Category Archives: Philosophy

Should PED Users Be Allowed into the Baseball Hall of Fame? Old Hoss Radbourn Thinks So

A couple of weeks ago, there was a retweet that came up in my feed from someone I don’t currently follow. As a brief aside: this is another cool thing about Twitter. Even though I don’t follow a person, their tweets may show up if someone else retweets them. The cool part: I get introduced to someone (by way of 140 characters, their Twitter handle, and their Twitter picture), that I wouldn’t have otherwise knew existed.

Anyway, this tweet was from @OldHossRadbourn. For those who don’t know, “Old Hoss” is the nickname for Charles Radbourn who was a MLB pitcher in the late 1800s. Radbourn was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1939. He was one of the first 25 players elected to the Hall of Fame. Radbourn passed away before the dawn of the 20th century, so it’s safe to say that the person behind the Twitter account is someone else. The tweet:

Obviously, the person who is behind this account is being sarcastic. In fact, one of the people who replied to this tweet made an even more salient point:

Like Radbourn, Ty Cobb was elected to the Hall of Fame very early on. In fact, Ty Cobb was part of the first class of players elected to the Hall of Fame. A bit of baseball trivia for you: Ty Cobb was elected to the Hall of Fame with a higher percentage of the vote than Babe Ruth (98.23% to 95.13%). While Ty Cobb was probably one of the greatest baseball players — ever — he’s also know for being one of “bad boys” of baseball.

From one of the reviews of a biography of Cobb:

Stump, Ty Cobb’s ghostwriter for the 1961 autobiography My Life in Baseball, fleshes out the story in this bare-knuckle, shocking biography. Born in Georgia in 1886, Cobb began his baseball career with the Detroit Tigers in 1905 and stayed in the big leagues until 1928-all the time hated by his rivals and teammates alike because of his meanness and combativeness. The author portrays the highlights of Cobb’s career: his first batting championship in 1907; his 96 stolen bases in 1915; and his three .400 seasons in 1911, 1912 and 1922. Stump also looks at Cobb’s involvement in game-fixing in 1919, his time as a manager and his activities after retiring. He died in 1961. The most sensational aspects of the book deal with Cobb’s personal life: his mother’s murder of his father, millionaire Cobb’s cheapness (no electricity or telephone in his house), wife beating, alcoholism and racial bigotry.

So, we’ve got meanness/combativeness, game-fixing, wife beating, alcoholism, and racial bigotry. Not exactly the upstanding qualities of a person you’d expect to be elected to a Hall of Fame, right? It’s worth noting that some of the severity of these claims have been challenged, but from what I’ve read/seen, I’m inclined to think that there’s at least some truth to them.

I suppose there’s the argument that Cobb’s transgressions don’t immediately relate to his ability to play the game. That is, those players who have dabbled in Performance Enhancing Drugs (PEDs), are immediately affecting their ability to play the game by using these drugs. I can totally understand that point.

Although, as I look down the list of players who have been suspended for using PEDs, there aren’t more than a handful of players that the casual MLB fan would recognize. Similarly, there are only a handful of all-stars. My point here is that even though players use PEDs, it doesn’t automatically skyrocket them to the top of the list of the best players in baseball. The player still has to play at an extremely high-level and for an extended period of time. No easy feat.

As the 2013 baseball hall of fame balloting starts to wind down (voting closes in January of 2013), there will probably be much ink spilt opposing the inclusion of Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens and there will probably be much ink spilt supporting their inclusion. I found these two cases, one from the San Jose Mercury and the other from NBCSports to seem well-rounded. In particular, the NBCSports article specifically addresses 3 common arguments you hear in opposition to players like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens.

If I were casting a ballot for the 2013 baseball hall of fame class, I’d almost certainly tick the box for Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens. The conclusion from the NBCSports article puts it succinctly:

In the final analysis, I hope we can all agree that there is no baseball reason whatsoever to keep Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens out of the Hall of Fame. Their baseball accomplishments — both those which can be measured by statistics and those which cannot — are so far beyond sufficient for induction that it’s almost laughable to list them.  To oppose their candidacy, then, one must make a moral or ethical case based on their drug use and the voter’s opinion of their character. And that case will almost certainly be made from a great distance and with imperfect information.

