Chart and Use “The Course” with Bias Blasting C.U.D.O.s
Hi everyone and welcome to your Food 4 Thought : Chart and Use “The Course” with Bias Blasting C.U.D.O.s
We are excited to bring you Food 4 Thought, with the intent of sparking new ways to look at and approach our lives and work, tackle the changes we are faced with and maximize the opportunities to grow, both in our own mindset and better together. (We also hope you get a chuckle or two along the way.)
I am republishing this (mostly) as I wrote it in my corporate work blog. As I wrote there, years ago, due to some amazing bureaucracy, I was not able to use many images and references without copyright infringement fear and concern, so I often made farcical references to continue to use analogies and popular culture to share my food 4 thought and tell my stories. (I was trying to take dry subject matter and make it at least slightly entertaining, and that is a tall order in larger corporations as many folks know.)
Here is how I adapted this one with words. In the corporate version I would have substituted milk-toast links pictures and videos showing generic, public use versions of the imagery, but reporting it here I can add some of the actual imagery and videos from pop culture (in this case Star Wars) to make the contrast hopefully even more entertaining!
A long time ago in a star cluster far, far away there lived a young hero. For the sake of copyright protections, let’s call this hero “Fluke Whywalker.” As this hero looked longingly out over the sand dunes of his desert planet at the three suns setting in the distance, he had little knowledge that just miles away there lived a wise man, he knew only as “Fen,” that was secretly a “Headeye” Master once known as “Toby Wanna Connoli.”
Upon learning of his acquaintance’s secret identify and past, Fluke was left with questions:
“Why???!!!!”
“Why???!!!!!!!!!” Fluke, moaned in a shrill yet decidedly uber-whiney cry baby voice.
“Fen, why didn’t you tell me you knew the ways of “The Course” and that you could teach me to be a “Headeye” like my father?
Later, on a frigid ice planet named “Roth,” after some rudimentary “Course” lessons from “Toby Wanna Cannoli,” Fluke found himself hanging upside down in an ice cave, under attack from a mighty silver-backed ice yeti! Using his meager Course skills, he barely escaped with his life, it was at this time he vowed the following:
(Traveler’s note: The Ice Planet Roth is inhabited not only by these yeti creatures, but it is also the home of tribesmen, who travel about on large white, camel-llama hybrid creatures who are notorious for freezing to death before nightfall if exposed to the frosty elements too long, the tribesman only stay on the planet because of the exemplary retirement accounts)
(read this in your best lawyer fine print commercial voice)
“I will learn to use “The Course” and I will never do what “Fen” did and hide my knowledge from others. Nor will I let my biases work against me and lead me down the path the dark side of “the Course.” Unlike him, and his master “Soda,” I will share what I have learned freely, generously, objectively and back it up with CUDOs.”
Fluke
At the Food 4Thought starbase headquarters we are always looking for fun ways to lure you into reading about techniques and strategies that might make for a better world and more effective problem-solving.
As we sit around in our “Headeye Council” meetings, we wax philosophical about how we need to get our Headeyes out of our “backpacks” sometimes and be more objective and unbiased in our dealing with the complicated challenges we are asked to resolve and collaborate on and the people we work and live with.
One of the best ways we try to teach our fellow “Headeyes” about the ways of “The Course” is to help them see the natural tendencies we all have to be fallible in our decision making and provide guidance on how to overcome our innate tendencies.
“Cookie Dough or Do-nuts, there are no fries”
Soda (Headeye Master Supreme)
(he was very wise but he had a bizarre and distracting affection for desserts over fast food?)
The mores of science possess a methodological rationale but they are binding, not only because they are procedurally efficient, but because they are believed right and good. They are moral as well as technical prescriptions.
Merton
If the tribe of science is a community defined by a common project — building a body of reliable knowledge about the world and how it works — the norms Merton identifies are something like the shared values of that community, values that are taken to be essential to the project of the community.
I propose that these norms can be useful outside of science as well. I propose they can be used in our daily work, projects, communities, decision making, and interactions. First let’s learn a bit about Merton’s norms and then let’s apply them as Food 4 Thought.
Merton believed you could boil down the values of modern science into a set of four norms – that form the acronym CUDO:
“Communism” (not the political system)
Writing in 1942, Merton was careful to put this in scare-quotes. He’s not talking about Marxist-Leninist Communism, but about the view that scientific knowledge is a resource to be shared by the whole tribe of science, regardless of which individual scientists produced which particular bits of knowledge.
In other words, ideally, if you establish a finding, you get recognition within the tribe for finding it, you may even get your name on an equation, but then that finding is public knowledge that anyone in the tribe of science can use to build additional knowledge (which itself is to be shared by the tribe of science).
One of the things a scientist needs to do to live up to this norm is to communicate her findings to other scientists. If a result stays in your head, or even your lab notebook, it’s not ending up in the shared body of scientific knowledge.
Knowledge that isn’t made public doesn’t help the tribe with its shared project.
