The Memescape

In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins popularized the notion of a 'meme,' which compliments the biological 'gene.' When he took a question about the subject at a talk in Columbia, SC recently, he seemed almost rueful, saying something like "Oh, no. Not the meme question." But there's no turning back now, as the google trends chart shows:

A search on Amazon.com revealed about eighteen books about memes, and there are currently 49 million hits on google, including the wiki page, a Daily Meme site, and Know Your Meme that claims to document Internet phenomena (one might say ephemera). A whole "science of memes" called memetics has sprung up, claiming 487,000 web hits currently.

So what's a meme? The wikipedia definition is just fine:

A meme (pronounced /ˈmiːm/, rhyming with "cream"^[1]) is a postulated unit of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena

Remember pet rocks, anyone? Meme. Tickle-me Elmo. Another meme. Obviously, "meme" itself is a meme, and a very successful one. If we think of any medium that will permit complex organizations within it, it seems to find fixed points (self-replicators) on its own. We might call this the cosmic version of Murphy's Law: if a system has fixed-point expressions, they emerge naturally from noise. Feed some noise into a microphone and point it at the speaker. You don't get amplified noise, you get a particular resonant frequency that is tuned to the physical characteristics of the system. This is a powerful idea because you can work it backwards too: look at what emerges naturally from a medium and then figure out what the characteristics of the medium must be.

Ever get a chain letter? That's a particularly interesting one because it's easy to dissect. This idea is described by Dawkins, but I'll paraphrase. A good way to get an idea replicator going is to combine these elements:

1. An imperative to replicate the idea. This is the basic "reproduction drive." E.g. Send this to ten of your friends.
2. A carrot. If you perform #1, something good is likely to happen to you. E.g. Cite stories of people who had amazing fortune after forwarding the email to ten of their friends.
3. A stick. If you fail to perform #1, something bad will happen to you. E.g. This one dude forgot to send the email and a brick fell on him.

Of course, the more fake documentation (a REAL LAWYER friend said "blah blah blah"), and other emotional mumbo-jumbo you can ladle onto the thing, the better chance it has. In order to survive, it needs to multiply its chances geometrically (at least, I think I can prove that if you give me an hour), and hence the replication imperative is structured to multiply senders. Dawkins notes that the elements above are found in most religions.

This is a mind-broadening idea, because we all carry around the burden of memes that are so deeply buried in our nous that we don't realize they are there. Some are undoubtedly hardwired by evolution so we avoid starvation, for example. Not everything you believe can be logical. This is because even logic is based on assumptions (called axioms). Karl Popper ran into this problem when he philosophized about science never proving anything a theory, but rather only disproving theories that didn't work. By his own logic, he couldn't prove that. You have to start somewhere. It's a nice exercise to dig around in your beliefs and see what's there. Could be a great self-assessment assignment for a course that contains noncognitives too. Which leads to next topic.

Memes and the Academy. What does this have to do with teaching, learning, and assessing? Obviously teaching has to do with the transmission of ideas. I think we miss a trick by not trying more actively to transmit habits of mind as well. After all, part of being open-minded is the meta-cognitive ability to examine ones own beliefs. We could do that more deliberately in our curricula.

There apparently are some scholarly activities on this topic, for example "Memes and the Teaching of English, which "Examines why some sayings and catchphrases stick in people's minds, while others are unrecognized and unused. Offers an answer to this question from an evolutionary standpoint."

It's much more natural to me to think of assessment on the meme level, rather than on the cognitive ability level. Individual concepts and skills can be taught. I'm not sure how to teach raw cognitive ability. The assessments of the former are more or less straightforward. Of the latter, steeped in statistical voodoo and ed-psych theory that may or may not have a basis in physical reality.

In practical terms, you can use memetics every day. Here's an example. You're sitting in a committee meeting, where the members are problem-solving. You have some ideas of your own about how the issue at hand might be resolved. What do you do?

