It hasn't been the most productive week, as I took the chance to visit with some friends who were in Seattle for the week. We met halfway between Portland and Seattle. Celia had a great time playing with her old friend Solomon and I got to spend some good daddy-time with Ferguson and Celia.
On Thursday, I had a great conversation with Tom Keller and David DuBois. We are cooking up a collaboration and it's really exciting. Hopefully our work together will provide some useful tools for the mentoring field.
I also arranged the first meeting of the NLC Mentoring Programs Research Committee this week. This is the committee that I helped organize made up of Big Brothers Big Sisters agency leaders from around the country. We have eight other top-notch members from around the country and we'll have our first meeting on March 5. I'm excited with the promise of this group to bring more research knowledge into our Big Brothers Big Sisters network. The committee has been authorized by the Mentoring Programs Committee of our Nationwide Leadership Council (NLC). The NLC is the agency-led body that helps set the direction for our nationwide federation.
I've also had some interesting reponses via email to my last blog post about meaning and truth. One of my friends, Kitt, pointed me to the work of William James. I find his pragmatist notions of truth attractive. Here's a quote from James on truth from "The Meaning of Truth,"
"Any idea that helps us to deal, whether practically or intellectually, with either the reality or its belongings, that doesn’t entangle our progress in frustrations, that FITS, in fact, and adapts our life to the reality’s whole setting, will agree sufficiently to meet the requirement. It will be true of that reality."
I also enjoyed the quote from my friend Charles, who does some cool work with experimental economics:
"Science, it seems to me, has nothing to do with truth. The concept isn't needed. Science is about statistical regularities, across individuals and through time, that characterize how we perceive empirical phenomena. That's it. Truth, whatever that is, doesn't appear. There's always noise. We never get regularities on the boundary (i.e. the error probability is 0), if for no reason other than we can only take finite samples. In fact, if it is even possible in principle to eliminate noise, the required model would probably be way too complicated for anybody to understand. But we can specify how close to the boundary we are. To me that seems like one of the big advances of science over, say, philosophy. Whatever your objective (truth, statistical regularity, etc.), only science insofar as I know has developed methods for specifying how close to the boundary you are. And I guess that's the point. The question is not, is it true or not? The question is simply, is it good enough?"
I welcome any and all comments on my blog. I've figured out the settings to where you don't have to register with blogspot to leave a comment. I would just ask that folks please identify themselves when they leave a comment. I find the practice of anonymous comments on blog sites kind of obnoxious. It seems to me that the promotion of anonymous comments in the blogosphere has lowered the level of discourse. As I've tried to keep up on current events through the Juneau Empire, I've been amazed with the thoughtlessness of so many of the anonymous comments, particularly when the articles commented on deal with politics.
This weekend, I'm hoping to finish Diffusion of Innovation, by Everett Rogers. What a cool book. I've been particularly intrigued by his theories on how innovations get adopted across social networks. Rogers talks about homophily and heterophily and how they affect transfer of knowledge across a network. Rogers defines homophily as "the degree to which a pair of individuals who communicate are similar" and heterophily as "the degree to which pairs of individuals who interact are different in certain attributes." Rogers posits that "when two individuals share common meanings, beliefs, and mutual understanding, communication between them is more likely to be effective." But interestingly, Rogers claims that heterophilous network links are especially important in conveying information, because they often bridge between isolated cliques. So while homophilous communication may accelerate the diffusion process because it's easier to do, diffusion can only occur through communication links that are at least somewhat heterophilous.
Thinking of these notions of homophily and heterophily got me thinking a lot about mentoring relationships. It seems that in many ways, we are creating heterophilous links when we match an adult mentor with a child. Not just in the sense of matching adults and youth from different socioeconomic or culture groups. We are also creating heterphilous links because of the age status of each individual. Maybe a question is how can we take advantage of the heterophilous communication in a match, to transfer knowledge from a Big to a Little, while helping our matches become homophilous over time. Maybe this is one of the ways that mentoring works, by turning heterophilous network links into homophilous links, that are effective in transmitting information, but also in creating social cohesion over time.
In our reading group last Friday we had an interesting discusison that touched on the network effects of mentoring. There has been a lot of theory in Big Brothers Big Sisters that if we can match enough children in a school or a community, we can have a larger "network effect" on that body. It would be interesting to find a way to test that notion at some point. It seems intuitively true, but finding a way to build an experiment around the idea seems daunting. Would you have two find two similar towns, and introduce mentoring at different levels of saturation to test these network effects? Or is there some kind of statistical model that could be built to demonstrate the effects?
I'm getting excited about the Portland Jazz Festival. It just kicked off yesterday and happens through next weekend. I'm hoping to be able to catch McCoy Tyner, Cassandra Wilson, and Bobby Hutcherson. Indeed, I wish I could go to a show every day, but I will be lucky if I can even pull off these three shows. I'm also excited that the festival features in-person interviews with all the performers. I'm also hoping to catch some of these free events to get some more insight on performers. Yesterday, I happened to run into the sax player Joe Lovano. I also met his wife, Judi, who is also a jazz singer. I got to tell Mr. Lovano how much I enjoyed seeing him at the Village Vanguard last September with Paul Motian and Bill Frisell. He and Judy even let me take their picture with him.
Judi Silvano, me, Joe Lovano, and an employee of KHMD radio
1 comment:
Gommista, I am impressed and gratified by the way you extracted the essence from James's _The Meaning of Truth_. For me, since I spent a number of years getting diffused by cultural relativism, the pragmatic test of truth as the thing, when held, that makes a difference to how you act made a pretty big impact on me. My thoughts are still in flux, but in pragmatism that is the nature of thoughts; in fact, it is fixed beliefs that are dangerous. Indeed, I try to hold the pragmatic test to my ideas: to hold them fallibly, as things that are incomplete, dependent upon experience and context, as pluralistic (members of a field of alternatives), as perspectival, experimental, contextual, and ameliorative. The only trouble this gets me into is how to meet an inflexible, absolute, essential idea; or, I should say, how to meet a person who holds their ideas in this way. A fundamentalist of whatever stripe.
So we are back to J.S. Mill, to the tolerance of all except the intolerant, except I as a pluralist want to go even further than this. Apropos of our recent topic--how foodies can become only another variant on the culture of consumption--I find myself a critic, as always, of my own milieu, how its members tend to a group-think even on perspectives I share (as, for example, a Pollan-esque critique of industrial food).
All of which is to say that the partial truth is the only truth we have. I think this can be empowering, but I acknowledge that I do not know what it is like to feel responsible for large groups of at-risk youth, like you are. On the other hand, it can be exhausting, right? Because a truth never grasped certainly is a truth that can never put one's search to rest.
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