Monthly Archives: May 2002

During my class in literary

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During my class in literary criticism, we were discussing Feminist criticism of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

Feminist criticism is so hard to listen to, because it is so painfully true. I find that I cannot pay attention to what’s being said for very long, because my mind instantly leaps to examples in my own life that uphold the argument made by the feminist.

My girl Kisa and I started writing notes to one another about the situation:

The thing they never seem to understand, is that we know MORE than them–about the world, us, AND them!

Yes, but the WAY we know things doesn’t fit easily in the logical, “reasonable” man-thinking that has become the only acceptable voice of authority. Emotion, compassion, or intuition are excluded.

Word! It’s strange, though. Sometimes I think there’s a sort of (oppressed) power in our secret knowledge. Kind of like the whole of womankind is collectively thinking, ‘OK, we’ll let them think they in charge/know what’s up/understand our “feeble” minds,’ while we know what’s REALLY going on. We can’t come out and SAY it, which is why I say ‘oppressed,’ but still, there’s a strange sense of power in it.

I think women are more concerned about relationships than power. It’s like, we love these men, and they want the power, so we indulge them. It’s more important to us to have love than power. It’s not worth the relationship to destroy their illusion of grandeur. But it comes back on women; we need to own our own power and flex it in ways that will help.

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I fear that this transcription might alienate male readers, but I still feel that the truth deserves to be told. Female ways of talking are often excluded from having the Right to be Right because they come from an unexpected place. A soft voice, a high-pitched voice is heard as less imperative than a forceful. deep MANLY voice.

Or words that are “emotional” are dismissed as irrational. I say, emotionality and rationality are not mutually exclusive.

I know that the world turns on what is already in place. As a teacher and as a Supervisor in the IT field, I have learned to Bark out forcefully what I need to be taken seriously. It’s like a tool in my toolbelt, I can use it when I need to.

Yet, I think it would be better if I did not have to. If women could wield authority based on the merit of what they have to say, the world would be that much better.

I personally resent having to become “masculine” to be taken seriously in this man’s world.
I know that I, and many of my women friends, have a way of seeing ideas holistically that leaves a lot of my male friends going “huh?”

And yet, we feel merciful towards these poor saps. We don’t want them to feel embarrassed. We’ll slow up and talk in little words so that they can respect themselves.

Okay, I might be overstating the case. But not every case.

I DO know that I, and other women, have purposely held back from attaining their full potential or expressing themselves fully because it would create a rift in their primary relationship. Like, “I could go to work, and be a blazing success. But what would my man do? What would my children do? I should make them a priority.”

Ambition is often quenched by a sense of duty. Thank god, things have changed. A woman’s duty has been redefined so that responsibility for children and the home is becoming shared between the man and the woman.

But the “work” of maintaining an intimate relationship is still often solely the responsibility of the woman, since men are so ill-equipped by the culture to assess the health a relationship.

But women know. We ought to share. But then, others would need to listen.

MORE ON BARRIERS TO ENTRY

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More on Barriers To Entry:

Jay, who is an Economist, introduced his little bit about “signal to noise” with this comment:

Economists tend to look at puzzling phenomena and
Ask themselves, “what problem does this phenomenon solve?”

Perhaps I should be an economist. I ask that question too! But I usually don’t stop there. I believe it is important to understand the uses of personal and societal structures or habits before altering them. It’s similar to finding out the uses of your house’s walls (are they weight-bearing) before knocking one of them down.

Common sense and personal responsibility require you to know something about what you are doing.

But if you stop after understanding the problem, you have wasted your time. Understanding should lead to action. Find a way to work within the structure usefully, or come up with a better structure.

Now, if, after understanding the structure, you see that it is flawed (it does not solve the problem it was originally intended to fix, or solves it at too high a cost), you must work on it to “fix” it.

This is very difficult, and a very worthy task.

Not everyone can do it. Oh wait; did I just put another barrier up?

Let me put it this way:
Not everyone can work towards the solution for every problem.
BUT
Every individual has at least one, and probably more, area of expertise.

If those who had expertise in an area were given access to more information (the kind usually reserved for those with THE RIGHT TO BE RIGHT) and were listened to, their expertise could be captured and made useful.

Jay’s right to be right

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THE RIGHT TO BE RIGHT

I’ve already talked about barriers to entry in this blog. I got a response from a reader, my friend Jay.

Yes, I do have a reader! Wow!

He made a good point about the barriers to entry as useful devices, screening out the “noise” from the “Signal.” That is to say, the signal is the useful information and the noise is the garbage created by external circumstances. As a person who has been (may still be, soon) professionally engaged with computer networks, I understand this concept. However, the only difference between the “Noise” and the “signal” is in whether the receiving end can process it in a useful way.

Bear with me.

Paolo Freire, a Brazilian law professor, did some very interesting work about the process and theory of education. He articulated the idea of the “banking” concept of Education. In this model, the teachers act as retainers and distributors of knowledge and the students are empty vessels for the teachers to fill. The teacher’s “task is to fill the student with the contents of his narration.” Students are perceived as unable to contribute, and are without knowledge until it has been given to them by the teacher. The students do not contribute to or interact with the knowledge to change or add to it; they merely receive it.

What students are supposed to do is take the static commodity that is knowledge information and shape it into the required forms—in the case of classes, it would be homework assignments, test, or papers. But they should not significantly add to the knowledge or change it. The authority to modify the knowledge information is restricted.

Okay.

In the business world, the persons who have the authority to make policies are restricted. The executives hand down decisions and policies, a static commodity, for the employees to shape into the required form—a product, an organization scheme, a metric to meet.

In the military, Officers give orders that the enlisted people are not allowed to question. They must execute the order.

But even the military, the example that seems most suited to a strongly hierarchical system of authority benefits from allowing knowledge to come in from “below”.

In his popular book Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, the physicist Richard Feynman talks about his experiences with the military. He was stationed at Los Alamos to do research and testing of the atom bomb. When he discovered where the military was procuring the radioactive material from, he freaked out. The men who were handling this volatile matter were doing it such a way as to endanger the entire base and blow it to smithereens. He immediately went to the military authority and told them about the danger they were in. Feynman wanted to tell the men working with the radioactive materials how to do is safely.

The general told him that the information was classified, and the men could not be informed about their danger. (it was the military’s knowledge, they owned it, they would do with it what they willed)
But the laws of physics supported Feynman’s plan and the general decided to let Feynman inform the men of what they were handling and how to handle it properly.

When he recounts the story, Feynman says that once the men were told what they were doing and given the information, they themselves came up with more efficient and better ways of handling the material than HE could have devised.

Here is the crux of the matter. When knowledge is retained and acted upon only by a few people, expertise is wasted. But if more people are empowered to act and interact with the knowledge then greater efficiency, greater results will be achieved.

But when knowledge and authority (the right to be right) is out of reach for most, most are powerless.

How many of us, in the company we work for, or the school we are in, found that we have to go against company policy to get our jobs done? As in, do the task first, and sidestep the proper procedure? Ignore or violate security measures to get something done?

Or who has had a truly beneficial idea that will have significant results for the company, but which will never go anywhere because the ones in POWER will not listen?

Then again, there are the majority of workers and students who have ceased to have ideas, since they have no way of implementing them in a system where action and power are reserved for the few.

In the realm of government, we used to have a system that put barriers of entry between the common person and power. It was called a monarchy. But the American democratic system was designed with faith in the individual to be able to operate meaningfully on information to take action and create policies. The framers of the constitution had faith in the people to create more “signal” than “noise”.