First, there are always ideas. Lots of ideas. I'd recommend sorting through your own in your head before advancing one. Make sure it has a chance of survival. Wouldn't want to get the poor meme's hopes up only to be dashed immediately. There is value to producing good ideas--it makes you seem smart--and so your standing in the community is enhanced when you display brilliance. So you may choose to pick your best idea and propose it. This is somewhat Machiavellian because the loading is "Professor Zza has good ideas" rather than the actual idea itself. We all have to play that game early in our careers. Of course, it extends to publishing research, which is more substantive than what happens in committees, but the idea is the same. This is the reason there are lots of meaningless papers produced--the real message is: Zza is really productive.

Once past the need to establish oneself, there is (sometimes) the altruist urge to actually reach good decisions in committees, simply for the good of the academy. This is an entirely different approach. It's like fishing. The problem is that everyone has only so much political capital to spend. Even if you have wonderful ideas, no one wants to admit that their own ideas are ugly misshapen things, so there is a kind of baby worship that happens when someone produces a newborn meme, no matter how defective and ill-begotten. At least, this can happen. If you're lucky there will be a ruthless meme-killer in the group who wields an idea-axe to put these unfortunate ideas out of their misery. That's a political minefield, so better have tenure first, and plan to be labeled a "character" for the rest of your career.

The fishing idea works like this: first, admit that other people have ideas as good as yours, and dedicate yourself to finding the best ones overall--not by wielding the axe, but by subtle twitches of the fishing lure. Help turn the discussion toward the ideas you see as best, and toss out a distraction if a real clunker comes along. A bright shiny object is as effective as an axe.

"I think we should eliminate faculty parking altogether."
"Hey--did you hear the merit bonuses are out?"

Check your ego. If you have a really great idea, wait to see if someone else comes up with it too. You can nudge your lure a bit toward the idea and hope someone grabs it. Then speak out in support of it strongly. This gives the little meme the best chance at life. For example, imagine that you like the idea of instituting an Assessment Day in the academic calendar to allow program assessments and surveys to be administered all at once. You might dangle your lure thus:

You: One of the problems is finding the time to get all these assessments done in an organized way. We don't want to duplicate students--ask them to take the same survey twice. They hate that.

Prof Eks: Maybe an assembly of students on Saturday?

You: They'd never show up. It would cost us a fortune in iPods to motivate them. I wish we could take class time to do it--you know, all at the same time period.

Prof Eks: That would never fly--we'd need to sacrifice a whole day from the calendar.

You: That's true. We'd need a whole day, probably. Hmmmm.

Prof Why: What if we added a day? Call it Assessment Day?

You: What a great idea! I've heard of this being done a Harvard and Yale. It would solve all our problems! Super!

You get the idea. You might want to hone your acting skills. A less honest way to engineer memes, which I don't recommend, is to attribute your own ideas to other people as a way of flattery. "You remember that idea you had about an Assessment Day? I really think that's a winner." If it really is their idea, that's fine, of course. But if you're inserting it into their memespace, tagged with their own ownership, you might get a funny look. It happens, though--now you're perhaps inoculated against such attacks. By means of this meme. Enjoy.

Update: Note that during the "fishing expedition" it often happens that someone advances an idea that's better than yours. At that point, it obvious what to do: support the better idea.

The Two Meeting Personalities

A while back, I wrote about the secret life of committees and mentioned an article about why you should never invite seven colleagues to a meeting. Later I mused about a meeting-driven life. There is yet more science to be explored on the topic I discovered today in Science Daily. The article dates from 2006, and explores the question of whether workplace meetings are a good thing or evil. It is based on research led by psychologist Steven G. Rogelberg of University of North Carolina, Charlotte.

The research team found that in public, most of us decry meetings as time-wasters, but our true feelings may be different:

"When speaking publicly, people generally claim that they hate meetings," said Rogelberg, "but in the surveys you see a different story -- some people's private sentiments are much more positive.

One important factor turns out to be whether or not the meetings are well led. In my experience, that's about half of the picture. The other half is the communication styles of those present. I'm an Act III kind of guy--I'll ask for Act I and Act II if I'm interested, but normally one act is enough. I may not be typical, because there is often far more explanation than I can stand in one meeting. But back to the article's findings.

Apparently there are two kinds of us. Some really don't like meetings because of the sense of not getting things accomplished. The other type actually likes them because they are not burdened by an itching agenda, and they enjoy the social aspects of meetings.

