I was going to title this “Not found @ 2009 Consumer Electronics Show…” but I’d get punished.
People invest in training for their education, work, entertainment and even lifestyles. The society as a whole invests billions in training and education for all its children and encourages more of it after high school. Collectively, corporations spend hundreds of billions of dollars on training of all levels; from simple tasks (MS Office) to the ultra complex (Billings fMRI certification). Training can be hands-on, case studies, role-play, webcasts, podcasts, virtual, instructor led, eLearning, Learning communities and even blog solutions groups. Then there is mentoring for individuals to complement sales training, technical training, service training, partner training and vendor training.
Professional athletic organizations spend billions of dollars globally each year to train not only the muscles of their athletes but the way they think about themselves, their competitors, and how to handle work-life balance issues that can be anything but normal. The ‘natural’ athletic ability of athletes like Michael Phelps, Tiger Woods, Paton Manning, Dana Torres, and Mario Williams comes at the price of eight+ hours of practice a day for years in order to be an over-night success. People watch super athletes perform a bevy of athletic feats and too frequently ascribe their behavior to a “natural ability” rather than to intense training in multiple areas that is required to do what they do. The US Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, CO, has classes for athletes on handling the media, food, injuries and anger. Organizations also spend millions more to learn new methods of training world class athletes for elite competition in every sport imaginable from both forms of football, baseball and basketball to lesser but intensely played X-games, tennis and ping pong.
All this time, all this money and all these people invest daily in what they can learn today that will take them to the next level tomorrow. They are all committed to acquiring whatever will improve performance, profit, presentation or information that will serve them in the pursuit of what each of them is organized to value.
However when any of these individuals, groups or organizations are presented with the learning and conditioning rules that apply to their training there is push back and denunciation conditioning. While even a grade school track coach knows how the Krebs cycle affects a ‘kick’ at the end of a 440, they know next to nothing of the methods of reinforcement and avoidance, chaining and fading, discrimination training or schedules effect those they train. Even the arguments against the use of conditioning and learning techniques as being relevant are learned using the very contingency management they deny is involved.
So, am I missing something? Did we all learn to read blogs by reflex? Was divination involved in finding the right partner to marry? Was it always their ‘motivation’ or was it due to a ‘calling’ he turned that MBA from University of Colorado into a creative design position for www.getgreen.com?
The value for us is that learning and conditioning is everywhere. It is harder to find a behavior that didn’t come about due to past consequences than it is to keep up with pop logic that eating chocolate is good for me or that purging is a disease. Please! The effects of learning and conditioning are everywhere; drug cartels, congressman, Joel Osteen, Rev. Wright, moms, brothers sisters and you too.
Maybe we ought to take the rules of learning seriously in order to understand the big stuff about what the heck is going on in the world. Then we can start on the tough stuff.
Find me a behavior that was acquired without conditioning and I’ll pay you money.
As a professional developer, I have had quite a variety of individuals beneath my wing from time to time. They are all at several stages of reticence, individuals whose aversion to change makes their overarching goals all the more unreachable. There are some that make lofty goals with sincere belief and motivation to see it through. What they do not take into account is that the person they are today can not be the person they are when they have completed their trek. They must change their perspective, planning with the end in mind.
Inspired, we book the “Better Self” travel agent without even looking at the itinerary. The shortest distance between point A to B may be a straight line, but what some of us fail to realize is that there are many points/stops unforeseen along the way, where decisions will have to be made. Do I continue? Is this what I signed up for? Can I actually do this? Is it too late to get my money back? It is in those moments, amidst the myriad of intervening steps to get to our destinations, that we make subtle deviations; decisions that contradict our truer purpose. We betray our former selves by smuggling aboard the caravan to “newness” or old habits. Change is about dedication, reflective practice & sometimes uncomfortable growth. Success is not about how sincere our decision was when we started our journey but how very honest we were when we considered what we are signing up for. It all comes down to the endless decisions we make on our way to B(e).
what the specific rules teachers, leaders, politicians, spouses… aren’t taking seriously?
it is possible to be controlled by the “rules” without knowing them. and in some cases, it might be more effective for someone to follow the “norms” without knowing why they work.
Let me explain.
Understanding how we learn is a very laborious process. Active reflection on the topic is currently a privilege afforded to those with the means and free time to pursue such research. If everyone spent their time studying how we learn (and learning and behavior science is very far from common knowledge/common sense/social norms still), who would get anything done?
I’m being a little glib but hopefully my point is clear. This is complicated stuff. If when you do understand some of it, applying it to your life is very challenging. i.e. parenting with this knowledge requires a lot of energy that isn’t obviously always well spent. I ultimately think the more you know how it really works, the better off you’ll be (more effective parenting, improved teaching, improved training). However, I’m in a situation that exposes me to these learning AND provides me the time, energy and space to try things out.
Glib is a gentle term here. With a position that elitist there would be no math, physics, pure research or dissemination of information that the citizens might have trouble accepting on first or 9th glance. Where would we be if no one had bothered to disseminate the idea of germs to the populace? Plague 3.22.z in star date time. SARS would be a mild version of what is possible as more and more antibiotics are failing to do the trick as those bacterial and viral entities morph and shift the way they are supposed to stay alive.
Indeed, most rules are not known about as seen from us consuming holy water, praying for our team to win on Sunday, keeping the dash boards busy with bobble Christs, arguing about ‘truth’ for 3000 years, ascribing to cause and effect (mono-causality) and attending to lunar rings for guidance. All the superstitions of other people are silly but the incantations I use work!
“It”, (figuring out how the heck the world works) is complicated because we are reinforced by the opposites and we have so much behavior it is difficult to change behavior sets and keep our comfort zones in tact. The translations do take time and our own learning is required. There are those that will not change cause they’ll be exposed to being different. There are those that will try because that will expose them to being different. It all depends on where you get your reinforcers.
Among the options are to continue to drink the cool aide and ask questions that lead no where – “Why did Columbine happen?” or “why not teach intelligent design and get the dialogue going?”
People that want ‘easy,’ comfortable or lack of contrast are not required to do anything. Just the ones that see that we could be more of everything we value if we knew how it might work on an elementary level so we could start to get to the complex stuff before the planet – or our solar system is evacuated to nothing.
Just a thought string…
“Where would we be if no one had bothered to disseminate the idea of germs to the populace? ”
hence the elimination of the Employees Must Wash Hands Before Returning To Work signs.
now, that’s glib.
So, does free will exist?
No.
Free will is a big phrase that has no evidence. Nor is it required to live a full experience like we do.
Just like anything else sufficiently complex we are determined but unpredictable. that lack of predictability makes it seem like we are “free” as in “free will”.