Batfort

Style reveals substance

Author: childlike empress (page 5 of 67)

Mental processing models mapped onto MBTI functions

So I think a lot about thinking, and how people function. For me, MBTI was the first thing that helped other people make sense to me (even when they don’t make sense to me) in that I can understand the framework for other perspectives and paths of action that I myself would not normally take.

As my understanding of MBTI has grown, the model has not broke down. Moving from a simplistic idea that people could be somewhere on a spectrum between Extraversion and Introversion, for example, is helpful in its way. Learning about the cognitive functions, and how the letters merely describe the mechanism of interaction between those functions—this is where MBTI as a model starts to be very helpful.

Now we’re going to take somewhat of a leap. In my understanding, if something is true, it will dovetail with other things that are true.

I want to see if Elliott Jaques’ strata of mental processing will map onto the cognitive functions. (Please bear in mind that this is just me exploring, and I’m not well versed in Jaques’ theories.)

Stratum I: Declarative
You might hear things stated “Well, it’s either this possibility, or this possibility, or this possibility. I don’t know, pick one. If that one doesn’t work, pick another.”

I would declare (lol) that this sounds like Sensing. “This exists. Let’s try it.” The faith is in the doing.

Stratum II: Cumulative
It might sound like this, “Faced with this problem, I can see this as part of the solution, and this as part, and this as part. If I put them all together, I can solve the problem.”

From process of elimination, I’m putting Feeling in this category. Feeling-heavy people often make decisions based on the face of things and how it looks, so while this one doesn’t immediately jump into a category, I don’t have an immediate reason to disqualify it.

Stratum III: Serial
“If this is the case, then this must be the result.”

Thinking. Most thinking processes get really bogged down looking for a direct cause-effect linear relationship, which doesn’t always exist because the world is very complex.

Stratum IV: Parallel
Not simply multi-tasking, but truly understanding the interdependence of each serial process with another.

Intuition. A robust, accurate intuitive framework will facilitate this kind of multi-layered processing.

 

No surprises here. I’ve either confirmation-biased myself into mashing up two different frameworks for understanding human cognition, or these two actually do reflect each other.

I’m rolling some implications around in my head, especially in light of Dave Super Powers’ maxim “everybody can do everything”—meaning every person uses each one of the cognitive functions. No one type has a monopoly.

There are some knee-jerk conclusions that you could draw here, like “Intuitive people make the best managers!” But I’m not sure that’s true. Don’t forget that the most successful people are often people who have identified and developed their weaknesses, so the best managers have likely developed their thinking/intuiting abilities over time.

Appreciation post: Anberlin’s Cities

Oh, Anberlin.

One of the bands that I’ve seen live an embarrassing amount of times. One of the bands that forever reminds me that you can take the girl out of the suburbs, but you can’t take the suburbs out of the girl. One of those bands that feels like it really shouldn’t exist—like if you blended up Fall Out Boy with a Christian Youth Pastor.

All the parts alone add up to nothing. The lyrics don’t always make sense, grammatically. The sound doesn’t always go anywhere new. And yet, Anberlin was an amazing band.

One of the fun consequences of driving a literal grandma car that only plays audio CDs is that I’ve been digging deep into my collection from high school and college.

Cities is one of those albums.

I still remember when Cities was released. It was the year I turned 21, and I was sharing an apartment with 3 friends. I had my own room, and papered the wall with magazine cutouts. Anberlin had caught my ear with “Glass to the Arson,” and I’d heard they were releasing an album soon.

Even from the first listen, I knew I was listening to something special. Cities isn’t a concept album, but it takes you on a journey. Each song leads perfectly into the next—bookended by an intro and an exit—in a way that weaves a really great spell. There’s a mix of yell-at-the-top-of-your-lungs choruses with completely incomprehensible verses (I still can’t figure some of the words out, even after 12 years).

I’ve been listening to Cities in my car this week, and it brings back so many memories. My college crush. Warped tour. Driving at night to visit my best friend. Going to the weirdest concert I’ve ever attended, one of Anberlin’s last, full of people who never go to shows. The week I listened to “Pray Tell” on repeat during grad school.

