“In math, we’re traveling around the world,” says sixth-grader Rocco Rose, a student at Quest to Learn and a citizen of Creepytown — an imaginary city where his class learns math and English. The students play travel agents, convert currencies, keep blogs about their travel experiences and budget trips.

Creepytown is structured like a video game that has jumped out of the computer. During their 10-week “missions,” students learn to adapt and improvise.

“The second trimester, Creepytown went broke,” Salen says. “They had … an economic crisis. So the kids worked to figure out … what had gone wrong. And then they proposed the design of a theme park to bring revenue in.”

Systems Thinking

Salen says playing with complex dynamic systems gives kids opportunities to learn.

Students “learn how to solve problems, how to communicate, how to use data, how to begin to predict things that might be coming down the line,” she says.

They also learn something called systems thinking, which Salen says is one of the cornerstones of 21st century literacy. It helps you understand how the behavior of a derivatives trader in Hong Kong affects housing prices in Florida. When a system becomes sufficiently complex, Salen says, you start to get outcomes that are hard to foresee.

“Suddenly you begin to get what’s called emergent behavior, and in emergent behavior, that system, the elements in it, begin to relate to one another in ways that can be unpredictable,” she says.

Hell yeah! If we can give the next generation early experience with complex systems and unintended consequences, there may be hope for the future yet.

Related posts:

1. A Middle/High School That Teaches Complex Systems Through Games??!
2. Evolutionary Game Theory and Archaeology
3. Game Theory and Military Planning

It’s not just the lives of individuals who eat crap (which is most of the country, frankly, even though they have no idea how toxic what they are eating is).  It’s the happiness and achievement potential of today’s youth.  It’s the emperor with no clothes at the center of the healthcare debate.  And it’s a lynchpin for economic recovery and sustainability.

Watch the premiere, and spread the word…

Related posts:

1. Two Important Links
2. Is Hunger Really a Problem in U.S.?
3. The Problem With Processed Foods

Click here to view the embedded video.

I am working with founder Nancy Conrad on creating a self-sustaining, growing funding mechanism to expand the mission.  Might be an endowment, might be for-profit investment fund, might be an incubator, might be some combination.  We need to talk to people who are veterans of funding innovation (VC, hedge fund and angel investor types), who are as passionate about the mission as we are, to figure it all out.

What the mission doesn’t say, but what I believe, is that this will change the educational landscape permanently and profoundly.  There a a million “ideas” for how to fix the broken system.  The only way change actually will happen is through setting up subversive alternatives that the discontent (that’s you and me) can switch over to and replicate with appropriate modification for their context.  Spirit of Innovation Awards actually works in a big way.

So if you are someone with experience in funding innovation, we’d like you to join us at The Innovation Summit, held this year at NASA Ames, Moffett Field, California, April 8 – 10, 2010. The list of people presenting and attending is impressive, more info here.  RSVP Here.

Whether or not you can come, if you have something to contribute (expertise, connections, money) to the goal of creating this funding mechanism, please either comment publicly below or privately via this link and use the subject “Innovation Fund”.  And let us know whether you will be at the Summit so we can loop you into the breakout session.

Related posts:

1. What I'm Working On: Supercharging Innovation
2. The Nature of Innovation
3. Equity Micro-Investing

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1. The Link Between Food & Healthcare Reform
2. The Most Important TV Show in America

“Extensive research has shown that people tend to lead either from their head or their heart. Unless we make a conscious choice to achieve the appropriate balance, we tend to do what comes naturally and solve the problem from within our comfort zone” (from the Decision Education Foundation)

Those of us on the analytical side of the spectrum often completely discount feelings in making decisions. But it’s worth noting that the Decision Education Foundation (DEF) was founded by Stanford professors who pioneered the science of decision analysis and whose work spawned an entire consulting industry that helps companies make billion dollar decisions. DEF is adamant about the importance of using both head and heart:

Using your heart means taking into account what you really care about, which often includes the effect on other people and retaining their respect and trust. It means listening to your emotions and intuition. If you have taken your heart into account in the appropriate way, a decision feels right.

Those on the other side of the spectrum often feel overwhelmed or scared by any sort of analysis.  They shoot from the hip all the time, justifying this approach by falsely believing that analysis somehow ruins or blocks their ability to tap into their keen intuition.

Both extremes of the spectrum are simply ego-protecting rationalizations that lead people to make bad decisions.