You may feel comfortable doing such a thing.  I do not.  And I believe that any Hall of Fame that does not include two of the best players to ever swing a bat or throw a ball, no matter what their flaws, is an utter joke.

What Do You Stand For?

In skimming through this week’s The Economist, I noticed a rather intriguing letter. I’ve included it below:

Go west!

SIR – I am a water-treatment operator in Fort McMurray, in the heart of Alberta’s oil-sands country, and I read your piece about our boom town (“The sands of grime”, November 17th). There are labour shortages here and we really do need 100,000 skilled tradesmen, as you said. But I’m worried that articles like yours might frighten off workers by writing about, for instance, our “ultra-low temperatures”.

Of course it’s cold here. It’s Canada. Last night was -27 Celsius (-17 Fahrenheit) and I went out without my jacket zipped up; you get used to the cold. And it is expensive to buy or rent property, which is why many people share apartments. In order to attract more workers the site camps are improving their facilities and financial packages.

My grandfather owned an iron foundry in Britain’s West Midlands. I was always taught that dirty hands make clean money. If you tell someone here that you are out of work you will get no sympathy as so much employment is available. Over the past 20 months I have earned $300,000 and spent a few weeks on vacation in Miami, a few more in Virginia and a few more in Toronto. It certainly beats overturning cars and waiting for some Russian or Arab billionaire to buy my local football club while collecting benefits.

The oil-sands boom is happening, like it or not, so why not make some money during this gold rush. Come on out and get your hands dirty.

Simon Moss
Fort McMurray, Canada

The letter-writer makes some good points, but as I considered the closing thoughts, I struggled with imagining myself as someone working in the oil-sands of Canada. Don’t get me wrong, I understand that oil is an important part of life (and the economy) as it stands today, but I just don’t know if I could bring myself to work for a cause that I didn’t whole-heartedly support. When I started my MBA back in the fall of 2011, one of my first thoughts was that I would graduate and work for a firm for which the mission was wholly congruent with mine. This was a strong contributing factor that led to me interning with Ashoka this past summer.

While providing energy/goods is a noble mission, I don’t know if I want to be directly part of it in this way. That is, I don’t know if I would want to use my skills in this way. However, I wouldn’t absolutely rule out working for a firm/organization that is in this industry. My way of reconciling something like this would be working for the firm’s department/area responsible for corporate social responsibility.

Ethics: A Jagged Line

Earlier this calendar year, I had an ethics class. It was only a half-semester course, but I rather liked it. That’s probably because I really enjoy morality and ethics. In fact, some of the research I worked on during my undergraduate degree required me to read one of George Lakoff‘s books, Moral Politics. Even now, I really enjoy reading the work of researchers like Dan Ariely, who often write about ethics. Anyway, back to the ethics class from earlier this year.

Towards the end of the course, the class was having a discussion about something that I don’t remember. In the course of the discussion, it was clear that there were valid reasons (on both sides) of the dilemma. As the discussion was wrapping up, the professor drew a jagged line on the white board (much like the jagged line in the picture at the beginning of this post). I don’t quite remember the “exact” phrase that the professor said, but that’s not important. The important thing is that I remember the takeaway — ethics are not black and white.

Conveniently, the jagged line picture also has ‘black and white,’ but the metaphor I like to think of is the straight line (vs. the jagged line). Some might think that there’s a clear right and a clear wrong — in every situation (a straight line, if you will). However, I think that life is much more nuanced, much more complex than that — a jagged line. Sometimes doing “x” in a situation will be ethical, and sometimes doing “x” in a situation will be unethical. It’s important to understand the context to understand the ethicality of a situation. That’s certainly an important takeaway, if you watch Professor Sandel’s Justice course.

Before I end this post, I wanted to touch share something from the current President of George Mason University, Angel Cabrera. He’s only the 6th President in the school’s history and his most recent position was as the President of the Thunderbird School of Global Management in Arizona. He recently wrote a post for the World Economic Forum. An excerpt:

No matter how high the legal penalties may be, an opportunistic, self-interested manager within a large corporation can always find a way to make the pay-off of a bribe a no-brainer. This is so because the personal benefits of earning a contract can be significant and the probability of getting caught can be easily minimized. The very same factors that make the modern corporation so productive – specialization and localization of knowledge – also make it extremely difficult to control the decisions of each individual manager. The delegation of authority to managers with specialized knowledge makes the corporation vulnerable to decisions by those managers because they are often the only ones who understand the full complexity of a given contract (technical details of the products being sold, personal circumstances of the individuals involved in the transaction, dynamics of the social and institutional context in which the transaction takes place, etc).