I’m glad that Anberlin exists. I’m glad that Cities exists.

And I’m especially glad that Cities sounds just as good in 2019 as it did in 2007.

Another College Admissions Scandal

Too bad it didn’t include Harvard:

As detailed in U.S. Department of Justice filings, the scheme involved a company, known as “the Key,” that illegally manipulated two main “side doors” to secure the admission of its clients’ children to elite universities. The Key, run by William Rick Singer, bribed officials at college-entrance examination companies to allow third parties to take the students’ tests for them. And it bribed college coaches to identify the students as recruited athletes — guaranteeing them preferential treatment by the admissions office — even though they were not so recruited.

Although let’s be real, Harvard already has legacy admissions. The price tag for a side door into Harvard is likely in the millions, rather than the multi-hundred thousands.

Here’s the sales pitch:

What we do is we help the wealthiest families in the U.S. get their kids into school … They want guarantees, they want this thing done. They don’t want to be messing around with this thing. And so they want in at certain schools. So I did what I would call, “side doors.” There is a front door which means you get in on your own. The back door is through institutional advancement, which is 10 times as much money. And I’ve created this side door in. Because the back door, when you go through institutional advancement, as you know, everybody’s got a friend of a friend, who knows somebody who knows somebody, but there’s no guarantee, they’re just gonna give you a second look. My families want a guarantee.

I’ve never worked at a school that had refereed undergraduate admissions, but now I wish I had. After seeing the different tensions and fault lines that split through a graduate-level admissions committee, I can only wonder at the amount of political jockeying that happens at the undergraduate level. Graduate school at least had a lot of technical ability and raw knowledge by which to disqualify applicants.

What’s interesting to me here is how this is yet another example of how elites game the system, while the rest of us dupes try to do the right thing. And yet, these aren’t even the elitest elites.

Do it right, and you get your name on a building or an entire academic program or an endowed chair, AND your kid gets an auto-accept.

With the famous actresses named, this feels a lot like the Seungri scandal that broke in the k-pop world over the last week: a token investigation that will drum up a lot of media hype and general outrage, blowing off steam from the real corruption.

There are people that the public already knows to provide a “face” for the wrongdoing. A scapegoat, really.

And when those people see justice, it’s all taken care of—right?

Yeesh.

Fear

I say that I’m good at starting a new endeavor, but am I really?

Ideas—yes, please.

Research—you got it (at least until I get bored).

Look and feel development—got you covered, baby.

Launch—

Launch?

…Hello?

Getting a project together is one thing. Getting a project out the door is something else entirely.

During the first 6-9 months of posting on this blog regularly, I had to steel myself against my brain’s constant barrage of “THIS ISN’T PERFECT IT CAN’T GO IN PUBLIC WHERE OTHER PEOPLE CAN READ IT.”

I eventually got used to the fact that I’m putting my thoughts out there, and became more at peace with the situation. Truly, I thought that I was getting better at blasting my message out.

Turns out I was very, very wrong.

The minute I switch domains (literally) from Batfort.com to my other domain that I won’t even talk about here because I am that much of a ninny about it, the SECOND that I think about moving things forward over there—I’m paralyzed by fear.

Goshdangit.

Gotta push through it—again. Hopefully it’ll be easier this time.

Unicorn Comix: Wifi

Mushbrain

Leratiomyces

It’s funny how much changing one habit—especially when it’s one of those lynchpin habits—changes your whole orientation to time and to the universe.

This week, I’m house-and-dog sitting for a friend of mine. I decided to use the change of venue as a way to change how I go about my day.

Namely: make a dedicated time for writing.

It’s been “writers retreat” this week, which has been great.

The downside is that I haven’t written this much, this consistently in a very long time. Not even last summer, when I decided to write a romance novel to see if I could (yes, it happened; no, I will not share).

Normally, I’d use YouTube as a way to crash out. Support an indie creator, learn something, get entertained, turn my brain off for a while. But since I’ve started using YouTube as a giant time-sink and excuse for not getting things done, I cut it out for Lent.

Which brings me to now. I’ve already written a bunch of pages today. An hour in the morning (although that also includes reading some scripture), between journaling and my writing project. Another 45ish minutes tonight. Plus whatever writing I did at work, and the writing I’m doing now.

