Noah D. Arney

Author: Noah Arney

  • Fiction as Philosophy

    This is based off of a short twitter thread.

    Jay Dragon had a great twitter post the other day:

    is there a term for when the particular conditions of a fantasy/fictional setting set up a particular philosophy? like how jack saint describes Sky High or how warhammer 40k’s setting self-justifies the imperium

    https://twitter.com/jdragsky/status/1584229756656300032

    It’s something that happens all the time in fiction, and always has. In a later tweet Jay mentioned Star Wars as a fictional universe where they avoid it.

    The use of the Jedi/Sith as the counter argument works so well. Because although the Original Trilogy sets it up as the now lost Jedi were right about everything. But the prequels and Clone Wars, as well as sequels to a lesser extent (they aren’t great at philosophy), point out that both Jedi and Sith are wrong but in different ways and to different extents.

    That’s important because in real life in the same way that you can’t say “this is the exact truth empirically determined and universally accepted”, you also can’t say “both sides are right in/from their perspectives” because if one person brings a salad to an all-meat BBQ night and another person brings a bag of shit they are both wrong, but in different ways.

    We can debate the nature of or existance of a deity or reason to the universe because we don’t know and can’t know. Though some say that reality is knowable, no one says that reality is already fully known. That brings us to fictional worlds.

    What do we call worlds where the reality is one-to-one with the dominant character worldview? I have a few ideas but it depends on what is happening.

    1. Reality doesn’t really align with the world-view, but the narrator thinks it does
      • That makes this an unreliable narrator, if the author intends it, then that’s fine, if the author doesn’t intend it, well too bad, they wrote an unreliable narrator without meaning to.
    2. Knowledge of the true worldview was broadly and explicitly explained by a deity
      • Perhaps we call this deus ex philosphia? If this has happened then what do the people who weren’t let in on the knowledge think?
    3. Reality is fully knowable and has become fully known via advanced science
      • Ok, so it’s science fiction, but I guess that means that we have a fully verified ontological positivism on our hands. Which is too bad because if all of the questions have been answered then there’s no more science left in the science fiction.
    4. If the author is doing this without understanding that they are doing it then we have a different issue
      • I’ve seen this called implied ideal, but really it’s just that the author has way too many unexamined biases and hasn’t realized that they are doing number 5.
    5. Finally what probably covers the majority of fiction that does this historically is that the author is aware of what they are doing and they’re doing it to explicitly imagine what would happen within that worldview if it were true
      • That makes this a thought experiment, which honestly is probably what we should call all of the versions, but only truly works if it is intentional.

    I think I’ll leave it at that, because Thought Experiment probably covers most of the intentional uses and implied ideal covers those who are just writing their biases without realizing it. Where this gets complicated is who the narrator in the fiction is. If they are an omniscient or semi-omniscient narrator then if it is well written it should be thought experiment, if poorly written it will probably be implied ideal.

  • Thoughts on “The Real World of College: What Higher Education Is and What It Can Be”

    A former twitter thread

    This is thoughts inspired by a book review of The Real World of College: What higher education is and what it can be, so take from that what you will.

    I empathize with what they’re talking about, and I have to assume that the book itself talks about this, but the shift isn’t a natural result of PSI’s movement. It’s a shift pushed by external factors.

    PSE has a few different stakeholder groups. Faculty and Staff, Parents and Students, Government and Board, Alumni and Community, and finally Industry and Professions.

    As the authors point out, the Faculty and Staff are pushing for transformational, so lets look elsewhere.

    Parents and Students overwhelmingly see PSE as a path to career. And they’re not wrong, it’s a well worn career trajectory that allows for a lot of variation. But in general they see transformational as being a good thing too as long as it helps career. So look outside the class.

    Industry and Professions maybe were a push toward transactional 20+ years ago, but now, because the advisors there tend to be the People Who Do The Thing in their areas, they love the transformational aspect of PSE and the transferable skills that come with it.

    I hear that in the US Alumni and Community have power over PSIs, maybe that’s good. It tends to be a slightly conservative hold trying to keep the institution looking like it always has. It’s not so much a push to something as an attempt to maintain a status quo.

    The Board and Government I think is where this shift happens. Through budget control, mandates, policy/guidance documents, hiring and tenure control, and control of the executive they have a massive amount of power.

