Stone is probably the gold standard in this market).
So the question is: how could you get 10% market share for a given subject material? I think there are a few key ingredients:
1) Must market (or at least target) kids and parents directly, rather than going through teachers and school districts, which are much slower to adopt novel teaching techniques.
2) The pedagogical approach must be research-based and proven to be effective, especially on standardized tests.
3) The product must have a low marginal cost.
So here's the vision: break each course down into lessons grouped into chapters. Each lesson is introduces by a video tutorial from two instructors: a subject-matter expert, and a "cool" host. The subject-matter expert should be someone who is 1) charismatic on camera and 2) articulate in explaining and teaching. The cool host is the one who is learning each lesson, asking questions, and working through problems. They would ideally be someone who has some initial B-list celebrity appeal, like Ashton Kucher, or Johnny Knoxville. Many of the lessons would be just the two of them together. But lots of lessons would involve some sample students (need around 4). And some lessons would be with a special guest, someone famous like Al Gore, Oprah Winfrey, Kobe Bryant, etc. The special guests could be stars from Hollywood, TV, politics, business, or sports. The idea is that kids would want to watch the lessons as a to see some of their favorite stars. It would also be great for marketing, because it would drum up a lot of media attention. If you make it something that kids want to see, then they will demand it before parents and teachers have even gotten on board with it.
After the video lesson, there would be a textual explanation of the material (which, frankly, a lot of kids might skip). All the text material would also be included in a textbook which could be purchased separately.
Then, the main event of the software is interactive problem-solving. At first, students would start with practice problems, where they could get hints, and explanations when they get a problem wrong. After getting comfortable with the practice problems, students could take a "qualifier" for each lesson. They would have to pass the qualifier to advance to the next lesson. Then, at the end of each chapter they would have to take a test to pass that chapter. The scores on the tests could be sorted into gold, silver, and bronze medals, with the requiremnt that a student earn at least a bronze before advancing to the next chapter. If they don't pass the first time, they could keep taking the test over and over again until they passed. If students are using the software with their school, the teacher could modify the course to rearrange the order of chapters or the requirements for advance.
So, to summarize, the key features that make this learning software an improvement over old teaching materials:
1) Students have an incentive to keep learning, as a way to see their favorite stars on the screen.
2) Students learn new material through a variety of channels--reading, listening, and watching, thus providing lots of ways to master the material.
3) Students practice skills until they master them, allowing for individualized pacing.
As for implementation, I think the key is to partner with a group with experience doing quality entertainment TV, like MTV. After all, education materials are competing with television (and video games, and movies...) for kids' time and attention, we have to use all the tricks that they use.
Initial production would be expensive, but doing a really good job on one course (say, algebra), and marketing it well (as part of a mission to ensure that every American understands math) would get a lot of kids to buy into it and that would generate a lot of revenue which could be used to support development of other courses. Let's say you charge $40 for the software (about what one hour of tutoring would cost), if you get 10,000 kids to buy it, that's $400K; get 100K kids to buy it, and you've got $4 million. And I think $1 million is a reasonable sum to pay for a low-budget MTV-quality videos. So I think it's very doable.
Back to TFA: the idea of taking smart, motivated college kids and having them work on the thing they know how to do best (do school) for the purpose of fixing one of the neediest problems in our country (bad schools) is not all that hard to come up with. Wendy Kopp just had the good sense to take that idea and put it into action. Math with the Stars isn't any brilliant breakthrough, but if it's a successful idea, it could take off and have a huge impact on education.
1990, has reached approximately 2.5 million children. These days, TFA recruits about 3000 teachers every year. Let's assume that the average TFA teacher teaches 50 students per year (elementary teachers would teach less; high school teachers would teach more). And they last for two years, so that yields:
3000 teachers/year * 50 students/teacher * 2 years = 300000 students impacted every year
Over 20 years, that would yield about 6 million students impacted. But we can figure in the early days, TFA was a lot smaller than it is today. So I think the calculation is about on par.