I love words, but I don’t want to look at another word.

Brain mush. Mushbrain.

It’s great.

Possible Futures

Another possible future opened up for me this afternoon. One of those “I spend so much time thinking about it, why don’t I capitalize on that and go for a PhD?” moments.

I feel like I’ve been putting off a very important decision for a long time now. I’m good at living in the in-betweens, but at a certain point you just gotta decide.

Here are the options that I have:

  • Accept that I work in higher ed, that I’m GOOD at higher ed, and that my pathway leads me right into the thick of a PhD in something related to organizational psychology or thereabouts—regardless of what I think about higher ed and my massive reservations in putting my time and talents toward sustaining a system that is antithetical to a lot of the things I believe in. Pursue a thesis on my personal theories about how university organization actually works. Parlay that into a popular book published by a real publisher.
    • Career path one: set myself and my love of connecting disparate parts on the internal research areas of universities. Work on creating huge datasets on which decisions can be made. Hate myself a little bit for contributing to the Singularity.
    • Career path two: take a “risk” and jump straight from a PhD into consulting.
    • Career path three: come out swinging and take all my “cred” to the Alt-Education playground.
  • Do nothing, and die a low-level office cog in the university machine. Cat-lady tier life, with or without the cats.
  • Gather all my cajones and jump ship ASAP. Figure out how to support myself online either with editing or some other freelance-type job, or by building up any one of the side gigs that I say I have. Literally everyone in my life would think I was crazy for doing this.
    • Career path one: double down on Batfort and become the YA fantasy publisher that this world needs.
    • Career path two: put my love of connecting-the-dots to use helping people navigate the health system as a coach and guide.
    • Career path three: outsiders perspective on higher ed (???).
  • Figure out how to be social, get married, have babies.

I don’t love any of these options. None of them are necessarily exclusive of any of the others. All I can see at the moment are a bunch of pros and cons. I don’t see the point of getting a PhD and them jumping ship on education entirely, but then again even if I do write a stellar book on what it might take to reform higher education (LOLOL), would anybody care if I don’t have a PhD, even if I left the field?

But, that’s why I’m quitting YouTube for Lent. Not because it will magically give me the answer, but because I’ll have more time to spend in prayer over the direction of my life. I would appreciate some clarity, because I’m feeling the need to commit to a direction.

It’s easy to imagine possible futures in almost any direction. The problem is knowing the one that will align best with God’s Will, and that will work out for me best in the long run.

I also hate stepping out in faith, without knowing exactly what type of ladder/safety net/rope swing might break my fall.

Unpacking Project 2021

Forgive me, but I read this story with a great deal of schadenfreude.

In five years, he said, the university wanted most of Austin’s students to be able to enroll in revamped degree programs. Project 2021, officials would later say, would incorporate state-of-the-art online classes. Redesigned curricula. An academic calendar that included short courses outside of traditional semesters. And researchers would dig into data to examine every aspect of the undergraduate academic experience — to measure what worked and adjust accordingly.

“Even the best,” Fenves said in his address, “can do better.”

Not two years later, Project 2021 was dead.

The story of the program’s rise and fall, based on more than 20 interviews and a review of emails, reports, and other documents, shows how universities too often pursue the elusive act of transformation: promising too much while investing too little. Campus leaders in Austin had used sweeping words to describe the potential of Project 2021: Futuristic. Next-generation. Bold. Higher education is “in the throes of a revolution,” one progress report read, and Project 2021 would meet those challenges.

Somewhere deep down inside, I still “believe” in education. Praxis-based knowledge and teaching is the way that our civilization has survived over centuries and built itself up to our current dizzying heights of engineering and technology.

Mainstream education does not currently ascribe that view. See Nassim Taleb, IYIs, and Soviet-Harvard Syndrome.

And yet, as someone who works within the mainstream higher education system, I see firsthand how things get done in the university. There’s a reason (or rather, REASONS) everyone within hearing distance will roll their eyes when they hear of the next new change on a college campus.

Navigating Austin’s maddening bureaucracy without much administrative experience had already proved challenging.

