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[roycekimmons]

Archdevil Grimthistle Lectures on the Internet

Author’s Note: I wrote this a few years ago as a thought experiment. Intrigued by the style and mythos of C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, I wondered what it would be like if Lewis’s anti-hero Screwtape (or a demon like him) were to give an update to his colleagues on the state of the world with the rise of the internet and social media. What advice would Screwtape give to other devils today whose sole purpose in existence is to make human life more miserable? To give myself more freedom, I created my own character—an Archdevil named Grimthistle—operating within Lewis’s mythos. Though similar to Screwtape in some ways, Grimthistle is first and foremost an academic who finds himself lecturing an auditorium full of other devilish academics on the possibilities afforded by emergent technologies to nurture human misery.

My lovely young devils, demons, succubi, and wraiths, it is with special delight that I speak to you today. As you are all well-aware, human history has taken some interesting turns in recent decades as our forces and those of the Enemy have guided humans in developing ever new mechanisms of warfare, both of the crude physical variety, such as naval and air vessels, machine weaponry, drones, and the most holy atomics, but also of the more refined intellectual and social variety, such as mass media, radio and television broadcasting, movies, and now, the internet and social media.

It is of the latter that I will speak today. I do so without intending any disrespect to the awesome mechanisms of destruction that many of you have had a claw or tentacle involved in developing. For who could ever argue against the amazing destructive power of the gatling gun, napalm, or chlorine gas? Indeed, I have never addressed a group of you, my fellow sufferers, in which the mere mention of phosgene did not elicit riotous applause. Yet, I fear that our wild successes in the 19th and 20th centuries on this front have somewhat distracted us from our eternal quest.

It is true. Seeing humans writhe in agony on a battlefield, dismembered, mutilated, frightened, and despondent has led me to shudder in ecstasy more times than I can remember. With delight I have pictured in my mind the ocean of tears that we have undoubtedly wrung from our Eternal Enemy’s eyes as He has been forced to watch his self-destructive children brutally hack each other to bits in ever bloodier and bloodier conflicts. Yet, in the eternal scheme, the joys of mortal bloodshed are merely a passing amusement that can lull our demonic efforts into a sense of security.

As I have always argued, war itself garners us no net benefit to souls corrupted. Lest we forget, the soldier can just as surely be saved by the Enemy as can the pacifist, and I can tell by your grumbling stomachs that many of you have developed quite a taste for the souls of these pacifists that now seem to find their ways to our kingdom in droves. Indeed, all humans will die, and though it may give us pleasure to help them toward that end sooner rather than later, we must always remember that our true goal is not to speed them toward death but to ensure that they belong to us thereafter.

Though a bare bodkin is all it takes to kill a saint, you need words to kill the memory of that saint and to prevent others from becoming saints themselves.

Toward this end, I have always contended that the aforementioned mechanisms of intellectual warfare have ever been of more use to us than their more blunt and explosive counterparts, because though a bomb may efficiently destroy the body, only words, ideas, and beliefs can corrupt the soul.

You might remember some of my earlier work with the Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks, Chinese, English, French, and Russians on this front. Through the mere writing and reading of words, we have empowered a single devil to serve as any given author’s muse, and through that author, that devil’s words can be propagated to untold thousands, even millions of humans. Indeed, how many of the countless children of light squirming in your insatiable bellies now were first corrupted by actions and ideas that originated from a written word?

For that reason, we should embrace human technological advancements that allow us to share our demonic messages at an ever greater scale and rate. But, if we do not act quickly, I fear that the Enemy will use these mechanisms toward achieving His ends, as He attempted to do, and I fear met some success with, when He began using the printing press to propagate His words and a knowledge of the universe to the masses. That is, we must always be at the forefront of every new advancement in communication the humans make both to thwart the Enemy’s purposes and to expand our own.

For the most part, I feel that we have done this and have beaten the Enemy handily across every emergent medium, ranging from early written texts to Hollywood movies. But I cannot stress enough to you how the internet, and social media in particular, is different from anything we have seen before, and for that reason, we should divert all of our attention away from any other interests we might have and focus squarely here. I will not belabor this point further, but suffice it to say that these new media have more potential for evil (or good) than any previous communication medium in history, and if we do not act quickly and in a devilishly smart way, then we may quickly find ourselves losing hard-fought headway in this great and eternal war.

So, the reason that I am here is not to tell you that we need to win the internet. In fact, I think it’s pretty clear that we are winning, and one need look no further than Ratcruncher’s pioneering work with pornography or Spinemold’s ever-impressive sex trafficking networks to know that the Enemy has no idea how to counter the efforts of our vilest and most devious. Rather, I want to extend an invitation to you all to participate in this great and important work and to show you how easy it can be to use these tools to destroy families, destabilize communities, and ultimately corrupt souls. In short, I just want to show you how easy it is so that every sufferer within the sound of my voice can corrupt enough souls to evermore stave off the insatiable hunger that the Enemy in his cruelty has inflicted upon us.