So that got me thinking: how else would it be possible to have such a large impact on education quailty in this country? And the answer, which has been brewing in my head for a while, is that high-quality education software could radically transform the way that young people learn in this country, and around the world.
I think the biggest opportunity lies with math. So let's consider a basic Algebra I course. the U.S. 8th grade enrollment is ~3.5 million. So that means that if you got 10% market share of all algebra students, you would be reaching 350k students per year. Already more than TFA reaches each year. And that's just one course. You could imagine doing lots of math courses (arithmetic, transistion math, geometry, statistics, calculus, etc.), reading comprehension courses at many different levels (read a passage and then answer questions about it--basically standardized test prep for reading), some history courses (American history, world history, comparative religions), social science courses (psych, econ), science courses across the board, computer science, and even foreign language (though Rosetta Stone is probably the gold standard in this market).
So the question is: how could you get 10% market share for a given subject material? I think there are a few key ingredients:
1) Must market (or at least target) kids and parents directly, rather than going through teachers and school districts, which are much slower to adopt novel teaching techniques.
2) The pedagogical approach must be research-based and proven to be effective, especially on standardized tests.
3) The product must have a low marginal cost.
So here's the vision: break each course down into lessons grouped into chapters. Each lesson is introduces by a video tutorial from two instructors: a subject-matter expert, and a "cool" host. The subject-matter expert should be someone who is 1) charismatic on camera and 2) articulate in explaining and teaching. The cool host is the one who is learning each lesson, asking questions, and working through problems. They would ideally be someone who has some initial B-list celebrity appeal, like Ashton Kucher, or Johnny Knoxville. Many of the lessons would be just the two of them together. But lots of lessons would involve some sample students (need around 4). And some lessons would be with a special guest, someone famous like Al Gore, Oprah Winfrey, Kobe Bryant, etc. The special guests could be stars from Hollywood, TV, politics, business, or sports. The idea is that kids would want to watch the lessons as a to see some of their favorite stars. It would also be great for marketing, because it would drum up a lot of media attention. If you make it something that kids want to see, then they will demand it before parents and teachers have even gotten on board with it.
After the video lesson, there would be a textual explanation of the material (which, frankly, a lot of kids might skip). All the text material would also be included in a textbook which could be purchased separately.
Then, the main event of the software is interactive problem-solving. At first, students would start with practice problems, where they could get hints, and explanations when they get a problem wrong. After getting comfortable with the practice problems, students could take a "qualifier" for each lesson. They would have to pass the qualifier to advance to the next lesson. Then, at the end of each chapter they would have to take a test to pass that chapter. The scores on the tests could be sorted into gold, silver, and bronze medals, with the requiremnt that a student earn at least a bronze before advancing to the next chapter. If they don't pass the first time, they could keep taking the test over and over again until they passed. If students are using the software with their school, the teacher could modify the course to rearrange the order of chapters or the requirements for advance.
So, to summarize, the key features that make this learning software an improvement over old teaching materials:
1) Students have an incentive to keep learning, as a way to see their favorite stars on the screen.
2) Students learn new material through a variety of channels--reading, listening, and watching, thus providing lots of ways to master the material.
3) Students practice skills until they master them, allowing for individualized pacing.
As for implementation, I think the key is to partner with a group with experience doing quality entertainment TV, like MTV. After all, education materials are competing with television (and video games, and movies...) for kids' time and attention, we have to use all the tricks that they use.
Initial production would be expensive, but doing a really good job on one course (say, algebra), and marketing it well (as part of a mission to ensure that every American understands math) would get a lot of kids to buy into it and that would generate a lot of revenue which could be used to support development of other courses. Let's say you charge $40 for the software (about what one hour of tutoring would cost), if you get 10,000 kids to buy it, that's $400K; get 100K kids to buy it, and you've got $4 million. And I think $1 million is a reasonable sum to pay for a low-budget MTV-quality videos. So I think it's very doable.
