Emordnilap

Recently, I have spent a lot of time thinking about my faith. I think it is important to return regularly to the question of what you believe in – otherwise, it becomes a vacant space for other agendas to take root.

Put simply, I believe that we are here in this existence to care for one another. Not because we will be rewarded for it, but because it is our duty as living beings. I cannot describe precisely how I came to this belief – some combination of influences, including religious study (I was raised Congregationalist), but more importantly I have had the experience of being cared for and caring for others. I have found that prayer and meditative practice help to remind me of my duty to others, but having friends, family, and community supportive of caring practice allow me to more easily engage in its practice.

I do not believe myself to be perfect or free of error, but it is my hope that by continuing to reflect on the duty of care I can become more oriented toward this duty, rather than toward selfishness, delusion, or fear. By publishing this statement, I hope that it might be helpful to others, and inform readers of my other writing of my underlying values.

Trying, trying to find a rhythm
Not the regular gait of a walking pace
or the three-step rhyme of a three step dance
or the clap clap [beat] boom clap of a pop song
No, a more complex complex of sounds
that almost don’t repeat

A rhythm that sounds
A rhythm that moves
that matches the cycles of the stars and the world
but moves at the pace of my mind

Trying, trying to find a rhythm
Not just that one stanza that stands on its own
a flexible framework
a crystalline thought
that connects to others
but still holds its form

Trying, trying to find a rhythm
looking for the right beat
Or if not the right beat
then a beat that’s not left
behind
on a line that’s too short

trying, trying to find a rhythm.

Recently, a friend encouraged me to sum up my biggest lesson from graduate school in a short sentence. I had to think about this for a while (most of my memories of graduate school have more to do with burnout and frustration than learning, if I’m being honest). Eventually, I settled on, “Understand goals before looking for questions.”

This lesson is more general than I might have hoped when entering graduate school. I think at that time I may have wanted to come away from the program being able to declare myself an expert in some subfield of statistics or information science. However, the more experience I gain with applied research and evaluation, the more I feel that the lesson of thinking about goals and purpose needs to be more widespread, both inside and outside of education. The relationship between what is done – paid labor, homework, academic writing, etc. – and why it is done (beyond immediate consequences like paychecks or grades) feels like it goes unquestioned in too many cases. Often, the reasons for not questioning might have more to do with a reluctance to acknowledge the lack of purpose behind so much of modern action (or a worry that there is no practical way to change systems for the better). I wonder, though, whether positive change will become more plausible if teachers and mentors train students to expect work to be done with a purpose in mind, rather than to expect to work in response to demands from society or a syllabus.

How does putting goals first work in practice? In management and evaluation settings, considering the strategic goals of a business or program is common. However, communicating the strategic reasons for different tasks to non-managers is less common, and consideration of the reasons behind specific actions does not always happen. Discussing strategy at high levels is a start, but defining it through practice will involve dialog and trust.

In school assignments (and other training), a similar approach is warranted. As the instructor, about how the assignment fits in with the goals of the program, the students, and yourself – is the purpose of the assignment to practice a skill that will further the goal of the class, or is it more to justify the cost or credit weight of the course through time expended? As a student, can you approach the assignment in a way that helps you achieve something beyond a grade, such as skills, knowledge, or creative work?

In higher education with a research focus, similar questions can and should be asked – is the research being conducted to further a goal, or is the research being done to fulfil unrelated expectations? Here, I feel it is important to note that furthering general knowledge can absolutely be considered a goal. However, even in basic research, it is good to think strategically. While the number of questions that can be asked about the universe are unlimited, our time here is not.

As I close this blog post, I want to emphasize the importance of honesty and courage in conversations about goals and purpose. When reflecting on whether a task is relevant to a broader goal, we should be comfortable with admitting that it might not be, and to change approaches if possible. I think it is also important to consider that there are many levels to have these discussions. While most of what I am writing here has to do with education and evaluation theory, there is an element of ethics to acknowledge, as well. The goal of an assignment might be to practice a skill, but that assignment fits in larger contexts as well. Ultimately, when reflecting on purpose, I believe that we need to engage with the question at an existential level, even if doing so is intimidating. Why are we here? What is my purpose, in general? These aren’t questions that can be answered conclusively in our lifetimes, but they will be answered, explicitly or implicitly. Why not give them some consideration?

I’m tired of phrases like, “this is not normal” and, “let’s get back to normal.” Were things ever normal? For different people and different cultural memories times were better and worse than today, but the idea of a static, comfortable normality seems to me very much imaginary.

In statistics, the “normal distribution” is one where the median and the mean averages are identical, while the probability of a value falling above or below average descending the further it is from the average. It’s a common pattern in nature and society, but it’s by no means the only pattern. Income distributions in the United States are famously skewed, with most people earning less than the mean; daily vehicle traffic and birdsong follow the day-night cycle rather than peaking during the day. Using the normal distribution to estimate effects and test for differences can be useful in data analysis, but only if the distribution fits the data.

Something that statisticians and data scientists try to do is to move beyond describing observed data to making predictions about what is expected, based on what is observed. When done poorly (for instance, when normality is assumed to be standard for all situations), it can lead to bad predictions and hard-to-trust analysis. When done well, it can lead to better strategies and deeper understanding of what to expect. I wonder if, when talking outside the world of data, it could help to speak of what is expected and what is hoped for, rather than what is “normal.”

This week, my grandfather lent me a metallurgy textbook printed in the 1940s: Elementary Metallurgy, by W.T. Frier. It wasn’t originally my grandfather’s. It belonged to an old friend of his; possibly a classmate. Grandpa re-discovered it while going through his library and thought that I might enjoy looking at it; I’ve expressed interest in his older books before.

I’m not an metallurgist, engineer, or geologist, but I enjoyed looking through it. It had been published in 1942, probably in support of the war effort. I enjoyed its size and the quality of the binding and the paper. In contrast with most textbooks that I’ve used, it fit in my hand and was not overly thick, making it easy to read while away from a desk. The fabric binding was both flexible and durable, and the pages were made with high-quality glossy paper. I’m not sure why more books aren’t published in this way any more; the only fabric-bound softcovers that I can think of that are published today are religious texts.

I think that the form of the book made the text more approachable; over the last week I found myself flipping through it and learning more about different ways to make and test iron and iron alloys. Some of this information might even be useful for me outside of trivia; the reasons for iron manufacturing being a major source of carbon emissions are much clearer, now that I know how carbon monoxide is used as a reducing agent in the iron refining process. I found the presentation of concepts like oxidation and tensile strength in this book more accessible than when I’ve tried to learn about them in more general textbooks or when browsing Wikipedia. I wonder if this is because Elementary Metallurgy was written with a clear purpose in mind for why these concepts would be introduced (to teach students how to make steel), while general resources for physics and chemistry attempt to present the entirety of the subject, occasionally reaching for “real world” examples. Of course, I would not have been able to follow many of the chapters in the metallurgy textbook if I didn’t remember notations and vocabulary from my high school chemistry course…

Reading the textbook also made me consider that even when dealing with substances with well-understood, reliable properties (like the melting points of metals), the categories used to describe differences at the human scale are very much approximations. Although materials can be tested to a high degree of tolerance (more so today than in the 1940s), the precise arrangement of microscopic structures in things like iron alloys can’t be perfectly predicted and can lead to major differences at the human scale. I don’t have a strong conclusion here, but the microscopy shown in the textbook was well-presented and I wanted the excuse to post an image.

Happy Father’s Day!