There is your first red flag—and that’s a major red flag. Even people who have titles like Associate Dean of Graduate Education PLUS know how to play the game well enough to get continuous federal funding for their lab (a huge deal in the sciences) PLUS high-profile consulting gigs PLUS a large amount of this ‘administrative experience’ have a difficult time getting a large change passed and off the ground.

The layers of bureaucracy in a university are deep. And if you think you’ve seen any of them as a student, you are wrong.

There are a few things that you have to have on your side to make changes in higher ed. These include, but are not limited to:

  1. The faculty. Without faculty support, or at very least, support from key faculty, nobody will actually carry out your plan.
  2. An understanding of how a university actually works.

I am unsure of how much faculty buy-in there was on Project 2021. I’d wager to guess it was largely ignored.

He envisioned a program that could be higher education’s Manhattan Project: a research team that would take on the future of learning. The group would come together, shake up campus bureaucracy, lay the foundation for long-term change, and then dissolve.

In the terms of the brilliant William Bergquist, who provided a map for the different warring cultures you’ll find in university faculty, this is a strategy favored by the “developmental” culture. Often using a consultancy model, these people (and generally identify with this) believe that change is a straightforward, rational process that be applied wherever, whenever—as long as the reasons are good.

Well, no.

People don’t like being told what to do. Especially faculty, who are the most independent of all people except, I am told, surgeons.

And the university model (Bergquist’s “collegial” culture) is built around obtaining faculty buy-in. The collegial model of governance is a series of committees on committees, who all have their favorite committee stalling tactics: the delays, the soapboxing, the subcommittees. This model of governance is built for people who don’t like being told what to do: it’s so dense that it deflects or smothers most of the people who journey into it unawares.

But anyway, enough about the faculty.

Let’s talk about money.

Charged with realizing that vision was Pennebaker and his executive team. They had a small, tucked-away office. To Pennebaker, it called to mind a bunch of FBI agents holed up in a motel room — a far cry from the university’s Star Trek sales pitch.

No matter how bad-off a university is, it will always always ALWAYS find the money to show off what it believes in. Always. Even to the detriment of the bottom line.

So if you’re in cobbled-together offices, trust me: you’re not supported by your university. You, my friend, are in the land of “We’re doing this because it sounds good, not because we actually intend to make any real changes.”

The powers-that-be within the university will find a way to show off and make their pet projects look good. Everybody else is on their own. The sooner you learn that, the easier your life will be.

(Ie, don’t expect any money and you’ll never be disappointed.)

But that leads us to my very favorite part of the article.

Early in Project 2021, Pennebaker approached the registrar with a question. What would it take, he wondered, to offer fractional-credit classes?

Such classes could make some students’ experiences more efficient. Say a student needed to take an introductory statistics course as a prerequisite for an upper-level class. Instead of delaying the advanced course by a semester, why not distill the statistics skills needed for that advanced class into a three-week, half-credit course?

The type of initiative would change the very definition of a class — a perfect fit for Project 2021.

Pennebaker quickly learned that such a change, though seemingly minute, would have far-reaching consequences. Updating student information systems cost other major research universities tens of millions of dollars each, and modernizing Texas’ aging system to handle the new classes would require a steep investment despite the various upgrades Austin had made over the years.

But it wouldn’t just take money. Making the change would touch many academic departments and staff offices, too. There could also be ramifications to federal financial aid, among other things.

This was a wake-up call for Pennebaker. Before Project 2021, he thought he understood how the university worked. He’d been a department chair for nine years, and creating the SMOC had connected him with deans’ offices and campus technology divisions. After hundreds of hours of meetings, he realized he was wrong. “I didn’t know anything about how the university functioned.”

Faculty know next-to-nothing about the inner workings of the university. Sure, they know how to enter grades online or who to tap to get a new course approved. In many senses they “run” the university by being the faces of programs and ratifying new policies.

But in terms of getting the actual work done, they don’t. Faculty usually don’t know anything about things like federal financial aid policy, or how the student information system was hard-coded back in 1992 when it was first set up, or how you actually transfer money from one service center to another without breaking any state finance laws.

