4/15: Emotions, Creativity, and Art

Here are the questions that we discussed in class today:

  • How does Roeser define “emotion?”  (Dual process theory states that thought is composed of “emotions,” which are rapid reactions, and “rational evaluation,” which is a slower process. Roeser proposes that there are also more elaborate type of emotions that are reflective, or are part of the reflection process. She also proposes that these emotions enable us to imagine future scenarios, which is an important element of risk analysis – remember the risk triplet – and moral decision making)
  • What is “moral emotion?”
  • How does one define “emotional maturity?” Why is it important for engineering professionals? Does your engineering education at Berkley help train your emotional maturity? (When I’ve applied for jobs in the past, and when I’ve been a reference writer for students applying for research positions, I’ve come across evaluation forms that ask reviewers to judge the “emotional maturity” of the applicant. If in your careers you are evaluated on this criterion, then it’s important to ask if your education helps you train this dimension of your skills).
  • What is creativity? What role does emotion play in creativity? How do you train creativity?

Below is a photograph of the blackboard notes.

Here are some follow-up questions that I would like to raise:

  • Could emotions be engaged to inform morally-sensitive design?
  • Can emotions be a source of critical reflection? Do they lead to more balanced judgements? Can they help in approaching complex ethical questions?
  • Narrative vs. computational intelligence – what do these terms mean? Do emotions help us better draw context-sensitive insights?
  • How do you define “emotional intelligence?” How does Roeser define it? What has helped you develop your “emotional intelligence?”
  • Can you make a list of emotions? Which one of these have you encountered in your work as an engineering student?

And here are some of my responses to today’s class discussion that I didn’t get to say in class (disclaimer: these are personal opinions, but of course all opinions are personal):

  • I don’t think that creativity is something that cannot be trained. I don’t think that people have to be born creative in order to be creative. Everybody has different inclinations, and everybody trains their creativity differently. To train it, it’s certainty necessary to be comfortable to try things that may or may not go somewhere; but at the same time there’s also a degree of discomfort that comes with the creative process – because you’re breaking the bounds of previously reasoned thought, and that can be uncomfortable – and you have to learn how to approach that zone of discomfort, and how to work in it.
  • There was a lot of discussion about emotions that arise from conflict – because engineers need to know how to work in teams, and poorly managed emotions get in the way of productive team work. First of all, I want to emphasize that repressed or dismissed emotions are NOT the solution to good team-work. It’s not only the responsibility of the person having strong emotions to analyze them and better express them so that everybody else understands their source, but it’s also the responsibility of everybody else to help that person do exactly that. When somebody is infuriated, that infuriates people around her/him and maybe that was exactly the intended impact, to get people mobilized to do something about the issue at hand. Think about the Bhopal accident – how can you tell that story without emotion? Now, sometimes it’s not the intention of that one person to infuriate everybody – but there is something at the root cause of that person’s anger, and that needs to be teased out – and that teasing out is a process is not a strictly self-reflective exercise – it actually should involve the team as much as it involves the infuriated person. Somebody gave the example of Steve Wozniak being very difficult to work with because he didn’t  keep his emotions at bay – well, he did get a lot of great things done, didn’t he? Perhaps it was his way of pushing people to do things better? All of that is the preamble to a bigger point that I wanted to make: emotional maturity does not mean being a master of suppressing your feelings, a master of continuing to be productive despite your feelings or your emotional state, a master of keeping your emotions at bay. Emotional maturity, or emotional intelligence means knowing how to work WITH your feelings, understanding them, soliciting them, working with them, teasing them out, using them to complement conscious thought.

[Another brief post to follow, on the instructions for the exercise at the art museum.]

 

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Peer Review and Critical Analysis

Here is some additional (optional) reading material related to critical analysis and peer review.

Crusade Against Sloppy Mathematics

On Piazza, under Resources, I posted an article called Crusade Against Sloppy Mathematics (from G. Szpiro, “A Mathematical Medley”. American Mathematical Society 2010. p 229-231). Here is also a link to the Douglas Keenan‘s website, whose work is discussed in the article.

On his website you’ll see that he received a check from Donald Knuth (computer science at mathematics Professor Emeritus at Stanford), for having found an error in one of his publications.

An interesting quote by Donald Knuth: “Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.” I think that this broadly applies to engineering practice; we should always be aware of the issues that arise upon implementation of an engineered product.

Peer Review Guidelines

Here are the guidelines for reviewers provided Elsevier, which is one of the large scientific publishers (they publish over 1000 scientific journals).

You may find this diagram interesting, for the Elsevier_Article_submission_process.png

Linked to these guidelines, they have a website for ethics in research and publication.

Take a look through these materials, and think about whether you agree with these guidelines, or find any key issues that are missing.

Also, on your own, take a look at the review guidelines and ethics statements provided by other journal publishers, book publishers, newspaper publishers etc.

Presenting Information

Lastly, Edward Tufte has some interesting writings on misleading presentation of information. This article, for example, is on the crash of the Columbia space shuttle.You may find his books interesting; the engineering library has a number of them.

Lecture Notes – 1/21: Introduction to the course

1/21 | First Class, Introduction

[Video clip: Alvin Ailey, “I’ve been ‘Buked” from Revelations: “There is trouble all of the world, children, there is trouble all over the world.”]

Alvin Ailey was a modern dance choreographer and an activist. (His dance company is performing at Zellerbach Hall on April 1-6, and Revelations is always part of their program.) I was inspired to show you this clip by one of your responses to the survey:

How do you envision your role in society?

