1. Amend the constitution
2. Public campaign financing

He gave a rousing talk however and at the end offered this challenge.  Though it may seem hopeless for us to curb the influence of money on public policy, consider this thought experiment:  Suppose a doctor told you that your child had brain cancer and that there was nothing you could do.  Would you really do nothing?

The problem is that partisans are not really focused on the question of campaign financing and are too busy fighting one another.  And the rest of us are frozen with apathy or hopelessness.

For me, it’s simply a matter of style: http://rootstrikers.org/

“…when in a good mood, people become more intuitive and more creative but also less vigilant and more prone to logical errors.” (p.68)

He provides other examples where even being forced to smile by holding a pencil horizontally in their mouth makes people more impressionable.

Increasing happiness too much arguably produces less dynamic cognition depending on your current balance of intuitive or logical thinking. Though people focused heavily on logic could probably benefit by being intuitive more often.

Self-actualization or fulfilling one’s potential, though more ambiguous, is a richer goal than happiness.

http://www.people.hbs.edu/mnorton/norton%20ariely%20in%20press.pdf

It’s all making sense to me now.

The moral foundation theory developed by Graham and his colleagues consists of five main moral foundations:

Harm - caring for and not hurting others,

Fairness - equality and reciprocity,

Ingroup - loyalty to one’s group,

Authority - respect for leadership, and

Purity - the sanctity of social norms and customs.

Liberals elevate harm and fairness above the others, conservatives consider all equally.

If these dimensions seem odd, there is some evidence that this is a good model of morality

http://moralfoundations.org/mft-mail/GHN.supplement.final.pdf

http://www.carnegiecouncil.org/resources/transcripts/0434.html

Here are some of my random thoughts on the topic.

1. The repeal of Glass-Steagall by Gramm-Leach-Bliley seems to have had the effect of forcing the US Government to guarantee risky investments. The free-market sympathizer in me insists that FDIC should have been repealed right along with Glass-Steagall. Let banks do what they want, but don’t make the tax payers responsible for them. Removing risk clearly breaks markets. (God know why the Irish agreed to effectively do the same thing during their own recent housing bubble as outlined by Michael Lewis’ new book “Boomerang.” ) Then again, why not just bring back Glass-Steagall and keep the FDIC. It is sort of nice to have a stable banking system for depositors.
2. All these protests including the entire Arab spring might just stem from high food prices. Note to dictators, just keep the masses well-fed and you can screw them any other way you see fit. Just build a strategic pork reserve like China. Of course controlling masses isn’t the only reason to care that people can eat. Maybe we should look into re-introducing some reasonable controls on commodity speculation that were removed by the CFTC in 2005. (I should become a policy wonk!)
3. While we are at it, let’s introduce a Tobin tax to slow down those high-frequency-traders that are so objectionable.

Sedlacek has an excellent point about growth capitalism http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xlrqfp_tomas-sedlacek-growth-capitalism_news

So if memorization tricks aren’t the key to meta-learning, then what is?  Well internet search skills are an obvious candidate.  I’ve had several conversations this past week where we discussed how fundamental search is to work.  I can’t imagine any field where a worker could compete if denied the use of Search.   We can discuss some of the ways knowledge is becoming debased on the internet another day.  Today it is definitely possible to find useful information to make work easier and better in almost any field.

I haven’t spent much time researching search (yet!) But here is how I conceive of search right now.  I would break the problem into some general categories:

1. Keyphrase craft – including and excluding the words most likely to return relevant results
1. Using filters – knowing how to restrict results by date, category, or even a single site
2. Results relevance analysis – determining how relevant each result is by scanning the results summary text and feeding back to recraft the keyphrase if needed.
3. Evaluating  sources -
1. how trustworthy is this site?
2. if I trust the site, how useful or relevant is the info?

So we can argue about this characterization or improve it with the state of the art research (by using search of course).  But I don’t want to suggest that I think meta-learning is all about search.  I personally deeply rely on dialectics for learning.  It’s one thing to read a book or find some good search results, but you really start to understand what you read when you talk it over.  So it’s essential to:

1. have relationships with people
2. pick the right person to discuss a given topic with
3. Clearly express your ideas
4. Listen to and be receptive to opposing viewpoints (within reason of course – see #2)

The problem was that Ferriss presented a heuristic approach to decomposing and learning new subject matter which seems most applicable to rote memorization tasks or physical skills.  All of his examples revolved around language acquisition or sports such as weight lifting or swimming.  It was hard for me to see how his approach would help someone develop deeper understanding of complex subjects or even learn the new job skills demanded by our changing economy.

Kevin Kelly and Stewart Brand tried to draw Ferriss into a discussion about how important meta-learning would be in an era of  accelerating change, but I didn’t feel that Ferriss contributed much to that conversation.  He seemed more comfortable talking about his own personal experiences or specific techniques for learning than thinking about the big picture.

One thread of the conversation between Brand, Ferriss, and Kelly acknowledged the importance of self-tracking to meta-learning.  Kelly of course founded Quantified Self and Ferriss was proud to reveal that he was at the first meeting.  I was surprised to hear Kelly admit that he wasn’t a self-quantifier himself.  He just wanted to observe the early adopters of what he thinks will become normal behavior.   I personally find it hard to believe that most people will end up carefully collecting, curating, and deriving value from their personal data.  Huge amounts of data will certainly continue to be collected about us, but I am afraid that the majority of us will fail to understand how it is being used to influence our beliefs and actions.

I don’t find Ferriss to be a compelling teacher.  Gretchen and I lost more weight just by tracking meals via livestrong.com than we did trying to follow the 4-hour Body diet.  So my final analysis boils down to this: Tracking good, heuristics bad.

I need to dig into this more and see if Robin is right and that it’s all bunk.