When the golden opportunity presents itself to bribe, benefit from it and not get caught, the only thing that can stop him or her is a deeply engrained belief that the action is morally wrong.

Do You Know Where Your Filters Are?

It’s been a couple of days since I last published a post. I’ll try to make sure that I have something published everyday for the next couple of days, but it is near the end of the semester and I have more exams (3) than I’m accustomed to.

I’ve had this link on my list of things to write about, so I thought I’d put something together really quickly this afternoon and clear it off the list. I’ve written before about the importance of cleaning off the list to allow for new ideas to come in.

The title of the post at the link I’ve had on my list to talk about is: “6 surprising facts about how we see the world.” I want to be encourage you to go and read the post on the other site because there are lots of good graphics/picture/videos that help to reinforce points. That being said, there are a two things that I’ll share.

Before sharing a couple of things, I do want to mention something I remember learning during my first Master’s (that’s reinforced in this link I’ll be talking about): we don’t see the world in the present. Pardon? That’s right. We don’t see the world as it’s happening — instead — we see it as it happened. That must sound a bit strange, but it makes sense after I add some more context to it. Think about how we see the world — through our eyes. When light enters our eyes, our lens focuses the light on the retina. The retina then carries signals of light to a somewhere in the brain by way of the optic nerve. While this happens fast, it still takes time. As a result, there is a delay (albeit a small one) between when light hits your retina and your brain processing what you see. Therefore, we don’t see the world in the present. Okay, now back to that link:

According to Dr. Mark Changizi, what is also common to trichromat primates is exposed facial skin (ie. faces not covered with fur). When the skin is exposed, these primates can communicate their emotional state based on the level of hemoglobin and oxygen in the blood. A green hue of the skin usually indicates sickness (low hemoglobin, oxygen), redindicates blushing or excitement (high hemoglobin, oxygen), blue – cold, lethargy(high hemoglobin concentration), and yellow – fear or bloodless (low hemoglobin concentration).

In other words, we see color not because color exists in the physical world but because color vision is useful for communication.

It never occurred to me (though, I never sat down to consider it) that seeing color was evolutionary. There’s a great picture of what we as (trichromats) vs. other mammals.

The other thing I wanted to share:

Now let’s go a step further. We’ll show how people’s need to find answers to the most important questions of life has less to do with some spiritual search for meaning and more with the fact that we evolved a mechanism which actively interprets the phenomena we experience. In other words, we form beliefs about ourselves and the world around us because these beliefs are useful for our survival.

So what exactly is this mechanism? Dr. Michael S. Gazzaniga, in his article The Interpreter Within: The Glue of Conscious Experience, explains:

The answer appears to be that we have a specialized left-hemisphere system that my colleagues and I call the “interpreter.” This Interpreter is a device (or system or mechanism) that seeks explanations for why events occur. The advantage of having such a system is obvious. By going beyond simply observing contiguous events to asking why they happened, a brain can cope with such events more effectively should they happen again.

Yet, the answers we seek do not have to be based in reality. They merely have to be consistent with our experiences and perception…

Beliefs can be very powerful. They can cause us to war with each other or they can simply cause us to believe something that might not be based in fact. If you’ve never heard of Byron Katie or The Work and you’re interested in learning about some of the ‘filters’ you might use to see the world, I strongly urge you to check it out.

 

Money Doesn’t Matter, Right?

I came across this short 3-minute clip narrated by Alan Watts and thought you might be interested:

Being in an MBA program, I’m certainly sympathetic to the argument that money does matter, but after watching this video, I was reminded of a story I’ve heard on many occasions. The story’s fame was aided because it was printed in Ferriss‘ “The 4-Hour Work Week“. Without further adieu:

An American businessman was standing at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish.

“How long it took you to catch them?” The American asked.

“Only a little while.” The Mexican replied.

“Why don’t you stay out longer and catch more fish?” The American then asked.

“I have enough to support my family’s immediate needs.” The Mexican said.

“But,” The American then asked, “What do you do with the rest of your time?”