Back to TFA: the idea of taking smart, motivated college kids and having them work on the thing they know how to do best (do school) for the purpose of fixing one of the neediest problems in our country (bad schools) is not all that hard to come up with. Wendy Kopp just had the good sense to take that idea and put it into action. Math with the Stars isn't any brilliant breakthrough, but if it's a successful idea, it could take off and have a huge impact on education.
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Language acquisition, the primary goal of education
What are the key goals of education? I would argue that they are to teach languages. The acquisition of language is what separates humans from other animals. Language is inextricably linked to the way that we think. Thus, by learning languages we expand the capacity of our minds. I see 5 critical areas of language that should be cultivated in one's education:
- Native: How to write and how to speak in one's native tongue. This includes both persuasive as well as narrative froms of writing/speaking.
- Foreign: By learning a language other than our native language, we gain a better understanding for words, and are able to access cultures in the world more dissimilar from our own.
- Mathematics: The language of mathematics is critical for problem-solving and clear thinking.
- Programming: Computer languages teach how to break a complicated problem into smaller steps.
- Music: The language of music opens up a world of expression.
Saturday, May 31, 2008
Why is Dawkins so hated?
Many believers have a special place of hatred in their hearts for Richard Dawkins (Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens may get squeezed in there too). I think part of the reason is that in his attempt to dismantle the truth claims of religion, Dawkins fails to recognize the many positive social benefits that religion provides.
Referring to the previous post, here is an example of where Dawkins misses this critical idea. A questioner in the discussion asks:
http://richarddawkins.net/article,2580,Is-Science-Killing-the-Soul,Richard-Dawkins-Steven-Pinker-Edge
In his response, Dawkins does not acknowledge the fact that religions are very good at consoling people. He also misses the fact that there are two ways to console someone: one is to tell them false things about what has happened to a deceased loved one (they have ascended into heaven...). The other is to make the grieving person feel loved by their community, in other words to surround them with people who show that they care about the grieving person.
I've never read anything by Dawkins that I don't agree with. I think the God Delusion is a pretty water-tight case against all the truth claims of religion.
Where Dawkins misses the boat is in the fact that there are lots of other things that religions do besides offer an explanation for the natural world. They bring hundreds of people together every week; they foster creativity, art, music; they provide time for reflection and ethical introspection; they provide economic support networks for the needy. I could go on. The point is that all of these social benefits of religion are very real and very valuable. The fact that the truth claims it makes about the universe are unsupported by evidence does not diminish from all the good social benefits it provides to a community.
By ignoring these social benefits, Dawkins is able to write of religion as a whole as mistaken and malicious. I think he would have made a much stronger, and more persuasive argument if he had instead said, "The claims that religion makes about how the world works are unsubstantiated. But many religions foster community spirit and moral reflection, which are certainly positive contributions to society. But there is no reason why religions need to hold on to their antiquated dogma in order to continue supporting their social good works."
Of course, anytime you tell someone that the thing they believe in doesn't exist, you're going to ruffle some feathers.
Referring to the previous post, here is an example of where Dawkins misses this critical idea. A questioner in the discussion asks:
...another thing that the religions do is give comfort to people if they lose people in car accidents or to cancer and so on, and as far as I've experienced it, the scientific view cannot give people this kind of comfort...
http://richarddawkins.net/article,2580,Is-Science-Killing-the-Soul,Richard-Dawkins-Steven-Pinker-Edge
In his response, Dawkins does not acknowledge the fact that religions are very good at consoling people. He also misses the fact that there are two ways to console someone: one is to tell them false things about what has happened to a deceased loved one (they have ascended into heaven...). The other is to make the grieving person feel loved by their community, in other words to surround them with people who show that they care about the grieving person.
I've never read anything by Dawkins that I don't agree with. I think the God Delusion is a pretty water-tight case against all the truth claims of religion.
Where Dawkins misses the boat is in the fact that there are lots of other things that religions do besides offer an explanation for the natural world. They bring hundreds of people together every week; they foster creativity, art, music; they provide time for reflection and ethical introspection; they provide economic support networks for the needy. I could go on. The point is that all of these social benefits of religion are very real and very valuable. The fact that the truth claims it makes about the universe are unsupported by evidence does not diminish from all the good social benefits it provides to a community.