This is the generosity that Fluke vowed to share with his teammates. When we have knowledge about a situation or circumstance, unless constrained by ethical or confidentiality requirements, we should share that knowledge. If we find a way or have data, tools or materials that will help our fellow humans, we should strive not to hoard it, but to share it with those around us.
Don’t wait for someone to ask- share what you have learned. (I am pretty sure Soda also said that once, but his mouth was kind of stuffed with do-nuts so I can’t be sure?)
Universalism
This is the idea that the important issue for scientists is the content of claims about the world (or about the phenomena being studied), not the particulars about the people making those claims.
In other words, the tribe of science is committed to investigating knowledge claims made by graduate students as well as those made by Nobel Prize winners, those made by scientists at small colleges as well as those made at famous universities with huge endowments and buckets of grant money, those made by scientists in other countries as well as those made by scientists in one’s own country.
Since the shared goal is building a reliable body of knowledge about the world we share, all the scientists engaged in that project are to be treated as capable to contribute. Disregarding another scientist’s report because of who he is, then, is a breach of the norm of universalism.
Too often, we bring our biases about a person, our past dealings, what we heard about them, what our initial impressions of them may have been to bear on our decision making. This can send us flying off in the wrong direction quicker than a lightning shock from a droid. When you feel yourself slipping into the opposite of universalism, take a breath, listen to your feelings and biases about the person, let go of them and concentrate on the facts and data presented to you.
Disinterestedness
One way to think about the norm of disinterestedness is that scientists aren’t doing science primarily to get the big bucks, or fame. Merton’s description of this community value is a bit more subtle. He notes that disinterestedness is different from altruism, and that scientists needn’t be saints, but they are fallible.
“We are not naturally disinterested. We don’t process information independent of the way we wish the world to be.”
Annie Duke
And neither are scientists, but they fight hard to be this way and so should we.
Annie further suggests some ways to overcome this bias : she asks us to try and promote disinterestedness by avoiding sharing the outcome of a story and focusing instead on the narrative, stopping short of sharing how we think it is going to turn out.
Of course, this is particularly challenging for us as we are often asked to provide a clear roadmap to the end state of an initiative or solution. We are asked to have not only the facts and a suggest path forward to try, but THE path and THE right set of solutions to bring about peace and harmony in our star cluster, community, or business.
So Annie offers another way to fight this bias, she suggests we reward people for debating opposing viewpoints and finding merit in opposing positions. Surely, this is a cultural challenge of the highest order for some, but it is very in line with our most aspirational behaviors. Our job is to practice this and find ways to do so (and encourage others to) that are healthy, aligned and done in the proper context.
Organized Skepticism
This is the value that balances universalism. Everyone in the tribe of science can advance knowledge claims, but every such claim that is advanced is scrutinized, tested, tortured to see if it really holds up. The claims that do survive the skeptical scrutiny of the tribe get to take their place in the shard body of scientific knowledge. This is also the norm that makes disinterestedness work — without organized skepticism, you might actually have a reasonable expectation of putting one over on your scientific peers for personal gain.
As Annie Duke puts it:
Skepticism gets a bum rap because it tends to be associated with negative character traits. Annie Duke
To be sure we have to guard against that, especially in our culture, where our delivery and timing of our skepticism is sometimes a critical part of creating the biases in other people about us described in the Universalism norm. If we are too overtly skeptical in our culture we can be viewed as “not onboard” if we are too flexible and open to new and out of the box ideas we may be seen as “flighty” or “naive.”
Bringing balance to “the Course” or finding the “Goldilocks’ Zone is called for in leveraging this norm as well. What Annie Duke advocates is operationalizing skepticism. She mentions that one way to build this into our lives is to build anonymous dissent channels and reward constructive dissent. We’ve made many strides in this area organizationally to be sure, but we need to consider how we can do more, especially in our teams and our individual projects and people we lead and encourage.
Some of this is taken from Annie Duke’s Thinking in Bets and others aspects from a relevant essay originally published as “Science and Technology in a Democratic Order,” Journal of Legal and Political Sociology 1 (1942), 115-126. I’m working from the version entitled “The Normative Structure of Science” included in Robert K. Merton, The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations University of Chicago Press (1979), 267-278. pp. 268-269. p. 270 as well as from a blog post by jstemwedel @ <https://scienceblogs.com/ethicsandscience/2008/01/29/basic-concepts-the-norms-of-sc>
So that is your Food 4 Thought.
Ask yourself :
Where do I see room for improvement in the C.U.D.O set of norms and how I show up?
What can I do differently, starting with just one letter of the acronym to improve?
How and in what areas of influence in my life can I address the other letters in the coming weeks and months
I hope you feel like you have learned at least some of “The Ways of the Course,” and you are better armed for your next encounter with the mighty silver back Yeti’s of your life, if you don’t that’s OK. Remember, after all, it’s just Food 4 Thought.
“May The Course be With You, and pass the Do-nuts will ya?”
Leave a Reply