First, use the newness of these media to divorce humans from the wisdom of their forebears. This is an old tactic that we have used in every bloody revolution in history, because it works! Young humans see Instagram, Snapchat, or whatever the newest app or tool is and think to themselves “this is my generation’s medium” and “older people just don’t get it.” And they’re right! Comically, they never stop to ask themselves why the older generations “don’t get it” or can’t be bothered to learn it, and this generational exceptionalism can be used to feed their hubris to a level that they will even divorce themselves completely from the aged, mock them, and disenfranchise them.

Once the young stop looking to the experiences of the old for wisdom, you know we have them! In the past, for instance, if you introduced relationship troubles to one of these youngsters, your greatest fear would be that they would go to a seasoned, responsible elder to learn from their experiences. The beauty of this generational isolation via the internet is that the young only talk to and trust the opinions of other inexperienced young exactly like them. Once they have started doing this, you should then encourage them to think that this is the meaning of community — surrounding themselves with others exactly like them — and you will quickly find them fumbling over one another incessantly, thinking themselves wise while they make the same mistakes made by their ancestors millennia ago. By playing upon this youthful exceptionalism, you can essentially create entire communities where no one has any experience, and by playing to their youthful hubris, you can prevent them from ever catching onto the simple fact that the best way to safeguard themselves against difficulties in life would be to learn from their elders as well as the other simple fact that homogeneity of experience is the antithesis of community.

If you do this correctly, they will quickly come to disregard the wisdom of millennia as quaint or old-fashioned, but you can take this one step further by simply introducing a few doubts in their minds about their forebears’ intelligence or morality — a few drops of poison in the deep well of history. Teach them some general labels or categories — without clear definitions, mind you — to apply to entire swathes of history, and you will never have to worry about them reading a book or entertaining a serious thought again. Don’t want them to read the Magna Carta? Remind them that England was an imperialist nation. Don’t want them to read Jane Austen? Convince them that she wasn’t a true feminist … or Victorian … or whatever. Don’t want them to read Milton? Convince them that he was not a true Christian … or for others that he was too much of a Christian.  Ad aeternum. It’s that simple.

Though we all loved the spectacle when Needlegrinder and his devious minions guided the Nazis in burning mountains of books, we don’t need the young to physically burn anything to have the same effect. Merely teach them that if a reductionistic label can loosely be hung on any person or document, then it should be relegated to the rubbish heaps in their minds, and you will never have to worry about them seriously contemplating the wisdom of previous generations.

Besides, not having them physically burn books serves another purpose. Even the most brainwashed sychophant casting a book atop a pyre might experience an idle curiosity to crack open a tome to see what the fuss is all about, but the young enlightened mind doesn’t suffer from curiosity, because it has already neatly collated and categorized the ideas of previous generations without honestly having considered them. The beauty is that they think they know what they reject before even considering it and then pat themselves on the back for their brave prejudice.

It’s also quite comical to do this, because then you can watch them claim intellectual and moral superiority over absolutely anyone in history without realizing that they themselves are the most ignorant, prejudiced, and backward of all. I, after all, was there with Socrates and can tell you that the youngest ancient Greek completing his first lessons in logic could wipe the floor with any modern thinker’s supposed intellectual prowess.

Second, on the topic of logic, you should ever strive to convince them that logic is merely selective cynicism or comedic skepticism. Allow me to explain. We have done a fine job of convincing everyone that they know what “logic” is, and we have had similar successes with “science,” “reason,” “rationality,” and various other terms such that the vast majority of humans who now use them have little to no understanding of their actual meaning. This allows them to weaponize the terms in favor of their own “noble” prejudices and beliefs — using them to aggressively criticize those of others — as they sit comfortably in their own irrational belief systems.

Indeed, we have succeeded in convincing the most “rational” minds of the day to now believe that their thoughts are rational merely because they have them, and that anyone else’s are irrational simply because they do not. And rather than question the rationality of their own “noble” prejudices, they think that “logic” involves nothing more than the use of sophistry to interrogate and humiliate others.

A beautiful, succinct example of this can be seen in how thought leaders quickly focus on spelling and grammar errors on social media to try to delegitimize the arguments of any who disagree with them. Had they actually studied logic or knew how it worked, they would understand that there is absolutely no connection between the truth of a notion and how it is presented. Yet, when they only have 280 characters to convey a meaningful thought — as if that were even possible — they will regularly devote half of that space to questioning their opponent’s thumb typing, believing themselves to be rational only because their autocorrect was working properly that day. You can participate in this beautiful dance by convincing them to respond while driving or otherwise distracted, because then they will feel flustered and committed to the argument only to have the veracity of their thoughts reduced to whether their car hit a bump.