By ignoring these social benefits, Dawkins is able to write of religion as a whole as mistaken and malicious. I think he would have made a much stronger, and more persuasive argument if he had instead said, "The claims that religion makes about how the world works are unsubstantiated. But many religions foster community spirit and moral reflection, which are certainly positive contributions to society. But there is no reason why religions need to hold on to their antiquated dogma in order to continue supporting their social good works."
Of course, anytime you tell someone that the thing they believe in doesn't exist, you're going to ruffle some feathers.
The purpose of qualia
I just read the following transcript of a discussion between Steve Pinker and Richard Dawkins on the question, "Is Science Killing the Soul?"
http://richarddawkins.net/article,2580,Is-Science-Killing-the-Soul,Richard-Dawkins-Steven-Pinker-Edge
It raises two important points, which I will address in separate posts.
First, I'd like to address the issue of qualia. Here is Pinker's response to one of the questions:
Qualia refers to this subjective experience--the feeling of pain, or sensation of the color red. So the question is why do I feel these things subjectively, rather than just behave like a robotic automoton. And to me the answer is: the only way to get a complicated thing to reliably and successfully navigate a complicated environment is to make it have subjective feelings. An organism with more computational power in its brain needs to have deeper, more visceral feelings in order to adapt to more varied environments and solve more complicated problems over a longer period of time. By contrast, an organism with very little computational power can successfully replicate under a very simple set of rules, e.g., grow roots downward, grow branches upward, turn leaves toward sunlight, etc. Let's say you build an organism as smart as a dog. Its brain is capable of navigating the animal through varied terrain, using its jaws to attack other animals, use its paws to dig holes, etc. How do you ensure that this rather smart brain does the right things in order to spread its genes? There is no simple rule-book that you can write down for it, like "take ten paces forward, bend head downward, extend tongue to drink". Life is too complicated--this organism must figure things out on the fly. But in order to get the organism to behave in evolutionarily successful ways, it has to enjoy fresh water, and dislike salt water, and enjoy sex, and dislike physical wounds.
Let me borrow on Dennett's idea of the zombie, which is a person who does all of the things that a normal person would do but has no subjective experience. If I remember correctly, I think that Dennett's argument is that even if we were all zombies, we should still treat each other the same way. I guess I would say that zombies simply don't exist. That is, there is no way to make an evolutionarily successful organism as complex and intelligent as a person without giving that organism subjective feelings. Otherwise, they would forget to eat. They would forget to have sex. They would forget to take their hand out of the fire. Their genes would die off rather quickly.
I think this is an important lesson for artificial intelligence. To get an individual to adapt to complex surroundings, it needs to have desires. The way to create those desires is with neural nets.
http://richarddawkins.net/article,2580,Is-Science-Killing-the-Soul,Richard-Dawkins-Steven-Pinker-Edge
It raises two important points, which I will address in separate posts.
First, I'd like to address the issue of qualia. Here is Pinker's response to one of the questions:
The part that remains a mystery [about consciousness] is why the purely subjective aspect of experience should exist at all. Some philosophers, such as Dan Dennett, argue that that isn't a scientific problem and may not even be a coherent question -- since, by definition, pure subjective experience has no observable consequences, we're wasting our time talking about it. I think that goes too far, but it is possible that the existence of subjective first-person experience is not explainable by science. When cognitive neuroscience completes the story of how the brain works and predicts every last itch, every last nuance of color and sound in terms of the activity of the brain, one can still wonder why it feels like something to see and touch and taste. My own hunch is that this unsatisfied curiosity may itself be an artifact of how our brains work.