    When power is used to meet government needs of increased employable people in certain areas to either build that area or decrease the cost of labour in that area (or unfortunately in service of an ideological goal) then it tends to be a strong push toward transactional PSE.

    How is that stopped? Well, in a democracy the government and the boards they appoint are supposed to be a reflection of the majority. So the way to change it is to be as public about the transformative nature of PSE as possible, and to be accessible in that.

    It’s not helpful if we talk about PSE as a transformative opportunity in a way that people don’t understand. It leads them to thinking that by transformative we mean something opposite to the ability to have a career at the end, or that it’s just academic jargon.

    We need to talk about how important a well rounded education with classes in many disciplines is, and how it leads to creative people who can think critically, can communicate with a wide variety of others, and are effective collaborators.

    We must push back against people seeing breadth requirements as being underwater basket weaving. Change the narrative about WHY we want students to take classes that aren’t about specific technical skills.

    Because if we change the narrative then politicians get more pushback from constituents when they call for removing discussion of race as something that impacts people. It would mean talking heads get seen as being silly when they complain about the worthlessness of college.

    Staff and Faculty are already on board. Students and Parents hear the narrative beyond the PSI, but are willing to go for transformational education if it also can be applied practically. Industry and Professions are already agreeing with us.

    Alumni and Community, except when they’re harnessed by politicians to score political points, are just a force for the status quo. The only stakeholders who seem to oppose transformative and favour transactional are politicians, so we need to change the narrative.

    We change the narrative by making transformational learning something that people understand. PSE tends to speak in technical terms to others who use those same technical terms. How do we explain it to those who don’t know those technical terms? That’s the way forward.

  • Transformation in Religious Display

    I recently went down to the San Juan Islands in Washington State. It’s a route I’ve been taking for about 30 years, and I remember the view from the Aerostar window and how it has evolved since the early 90s.

    Because I drove that route at least 3 times a year as a kid and at least twice a year as an adult I got very good at using the buildings as my guide post, noticing changes and the steady growth in the northern part of Whatcom.

    Well, moving to a different Province and then a pandemic changes things and it’s been about five years since my last trip down.

    For many years along the road I take there was a small chapel, just big enough a couple people. A place for you to pull off the road and have a moment of prayer. A couple years ago the chapel disappeared. Things like that happen when you only see a snapshot of the road once or twice a year.

    Further down the road there were several other churches, one I always noticed because they always had a big sign talking about how Jesus loved you and you were welcome at their church.

    This year things were different.

    Where the chapel had been was a large anti-abortion sign making some misleading statements and with the implication that 1) late term abortions were the most common (as opposed to less than 2%) and 2) they were some sort of intentional evil (rather than something that almost only happens if the life of the mother is in danger).

    Where the church with the welcoming sign had been there was still a building, but there was no longer a sign welcoming you, telling you that Jesus loves you, or even telling you the churches name. Instead a new sign was there urging you to defund Planned Parenthood.

    As I reflected on these changes it made me realize that this is what has happened in the US over the last 30 years. The Christian faith and prayer replaced with misinformation in support of their culture wars and political statements. White American Evangelicals replaced Christ, first with celebrity preachers, then with political influence, and now with explicit power over others. Maybe that was always the goal, and I was too young to understand it, maybe it’s a shift.

    What I know is that where a roadside chapel stood, now stands a sign with a lie on it, and where a church welcomed you, they’re now telling you to lobby the government.

  • Thoughts on Invisible Boy

    Invisible Boy by Harrison Mooney

    https://www.harpercollins.ca/9781443463935/invisible-boy/

    As I was writing this I realized I wanted to do two things. I wanted to give a review and I also wanted to reflect on how I experienced the book. So it’s two posts in one now. Feel free to just read one or the other.

    Full disclosure, Harrison is a friend I’ve known since university.

    The Review

    This book will unsettle you. It is meant to. It is meant to show you truths many people would prefer not to see. This book made me cry. Crying in grief, in compassion, in horror, and in thankfulness for promised hope.

    This memoir walks you through Harrison’s life as a Black person adopted by a white family. It puts a bright light on the problems inherent in a certain thread of inter-racial adoption that happens all too often, such as in the recent case in the US of the use of inter-racial adoption as an attempt to assert whiteness and to “save” the souls of children.