If that doesn’t work, then the boilerplate tu quoque has never gone out of style. When the hated Lamb shouted “thou hypocrite” to those we had seduced, He obviously did so to convince them to repent — signaling to them that their beliefs were correct, but their actions were not, thereby jeopardizing their souls. From time immemorial, we have devilishly twisted this powerful technique away from a tool for salvation toward destruction. Rather than concern for the welfare of their opponents’ souls, convince your humans to shout “hypocrite” in an attempt to attack their opponents’ underlying ideas. It will never occur to them that distance between belief and action actually represents cause to repent  — the changing of one’s actions to better align with one’s beliefs  — and they will rather use it to argue the inverse: that a person’s thoughts, ideals, and beliefs should retroactively be manipulated to reflect their actions. Or, in other words, that if there is a disconnect between belief and action, then belief must be the culprit.

This wicked tactic is devilishly sinister, because it implicitly confuses the relationship between belief and action to the point that they will no longer look to beliefs as ideals to aspire to (therefore inspiring them to change their actions) but will rather treat them as little more than excuses or justifications for their actions. Indeed, though the Lamb wanted his targeted “hypocrites” to act on their beliefs so that they might be saved, we can easily convince modern thinkers that their beliefs should be malleable constructs that serve no purpose beyond justifying their damnable actions. Hence, though the Enemy appealed to hypocrisy to convince humans to change their actions, we can devilishly appeal to hypocrisy to convince them to change their beliefs.

Taken together, these muddled approaches to logic are invaluable tactics for ensuring that our followers will always “strain at gnats” while “swallowing camels,” as the Enemy Himself suggested of our adherents. By absorbing themselves in the critique of others’ “gnats,” they can console themselves in their own “camels,” yielding beautiful generations of cynical, aggressive humans who have no rational basis for their own beliefs but who nonetheless demand pure, stone cold reason from any who disagree with them.

And third, because the simplest antidote to any of our efforts is civility — or hell forbid, love — you should work tirelessly to paint any instances of moderation, kindness, respect, or deference as weakness or, preferably, treason to one’s cause. What has at times been considered simple human decency and concern for the other should be treated as wishy-washy indecision or barriers to the crushing wheels of progress. Having a civil conversation should be treated as fraternization with the enemy. Speech itself should be treated as a form of oppression, rather than just the communication of ideas, so that the very act of speaking may be regulated and controlled and the speaker can be dehumanized as nothing more than a soulless perpetrator of evil to be stopped at all cost.

Here, again, labeling can be enormously useful. Just as history can be ignored if it is merely labeled, so too can the living human other. In the U.S., for instance, we have polarized politics enough that merely appending a D or an R to the end of a leader’s name is enough to convince almost half the population to distrust anything that they will say. And this works for lay people as well. Every time your adherents notice their neighbor saying something online, you should whisper softly to them “Mrs. So-and-So is a democrublican, so I should distrust her.” That way they don’t have to busy themselves with understanding the actual content of Mrs. So-and-So’s words, the reasons why she might say them, or the experiences that might have led her to do so. If they have a useful label for her, then Mrs. So-and-So becomes nothing more than a label, something to be collated and ignored at whim — certainly not a human to be valued.

Playing upon historical pendula of oppression and evil-doing helps in this regard, because if humans can feel that their voices have been silenced in the past because of a label that has been placed upon them, they then can use this feeling of injustice as moral grounding to place labels on others for the purpose of silencing them in return. Some angry souls will embrace this as justifiable vengeance, but most must be convinced that it is merely a practical consideration to correct historical imbalances of power. At any rate, the effect is the same. Some are allowed to speak, while others are silenced not because of anything they themselves have done but because a label has been placed upon them that likely originated hundreds or even thousands of years in the past. The deliciousness of this irony is that oppressors and victims can engage in an eternal hateful dance, wherein they merely alternate who is leading at the moment. Feeling justified, oppressors can ridicule and demonize victims for as long as they are in  power only to have the situation reversed in never ending cycles of hateful vindication.

The deliciousness of this dance is that they will never realize that the simple solution peddled by the Lamb is forgiveness, mercy, and love. By viewing human history as a never-ending cycle of oppressor vs. oppressed, they can easily be blinded to the only solution to the cycle, believing that someone must inevitably always be the oppressor and that the other must always inevitably be oppressed. Thus, they will direct all of their vengeance and moral outrage not toward destroying oppression but in becoming the oppressors themselves. This allows them to self-justify their hatred, wrong-doing, and all manner of injustices while at the same time patting themselves on the backs, claiming that their hatred is justified or is even an act of love.

As with other tactics I have previously mentioned, this tactic relies upon the use of labels and that they have a superficial awareness of one another. Be cautious in this regard, however, because though you want to provide enough identifying information to allow your adherents to effectively marginalize the other, you must walk a fine line between that devious enterprise and unknowingly guiding them to develop noble emotions like empathy. For that reason, keep labels limited to divisive issues of the day, and never encourage humans to label themselves in any way that acknowledges their common humanity or their common relationship to one another as children of the Enemy.