“TO MAKE DA PLAN3T BETTAAAAA 4 EVERY11111111111”

It expresses the same idea, just in a different format. I’m not sure if you meant “beta” or “better.” I wonder if there is if the two might not be that far from each other. After all, if you’re continuously improving, you’re continuously in “beta” version. This might be fine, but it’s important to understand just that – that the level of knowledge is continuously evolving. This is the best of what engineering can offer, and it has one foot in the future, and one foot in the past. Some of you may rather advocate to make the PLAN3T good. That’s an interesting concept; assuming that you can pick what the world will look like forever – what would you pick?

Yesterday was Martin Luther King Jr. day. He was a civil rights activist, and like many great thinkers and leaders he spoke of many problems that are universal and timeless. Here’s a fragment from a speech by him that relates to this class:

“Power, properly understood, is the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political or economic changes. In this sense power is not only desirable but necessary in order to implement the demands of love and justice”

“One of the greatest problems of history is the concepts of love and power are usually contrasted as polar opposites. Love is identified with resignation of power and power with a denial of love. […] What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.” (“Where do we go from here : Chaos or community?” Martin Luther King, Jr. New York : Harper & Row, 1967, p 37)

In this class we speak of power – technology –  and love – what we want to do with this technology. The artifacts of engineering are not inherently good, or inherently bad. Rather, how technology is used that determines if it has a good impact on human civilization.

Many of you have read Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Here is an analysis of this novel from a book called Technoculture: “Shelley’s monster, initially, is far from the marauding demon that is portrayed in most of the Hollywood films adapted from the novel. Actually, he is rather sweet. He evidences an endearing, childlike curiosity about the world and tries desperately to be accepted but everyone he meets creator with horror because he is so obviously wrong. At the end of the novel you are left with the impression that Victor Frankenstein’s mistake was not in the creation of an artificial form of life but in ot taking account of the prejudices of nineteenth-century European culture.” (Technoculture, Shaw, 2008)

Some of your responses to the survey also speak to this:

Should engineering undergrads have to learn about ethics?

“Yes. I feel that only if future engineers have ideas of not only what they are going to make, but also why they make, how they might influence and where might be influenced by them, they could bring real contributions to the future.”

“No. It is our job to provide society with the knowledge and tools. It is society’s job to decide whether or not to use them.“

So this is the context of this class: how do we better put engineering in the service of society?

Ethics is important in engineering education because perhaps it will help prevent future disasters, such as the gulf oil spill, Fukushima, or 30 thousand car crash fatalities a year in the US (1 per 100 million  miles traveled) – that’s all of the student body at Berkeley.

I’m also really interested in the discourse that we have as engineers about the impact of technology on human civilization. The impact and management of new technologies is a particularly challenging topic that we will discuss. The intro for the science fiction show “Almost Human” gets this point across really well.

In order to really tackle these questions we must reach to many other disciplines besides engineering. I don’t expect every engineer to be an expert in philosophy, politics, or sociology, but I do believe that engineers should be aware that there is much insight to be drawn from other disciplines.  And I do believe that engineers become better engineers, and better human beings, by continuously trying to reach and little by little learn more and more about these disciplines; if not necessarily to become competent in these fields, at least to become aware of their own limited knowledge. This type of exposure would help engineers identify topics in their field of work for which expertise is needed from other fields, and would seek help, rather than trying to do it themselves without the necessary background.

I don’t expect engineers to do more – but I do expect them to reach out more. In this class I hope to expose you to concepts from the humanities and resources that will help you reach out to other fields in your engineering practice.

[explain the San Bruno pipeline explosion example]

There are, of course, engineering ethics issues whose foundation is found in the field of engineering itself, and we will also cover those in class.

There is also a certain amount of introspection that is needed from you. What are your values, what motivates you in your engineering work, what do you deem important? Introspection goes hand in hand with critical thinking that we should continuously apply to the work of others as well as our own thoughts and values.

The challenging thing about teaching ethics is that the instructors themselves have a set of values, an internal system of ethics.  My goal in this class is not to impart to you my values. Rather, I want you to discover, scrutinize, and better understand your own set of values. I want to have a conversation with you, and in this conversation it is impossible, or in fact unnatural, for me to be completely neutral. But this doesn’t mean that I, as an instructor, want you to adopt my point of view. I want you to develop your skills of presenting and supporting your values, I want you to make me understand your point of view, and to challenge mine. These types of conversations you will likely have many times in your career, with your colleagues, your bosses, and with employees who work for you. And most importantly of all, these types of conversations you will have often with yourself.

The assignments are aimed the providing you with different types of formats of expression and different kind of contexts for these conversations  – critical reflections, interview, group project, ethics in the news, learning proposal, and summary reflection.

Generally writing and oral communication is the way in which we exchange ideas in engineering education. Sometimes we build things. At this point this is how all of the assignments are set up. However, if you find that another medium is more appropriate for sharing ideas, or starting a conversation, please go ahead and go that route. Perhaps you’ll want to create a short clip, or a video animation, or make a drawing, or combine a drawing with some text, or enlist a friend majoring in theater to act out something for the class, an interactive website and so on. Maybe a photograph or a sound clip would complement well your written work, and so on. Don’t do it to be exotic – do it if it makes sense to you.

The edublog is meant to be free form. Also, it’s meant as a resource for you past the end of the course. So feel free to use it as such.

Question for the class: what is on your wish list for topics to be covered in this course?