The Mexican fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take a siesta with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos, I have a full and busy life, senor.”

The American scoffed, “I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds you buy a bigger boat, and with the proceeds from the bigger boat you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats.”

“Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the consumers, eventually opening your own can factory. You would control the product, processing and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually NYC where you will run your expanding enterprise.”

The Mexican fisherman asked, “But senor, how long will this all take?”

To which the American replied, “15-20 years.”

“But what then, senor?”

The American laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO (Initial Public Offering) and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions.”

“Millions, senor? Then what?”

The American said slowly, “Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take a siesta with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos…”

[source]

Are Grades and Tests the Best Way to Measure Learning?

The other week in class, I was speaking with a classmate about grades and learning. We were opining about how sometimes, getting the right answer (on an assignment) shouldn’t necessarily be the goal of the assignment. That is, shouldn’t learning be the goal? Shouldn’t improving one’s storehouse of wisdom be the goal? Shouldn’t understanding be the goal?

Of course, that is the intention with these assignments — that one will learn/understand the material. After having spent (almost) an entire semester on the other side of the classroom, I certainly have [some] empathy for teachers and their assignments. While I don’t have to report to a department chair, I understand that in order to measure students, there needs to be something measurable and I understand that tests/assignments have become the easy way of doing this. Should this be acceptable, though?

I recently came across an interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that addresses this issue:

According to this view, the nature of teaching and learning should be measured instead of relying solely on an outcome like a grade or a test. Students should be exposed to courses and assignments that require them to analyze information and apply it to new contexts, reflect on what they know, identify what they still need to learn, and sort through contradictory arguments.

Such opportunities are described in research literature as “deep approaches to learning.” They figure prominently in Thursday’s release of data from the National Survey of Student Engagement. While Nessie, as the survey is known, has long sought data on those practices, this year’s report replicated and extended the previous year’s findings, which showed that participation in deep approaches tends to relate to other forms of engagement, like taking part in first-year learning communities and research projects.

This article has sparked a great deal of debate in the comments section, too. Here’s one comment that I found particularly on-point:

I do not want to be an apologist for the way things are, because it is always possible to improve our practices and in many respects we are responsible for the critical view the public have of us (honestly, it isn’t all the fault of right wing politicians with an anti-intellectual bent); however, higher ed adminstrators and the higher ed press have to stop treating each new study, each new innovation and each new utterance from some rich person suddenly interested in, but also dismissive of, higher ed (I’m looking at you Bill Gates) as the silver bullet  that is going to transform and save higher ed.  My head is not in the sand, I know higher ed (particularly public higher ed) is going through rough times but the panicked responses of the folks in charge is truly dismaying.

~

I once wrote about the need to shift towards Waldorf- & Montessori-like education. When I wrote this, I was thinking more about elementary and high school. I wonder — what should the model look like for college/university? Should it also be Waldorf- & Montessori-like? I don’t know, but it’s certainly a question worth asking.

21-Day Meditation Challenge: UPDATE and Research!

So — we’re into day 8 of Deepak Chopra‘s 21-day meditation challenge. How’s it going? Are you finding it easy to stick to meditating? Are you finding it hard? Are you noticing any benefits? Are you noticing any strange thoughts coming up? I’d love to hear about any/all of it! Let me know in the comments. If you’re finding it somewhat difficult to stick to the meditation, you might want to read about the importance of stillness and unplugging. This may (or may not) help to motivate you to stick with the meditations.

~

I came across some research this past week that I thought you might find interesting, especially in the context of meditations. From the Daily Stat:

After just 5 weeks of daily 5-to-16-minute training sessions in focused-attention meditation (“Relax with your eyes closed, and focus on the flow of your breath…”), research subjects showed strong brain-wave changes associated with positive emotions, says a team led by Christopher A. Moyer of the University of Wisconsin. The findings suggest that the benefits of meditation may be more accessible than was previously believed, the researchers say.

Pretty cool, eh? Of course, the Daily Stat is a secondary source, so if you’re interested in reading the journal article, you can find it here: Frontal Electroencephalographic Asymmetry Associated With Positive Emotion Is Produced by Very Brief Meditation Training.

So, maybe this is more motivation for you to get back to (or start!) meditating.