If you find this pedantic and obvious, consider the following: Do you think you are a better than average decision maker (like most people think of themselves)? Do you believe you are a great decision maker?

Were you ever taught in school or at home how to make a good decision or to even know what goes into making a good decision? Given that there is a whole science and industry of decision making, do you think you can possibly compare in skill to someone who has been formally trained?

Over the course the course of your lifetime, how many thousands of decisions (big and small) impact your health, wealth and happiness? No matter how good you think you are at making decisions, don’t you think you could benefit from at least a little formal training?

As a poker player, entrepreneur and investor, I spend a good portion of my life making decisions that directly and immediately impact my finances. And I was never taught the principles of good decision making that DEF teaches. I’ve had to learn what I know from hard knocks and self-directed study.  I wish it were different, that I had learned about decision science school.

Would it it surprise you to know that outside of DEF there is not one non-profit teaching the general public what’s been learned by the decision analysis community over the last 30 years? And it’s not like it’s hard to learn: DEF focuses on middle-school students! Actually they concluded after methodical testing that that’s where it needs to be taught for a person to learn the habits for life.

This is the same conclusion that Self Enhancement, Inc. has come to after 30 years of working with disadvantaged youth in their after school programs. In fact, SEI won’t accept a new student beyond middle school age because in their experience it becomes a lot tougher to make an impact.

While it’s too late for you become a good decision maker, don’t you think you owe it to your children to make sure they learn how? Just kidding, it’s never too late :-) But it is 90% habit and only 10% conceptual. Following a methodology is key to learning a new habit.

I learned about DEF when Annie Duke asked me to play in a poker fundraiser from them (she serves on the Board of Directors). As soon as I saw their tagline (“Better decisions, better lives”) I knew I had to support them. If you feel similarly, I want to hear from you in the blog comments, and if you have any ideas at all on how to support the mission, how to improve the message, questions about or how you can support your local schools in decision education, I especially want to hear from you.

And if you are somehow still skeptical about how learning more about science of decision making can directly improve your own life, check out Annie’s kick-ass talk from The Feast this past October.

Related posts:

1. Decision Education Foundation
2. Health Care Parallels Education
3. Making Great Decisions When it Counts

Okay, so who do you think I should interview?

No related posts.

1. “It is not the case that the largest banks are the same as other banks, just bigger“
2. “The largest banks are different is that they have something close to monopoly power”
3. “They are not open to outside competition because there are huge barriers to entry”
4. “They promote a noncompetitive industrial organization… by, among other things, creating informational asymmetries.  The innovative products they promote — both derivatives and consumer products — give them an informational edge over their customers. The trading operations they run do the same.”
5. “So if we want to curb the risk taking, too-big-to-fail conflicts, opacity, and the creation of informational asymmetries and complexity, we need to move them down to the scope and scale of the smaller banks. We need to break them up.”

 I hope Rick has a way of converting his personal views into those of the SEC and its staff.  It may have been catastrophic to let the banks fail in the midst of a panic (fall of 2008 – early 2009), because wealth destruction through leverage could have brought the whole fiat money system to a halt.  But if we have learned anything from this crisis, it is that we need to break up JPM and BOA sooner rather than later. 

 Let’s not stop with banks though.  We can extend the information asymmetry analogy to politics.  Profit/money/wealth that was accumulated in the past always tries to control the future by creating barriers to entry (information asymmetry).  It may be as indirect as placing former industry experts on boards of the FDA, RIAA, and don’t forget the Fed.  It all boils down to the battle for copyright of ideas.  It may seem like it has to do with music, but that’s just where the battle front is for now.  Music and culture always build (remix) the past music and culture.  If we are allowed to recursively rearrange Shakespeare’s ideas into books, plays, and movies, then there’s something to be said for balance of the ability to create and copy in all facets of life. 

I am of the opinion that the relatively recent boom in emerging countries has a lot to do with a phase shift in the ability to rip-off ideas.  Last I checked we sometimes call that learning.  Of course the standard counterargument is that one needs incentives to be creative and productive.  No one is denying that, but only to a degree.  The only argument I have is that IF the ability to copy an idea has become cheaper, then the copyright needs to shrink proportionately (but not exceeding the ability to create), whether we’re talking about cultures, ideas, wants or needs.  But scaricity is a very squishy concept.

