technicalpsychology

Video Games and Desensitization to Violence

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 02:54:23 +0100

Playing video games has become one of the most prevalent pastimes for kids as well as adults. Therefore I thought it would be neat to explore some of the ways in which video games can affect our psychology. In this blog post I want to relate an interesting factoid as explained by Dr. James Garbarino (a child psychologist) in his book Lost Boys:

"Until World War II, the military trained soldiers to shoot at bull’s-eye targets. Soldiers could get very good at this, but when a human being was put in a gun sight, many soldiers couldn’t pull the trigger. In fact, 80 percent couldn’t pull the trigger. The military changed the training after World War II, and by the time we were engaged in the Vietnam War, 90 percent of American soldiers were able to shoot their weapon at the enemy. How did the military do this? They did it through desensitization, that is, by training soldiers to shoot at human figures and not at abstract targets like the old-fashioned bull’s-eye.”[1]

Garbarino’s point is that while violent games don’t necessarily make us more hateful towards people, they desensitize us to violence. So in situations where violence presents itself as a real option, there is more potential for that option to be realized.

[1] p. 114.

Lewis Mumford, Machines, and the Workplace

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 21:59:54 +0100

In an effort to organize my thinking and solicit personal discussions with others, I frequently post blog entries about the manner in which work ought to be carried out. I do this because I think that the West’s relationship towards work could stand to be improved, on the whole.

Lewis Mumford - a historian/philosopher of science, technology, and humanity - thought extensively about man’s relationship to the workplace. In this blog post, I want to briefly touch on a recurring theme found in his work: that machines and the workplace are made for man, and not the other way around. Here are a few passages from his book Technics and Civilization (published in 1934) that portray this theme:

"One makes beds to fit human beings, one does not chop off legs or heads to fit beds" (p. 35).
"Efficiency must begin with the utilization of the whole man; and efforts to increase mechanical performance must cease when the balance of the whole man is threatened" (p. 250).
"Our disregard…for work as a vital and educational process is so habitual that it scarcely ever enters into our social demands…What the product contributes to the laborer is just as important as what the worker contributes to the product" (p. 411).

In order to orient machines and the workplace around man and not the other way around we first need to become conscious of what orienting something around man actually means, otherwise we are likely to externalize on things that, alone, do not further depth in life, such as company profit, programming knowledge, promotions, salary, or just getting by.[1]

Finding the courage to strike out and identify a more related approach towards work is not easy.[2] Perhaps just as difficult is implementing a more related approach towards work once one has been identified. Yet consider the perspective that can be gained as a result:

"Labor itself, from spading a garden to mapping the stars, is one of the permanent joys of life" (p. 414).

In addition, Mumford notes that societies have not always placed as much emphasis on work as we do. Between the years 1000 and 1750 (i.e. pre- industrial revolution), for instance, some European countries enjoyed “about a hundred complete holidays a year.” [3] Perhaps machinery played some role in this; the chief characteristic of a machine is, after all, to automate work we might otherwise have to do ourselves.[4]

[1] “Externalization refers to a state of ego control in which the personality, being without self-containment, which is to say, autonomy, looks to something or someone external to it for its life orientation, meaning and drive.” From Robert Aziz’s The Syndetic Paradigm, p. 244.

[2] In her book Married to the Job, Ilene Philipson relates several case studies of employees who so externalized on their work that, after they were laid off, felt their lives to be completely meaningless.

[3] Mumford, p. 148. See also http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html. To this day Dutch workers enjoy on average 58 more vacation days per year than US workers. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time.

[4] Mumford, pp. 9-11.

Nitrous Oxide, Pain-Free Surgery, and the Hardcore Programmer

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 23:40:32 +0100

I have been reading Richard Holmes’ Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, which describes a number of enlightenment era scientific escapades from the standpoint of the inventors and scientists themselves. One of the major scientific figures of this era was Humphry Davy, a British chemist/inventor. Amongst other things, Davy was the first person to discover the effects of nitrous oxide (laughing gas) on human beings. He spent months inhaling it himself and testing it on others in order to determine whether it could be used in some kind of therapeutic capacity. One of the effects he observed was that it could numb pain. He noted this in a scientific publication, and drew attention to its potential usage in the context of surgery, which in those days was conducted without anesthetics. (For a description of what an anesthetic-free surgery is like, see Fanny Burney’s account of her own mastectomy - if you have the stomach for it.)