"People who are high in accomplishment striving look at meetings more from the perspective of seeing them as barriers to getting real work done," Rogelberg said. "But the others may view meetings as a way to structure their day or a way to network and socialize. As a result, these people see meetings as a good thing."

As a practical matter, then, perhaps we should all identify ourselves as belonging to one camp or another. Pins or arm patches would do the trick, or little markings on staff rosters. Those who don't like meetings breaking up their day (Type I) could be scheduled accordingly, in blocks, but only when absolutely necessary. The meeting-social types (Type II) could gather frequently in exclusive groups for their sort. Of course these 'talky' committees might not accomplish much. Another Science Daily article notes about workplace groups that:

From the operating room to the executive board room, the benefits of working in teams have long been touted. But a new analysis of 22 years of applied psychological research shows that teams tend to discuss information they already know and that "talkier" teams are less effective.

The authors advise that the remedy is:

[T]eams communicate better when they engage in tasks where they are instructed to come up with a correct, or best, answer rather than a consensual solution.

In other words, don't make it a social event. This would make our Type I committee members less grumpy, at the expense of the Type II's enjoyment. I guess the lesson is that if anyone in the room is enjoying the process, the meeting isn't proceeding efficiently. Perhaps the Type II crowd could benefit from the new drug Despondex, which is designed to take the edge off of people who are too cheerful.

The good news, I suppose, is that groups still function better than individuals, according to this article and this one. Scientific proof that committees are here to stay.

But the Internet has created a whole new kind of group. In a graphic novel, it would be the committee that fell into the vat of toxic waste and woke up with new powers and strange motivations. As a force for good, see the power that is the Mechanical Turk. As a force for the strange, see this article about 4chan's hack of an online TIME poll. For both of these examples, the whole being greater than the parts on a large scale. Imagine if your whole institution met as a committee and actually got something done. Scary, isn't it?

The Committee Driven Life

It occurred to me yesterday while watching presentations throughout a half-day board meeting that one could spend all of one's energy preparing for and attending meetings. I have already written about The Secret Life of Committees and the jinxed number of eight members, but we can go further. We might think of committee work as like a peat bog, where one could sink in, become immobilized, and slowly mummify, perhaps to be found perfectly preserved a thousand years from now. The future archaeologists would marvel at the perfectly bulleted agenda and still-legible inked initials of the committee secretary on the peaty minutes.

I propose the following principles to achieve this aim, this committee-driven life.

• The committee needs you. Never turn down a chance to serve on the most obscure ad hocity that crosses your path. To do so is to counter your purpose.
  
  
• The committee is infallible. Without this tenent comes doubt. Not only must you believe, but you must also proselytize to your colleagues. Burning heretics at the stake should only done if no one is there to put it on Youtube.
  
  
• Minutes are inspired by the committee. There are those who will doubt that the minutes are the true word of the committee, and will seek to modify them, even translate them into other languages. This must not be tolerated.
  
  
• The committee has no purpose other than to be the committee. This may be the hardest tenet to absorb, since committees are often given names that give rise to the implication that they have a purpose external to themselves. For example, the uninformed or unbelieving may think that the Curriculum Committee has a purpose that relates to maintaining the curriculum. This is false. The committee may speak to and make reference to the profane world outside its walls, but its one true purpose is to be. The committee is that it is.

By following these guidelines, you too can have an inspired and purposeful life. That is, if your purpose is to be discovered in a millennium, raised from the strata of bureaucracies past to give glory to the one goal worthy of a life's dedication: sitting around a table with a bunch of bored people over a sheaf of handouts no one read, complaining about the parking situation.

The Secret Life of Committees

There really should be a required graduate course like Introduction to Committees. I can remember actually being disappointed (!) the first time the ballots went around and I was not elected to any faculty senate committees. My friend Dave, who came the same year I did, was elected the following cycle to serve on the Earthquake Prevention Committee, and I nursed the envy for months. I'd see him and five other faculty members stepping into private rooms, yellow pads in hand, and mutter cryptically when they thought I couldn't hear. Something about fault lines being created by the athletics program. This state of affairs continued until the following year when I was finally chosen by the collective to serve on the Exotic Plumbing Committee. Then I got my own introduction into the arcane art of committee work.