If I invent the HIV vaccine, how much should I get paid?  How long should my copyright/patent last?  There is not enough information to answer these questions, because you first have to define what economic and political system I exist in as well as the cumulative benefits from an HIV cure and how much R&D is required.  The current state of the US system is moving towards that that of privatized gains and socialized losses.  You tell me what emerges from that!  France, Russia, China, Brazil all benefit from globalization by getting access to good ideas without having to invest as much in R&D.  That is the ecosystem that we exist in.  IF all the countries were one, what would the optimal (most balanced) system be?

But how do we quantify the value of removing scarcity (in this example – the abudnance of HIV)?  What if instead of fighting HIV, I choose to fight computer viruses and to create scarcity, I go out and hire people to create viruses for me to fight or at the very least prevent extermination of virus creators.  The RIP: Remix Manifesto refers to this as “Culture Jamming”.   Scarcity can be created artificially.  Yes, Beatles have a legendary standing.  So do the Rolling Stones, U2, and even Brittany at the very least if we look at their earnings.  They have all built empires remixing older music.  You tell me how much a musician ought to make.  If we can’t figure out music, we won’t make any progress with more important patents.

The whole movie is revolutionary, but these parts are critical:
RIP: Remix Manifesto – Part 7
RIP: Remix Manifesto – Part 9

If you want to jump ahead and become the teacher instead of the student, this is where the peanut butter to my current culture jam is:
The Incommensurability of Scientific Theories

Related posts:

1. Balance the past with Zeitgeist
2. Gene-culture Co-evolution
3. Last.fm Meet Research Networks

Kafka gave us The Metamorphosis.  We have the power to realize our own humility.  Being wrong is irrelevant if you learn from your mistakes and prevent systemic risk from such errors.  How can we be so content with our wisdom if we continually ignore this vital lesson.  As Wikipedia suggests, some people mistakenly dismiss The Zeitgeist Movement of being similar to Socialism, which could not be more wrong.  Emergent systems are the building block of The Zeitgest Movement, while socialism tends to ignore incentives between the group and the individual.  Most “losers” of history tend to argue that their system of beliefs wasn’t implemented correctly.  But they are right!  Thomas Sowell suggests that WHO is making the decision is the most important aspect of any system.  I urge you to skim this excellent summary of the book.

Zeitgest Movement is a school of thought that grounds itself in its humility and focuses on learning and technology to achieve a kind of Truthocracy I’ve been posting about.  The Zeitgesters are working to create a system for continual improvement where the incentives of the individual are aligned with those of the group.  Where the decision maker is in a continual iterative effort to harvest every drop of wisdom from the group prior to making the decision.  Let’s not be naive though – we have to be honest and humble in this pursuit and continually strive to improve the knowledge gathering algorithms.  We must also beware of students bluffing their way to teaching.

“The Internet was not the first technology to disrupt a few business models. From the printing press to the player piano, one generation is always calling the next a pirate”.  The aim of copyright law was to aid in learning by BALANCING the rights of the authors and readers (teachers and students).    Balance between the copyright and copyleft is the key.  Removing the obstacles for a balanced use of the rational and creative sides of the brain is the trick to achieving flow:
“Alice Flaherty argues that creativity is due to a balance of frontal and temporal lobe activity. In other words the trick is not, in fact, to get out of your “left brain” and into your right, but to increase activity in the right hemisphere (or reduce activity in the left) so it matches the activity on the other side.” Source

Awareness  vs “Bewareness” is the eternal and internal battle of the present imagination and past “experience”.  Our goal then must be to reduce obstacles to balance to create flow in all systems.

Rafe was here more than 2 years ago:
“- Cooperators and defectors co-exist
- “Cooperators survive in clusters”
- “Cooperators can invade defectors when starting from a small cluster”
- One interesting dynamic occurs when two self-sustaining “walker” sub-populations collide into a “big bang” of cooperation which largely takes over the population.”"

So it is very reasonable that I would have never learned this or learned it years from now if i didn’t start Googling my hypotheses.  Ultimately the resource focus of Zeitgest will revolve around the speed of learning, which resides within you – your own willingness to learn, teach, and stay humble.

Please watch the Zeitgeist Addendum, and RIP: Remix Manifesto

Then facebook and twitter it (buy a copyleft t-shirt to spread the word and create more balance).  You can’t have big bang without them.