Some of you will contend that this is nothing new; after all, labeling the other has always been a useful tactic. But, I contend that the internet has made such labeling immensely more powerful for sowing discord and corrupting souls for two obvious reasons. First, the sheer amount of information that humans must now deal with via the internet and their social media feeds means that they must organize information — and by extension the people producing it — in ever more efficient ways, and labels are nothing if not devilishly efficient. And second, the actual design of these tools allows them to do this with ease! Many platforms actually solicit labels from their participants and allow them to block, ignore, or even silence other humans for no reason other than being different from themselves. Thus, with only a little prodding on your part, you can effectively guide your subjects in creating the most vitriolic, isolated, and homogenous echo chambers imaginable, where they incessantly rage against the idiocies of the unrepresented other while having their moral egos continuously stroked by those most like them.

It is amazing to think that rather than learning to love the quintessential other in the form of one’s neighbor, as the Enemy implored them to do millennia ago, human technologies have instead veered toward empowering ever more selectivity in determining who one’s neighbors are, thereby not requiring humans to make any kind of soul-stretching growth! Rather than following the Lamb’s uncomfortable commandment to “love thy enemies,” humans have rather decided to separate themselves more fully from their perceived enemies. After all, all religious and humanist arguments for loving others is predicated on the belief that the other is human, but if we can convince them to think of the other as something less than human (via a smorgasbord of available labels), then all such mandates become null and void, and those labels only develop teeth if they have a safe place where they can demonize labeled others without intellectual interference or empathetic overtures.

I am mindful of my time and that the hour draws late. As you might guess, I have much more to say on these topics and encourage you to visit my work published in Tormentors’ Quarterly and the Journal of Soul Corruption Techniques for more detailed guidance on how to use the internet to full effect. But allow me to just close by providing a few words of encouragement.

This is an exciting time for us as the demonic host, because humans have found themselves with more unbridled power and less soul-searching discipline than at any other time in history. The Enemy seeks to use these tools for promoting love, goodness, and salvation, but there is no doubt that we are winning. Humans today live on the privileges afforded to them from the sacrifices of previous generations and squander their time and resources on selfishness, self-delusion, and self-destruction. This old devil, for one, has never seen anything like it. What a time to be dead!

[roycekimmons]

I can understand how [parenthood] might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people’s children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one’s own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a [parent's] function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness.

G.K. Chesterton

[roycekimmons]

Social Media & Logical Fallacies: 4 Guidelines

I love logic. I love studying arguments and dissecting them. So, whenever I see someone mention a logical fallacy on social media, such as a red herring, tu quoque, appeal to authority, or ad hominem, I get an irrational thrill and think "Yes, finally someone is willing to engage in rational conversation about things that are happening in the world!"

Yet, I'm almost universally disappointed with what people who cry "logical fallacy!" inevitably say next, because though the acknowledgement of fallacies in our thinking is an essential step toward becoming more rational, these gems of reason are typically misused, weaponized, and even turned against themselves in ways that make them meaningless.

So, here are some quick guidelines that I hope may be useful for you the next time you are tempted to point to a logical fallacy chart and shout "See, I gotcha!" to an internet troll.

1. Beware the fallacy fallacy. Logical fallacies serve one purpose: they can help us to identify instances when a specific argument is not persuasive based on reason alone. If you told me "I was abducted by Martians once while I was tripping on mushrooms, therefore Martians are real," I would be quite justified in skeptically rejecting your argument on the simple basis that it is predicated on a single experience or anecdote. Doing so means that I am only rejecting the rational persuasiveness of your argument based on the evidence given. Your inability to provide a strong argument, however, in no way influences the truth or falsity of your conclusion. If Martians exist or not is not influenced in the least by your ability to make a cogent argument for their existence.

Yet, folks on social media will often point out logical fallacies of others with the implied intent of disproving their conclusions. "You disagreed with my argument regarding the shape of the Earth, but you made fun of my lack of credentials in your response (an ad hominem fallacy). This proves that your conclusion is wrong and mine is right. Therefore, the Earth is shaped like a croissant." Using a fallacy to claim that a conclusion is either true or false is itself a fallacy: the fallacy fallacy.

This is important, because truth exists independently from human argumentation. Just as the sage Buffalo Springfield taught that "Nobody's right if everybody's wrong," proving the irrationality of an argument does not prove or disprove anyone's conclusion, because something might be true and poorly argued or false and expertly argued. Proving that your opponent has a fallacious argument only shows that the argument is fallacious. The conclusion might, nonetheless, be true, and if you proclaim to your opponent "thou shalt not commit fallacies" with the intent of disproving their conclusion, then you are committing a fallacy yourself.

To avoid this, don't argue (or even suggest) that your opponent's conclusion is wrong by virtue of their argument's fallaciousness, and if you feel compelled to point out a fallacy, then invite your opponent to provide a better-reasoned argument so that you can be persuaded.

2. Beware the cherry-picking fallacy. The cherry-picking fallacy is a common one, but it is ironically often implemented in fallacy-finding itself (i.e., using a fallacy to find fallacies). Just as someone picking cherries might only grab a couple of the closest, low-hanging, shiniest, ripe fruit, we commit this fallacy when we make an argument only using a few examples (while ignoring others). Typically, this means that we choose examples that align with our argument (the ripe cherries) and ignore those that do not (the unripe ones or those that are just out of reach).