 

Can the Discourse in American Politics Be Saved: The Lost Art of Democratic Debate

I came across a tweet earlier this morning that linked to a TEDTalk given by Michael Sandel in 2010. I’ve written about Prof. Sandel’s course “Justice,” so naturally, I was interested to see his TEDTalk. The title: “The lost art of democratic debate.”

Of course, given the election tomorrow and the absurd hyper-partisanship in the US right now, I thought it would be interesting to hear what Prof. Sandel had to say, even though it was something he said 2 years ago. Ironically, 2 years ago, Congress was still at odds with each other (over healthcare). There’s still discussion about healthcare in the US.

As a quick primer to the video, you may want to check out what I wrote on golf being a sport last summer.

After watching the video, I’d love to hear what you think of what Prof. Sandel has proposed. Do you think discussing the morality of ideas will make Congress less partisan and more productive?

21-Day Meditation Challenge: Join Me!

I just finished listening to Day 1 of Deepak Chopra‘s 21-day meditation challenge. Boy, did it feel good to meditate again! When was the last time you sat (and didn’t fiddle with technology or thoughts) for an extended period of time? I’ve written about the importance of stillness and unplugging before, but now I’m offering you an opportunity to follow-through on it.

Why don’t you join me and thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands?) of other people and follow along with Deepak’s meditations for the next 21 days.

I really like being part of something bigger than “me” and this is certainly an opportunity to feel connected to an infinite number of people. As I’m listening to the meditation, I can be sure that there will be countless people who will also be listening to the same track as me (at some point during the day).

So, whaddaya say — let’s meditate together over the next 21 days.

~

I will say that the meditations are couched in abundance. That is, the theme of the meditations have to do with abundance. Most folks think of abundance as an abundance of cash, but there are many other kinds of abundance. One can have an abundance of peace, joy, comfort, love, and the list goes on.

So — head on over to the landing page and listen to the first meditation because it started today. You can do it!

The Never-Ending Quest for Balance

As part of the for the PhD program I was in a few years back, I had the pleasure of learning a martial art – . I’d already done quite a bit of training in martial arts when I was younger, but Aikido is quite different from . Not to descend too far down a tangent, but, in my understanding, Aikido is much more about blending whereas karate’s primary focus, again, in my understanding, is not blending.

One of the exercises we would often do to practice this sense of blending involved our partner (or partners as it was usually in groups of three or more!) to approach us as if they were attacking us. It was our job to then move out of the way, whilst staying centered. [Note: I couldn’t find any video of this particular exercise, as I think it’s quite basic. However, I was able to find of some of the basic Aikido exercises that are similar to the one I’m describing.] The tempo of this exercise usually started out really slow (intentionally). Though, as time passed, our partners would then speed up. You can imagine how it might be challenging to stay centered in this kind of an activity.

During these times of practice, I remember having a bit of an epiphany.

As my partner would approach me and I would step out of the way, I noticed that the quicker (and the more out of balance!) I was, the more out of balance I would be when stepping out of the way for the next partner who was approaching. Think about that for a second: as I stepped out of the way of one partner and I was off-balance, I was that much more off-balance when stepping out of the way for the next partner. It’s almost akin to the .

This may seem like a small thing to notice, but we can apply this lesson to a much broader (macro!) scope. Let’s think about this in terms of our own lives. When I am faced with one problem or issue and I “lose my center,” I will be that much more out of balance when approaching the next problem that comes my way. This sense of being out of balance seems to grow exponentially (see: the Bullwhip Effect).

We can apply this to an even broader scope (communities or countries). When a community/country reacts to a problem they are faced with, and they aren’t approaching the problem from a sense of balance (and they don’t maintain a sense of balance throughout the problem-solving process), there will usually be a sense of being out of balance at the end of the solution. Furthermore, by being out of balance at the end state, when the next problem approaches, there will be even more “out of balance.”

There’s just two more things I want to mention about my experience during this Aikido exercise. First, when I noticed myself starting to get out of balance during the exercise, I would often try really hard to get myself back in balance. This only made it worst. As I would try to get back to a sense of balance, I would often swing the other way, causing more imbalance, etc. And second, eventually, by being out of balance, I would fail the exercise. That is, by being so out of balance, I might not see one of my partners who was behind me.

The consequence of being out of balance in this exercise illustrates the inherent narrow-minded focus of one who is not centered.