What is Loving?

Parents have a certain view of what is the best thing to do for their children’s well being. As the children grow up, the parents try to direct the children and help them make good decisions. When does the parent begin to let the child mess up. When is it more loving to allow a child to make mistakes and face the full consequences of those mistakes rather than trying to direct the child to make good decisions. What is the loving thing to do?

When we are managers and we are trying to direct the staff of our department, what is the best way to act towards the staff. Sure we do not use the phrase “what is the most loving thing to do”, but we are still trying to figure out the “best” way to act. Do I allow my staff the latitude to mess up, and face the full consequences of it, which may include them getting fired? Or do I correct their mistakes and keep on correcting their mistakes, sort of like the image of coming along behind them sweeping up after their mess. What is the best thing to do?

When we are teachers and we watch students that seem to be trying to surf the bell curve, students that are not really putting in the effort – just hoping they can scam their way through. What do we do? Do we fail them just to teach them a lesson? Do we pass them so we do not have to make a big stink about the issues – let someone else worry about the problem. Do we try to meet with the student personally and try get them interested in putting the effort into passing? What is the best for the long-term future of that student and the reputation of the school?

What is the right thing to do has so much to do with the perspective from which it is viewed. Looking back at the parent/child issues: the parent is concerned about the child messing up and the consequences of that mess up. The parent may be thinking about a baby that may be born to a 14 year old child that makes a bad decision, or a 17 year old child getting killed in a car accident because they were street racing or driving drunk. So from the parent’s perspective, they see that it is urgent to be directing the decisions of their children because so much can go wrong.

However, that same situation from a child’s perspective is a child yearning for independence and trying to prove that they have the ability to “make it” in the world. They see the constant corrections and restrictions from their parents as suffocating them. What is the loving thing to do?

Perspective: when you see it from the different perspectives, the best thing to do looks quite different. I have often heard it said from evangelical Christians that the most loving thing to do is to care for the soul of a person and ensure that soul is going to heaven. However, I have also heard from other people’s perspective that the most loving thing to do is to accept people, embrace people for who they are and not and not try to “ram religion down their throats”. Which perspective do you look from? Do you care about the eternal destiny of a person or encourage their freedom of though and individuality?

It seems odd that most of us go through life thinking that what we are doing is the best thing. Most of us do not purposely set out to harm people or take advantage of people. Rather, we like to think that we are helping the world. It just seems so weird that we can set out and do what we think is the best thing to do, while other people will look at what we are doing and think it is disastrous. What is the most loving thing to do?

Are leaders above ethics?

Business people often think that they are above ethics. They often pride themselves in how they can deceive a customer. Politicians also often see rules as meant to be bent rather than lived. What these people are doing is relying on the other people to be ethical, and taking advantage of a general ethical understanding in society, and thinking they can get ahead by bucking the system.

If everyone started bucking the system, then the system would collapse, society would crumble. You would not be able to trust a word anyone said. The moment you turned your back, you would be stabbed. The moment the police were not looking, you would be robbed in broad daylight.

Why do certain people think that they are better then others, that they do not need to adhere to rules like the masses? They think they are part of a superior class. Machiavelli sees that he can turn on and off truthfulness as he chooses to accomplish his own ends. These “superior” people see that ethics are for the simple people. Simple people need rules to live by, they need to be told what to do, herded like sheep. But the leaders, they are not bound by the same code. They make the rules, they do not have to live by them.

But if the leaders continue to not live by ethics, how can the ‘simple’ people be expected to continue to uphold the ethical code? And if the ‘simple’ people do not hold the ethical code, then chaos breaks out. The whole world begins to look like Beirut or Rwanda.

In Canada, we have just come to assume that our leaders will be un-ethical. We do not see a political leader as a person that could improve the country. Rather, they are the one with the most tenacity to fight the political games, cut down enough of their opponents and climb to the top.

It is interesting that people see Barak Obama in a different light. People see him as genuine and consistent with the concept of an ethical leader.

Maybe the reason society needs to be cleaned up by substantial events such as the enlightenment and waves revivals is because the leadership in society is continually trying to shirk their ethical responsibility and thus slowly bringing down the ethical climate of society. Only by having these occasional cleanings can society get a renewed ethical perspective and continue to function rather then descend into anarchy.

What would ethical leadership look like?

I am seriously trying to understand this as I am currently teaching a course on ethics. One of the roles of a professor is being an ethical role model. It is not a question of how I can scam the system. Rather it is a question of doing what I believe needs to be done to care for my students and ensure they get the best possible learning experience I can deliver. It is actually a refreshing way to look at the world. There is cleanness to it. I can get excited about it. It is a consistent framework that makes sense. Sure, it is not easy, but in the end I feel like I have done something.

Would you pay $599 for this vacuum cleaner

The Dyson ball is a monument to what can be accomplished by marketing. While a person could easily go to Walmart and purchase a vacume cleaner for $50, people are marching out and spending $599 and telling their friends that they have to have one also.

How can Dyson charge such a premium for their product while also taking over the market share? They have figured out how to appeal to something which other home appliance manufactured have ignored. I will call it the techie factor. All the other home appliances we buy like fridges, stoves, freezers, or washing machines are in nice white packages, completely hiding their functionality.