For instance, if I told you that Fordrolet trucks are the most dependable on the road simply because my grandpa had one that lasted a long time, but I ignored consumer reports, other owners' experiences, and other evidences that proved they are junk, then you'd be right to reject my argument. Focusing in on just a few examples that support my narrative while ignoring others is (at best) not compelling and (at worst) intentionally dishonest.

The problem with the internet, though, is that there's just about an infinite number of cherries to pick from. So, if you want to point out fallacies of your imagined opponents, then you'll have no difficulty finding an inexhaustible number of absurdities to choose from. This might make you feel good and give you an irrational sense of superiority over your opponents (e.g., "I'm so rational, but look at this idiotic troll bot"), but the problem is that if you make sweeping claims about your opponents based on these absurdities while ignoring better-reasoned arguments, then you are guilty of a fallacy yourself, and since you set out on your crusade for logic with the assumption that fallacies matter, you have altogether undermined yourself.

To avoid this, withstand the urge to make sweeping claims about groups of people and their reasoning. Apply logical fallacy checks to specific arguments that the strongest thought leaders among your opponents are making, and never play "logical fallacy bingo" with your social media feed, because you'll win too quickly, the game is depressing, and in the end all you'll be able to prove is that you are connected to people who are irrational. (But, spoiler alert, we all are!)

3. Know thyself. Here's where things get a bit touchier because the fact of the matter is that you are most certainly not as rational as you think you are. In fact, none of us are. Though humans are adept at rationalizing our behaviors, most of what we do on a day-to-day basis is the result of habit and prejudice. Say someone cuts you off in traffic, you honk your horn, and then you hear a small voice from the backseat ask "Mommy, why did you do that?" Sure, you can come up with a rational explanation for why you honked the horn, but is that actually why you did it? Did you go through a lengthy rational process in your head about what would be the appropriate response in the situation given the variables available to you? Did you appeal to a Kantian categorical imperative or go through a utilitarian equation where you weighed the risks and benefits of the action? No. You just honked based on the norms, habits, and customs that you're used to, and though you may be able to provide a very solid case for why you should have honked after-the-fact (one that the tiny voice might even believe), your honking was not purely rational.

In fact, very little of what we do in life is purely rational. When you last left your home and kissed your significant other goodbye, did you do so for a rational reason? Did you calculate the purpose for the kiss, have a firm reason for why doing so constituted moral action, and then act with the goal of catalyzing a predicted outcome? Probably not. You probably just did it without thinking, and if you had gone through a laborious rational process, then that would probably be a sign that you were either experiencing relationship problems or were suffering from some form of psychopathy that was impeding your ability to feel and act on healthy human emotions.

In such situations, lack of rational forethought is not a problem. It is largely healthy and necessary to react quickly to emergent situations based on muscle memory, habit, or emotion, and this is not just an evolutionary mechanism that allows us to survive in a fast-paced world. Rather, many of our most deeply-seated beliefs, attitudes, and dispositions are not rational at all but are emotional. Do you believe in the importance of justice, equality, fairness, kindness, or love? Why? You might be able to make some kind of rational argument for these things, but if you peel away the layers of reason, I'm betting that you'll eventually get to a center that is not rational at all but is purely emotional or self-evident. Consider the truism that "parents should love their children." As a father, I might ask "why?" "Well," you might respond, "because parents should care for their children's wellbeing." "Why?"

When taken to this fundamental level, believing in logic itself is not even a rational belief. If someone asked you "why should I believe logic," there is no rational explanation, and even if you did come up with one, your answer would be circular (appealing to logic to justify believing in logic).

All this is to say that if we are being honest with ourselves, none of us is as rational as we think we are. Yes, there might have been some irrationality influencing who you voted for in the last election, sure, but I can't even claim that my eating a cream-cheese bagel for breakfast or marrying my wife was purely rational (though both were great choices!), so how firm should I be in holding you to a standard of pristine rationality?

Rather, what I fear actually happens as folks start invoking logical fallacies against each other is that we point the fallacy microscope at our opponents but never at ourselves. We can see and condemn their irrationality with pristine clarity while altogether ignoring (or justifying) our own.

To avoid this, never point a fallacy at your opponent that you have not fully and deeply pointed at yourself. Is your opponent appealing to an anecdotal experience? That's irrational, fine. But how many anecdotal experiences shape your beliefs? Is your opponent ignoring important evidence? That's also irrational, but what evidence are you ignoring because it conflicts with your narratives about the world and yourself? It's fine to expect people to be rational, but first recognize how irrational you are and then make sure that you are not holding others to a higher (unrealistic) standard.