But, as Holmes relates, nobody picked up and ran with Davy’s discovery, and Davy himself went on to other scientific matters, never to return to it. Meanwhile drug-free surgeries proceeded for another forty years (!), until 1844 when an American dentist successfully employed it.

Why was it that nobody picked up and ran with the connection between nitrous oxide and pain-free surgery? One reason was that nitrous oxide caused people to laugh and become slightly uncontrollable, which presented difficulties for the surgical procedure. Another, more interesting reason that Holmes relates is this: “Several scholars suggest a ‘cultural’ as much as a technical inhibition. They argue that the late-eighteenth-century attitude to pain, in a surgical context, did not admit to the concept of a ‘pain-free’ operation. Pain itself was a natural and intrinsic part of the surgical procedure, and a surgeon’s ability to handle a patient’s pain – through his imposed psychological authority, his dexterity, and above all his sheer speed of amputation and extraction – was an essential part of his profession. In a word, there was the need for a ‘paradigm shift’ to conceive of pain-free surgery.”

In other words, surgery was painful by cultural definition, and doctors and scientists at the time were unable to escape from this definition. In the depth psychology space, one way to describe this kind of phenomenon is a “concretization”: a fixed or concrete pattern of thought that refuses to bend, and thus kills our ability to be open, flexible, and receptive to the self-organizing dynamics of Nature (see Robert Aziz’s Syndetic Paradigm, p.264). Concretizations, according to Aziz, can arise from a number of different sources, including social norms, which is what Holmes suggests happened in the case of nitrous oxide and pain-free surgery – at least in part. I say “at least in part” because Holmes also implies that another source of this concretization was the surgeons’ ego. A surgeon’s skills, at the time, were rated on how fast he could cut, amputate, and hold an authoritative presence in the face of a screaming patient. To undermine these skills would be to undermine his sense of certainty about himself and his abilities.

What concretizations do we hold in the computer programming profession? One that immediately comes to mind is the idea of a “hardcore programmer,” the commonly held conception of what a good programmer should be. A hardcore programmer spends all day and night working in a dark lonely place, hammering out code, sacrificing nearly every aspect of his or her life towards this end. It is a concretization which provides little wiggle room for “self-organizing Nature” to operate in, and kills one’s ability to pursue a healthy career.

Unfortunately, numerous undergraduate computer science programs perpetuate this concretization by assigning insane amounts of work. This, I think, is something computer science students should keep in mind as they consider how many classes to take at once. As with the prospect of nitrous oxide in the context of surgery, it could reduce unnecessary pain.

Positive Thinking in the Workplace

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 22:01:17 +0100

I recently read Barbara Ehrenreich’s new book entitled Bright-Sided, which contains a critique of the cult of positive thinking that has swept corporate America.

Corporations spend a good deal of money promoting positive thinking in their workforces. Consider the benefits of positive thinking from a profit perspective: it makes employees work harder; helps employees to cope (however delusionally) with the loneliness and alienation that accompanies the pressures and long hours of company life (in other words, it helps “maintain discipline within a demoralized workforce” - Ehrenreich); and it allows executives and other highly paid employees to justify their successes: “I got here because I was positive-minded enough – you are not here because you are not yet positive-minded enough.”

According to Ehrenreich, one of the chief ideas in positive thinking today is “the law of attraction,” which states that good things happen to people who are sufficiently willful to attract those things to themselves. Say, for instance, that you want a boat. A positive thinking life coach would suggest that if you visualize the boat, meditate on it, and are sufficiently firm in your expectation of it, you’re going to get it because the mind attracts what it thinks.

No depth psychology that I know of would regard the practice of “willing desires into reality” as advantageous to depth experience in life. Such a view is irreconcilable with the Freudian, Jungian, and Syndetic Paradigms of depth psychology, which would see orienting life around one’s personal will as a recipe to ruin.*

In the Freudian Paradigm, one is taught to use will to restrict one’s desires for the benefit of society, rather than seek their gratification. In the Jungian Paradigm one is led by compensatory archetypal symbols away from a focus on strictly personal needs to the realization of transpersonal meanings. In the Syndetic Paradigm one is led to move through a position of will and ego control to a position of ego strength - a position in service of the inward and outward directives of self-organizing Reality.

Say that the law of attraction really does work, when we are sufficiently willful. This scenario has a mythological analog: the story of King Midas. In this story, Midas wishes for and is granted the golden touch. But alas! Midas soon realizes that this power is not as wonderful as he initially thought, for he is unable to eat food without it turning to gold, and worst of all, his touch turns his own daughter into a golden statue. The story of King Midas tells us that playing God is not a good idea because we are not conscious enough to decide what is best for ourselves.

