Week 2 / Responsible-thinking and its subjectivity
When there is subjectivity, we need empathy and transparency
Hello 🤗
Hope you all had a great start to your week!
I'd like to first thank you all for following this journey along since the start ❤️ I received many constructive and positive feedback on the first entry last week, which is very exciting!
This week, I continued to explore responsible-thinking education but with an emphasis on ways to deal with subjectivity in acting on a shared intent. I also focused the experimentation on less of coming with a solution but more of treating it as another way to flesh out the nuances of the topic.
Analyzing
what I have been digging into...
"And in the ceteris paribus that everyone has good intentions, their personal philosophy on “responsibility” can still differ. In other words, it begs the question of whether the means justify the ends (e.g., the trolley problem)." Two people can share one intent but act differently on it, is one of the responses I received to last week's entry. We see this everywhere every day: in meeting rooms where different people have different ideas to help the company reaches its quarterly goals; at dinner tables where different relatives have different notions about what it means for their kids to be successful; in this progressive society where different organizations introduce different goods and services because they believe in ways to make this world a better place. In a sense, these dynamics between a diversity of thoughts reflect the beauty of being human. However, they also surface the most challenging aspect of ethics and education. What is right for one person could be wrong for another, and what is right in one context could be wrong in another. Even when people know that they should take responsibility for what they do, they could have different notions of the form and extent in which the responsibility should be taken based on their values that are shaped by their unique personal experiences. Given this, I think ethical education should strive for is not to educate people to achieve absolute or one-size-fits-all fairness. It should equip them with the ability to sympathize and empathize with different stakeholders' perspectives fast.
Last week's experiment focused on training students to think more responsibly by iterating on their solution and monitoring the effects. One feedback I got was that it is very important for people in the room to learn to address the lack of diversity and one's own biases when contributing. I think this is key to address what I outlined above.
Experimenting
with new possibilities...
The goal for this week is still to design a course to make responsible-thinking our second nature but with more emphasis on training students to understand the degree of influence of people's unique experiences on how they contribute to the shared intent.
During the discussion time, each person will explain their rationales behind their mappings. This will not only allow them to check their mappings with others but also be more aware of how they could impose their biases onto others' ways of thinking (in cases where their mappings are incorrect) as well as seeing how different ways of acting on the shared intent could potentially clash.
This would enhance students' responsible-thinking by
surfacing that people could have different ways to act on a shared intent, and
training them to think more deeply about where other people might be coming from
Ideally, this should be done repetitively with diverse groups of people and/or incorporated into the discussion-based subjects like Philosophy, History, Psychology, and Literature.
Some of the possible challenges of this structure are
students not being open and honest about their backgrounds (could be a sensitive topic to some people)
mappings could be taken personally as a form of personality judgments among team members
These challenges reflect a crucial challenge in the field of ethical education, which is a lack of access and transparency about different stakeholders' backgrounds.
Reflecting
on what I've learnt...
This week's experimentation makes the purpose of it more clear to me. Through fleshing out ideas, I am not yet looking to come up with anything close to perfect solutions. This is a means for me to better understand the nuances of the complexity of a topic through rapid prototyping, in this case, ethical education, by drawing the correlation between challenges of the idea and challenges of the system.
In addition, Responsible-thinking is a very broad topic with a lot of moving parts that are impossible to synthesize in a week. While this provides me with the freedom to explore the topic from any angle I want, I struggled to settle on something until the second to last day of the week. I am also not looking to settle on a thesis topic this early because I want to see what aspects of education excites me most. I will be trying out a rotation structure (similar to how rotational programs work in the corporate world) where I will give myself a specific amount of time to exploring a few topics in depth before settling on one. I am thinking about four weeks per topic for four months at this point. I will keep you updated on this as I go.
Sourcing
for your unique perspectives...
In addition to perspectives on the topic, I am looking to hear about your personal experiences in deciding what is right and wrong in different situations. I would love to learn about the situations that you went through and your thought processes behind your decisions.
Thanks for making it this far! My twitter inbox and email are always open 🤩
Happy self-made,
Mind