4. Be charitable. And my last bit of unsolicited advice in all of this is to be charitable to people. Logic is best used as a tool for introspection and self-discovery not as a weapon for manipulation. Because truly deductive (i.e., 100% convincing) arguments are rare in real-life matters, nurturing the relationship with your opponent is more important than trying to win a game of logic in your own mind or in front of an imagined audience of like-minded followers. Winning an argument is easy (especially when the only judge you care about convincing is yourself). Changing real hearts and minds, on the other hand, is difficult and requires the much more difficult and demanding work of kindness, patience, and love.

Can pointing out another person's fallacies be an act of love? Maybe. If it's done for the purpose of genuinely helping the other to learn and grow, but this seems pretty rare on social media, and most of the time fallacies seem to be invoked for performative reasons (e.g., "so that everyone in my friends list can see that you're dumb") or for self-indulgent reasons (e.g., "so that I can feel better about how rational I am in comparison to you and the other dummies like you"). Yet, I do think the only responsible way forward for each of us in our social media interactions is the narrow path of charity and love. To me, that is the only responsible use of logic, and it is the only use that will make the world a better place.

[roycekimmons]

Has…Marxism ever predicted a stunning novel fact successfully? Never! It has some famous unsuccessful predictions. It predicted the absolute impoverishment of the working class. It predicted that the first socialist revolution would take place in the industrially most developed society. It predicted that socialist societies would be free of revolutions. It predicted that there will be no conflict of interests between socialist countries. Thus the early predictions of Marxism were bold and stunning but they failed. Marxists explained all their failures: they explained the rising living standards of the working class by devising a theory of imperialism; they even explained why the first socialist revolution occurred in industrially backward Russia. They “explained” Berlin 1953, Budapest 1956, Prague 1968. They “explained” the Russian-Chinese conflict. But their auxiliary hypotheses were all cooked up after the event to protect Marxian theory from the facts. The Newtonian programme led to novel facts; the Marxian lagged behind the facts and has been running fast to catch up with them. (S&P: 4–5)

Imre Lakatos

[roycekimmons]

It is not as a child that I believe and confess Jesus Christ. My hosanna is born of a furnace of doubt.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

[roycekimmons]

To grumble about the world and its unhappiness is always easier than to beat one's breast and groan over oneself.

Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love

[roycekimmons]

All distinctions between the many different kinds of love are essentially abolished by Christianity.

Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love

[roycekimmons]

Allah's Messenger said, "Help your brother, whether he is an oppressor or he is an oppressed one. People asked, "O Allah's Messenger! It is all right to help him if he is oppressed, but how should we help him if he is an oppressor?" The Prophet said, "By preventing him from oppressing others." - Sahih al-Bukhari, 2444

[roycekimmons]

A Case for Less-Passionate Research

As a young teacher, my mentors told me over and over again: "Be passionate about your work." Later as a researcher, many of my colleagues repeated the same mantra: "Research the things that keep you up at night."

In the education field at least, the caricature of the dispassionate researcher does not hold. Rather than operating in a cloistered office or lab, researchers work in vibrant classrooms and schools. Rather than giving stuffy "Bueller, Bueller" lectures, they exert every effort to correct societal wrongs. And rather than providing measured bits of evidence to incrementally improve life, they often passionately call for revolution and disruptive innovation in every form.

So, what's wrong with passion?

Kierkegaard in some of his writings gives a nod to the inverse relationship between passion and certainty. If you are uncertain about something but desperately want it to be true, then you will exert passion to try to bring it about. This is the basis of subsequent existentialism in which humans must exert their passion (e.g., faith) to act despite staring into the dark abyss of uncertainty.

One of the great double-edged swords of passion is that it is blinding. By investing ourselves passionately into something, whether that be a research agenda or a relationship, we intentionally close ourselves off to alternatives and make an implicit vow of fidelity and support to the object of our passion.

In the case of a spouse, most of us would say that this self-blinding process is commendable, because it is only through an exertion of the will that we dedicate ourselves to the other and together build a relationship that is worth having.

Even in this case, however, passion is the servant, not the master. We exert our passion toward achieving a desire of our will, using it as a means to act rather than allowing it to act upon us. To say otherwise would be to give into a cheapened view of relationships (often perpetrated by popular movies and TV) in which devotion is fickle and love is something that happens to us (like catching a cold) rather than something that we willfully enact toward others.

Applying this to academic work, it seems that researchers often become most animated when their work is challenged. Seeds of doubt are often suffocated by passionate responses, and often the coolest logic is contradicted by the most passionate rhetoric or appeals to authority.

In such rhetoric, passion is typically used as a smokescreen for uncertainty, but if we step back, that smokescreen becomes a signal fire. By removing ourselves from the ruse, we see that flaring pathos is the result of a failing logos.

Years ago a colleague from another field came to me to ask about some research he was wanting to present at a prominent education conference. I (somewhat cynically) suggested to him that the researchers at that particular conference probably wouldn't care much about how he did his research (i.e., the rigor of his methods) but only whether his results aligned with their current narrative of educational problems and the types of policies that they wanted to enact.