There is no setting that I can think of – corporate or otherwise – where unbridled positive thinking would actually serve to take us deeply into life. I agree with Ehrenreich that it is time to become more conscious of how the cult of positive thinking (and especially the law of attraction) has affected the way we view and live life. “Thinking positive” has a dangerously willful aspect to it that in no way serves the establishment of a deep and meaningful life.

Special thanks to Dr. Robert Aziz for the input provided during our discussions of this subject.

*The goal of the Freudian Paradigm is to strike a balance between our powerful instinctual passions and social norms.

The goal of the Jungian Paradigm is to secure depth meaning in life by attending to the transpersonal symbols that issue out of the self-regulating psyche.

The goal of the Syndetic Paradigm is to secure depth meaning in life by moving from a position of ego control to ego strength in our engagement with self-organizing Reality.

Software Development and the Black Swan 2

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 21:34:17 +0100

Nassim Taleb’s book The Black Swan has enormous implications for the human sciences, including the psychology of scoping and projecting software timelines. (If you haven’t read my previous post that introduces what a Black Swan is, I recommend you do so (click here) before continuing.) I want to use this post to relate a few additional lessons that this book brings to the table.

1. Watch for the nerd effect.

The nerd effect refers to the “mental elimination of off-model risks, or focusing on what you know. You view the world from within a model. Consider that most delays and cost overruns arise from unexpected elements that did not enter into the plan – that is, they lay outside the model at hand – such as strikes, electricity shortages, accidents, bad weather, or rumors of Martian invasions. These small Black Swans do not seem to be taken into account. They are too abstract – we don’t know how they look and cannot talk about them intelligently.”

2. Humans are bad at predicting timelines.

One of Taleb's examples: “Researchers have tested how students estimate the time needed to complete their projects. In one representative test, they broke a group into two varieties, optimistic and pessimistic. Optimistic students promised twenty-six days; the pessimistic ones forty-seven days. The average actual time to completion turned out to be fifty-six days.”

3. In it comes to projects, when you're off you're off.

If what Taleb says is correct, then every project manager should know about this one: “Let’s say a project is expected to terminate in 79 days…On the 79th day, if the project is not finished, it will be expected to take another 25 days to complete. But on the 90th day, if the project is still not completed, it should have about 58 days to go. On the 100th, it should have 89 days to go. On the 119th, it should have an extra 149 days. On day 600, if the project is not done, you will be expected to need an extra 1,590 days.” Basically we're looking at an exponential curve here.

And a few personal observations:

4. Because of the number of variables involved, software development is particularly susceptible to Black Swans.

I think the main implication here is to have a project plan that acknowledges the existence of Black Swans. It also means having the guts to say to the client, “I don't know when this project will finish definitively, we may have to bump things back because of all the wild, unpredictable stuff that happens in projects, such as x, y, z.” Taleb calls this turning Black Swans into Grey Swans.

5. There are no positive Black Swans in software development – only negative ones.

A positive Black Swan is akin to winning the sweepstakes, a negative Black Swan is akin to being swindled out of all your money. In the world of software projects, sizable delays can arise for no predictable reason; it is not very often that a project finishes a couple months ahead of schedule, in my experience.

6. Being unprepared for Black Swans gives new meaning to development “sprints.”

Failing to accommodate for Black Swans in project plans turns 40 hour work weeks into 80 hour work weeks, with scaled back functionality.

I kept a diary of all the Black Swan events (that is, highly irregular and - at the time - unpredictable events that make a big impact) that happened to me over the course of the last month. The results are interesting, especially when you add up the time.

A crisis situation arose with another client, and I was suddenly pulled away from my current project for two weeks to work on it
I experienced a two day delay trying to resolve an intractable symbols file error that (I think) was related to a problem with IIS
I needed an external hard drive to transfer a big file to my computer, but the task had to wait for a day while I tracked one down
There was one day where, instead of spending eight hours coding as I had anticipated, I unexpectedly spent six hours helping people around the office

All told, in the period of a month, I spent about half my time on unexpected issues. To see if this is representative of what normally happens I'm going to continue this diary for an entire year. The results should be interesting, especially if I can group Black Swan occurrences into different fractals.* As for managing the lower order fractals and "expected unexpecteds," Joel from joelonsoftware.com has a great blog post on that.