Qualia refers to this subjective experience--the feeling of pain, or sensation of the color red. So the question is why do I feel these things subjectively, rather than just behave like a robotic automoton. And to me the answer is: the only way to get a complicated thing to reliably and successfully navigate a complicated environment is to make it have subjective feelings. An organism with more computational power in its brain needs to have deeper, more visceral feelings in order to adapt to more varied environments and solve more complicated problems over a longer period of time. By contrast, an organism with very little computational power can successfully replicate under a very simple set of rules, e.g., grow roots downward, grow branches upward, turn leaves toward sunlight, etc. Let's say you build an organism as smart as a dog. Its brain is capable of navigating the animal through varied terrain, using its jaws to attack other animals, use its paws to dig holes, etc. How do you ensure that this rather smart brain does the right things in order to spread its genes? There is no simple rule-book that you can write down for it, like "take ten paces forward, bend head downward, extend tongue to drink". Life is too complicated--this organism must figure things out on the fly. But in order to get the organism to behave in evolutionarily successful ways, it has to enjoy fresh water, and dislike salt water, and enjoy sex, and dislike physical wounds.
Let me borrow on Dennett's idea of the zombie, which is a person who does all of the things that a normal person would do but has no subjective experience. If I remember correctly, I think that Dennett's argument is that even if we were all zombies, we should still treat each other the same way. I guess I would say that zombies simply don't exist. That is, there is no way to make an evolutionarily successful organism as complex and intelligent as a person without giving that organism subjective feelings. Otherwise, they would forget to eat. They would forget to have sex. They would forget to take their hand out of the fire. Their genes would die off rather quickly.
I think this is an important lesson for artificial intelligence. To get an individual to adapt to complex surroundings, it needs to have desires. The way to create those desires is with neural nets.
Sunday, January 27, 2008
I’m here because of Ashley
For me the most memorable moment of Barack’s most moving speech of the campaign, given last week at the Ebeneezer Baptist Church in Atlanta , was when he talked about a roundtable discussion in S. Carolina :
There is a young, 23-year-old white woman named Ashley Baia who organizes for our campaign in
And Ashley said that when she was nine years old, her mother got cancer. And because she had to miss days of work, she was let go and lost her health care. They had to file for bankruptcy, and that’s when Ashley decided that she had to do something to help her mom.
She knew that food was one of their most expensive costs, and so Ashley convinced her mother that what she really liked and really wanted to eat more than anything else was mustard and relish sandwiches. Because that was the cheapest way to eat.
She did this for a year until her mom got better, and she told everyone at the roundtable that the reason she joined our campaign was so that she could help the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their parents too.
So Ashley finishes her story and then goes around the room and asks everyone else why they’re supporting the campaign. They all have different stories and reasons. Many bring up a specific issue. And finally they come to this elderly black man who’s been sitting there quietly the entire time. And Ashley asks him why he’s there. And he does not bring up a specific issue. He does not say health care or the economy. He does not say education or the war. He does not say that he was there because of Barack Obama. He simply says to everyone in the room, “I am here because of Ashley.”
By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children.
But it is where we begin. It is why the walls in that room began to crack and shake.
And if they can shake in that room, they can shake in
And if they can shake in
And if they can shake in
I thought of this speech twice this weekend. Yesterday, halfway through my shift for 100,000 Calls for Obama (getting a lot of wrong numbers and answering machines), a grad student walked in, holding in his hand the blue flyer that I had posted on Rains doors two days before. He doesn’t live there, but his girlfriend does, and so he came out to join the cause. For the record, his name is Kenny, and he’s an immunology grad student.
Then today, I was supposed to go on a bike ride/hike with Rachelle, but the weather forecast didn’t look good so she suggested planting trees up at the dish. So we did. I planted the first tree of my life (a Douglass oak hybrid), right by a big rock near the dish. If anyone had asked why I was there, I would have had to say, “I’m here because of Rachelle.” While we were digging berms for the trees, a lady with a Russian accent walked by and asked if there would be more tree planting opportunities in the future. She made note of the email address and said she would be back sometime.
Social movements are about connections between people. Great leaders inspire those kinds of positive connections to occur. I think that is what makes Barack so special—that he ignites an energy in us that we didn’t know was there before. One tree won’t save the planet. But it’s a start.
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