Later, he explained to me that though he was initially skeptical of my non-scientific description of the conference organizers, my summary turned out to be completely true. His work was extolled as being very valuable, and various researchers praised him for being their ally, but no questions were asked of his methods. He was surprised that criticality was supplanted by passionate service to the narrative, and I suggested to him that it was lucky that he got the results that he did. Otherwise, the same methods that made him an ally could have just as easily made him an enemy.

Herein lies the problem of allowing passion to be a researcher's guiding star in any quasi-scientific field: it loses even its "quasi" status and becomes nothing more than an exercise in persuasive rhetoric. We relegate ourselves to a world of confirmation biases and siloed self-talk, discounting any evidence or argument that might shake the scales from our eyes.

Passion is important, to be sure. It keeps us grounded in what matters and helps us to find joy and meaning in our work and to effect our desired impact on the world. But just as passion should be the servant of love in any relationship, it should also be the servant of inquisitiveness and rigor in any research endeavor.

Thus, researchers should cultivate a certain amount of passion in their work but should ever be wary of the moment when their passion becomes self-blinding.

As a guide, I draw an image like a speedometer for my graduate students with five levels of passion that we can feel toward our research topics: (1) Not Important, (2) Important, (3) Very Important, (4) Most Important, and (5) All That Matters.

If we are operating below the Important level, then we probably will not find meaning in our work and will feel unfulfilled. So, I suggest that students should find topics to research that they feel are either Important or Very Important. Once one moves into the arena of The Most Important, however, we must become ever vigilant that our passion is not blinding us to alternate interpretations or realities that conflict with our a priori expectations. To be sure, good researchers can probably still operate in this Most Important area, but it becomes increasingly difficult to be a good researcher (by any form of external standard) and requires ever more self-control and temperance to do so.

The real problem, however, is when researchers enter the red zone of All That Matters. In this space, all other research topics, methods, and interpretations outside of the researcher's accepted stance are seen as inferior or categorically wrong (by virtue of just being the other). Passion supplants reason, evidence, and critical thinking and rules them with an iron fist in which the latter are employed only at the behest of the former. Rather than seeking answers, these powers of inquiry take a seat alongside every other rhetorical technique and vow to only employ their might in defending the crown - the upshot being that any potentially subversive activities must be quelled.

It's hard to gauge where education researchers generally fall on this spectrum, but all I know is that I have felt numerous pressures throughout my career to escalate my passion to the Most Important or the All That Matters levels. In each instance, I have grappled with how such escalation of passion might negatively influence my ability to do my work in a responsible and rigorous manner and how doing so could potentially blind me to the complex realities that we must face as education researchers.

I have also had numerous interactions with other researchers who (I believe) operate at these levels, and I have noticed in my own behavior that I am typically less willing to engage in discourse with others as their passion increases. I think the reason is that such passion is often entwined with volatility and resistance to critique. If you are passionate, it signals to me that your passion can easily be redirected toward me if my reasoning does not align with your All That Matters worldview. No one wants to be labeled, othered, or disregarded. Another’s passion is a simple gauge of one’s own potential alterity.

So, I submit that though passion is important for education researchers, it is a virtue that must be tempered. Passions are powerful things, but they must be bridled if they are to be used wisely and responsibly in the service of a profession.

[roycekimmons]

Love is a matter of conscience and thus is not a matter of impulse and inclination or a matter of feeling or a matter of intellectual calculation. According to the secular or purely human point of view many different kinds of love are discernible.... With Christianity the opposite is the case. It recognizes only one kind of love, spiritual love, and does not busy itself very much in elaborating on the different ways in which this essentially common love can reveal itself. All distinctions between the many different kinds of love are essentially abolished by Christianity.

Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love

[roycekimmons]

In reflecting on what made American democracy work, Tocqueville highlighted the role of small-town government and churches. These institutions, he suggested, drew Americans away from the narrow concerns of their private lives into public projects where they learned habits of the heart conducive to democratic compromise and a sense of civil good. ... [O]ur democratic confidence should be based on the conviction that, in the end, the appeal of freedom, equality, and tolerance-in-plurality is not narrowly circumscribed. ... The ideals respond to circumstances and desires widespread in our world.

Robert W. Hefner, Democratic Civility

[roycekimmons]

How you say something is more important than what you say, because how you communicate reflects the ultimate outcome of your worldview: your view of me as a person, your view of others, and your commitment to co-exist with us.

[roycekimmons]

A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

[roycekimmons]

Study: Fostering Thoughtful Technology Integration with Pre-Service Teachers

In my teacher education program, I remember devoting an entire course to using iMovie. The course was intensive, and sessions were day-long events compacted into a single week. Because I was commuting a great distance to my Masters classes, my wife and I found it to be cheaper to just rent a hotel room near the university for the week of the course as I pored over the lab Mac, trying to learn the tool and create a cool project.

My movie was great! It involved spaceships, sound effects, music, and compelling narrative. (Well, at least I think it was compelling.) There was only one problem: After the course, I never taught in a K-12 classroom that had iMovie or a Mac. So, what did I learn from the experience?