*A fractal is a pattern that, when scaled up or down, contains smaller or larger copies of itself respectively. The more scaled down a fractal, the more often it occurs. For instance, Taleb describes a rock as fractal; pebbles are scaled down rocks, mountains are scaled up rocks. There are many more pebbles than mountains. Make sense? Basically a fractal is a scalable pattern of something. When it comes to software project planning, Black Swan occurrences share the same basic pattern of creating more work and pushing back deadlines. They are fractal because they share the same basic properties at varying occurrence rates which are proportionate to how impactful they are. Looking back at my diary, the Black Swan of suddenly needing an external hard drive falls into a lesser fractal category (with a greater occurrence rate) than does the occurrence of a two week project delay (with a lesser occurrence rate). It is possible to predict rates of fractal occurrences (using what Taleb calls "exponents"), if you are comfortable with extremely wide margins for error.

Where are the Female Programmers?

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 01:48:23 +0100

Why are there so many male computer programmers and so few female programmers?

In her book The Female Brain, neuroscientist Louann Brizendine suggests that one of the most significant factors about the kind of career a woman chooses is her hormones.

Women have much more of the hormone estrogen than do men. Estrogen results in making us feel more concerned about relationships, and heightens emotional sensitivity. Says Brizendine: “[A]s estrogen floods the female brain [in the teen years], females start to focus intensely on their emotions and on communication – talking on the phone and connecting with girlfriends and the mall …[their reality is] dictated by communication, connection, emotional sensitivity, and responsiveness.”

Conversely, men have much more of the hormone testosterone than do women. Testosterone results in making us feel more competitive and sexually hungry. Says Brizadine: “[A]s testosterone takes over the male brain [in the teen years], boys grow less communicative and become obsessed about scoring – in games, and in the backseat of the car.”

As a result of these two differences, “at the point when boys and girls begin deciding the trajectories of their careers [again, in their teen years], girls start to lose interest in pursuits that require more solitary work and fewer interactions with others, while boys can easily retreat alone to their rooms for hours of computer time.”

Because of this, says Brizendine, women tend towards jobs that involve greater interaction (women talk an average of 20,000 words a day*) while men do not require jobs that involve as much interaction (men talk an average of 7,000 words a day*). If this is true, I think this provides some insight as to why there are far more men than women in programming; as with many engineering and math–related jobs, programming can be pretty solitary work.

A final note: Having read Brizendine’s book, one might be inclined to presume that the better part of everything we do in life is the direct result of hormones. And that the solution to many of life’s problems can be resolved by simply becoming more conscious of how we as males and females act, from a fundamental biochemical perspective.

Though our biological makeup has an effect on the way we engage with life – it conditions, for instance, how aggressive, sexual, emotional, and communicative we are – life’s problems certainly go deeper than mere gender. By the sole fact that I am male, this may indeed contribute to my ineptitude at picking up on important signals that my wife is sending my way, but perhaps not exclusively. Perhaps it is the case that I subscribe to norms or ideals (learned from society, my parents, or religion) that prevent me from picking up on her signals as well.

*Thanks to Clara (http://clararaubertas.net/blog/why-are-there-so-few-female-programmers/) for pointing out that these statements are false, as Brizendine herself now admits. See:

http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~nunberg/beckies.html

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004370.html

http://www.inklingmagazine.com/articles/book-club-the-female-brain-by-louann-brizendine/

Software Development and the Black Swan

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 00:38:11 +0100

In his book The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb describes a “Black Swan” as an unexpected event caused by some unanticipated variable that has a disproportionate impact on things. Taleb cites J.K. Rowling, Christianity, and 9/11 as Black Swans.

Black Swan events only happen under certain circumstances. The example from the book is say you have a thousand people, and that the average weight amongst them is 135 pounds. Now add the heaviest person in the world to this group – a guy who weighs 1000 pounds. If you do the math, this extra 1000 pounds represents less than a fraction of a percent of the total weight of the group; adding the heavy guy to the group hardly makes a dent to the total.

Now pretend that instead of weight we are concerned with net worth, and that the average net worth in the group is $100,000. If we add Bill Gates to the group, whose net worth is $40 billion, the opposite happens: the net worth of those thousand people represents only a fraction of Gates’.

Unlike with weight, Black Swans are possible in the context of income. Bill Gates is a Black Swan. The thousand pound guy from the previous example would have had to weigh millions of pounds to become a Black Swan.