    Though the focus of the book is on Harrison’s experience which may be new to many readers (growing up in a fundamentalist group considered extreme by the other Christians in the “bible belt”), the underlying concept (especially explored as Harrison moved out of the bubble his family created) is that their performance of whiteness was just one way that Blackness is attacked.

    In Harrison’s narrative he points out that whiteness and white supremacy are intertwined. When white becomes default all else gets swept away in the move to embrace the similarities, but only the similarities to whiteness. It’s a perspective that harms everyone because it hides that the differences matter, and ignoring that makes it very easy to privilege what we are used to and shun/hate/fear what we are not used to.

    This book is about the attempt of whiteness to use Blackness, to exert control over Blackness, and ultimately to erase and destroy Blackness. I wanted to start writing that sentence by saying “well meaning whiteness” but it doesn’t matter that those involved thought their intent was good, because the intent was only good for whiteness. Erasing and destroying are what white supremacy does, but worse, it makes us think that there can be a good way to do it. That the harms and lives destroyed in service to whiteness can be minimized because really the people doing it are good but misguided people.

    This book doesn’t let you walk away with that thought. It might make you walk away though. It is hard for those of us who grew up with whiteness being a default to face the truth. Like Harrison’s classmate late in the book you might walk away instead of facing truth.

    So it’s a book about attempted destruction, and about survival. About asking the questions were afraid to ask because it means moving away from the uniformity of using whiteness as a default.

    And it’s especially a book that brings us to the hard question James Baldwin wants us to ask ourselves. “If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.”

    If you’re ready to ask yourself hard questions, read this book.

    The Reflection

    For me reading Invisible Boy was an especially emotional read because I exist just off screen. Imagine reading a book where you exist in the world, in the city, at the camp, in the stores, at the university, but not in the book. Its unsettling, but comforting. Things you remember exist there but seen from a different perspective.

    I attended the churches his church saw as old and not charismatic enough (we didn’t do dancing). I attended the school his school said had too many Sikhs. I shopped at the same Christian book store, steered away from the products his parents embraced (what I didn’t realize then but do now is that my parents saw the Pat Robertson’s and the Charismatic Pentecostal and Evangelical celebrities as misguided, grifters, or heretics).

    I went to the same camp the same year, but I seem to recall reading a book through the entire cougar ordeal. Things that were impactful for him have since been wiped away by other memories I have of there. We met again at the secular University as he was wrestling with his identity and relationship with his adoptive family. I was part of the clubs and classes and theatre with him.

    I’m not in the book, but everything is so familiar that I am one of the extras who you only see the back of the head of in a crowd. When I knew him is almost a footnote in the book. A deep breath before his eyes were truly opened.

    And that makes everything hit harder. Because the people I thought were weird were in fact abusive. The places I shopped or visited used him and his existence to market themselves to me. Places I felt welcome in were actively hostile to him.

    Having read back through this I’m thankful for not being part of the story of my friend’s trauma. But I also know that not throwing stones doesn’t mean I wasn’t holding the coats. And this probably won’t be how others read the book (hence why it’s in a reflection), because that particular shining of the light isn’t hitting something they’re familiar with. But that was a big one for me, seeing how many places, people, and experiences from my childhood don’t move people toward being “larger, freer, and more loving”.

  • Short Review of Beyond Blue and White Collar

    A former twitter thread

    Hey #careerdevelopment #skills folks, Conference Board of Canada and Future Skills Centre has an interesting document out that I think needs more discussion: Beyond Blue and White Collar: A Skills-Based Approach to Canadian Job Groupings.

    It does two things, it breaks down skills into categories and breaks down jobs into 8 categories. Skills are broken into 5 categories # of skills in brackets: Basic (8), Social and Emotional (9), Resources Management (4), Systems (3), and Technical (11).

    This is a pretty cool breakdown, though that it’s different from the other skills breakdowns being used by the government is a bit frustrating. The Skills for Success is right there my friends.

    Here are the 8 groupings with the percent of current Canadian workforce: STEM professionals 7%, Knowledge workers 27%, Personal services 20%, Supervisors 9%, Technical trades 6%, Non-technical trades 6%, Builders 13%, Doers 12%.