I see resumes from time to time where the applicant actually lists the academic committees they've been on. I suppose this is something like military officers and their service ribbons. I remember from my National Guard days that the Infantry Combat Badge (picture below) is one of the most prestigious ones. It means you've served under fire.
There should be something like this for academic committees, I think. I don't really mean to draw the comparison between what our servicemen endure in the line of duty and what academic committees do, but what's wrong with a visual representation of the mental scars endured by those who've seen the worst that can be offered up by the political bureaucracy? Here are a few suggestions. These ribbons would adorn faculty gowns on formal occasions.
My own interest began to wane about 2002 after a third term on the Y2K Preparation Committee, which had become a zombie: a wakeful dead committee with no purpose left but to terrorize the living. About that time I read about a species of snail that had accidentally been introduced in New Zealand, to the detriment of the fauna there. The new creatures would wander around until they found the trail of a native snail, and then track it relentlessly until they found and ate it. I decided we needed something like that: a committee to destroy committees. It would have to be innocuously named of course, and the members carefully chosen. Thus was the Transcendental Transition Committee born. It was not a great success, itself spawning at least 12 sub-committees before it thankfully self-destructed in a parlimentary accident. That was the last straw.

I began to avoid committees altogether. I developed a sophisticated system of "committee tag" whereby I had a list of names and a script taped to the wall next to the phone. If a colleague called to invite me to be on a committee, I'd simply read my script and pull a suitable name from the list: "I'm sorry Dr. Chairlice, but my rampant myopia would prevent me from reading the files at good speed. Might I recommend Professor Goodchoice as a superior candidate? She always shows up on time, and will do most of the work." I decided that the optimum committee size was one.

So it was with some interest yesterday when I opened the latest New Scientist to find an article entitled "The Curse of the Committee." It sounds like a sequel to The Mummy franchise, with perhaps Brandon Frazier as the independent chair who defies the president, but it's actually a fascinating history of the theory of committees. The notion--called Parkinson's Law after C. Northcode Parkinson--that work expands to fill alloted time, comes from this body of work. According the research cited, there seems to be a lifecycle of committees or other political bureacracies, whereby they grow and expand in a bubble, until it collapses. This is rather like Ibn Kaldun's notion that

when a society becomes a great civilization (and, presumably, the dominant culture in its region), its high point is followed by a period of decay. This means that the next cohesive group that conquers the diminished civilization is, by comparison, a group of barbarians. Once the barbarians solidify their control over the conquered society, however, they become attracted to its more refined aspects, such as literacy and arts, and either assimilate into or appropriate such cultural practices. Then, eventually, the former barbarians will be conquered by a new set of barbarians, who will repeat the process. [source: wikipedia]

In the case of committees, the transformation is simply one of size and effectiveness. They expand, become less effective, and then collapse into a smaller size again. To investigate this, researchers Peter Klimek and colleagues at the Medical University of Vienna used the following method.

[R]esearchers constructed a simple network model of a committee. They grouped the nodes of the network - the committee members- in tightly knit clusters with a few further links between clusters tying the overall network together, reflecting the clumping tendencies of like-minded people known to exist in human interactions. To start off, each person in the network had one of two opposing opinions, represented as a 0 or a 1. At each time step in the model, each member would adopt the opinion held by the majority of their immediate neighbours. (page 39 from the print edition)

Their conclusions? No committee should number more than twenty, a number reached by Parkinson's original heuristic approach. More surprisingly, odd combinatorical things happen when the committee size is eight, making it more likely to have deadlocks according to the research. Quoting again from the article:

[O]nce again, Parkinson had anticipated it, noting in 1955 that no nation had a cabinet of eight members. Intriguingly, the same is true today, and other committees charged with making momentous decisions tend to fall either side of the bedevilled number: the Bank of England's monetary policy committee, for example, has nine; the US National Security Council has six.

Just to be safe, you might want to consider committee sizes less than two.

[Update: this New York Times article from 1/15/2009 claims that as college costs have risen, disproportionately more money has gone to pay for administration. This is perhaps the same bureaucratic spread that is described above, in a wider context. A contraction is probably not far behind.]