When it comes to Black Swans and technology, the first two things that come to mind are nuclear energy and software development. First, nuclear energy: It goes without saying that a nuclear disaster could have a Bill Gates-sized impact on humanity. And while nuclear plants implement a host of failsafes and safety measures that make them seemingly risk-free, consider that very few empires or nation-states in human history have managed to avoid war or internal political strife for a period of more than some hundreds of years. If a war were to break out in a country with nuclear plants, who is to say what might happen, especially since power plants have traditionally been targets for sabotage and bombings. Radioactive elements found in nuclear plants can have half lives of hundreds to thousands of years. The consequences of a nuclear disaster – say, by way of political strife – despite how improbable this may seem - are, well, Chernobyl-like. Based on these variables alone, nuclear energy could be interpreted as short-sighted: like a Black Swan waiting to happen.*

Second, I want to touch on the occurrence of Black Swans in the context of software development. Software projects are particularly sensitive to getting thrown way off schedule by unexpected variables. Partly as a result, scoping and projecting software development is a notoriously difficult task.

Now, when I say “unexpected variables,” I am not referring to known unknowns, such as “this use case is much more complicated than I expected,” which can be accommodated for by employing best practices such as multiplying projected development time at the outset by a factor of 2.5. I’m referring to unknown unknowns; where the variables themselves cannot be predicted.

I recall the story of a conversion analyst who quit her job during a critical stage of a big important software implementation. Her departure was quite unanticipated, and it left the project team in a state of disarray. Although another conversion analyst stepped in and successfully finished the conversion, he did so at great expense to health and happiness. From that point on conversion analysts were paired up on projects, just in case someone quit or got hospitalized.

Sometimes, as with the situation I just described, there’s not much we can do about Black Swans except to learn from them. Not learning from them would be akin to knowingly building nuclear power plants amongst a war-prone species of beings.

In the spirit of this blog post, please enjoy the following clip – it’s one of my favorites. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0LPUI0lfVw

* To my knowledge, Ernest Schumacher was the first to propose this argument in his book Small is Beautiful.

Taking Breaks from Programming

Wed, 05 May 2010 03:11:17 +0100

In the four software organizations I’ve worked for over the years, I’ve found that very few programmers ever take breaks. Some reasons to explain this:

   - Programmers don’t feel the need to take breaks
   - Managers don’t encourage breaks
   - Limited number of suitable break areas
   - Not taking breaks is socially normative amongst programmers

Why take a break? The most obvious reason is to rest one’s eyes and one’s mind. A deeper reason is to get recalibrated with what matters most in life, so that work doesn’t take control of you.

It is my experience that when I get to programming for a couple hours straight, I tend to lock into a state of mind whose primary goal is to produce the technical solution I am working on. The intensity of this state is magnified by a number of factors, including social pressures to produce working code, pride, and the comfort of a familiar means of escaping other pressing responsibilities, such as family and personal development.

When “producing a technical solution” substitutes as the dominant focus of one’s consciousness - when a mere technical task takes on greater importance than the pulse of core responsibilities that issue out of one’s humanity - one becomes more robot-like than human. Depth suffers as a result.

Perhaps work breaks can be utilized to maintain that link with the core of our humanity.

Muslims take breaks five times a day for prayer. Proper Muslim prayer, as I understand it, is primarily concerned with submission, as symbolized by the trademark Muslim prostration before Allah. This is most interesting to me. If the purpose of proper prayer is to re-align oneself with the subject of one’s ultimate concern, and if writing software is not the subject of one’s ultimate concern (yet threatens to be), then perhaps this mode of taking a break could prove beneficial.

But first we have to learn to take breaks to begin with.

Mentorship in the Workplace

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 22:00:46 +0100

From time to time I hear the word “mentor” used in the workplace. I think most of us define a mentor as somebody who instructs others in work-related processes, especially through difficult points.

If instead of thinking of work solely as a means by which to earn a living, we consider work as a pathway towards human development, the word “mentor” goes beyond the machine level aspect of one’s work, and takes on a human dimension. With this in mind, I find Robert Aziz’s definition of a mentor to be instructive:

Mentorship, as with parenting in its deepest sense, is about one individual supporting and holding in consciousness that which is seeking to emerge in another individual, almost always unbeknownst to the latter. Mentorship is about creating space. In its highest form, it is about one individual creating the space for the emergence into life of that which constitutes the core meaning of the individual process of another. Mentorship cannot be fabricated. One cannot, even with the best of intentions, support in another individual the emergence of that which one does not in truth understand oneself. (The Syndetic Paradigm, p. 106)

Here, mentorship is about more than simply helping someone to become a more efficient machine. Instead, it is about the conscious furthering of life at its deepest and most meaningful level. While this form of mentorship might well involve overcoming programming difficulties, such help would be offered in the spirit of evolving the individual into a more conscious, related human being.