    Laying that out by general education level:

    • 4 years PSE or more 34%
      • STEM professionals
      • Knowledge workers
    • 2 years PSE 15%
      • Technical Trades
      • Supervisors (40% have 4+, the rest have less)
    • 1 year PSE 26%
      • Personal Services
      • Non-Technical Trades
    • no PSE needed 25%
      • Builders
      • Doers

    It’s an interesting way of breaking thigs down, though “doers” does seem like a holding category for roles that don’t require PSE.

    What do you think?

  • UDL Critiques and Misrepresentations

    A former twitter thread

    Based on this tweet:

    Thoughts and feels pedagogy friends?

    “UDL shares problematic similarities in theory, operationalization, and research with the discredited concept of learning styles. No strong research evidence exists that either approach increases learning.” https://doi.org/10.1037/stl0000280

    https://twitter.com/karenraycosta/status/1480644625232715776

    I’ll have a kick at this. The problem in this article is that
    essentially what Boysen has done is misconstrue UDL in a way that allows him to advance his critique of his misconstrued version rather than address its actual goals.

    Boysen says “To achieve the goal of increased learning for all students, the UDL framework outlines educational guidelines that account for diversity in human learning ([CAST], 2018b; Rose et al., 2006).”

    Except, that’s not what those sources say. In fact they say “to ensure that all learners can access and participate in meaningful, challenging learning opportunities.” (CAST 2018b) and “Universal design focuses on eliminating barriers through initial designs that consider the needs of diverse people, rather than overcoming barriers later through individual adaptation.” (Rose et al., 2006).

    The goal, as stated in the cited literature, is not increased learning, but rather accessibility, not simply of being able to access the learning, but being able to understand the content.

    So when Boysen says “Put simply, UDL proposes that education should match the diverse ways that students learn” he’s not actually addressing the stated goals, but rather a way he has encountered UDL through some other source, not through his cited sources.

    This lets Boysen take a part of UDL that aligns in its presentation with “learning styles”, the allowing multiple ways of accessing information or presenting understanding, and decided that that means the two are the same.

    The goals of “increased learning for all students” isn’t correct. That might be a hoped for impact, but the immediate objective and goal is actually increased accessibility for all students.

    Final thought, I would say that by incorrectly stating the purposes of UDL Boysen actually makes it more likely that it will be interpreted in that direction by those less well versed in the research.

    Similar to how the misconstruing of the purposes of learning styles has led some of the researchers behind it to decrying the ways it is actually used in practice.

    If you present the straw man version often enough, those new to it assume that is the correct version.

    TL:DR there’s a fundamental misrepresentation at the core of the article. It does have some good points in it, but that misrepresentation (or perhaps misunderstanding) ruins the argument.

  • AI and Hiring

    A former twitter thread

    In response to this tweet:

    NEW: the insurance startup Lemonade claimed it was analyzing “non-verbal cues” like eye movements and speech patterns to reject insurance claims.

    then the company deleted a bunch of tweets, and now it’s saying “we def do not do phrenology”

    https://twitter.com/janusrose/status/1397602847064215554

    This is part of a trend of problems with companies who use AI to make decisions about people. Now, I’m not involved in AI ethics, for that you should follow Timnit Gebru, but my work in career development involves understanding how people assess other people.

    A problem in hiring is the role bias plays. If you ask 100 people if bias plays a role in their decisions about job candidates you’ll probably have 90 saying no. That’s actually one of the problems. Our brains do this wonderful thing where they say “I’ve seen that behaviour before and it meant they were lying”. But the problem is that the experiences your brain is assessing against are based in the culture you are within. The things it assesses are what people within your culture do when they’re lying. That may be different for those raised in other cultures. But your brain tells you that your experience is universal. And that’s not just about lying. It does the same for what means attentive, friendly, pleasant, combative, and dedicated. That means that when we’re interviewing someone for a job and we think about “fit” it’s very very easy to favour those raised in your own culture.

    So let’s talk AI. The cues that AI is told mean certain things are also culturally conditioned. Usually from how the system was trained. The problem is that AI can’t critically assess itself and say “wait, is that true or just what my upbringing says?”