Dyson products broadcasts their functionality. Buying a Dyson is a lot more then buying an home appliance, it is buying a statement of technological progress and innovation. Think of the conversation starters when your friends are over at your house and you can pull out your Dyson and show how it works.

The marketing of the Dyson with is transparent cyclone and all the visible moving parts appeals to a generation that has a new attraction with technology. They do not want things in nice packages where all the working components are hidden from view. They want to feel like they understand what is going on inside the machine. These are the same type of people the buy computer mice made with transparent plastic so all the electronics are visible. They are also the same type of people that bought the original hummers which declared functionality (low center of gravity, wide wheel base, high ground clearance) above pleasant looks.

Dyson has done an excellent job at identify this "techie" market and selling a premium product which is taking over market share.

The Lawnmower that Cannot Die

My dad loves to tinker with mechanical things and has a car that is 22 years old and he keeps it going. I joke about it that he keeps the car on life support much past the car's natural age. He should just perform euthanasia on the car and allow it to gracefully die.

Well, I guess I am the same way with my lawn mower. I have a 22" Lawnboy that I got used for $25 dollar, 14 years ago. So I figure that the lawn mower is actually 30 years old. Every spring when I start it up for the first time, I wonder if will actually come to life. And sure enough, it sputters and coughs and comes to life. Over the years, the steel deck on the mower has been slowly rusting apart. I have re-welded on supports around the back wheels and last summer I bolted extra supports along both sides of the deck from the back wheels to the front wheels. (the deck was rusting so much that when I would push down on the handle to lift the front wheels, I would hear the blade hit the underside of the deck.

When I started my mower this spring, it took a significantly longer time to come to life, and I found that I needed to keep shaking it to keep it going. I suspect that sediment had built up in the carburator and that by shaking it, it loosened up the sediment and eventually enabled it to pass through the engine. Even through I finally got it to life, it is getting louder every hear. So much so that I am actually considering getting a quieter lawn mower.

Then I found out that my friend down the street had given up using her LawnBoy. She said that it would die on her in the middle of cutting the lawn. She was planning on getting another lawn mower so she was quite happy to give the LawnBoy to me (since she was also convinced that it did not work). I took it home, squirted some Rapid Fire into the carburetor, filled up the tank with gas and gave it a few yanks. Just like that, it started. But then after 2 minutes, it died. So I tried my shaking trick. I got it started again then I kept shaking it for a couple of minutes. Sure enough, it ran smooth after a couple of minutes of agitation. So after about 15 minutes of playing with it, it works as good as new. I felt guilty about taking a perfectly good lawnmower from her, so I gave it back to her.

I guess in my own way, I like to keep machines living much past their natural lives.

Teaching C programming

This week I gave my C programming class an assignment in which I was able to observe their comprehension of programming in C.

The assignment was as follows: Write a program that inputs two floating-point values from the keyboard and then displays their product.

I directed them to a sample piece of code as follows:

#include
int main(void)
{
float y;
int x;
puts("Enter a float, then an int");
scanf( "%f %d", &y, &x);
printf( "\nYou entered %f and %d ", y, x);
return 0;
}

I had the students think through each line of the above code so that they understood how this is taking in 2 numbers and printing them back out.

Then I had them consider the following:

Arguments in printf () can be any valid C expression. For example, to print the sum of x and y, you could write:

total = x + y;
printf("%d", total);

You also could write

printf("%d", x + y);


With the above information, they should be able to figure out how to complete the assignment. It was interesting watching them piece together these bits of information from different locations to come up with a complete solution. The students also felt the satisfaction of figuring out the solution on their own, since I gave them hints in the right direction, but they still had to make the connections on their own.

Kant and a priori knowledge

Kant liked to talk a lot about a priori knowledge: The knowledge that you can gain without experimentation, for example "All bachelors are unmarried". He goes on in his "Critique of Pure Reason" to elaborate on all this knowledge that we can gain without experiments. Well, if you look at the above example, the knowledge that all bachelors are unmarried is just a clarification of language. By looking at the definitions of these terms: bachelor and unmarried, there a pre-defined relationship between these concepts in the English language. So then, a priori knowledge is just a fancy way for clarifying the relationships that already exists between words and concepts in a language. I really think that a priori knowledge can only exist in the context of language because a priori knowledge is really only the clever manipulation of words.

The development of a priori knowledge is also called deductive reasoning - figuring things out from pre-existing premises. Philosophers love to figure things out deductively rather than lift a finger and do an actual experiment. They do not want to "dirty" their thinking with experimentally obtained facts.

Well, my question is "what are they thinking about if they are not using experimentally obtained information". Since most of their deductive thinking is just clever manipulations of definitions of words, how can they do their deductive thinking without having first learned a language. And learning a language is done experientially. So they have to experience before they can deductively think.

I think that pure philosophy has this illusion that they can think their way to figuring out life rather than actually engaging in life and experiencing it. Because of this, they do not have a framework for combining critical deductive thinking with experientially gained information. Thus philosophers do not know how to incorporate spiritual knowledge gained through experience into their deductive reasoning processes.

Of course, the current trend in philosophy (post modernism) is to throw out the deductive reasoning and rely totally on personal experience as the only way to gain knowledge.

I think both reasoning and experience need to be valued. People need to be able to communicate their experiences in reasonable ways, and they need to temper their reasoning with experiential reality.