Related posts:

1. Notes from TED
2. Decision Education Foundation
3. Peanut Butter and “Culture Jamming” Sandwich

Scientific thinking as problem solving
“In a similar vein, Klahr and Dunbar (1988) characterized scientific thinking as a search in two problem spaces, an hypothesis space and an experiment space.” (hypothesis space is highly related to emergence)

Scientific thinking as hypothesis testing
“Using this approach, researchers have found that subjects usually try to confirm their hypotheses rather than disconfirm their hypotheses. That is, subjects will conduct an experiment that will generate a result that is predicted by their hypothesis. This is known as confirmation bias. Many researchers have shown that it is very difficult to overcome this type of bias. Mynatt, Doherty, and Tweney (1977) devised a task in which subjects had to conduct experiments in an artificial universe and found that subjects attempt to confirm their hypotheses. Dunbar (1993) has found that while subjects do try to confirm hypotheses, their hypotheses will change in the face of inconsistent findings. Klayman has argued that people possess a positive test bias – people attempt to conduct experiments that will yield a result that is predicted by their current hypothesis, and that under certain circumstances, this is a good strategy to use (Klayman & Ha, 1988).”

Experimental approaches to the development of scientific thinking
“Many researchers have noted that children are like scientists; they have theories, conduct experiments and revise their theories. Thus, while most researchers agree that scientists and adults have much more complex knowledge structures than children, the developmental question has been whether there are differences between children and adults abilities to formulate theories and test hypotheses.”
“Overall, recent research on the development of scientific reasoning indicates that, once amount of knowledge is held constant, few radical differences between children and adults abilities to test hypotheses and design experiments.”

Computational Approaches
“Early computational work consisted of taking a scientific discovery and building computational models of the reasoning processes involved in the discovery. Langley, Simon, Bradshaw, and Zytkow (1985) built a series of programs that simulated discoveries such as those of Copernicus and Stahl. These programs have various inductive reasoning algorithms built into them and when given the data that the scientists used, were able to propose the same rules. Computational models since the mid 1980’s have had more knowledge of scientific domains built in to the programs. For example, Kulkarni and Simon (1988) built a program, with much knowledge of biology and experimental techniques, and simulated Krebs’ discovery of the urea cycle. The incorporation of scientific knowledge into the computer programs has resulted in a shift in emphasis from using programs to simulate discoveries to building programs that are used to help scientists make discoveries. A number of these computer programs have made novel discoveries. For example, Valdes- Perez’s (1994) has built systems for discoveries in chemistry, and Fajtlowicz has done this in mathematics (Erdos, Fajtlowicz & Staton, 1991). See Darden (1997) for a summary of work on computational models of scientific discovery.”

Real-World Investigations of Science
“He has found that much of the scientists’ reasoning is concerned with interpreting unexpected findings. In fact over 50% of the findings that the scientists obtained were unexpected. As a consequence, scientists have developed specific strategies for dealing with unexpected findings that are very different from the strategies seen in the hypothesis testing literature. Dunbar has also found that scientists use analogies from similar – rather than dissimilar- domains in proposing new hypotheses . Furthermore the scientists distribute reasoning among members of a laboratory. For example, one scientsist may add one fact to an induction, another scientist add another fact, and yet a third scientist might make a generalization over the two facts. This type of research on real-world science is now making it possible to see what aspects of scientific thinking are important. By fusing together findings from real-world science with the results of the more standard experimental methods, it should be possible to build detailed models of scientific thinking that, when implemented, can be used by scientists to help make discoveries.”

from http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~dunbarlab/pubpdfs/DunbarMITECS.pdf

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2. Embodied Cognition
3. Discovery and Being Self Aware

“…If open courseware is about applying technology to sharing knowledge, and Peer2Peer is about social networking for teaching and learning, Bob Mendenhall, president of the online Western Governors University, is proudest of his college’s innovation in the third, hardest-to-crack dimension of education: accreditation and assessment.

…WGU began by convening a national advisory board of employers, including Google and Tenet Healthcare. “We asked them, ‘What is it the graduates you’re hiring can’t do that you wish they could?’ We’ve never had a silence after that question.” Then assessments were created to measure each competency area. Mendenhall recalls one student who had been self-employed in IT for 15 years but never earned a degree; he passed all the required assessments in six months and took home his bachelor’s without taking a course.”

from Infectious Greed
Article

Related posts:

1. Decision Education Foundation
2. Reinventing Liberal Arts Education
3. Truthocracy – Part III – MIT Center for Collective Intelligence