Say that I am a perfectionist. If my mentor perceives my tendency towards perfectionism, and recognizes that this tendency is killing my ability to process work in a related way, there are several ways he might help me step out of it. For instance, he might take a direct route and discuss the issue of my perfectionism face to face with me, or he might take an indirect route such as assigning me an impossible programming task that will cause me to fail miserably, so that he can pick it up and show me a less perfectionistic yet ultimately more successful approach towards it.

In any case, I like Aziz's deeper definition of mentorship better than the typical definition (e.g. someone who helps me when I get stuck), since it has greater potential to make my work environment more meaningful.

A Paradigm Shift in Education

Wed, 05 May 2010 03:38:37 +0100

In 2000 an American high school student by the name of Marcus Arnold became the leading law expert on the Internet’s most popular knowledge sharing site, AskMe.com. Despite having no formal education or any legal training, Marcus managed to acquire his lofty status on AskMe.com after falsely registering as a “law expert.” Marcus simply had the motivation to study law, and the resources to do so were within his grasp. (For more on this story, see Michael Lewis’ Next.)

In the late 1970’s, a high school dropout by the name of John Robison became the lead concert technician for the band Kiss, devising some of the coolest guitars and special effects ever created. John later became an engineer at a toy company, now he restores high-end cars for a living. (See Robison’s Look Me in the Eye.) How did John manage to learn so much about engineering without ever setting foot in a technical school?

I work as a technical consultant at a software company. Some of the most senior technical positions in my department are occupied by people who have had no formal training in programming, and I can assure you that they are amongst the most skilled and knowledgeable employees in the department. As with Marcus and John, they were able to successfully learn outside a school system because they had the means and the motivation to do so.

I have to ask: what good are schools if I can learn the same stuff in a more related, relevant capacity outside school walls?

Sociologist Alvin Toffler explains that schools in their present form were originally devised as a solution to instill characteristics that would make for good factory workers in the 1800’s. Classes run in shifts, bells ring, attendance and shift breaks (recess) are taken, educational material is distributed and taught en masse in a pre-packaged, static format. Toffler also explains how schools are one of the slowest evolving institutions in America, slower even than most other government bureaucracies and regulatory agencies (see Toffler's Revolutionary Wealth).

Humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers explains that one of the reasons why America thinks it needs schools is due to the normative impact behavioral psychology has had on our thinking. Behavioral psychology claims that man is born with only the bare minimum of innate tendencies, and that he learns everything else by means of rewards and punishments. Sound like school? That’s because most schools operate on the principle that people will avoid learning unless coaxed by means of rewards and punishments, such as grades. Regardless of whether we have an inbuilt instinct to learn or not, schooling teaches us that grades, curriculum, and teachers are required in order to do so.

Religious schools that regard human nature as inherently evil trust people even less to learn by merit of their own personal motivations…

A third take on human nature and schooling is that man, when he is free to listen to his inner core, in the absence of external influences, naturally takes it upon himself to learn, according to his own personal growth needs. Studies show that this method of learning can be incredibly effective. Schools that allow student self-motivation, self-direction, and self-assessment to guide the learning process - where teachers exist merely to dynamically facilitate student learning -students in these schools actually look forward to learning, and don't as often forget what they learn. (See Carl Rogers’ Freedom to Learn for examples of such educational systems.)

This is not a new viewpoint on education. Aristotle touches on it in Nichomachean Ethics, and Rousseau wrote passionately about it in On Education. Oxford University is one of a minority of educational institutions that takes advantage of such a “person-centered” approach towards learning. This pdf provides an informative account of how Oxford's tutorial system works.

Yet person-centered schools can be expensive and they are definitely in short supply. So what to do? One option is not to go to school at all, and instead to hire mentors and work on ad-hoc projects either by oneself or with groups of like-minded individuals via the Internet.

In Deschooling Education, social critic Ivan Illich states that a proper education requires four things: resources (books, equipment), peer groups, skill exchanges (places where skills can be learned), and mentors. Without going into an exhaustive examination, it is my opinion that the Internet facilitates the first three, and is on its way to facilitating the fourth.

What would a good mentor/mentee matching webiste look like? Under what circumstances would learning necessitate a mentor?