    Now there are many employers who don’t critically assess their biases, and that’s a problem. But transferring those biases to AI and then claiming it’s unbiased because it’s AI is much much worse. So that’s where we are. AI remains subject to the garbage in garbage out problem, so pretending that it’s unbiased is untrue. What AI does is apply the same biases to everyone. That’s wildly different from being unbiased.

  • Changing Employee Cohorts and Retention

    Originally two twitter threads: thread 1 thread 2.

    It took everyone a bit of time to notice this year, but the labour market shortage is basically being driven by mass retirements over the last two years, just not where you think (is the cultural moment for a Madisynn MCU reference past? Probably). Employment stats time. All of this is some back of the napkin calculations from Stats Can’s info on people accessing retirement benefits and leaving or entering the workforce.

    We know people have been pushing retirements a bit later, and recent stats back this up. In the last 9 years, as this has been happening there’s been an average of about 100K new retirees under 65 in Canada. It took a dive during the pandemic of 8% and 10%. So more people retiring a year or two or five later than they used to. As with every other economic shock, the pandemic made more people avoid early retirement a little. So fewer people retiring under 65.

    What you might not know though is that the number of people retiring at 65 went up during the pandemic, up 5.4% for men and 6.6% for women. Interesting, yes? So during the pandemic fewer people retired early, but more retired at the standard age.

    But we also have stats for those who stayed in the workforce well past standard retirement age. For those still working at 70 or above the retirement numbers during the pandemic jumped over 300% for men and over 900% for women. It’s not quite as drastic for the 66-69 group, but it’s still significantly increased. So all those people who delayed retirement before the pandemic decided this was the right time to retire.

    The question everyone was asking as this labour market tightening happened was: where are the workers? Well the people who were working well past retirement age have now retired. And that might not seem like a lot, but it’s about an extra 100 thousand people (over 65) leaving the workforce over the last last two years than was expected, and that’s not counting the over 5,000 people in the 20-65 age group who died in Canada from COVID.

    So the Baby Boomers are retiring, as was foretold. We expected this. But, even more impactful, the incoming age cohorts are shrinking, the current group of teens is 20% smaller than the current group of new professionals. The preparing for retirement cohort is the same size as the new professionals cohort, so the labour shortage isn’t going to go away any time soon, because the group of replacement workers coming up isn’t big enough to make an impact.

    What does this mean for retention then? Employers need to adapt, because young people have something they haven’t had since before 2006: options.

    What was a shortage in manufacturing, construction, and retail in 2018 has now hit health care and professional roles, and it will just keep going. I’ve been thinking a lot about this with the discussion regarding work-from-home, return-to-work, quiet quitting / work to rule, skills gaps, and the labour shortage.

    If you want your employees to go above and beyond you need to offer one of these things:

    1. intrinsic rewards: motivates staff to want to do more, like work that is impactful or fulfilling or helps them grow and develop in the ways they want to.
    2. extrinsic rewards: pay for the extra time and effort either through overtime, bonuses, or other tangible rewards.
    3. career development: people will do more for you if their positions are secure or if they have a path to promotion.

    Once upon a time these three were considered standard in a professional role, but over time as the number of professional roles have grown, they’ve decreased. That probably was because of labour oversupply. Retirement age got later and more people finished university so the total # of people wanting professional jobs went up much faster than the number of jobs. But that started shifting about 4 years ago, and rapidly in the last year.

    The retirement bump that was promised in 2000 didn’t materialize until right before the 2008 recession, so the cohort ready to move into those jobs didn’t get them as they were cut. But the seeds of the labour shortage were there. 2012 saw an outlier level retirement group. After that things cooled off for a few years, then in 2015 they started picking up steam again, and by 2018 statisticians could see that there was going to be a labour shortage. COVID19 layoffs obscured it for a while, but now that those layoffs are over we can see the result.

    The labour shortage that was expected in 2000 didn’t happen, the one in ’06 was offset by the recession in ’08, and the delayed cohort of young people was more than enough to cover what should have been a shock to the system in ’12. But demographics keep marching on.

    We’ve expected it 22 years, and now it’s here, and that’s a very good thing for young people (if inflation and housing prices don’t destroy the gains). Employers, look at those 3 things, if you don’t offer them, then your employees will get snatched up by an employer who does.