Initially, I hoped that at least some of the skills I learned were transferrable when I picked up Adobe Premiere at my PC-only high school, but Premiere was an entirely different animal, and it was a struggle. Even years after the iMovie class, I was left wondering whether I had wasted my time and money that entire week learning about an "educational technology" that didn't actually help me become a better teacher.

I’m sure that other teachers have had similar experiences.

In teacher technology education, we have to grapple with the problem of how to help students develop technical skills now while also training them to solve problems and think critically with technologies that we don't know about or that may not even exist yet. You might have your students do a video project, but the way you craft that project and the tools you use will dictate the learning that they take from it. When they leave your class, do they merely take a few skills that may or may not be transferrable to their context, or do they take something deeper? Do our learning activities foster the development of deep literacy development with technology or only superficial competencies that may be impractical, non-transferrable, or limited in shelf life?

In this study published in ETRD, we wanted to see how our teacher education students were thinking about technology and explore the relationship between how the learning tasks we employed in the class related to different types of thinking. Using the RAT framework (Hughes, Thomas, & Scharber), which categorizes all technology use in education as either Replacement, Amplification, or Transformation of existing practice, we discovered that the different tasks we used did influence our students’ transformative thinking about technology integration, but not the other types. We also found that self-assessments of competence with regard to technology integration seemed to be connected more to technical fluency than to thoughtful application in the classroom. 

From this study, we concluded that we needed to be very intentional with the types of learning activities we used in class if we wanted our students to be truly thoughtful about technology integration and argued that reflective, thoughtful use of technologies in teacher education may actually be much more valuable than the acquisition of a technical skill or two.

Study Citation:

Kimmons, R., Miller, B., Amador, J., Desjardins, C., & Hall, C. (2015). Technology integration coursework and finding meaning in pre-service teachers' reflective practice. Educational Technology Research and Development, 63(6), 809-829.

[roycekimmons]

And Religion, in its fullest development, essentially requires, not only this our little span of earthly years, but a life beyond. Neither an Eternal Life that is already fully achieved here below, nor an Eternal Life to be begun and known solely in the beyond, satisfies these requirements. But only an Eternal Life already begun and truly known in part here, though fully to be achieved and completely to be understood hereafter, corresponds to the deepest longings of man's spirit as touched by the prevenient spirit, God.

Baron Friedrich von Hugel

[roycekimmons]

Fathoming the Mysteries of Conference Peer Review

This year I got a little overzealous and submitted six proposals to AECT, which happens to be my favorite professional conference. As always, I was excited to see that some of my proposals were accepted and dismayed to see that others were rejected. However, given the fact that I submitted so many, I thought it would be interesting to look at the reviews together and to see if I could piece together some nuggets of wisdom to guide my future submissions (and those of my grad students). In the provided table, I've included data on all of my proposals, along with the final decision of whether to accept or reject. However, rather than coming away with nuggets of wisdom, I'm just feeling a bit confused, with two main wonderings percolating in my brain.

The first wondering is what the overall (average) evaluation means in terms of acceptance/rejection. #6 was the highest rated proposal this year, but it was rejected, while three lower-rated proposals were accepted. This could be chalked up to the fact that divisions have different submission numbers and acceptance rates, making some more exclusive than others. But notice that a lower-rated proposal to the same division was not only accepted but was also accepted as a featured research presentation. There may certainly be some conference scheduling at play here, accommodating for available time slots and what not, but I can't help but think that this seems a bit odd and wonder what role the overall rating plays in the final decision.

And the second wondering emerges from some extreme differences in reviews and how drastic variability may influence decision-making. #5 is the most illustrative example of this, wherein two reviewers had a combined rating of 96%, and the third rated at 35%. (A similar result is also found in #4.) I don't think that anyone expects all reviewers to see eye-to-eye, and I've come to expect that some simply will not appreciate the work that I do. It's for this reason that I submit less orthodox studies to the RT division, because it seems that a division devoted to new research methods and theoretical development would be most amenable to unorthodox or divisive topics and methodologies. These results make me pause, however, because the two papers with the most diverse votes were in the RT division, suggesting that these were the most divisive in nature (or simply had the most diverse reviewers), and they were both rejected. I don't know the reason for their rejection; there may have just been very good submissions this year. But, I can't help but wonder whether the divisiveness of a topic or methodology is what's at play here and whether methods of acceptance favor those studies that "get in line" rather than those that "rock the boat."

Don't get me wrong. My reason for writing this post is not to complain. I'm stoked that I got three proposals accepted, and I'm excited to attend AECT! But, like any good academic, I want to learn from my experiences and to take away lessons that I can teach to my up-and-coming grad students. From these results, though, I'm just left scratching my head and wondering what to say to a graduate student other than "play it safe, pray for like-minded reviewers, and realize it's a crapshoot."

[roycekimmons]

The words of wise men are heard in quiet more than the cry of him that ruleth among fools.

Ecclesiastes 9:17