Those are all the purview of staff, people whose opinions don’t count (because we don’t have PhDs) but who know everything about why courses are set up the way that they are and how to best get the Dean’s signature on short notice.

I’m not saying bureacracy is good (it’s not) but there are a million and one reasons that universities have gotten to be the way that they are. You start layering up all the regulations—for a state-funded institution, on top of federal funding, regional accreditation, Title IX issues and other “not law but everybody knows” type stuff, grants administration, IPEDS reporting—layer that on top of local traditions and norms, as well as the competing interests of research and education, graduate students and undergraduates, all with a constantly-rotating senior leadership, and…well…it’s a mess.

Without a little bit of understanding of all of those areas (and I’m sure I forgot some), you’re not going to get anywhere.

This circles around a little bit more to the thesis that I may never write, if I ever decide to go for my PhD: staff in a university are just as influential as the faculty, but they are the underwater part of the iceberg that no one ever sees.

Nobody—even the people who are actively studying the university as an organizational structure—takes into account the importance of the staff role.

I’d be willing to bet that staff have cultural biases just like the faculty, and that staff culture directly impacts the ability of faculty to get things done. I’d even say that staff cultures are compatible with faculty cultures, but not in a 1:1 way.

After all, being a staff member (aka, “having a job”) isn’t the same as having one’s identity wrapped up in having a PhD.

Anyway, there is a reason that most efforts to reform higher education fail.

Honestly, it might be a better idea just to start from scratch.

The Reader: Work as Religion and the Century of the Self

 

It’s been a week, y’all. I got nothing for this section.

 

» Facebook’s 10 Year Challenge is Just a Harmless Meme, Right?

Humans are the connective link between the physical and digital worlds. Human interactions are the majority of what makes the Internet of Things interesting. Our data is the fuel that makes businesses smarter and more profitable.

We should demand that businesses treat our data with due respect, by all means. But we also need to treat our own data with respect.

 

» Conspiracy theory updates: IRL edition and K-pop edition.

» What the Right can learn from the Left

That’s what movements are about: gaining power. Movements don’t just happen. And they’re not the product of orders from on high, or rent-a-protestors paid out of somebody’s checkbook. They’re the product of a lot of people doing a lot of hard work over a very long time.

Righties don’t want to believe that. Thus, the same old horseshit: “oh it’s all George Soros.” “Oh we don’t get turnout for protests because we all have jobs.” “Oh we’d win a Second Civil War in five minutes anyway because the Lefties are wusses and we’ve got all the guns.”

It can’t possibly be that there’s work we need to do, work that we’ve been neglecting because we don’t understand how it works and we’re lazy. That’s unthinkable.

Well, think it. Because it’s true.

 

» If you thought the Academy was still about preserving disciplinary knowledge…nope.

To the best of my recollection, no one on the SCS panel ever used the word “diversity.” No one on the panel talked about diversity (however it might be defined), or affirmative action, or mentoring, or encouraging all students. They did not talk about teaching or students, or classes or courses, or the challenges facing teachers, or helping scholars get published; nor did they discuss the Classics, or Classics as an academic discipline (beyond what I have stated), or even the future of the field. This isn’t surprising because the panel wasn’t really about any of that, or even ultimately about race, but rather about how to destroy Classics.

 

» This will make you cringe, but pairs well with the article below: The New 30-Something

» Work as a religion?

There is something slyly dystopian about an economic system that has convinced the most indebted generation in American history to put purpose over paycheck. Indeed, if you were designing a Black Mirror labor force that encouraged overwork without higher wages, what might you do? Perhaps you’d persuade educated young people that income comes second; that no job is just a job; and that the only real reward from work is the ineffable glow of purpose. It is a diabolical game that creates a prize so tantalizing yet rare that almost nobody wins, but everybody feels obligated to play forever.

 


 

 

 

 

 

More on Magazines

I’ve been exploring the question of whether magazines have always been propaganda. I think it’s safe to say that the answer is YES.

At the very least, they are a very convenient meme vector for propagandists such as Edward Bernays, the inventor of PR and nephew of Sigmund Freud. He pioneered the “hall of mirrors” technique by orchestrating an “environment of consent” around his products. This included pitching a different “exclusive” story to all the different women’s magazines.

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