The president

On the train this morning, Linnéa and I came to reflect on the fact that Donald Trump first became president in 2016, and that for our younger kids, he is simply “The President”, in much the same way that Ronald Reagan was for our generation. Like yesterday, when we watched a rather disturbing documentary about Sweden’s minister for civil defence, Carl-Oskar Bohlin, it is difficult to fully grasp just how much political discourse has changed.

Considering the speech Trump recently gave at the United Nations, it is worth remembering that, for all his faults, Ronald Reagan told the 42nd session of the General Assembly in 1987:

“In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we often forget how much unites all the members of humanity […] I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.”

Science fiction, alright. But perspectives like that mattered. Democracy itself depends on something similar: losers’ consent, the willingness to accept temporary defeat because one remains committed to a political order larger than one’s immediate interests. The same is true internationally. Politics cannot function for long if every disagreement is reduced to the satisfaction of our basest instincts.

Perhaps that is what feels most different today: not simply the policies, but the shrinking of the horizon.

Too cool for school

Returning to Halland in time for tomorrow’s workplace meeting (APT) on learning sciences and the cognitive psychologist Daniel T. Willingham’s book “Why don’t students like school?”, I am struck by the basic point that our brain is not designed for thought, that thinking is hard work, and something we often do our best to avoid, especially when it comes at a social cost.

At the same time, humans are naturally curious. We want to see what lies beyond, to better ourselves (if we are to speak Star Trek), and to learn new things. But curiosity is fragile. What we seem to enjoy is not thinking as such, but the small reward that comes from successful thinking. Problems that are too easy are boring; problems that appear impossible are frustrating. Somewhere between the two lies the pleasure of figuring something out.

This also means that good teaching cannot simply consist of making students “active”. To think about something, students need something to think with: factual knowledge, previous examples and procedures stored in long-term memory. Asking students to critically discuss a question for which they lack the necessary background knowledge is no more intellectually demanding than asking them to guess.

Perhaps the better question for teachers is therefore not whether a class is a lecture, seminar or game, but: where is the cognitive work? Who is actually doing the thinking? Willingham notes how easily a lesson can become a long series of teacher explanations, while the students themselves solve very few problems. And perhaps we are sometimes too eager to supply answers before we have created a question that students actually want answered.

Seen this way, the challenge is to design teaching in which students repeatedly encounter problems that are difficult enough to require thought, but sufficiently accessible that they can experience the satisfaction of solving them.

C4

Founded by the Danish king Christian IV in 1614, many things in Kristianstad, including the city itself, bear his name. Taking the bus out to the C4 shopping mall, I started the day with an upper-body strength session at Nordic Wellness (my legs are still trashed from the marathon) before sitting down to mark 47 exams in Inspera, a marathon in its own right.

However, as so often in my life, I had already received the reward before putting in the work, as Linnéa baked the most delicious cinnamon buns yesterday while I cooked an old favourite dish of mine (minced lamb with sage and lemon) for dinner. We also got to play a game with all the flags of the world, which I am bringing along to Karlstad to play with William next weekend, as well as a round of the feminist edition of När då då?. Linnéa’s daughter won the latter, presumably thanks to Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls: 100 Tales of Extraordinary Women having been her favourite book when she was younger.

Malmö, again

Being a city full of memories, reaching back to the 1980s in Beijers Park, through the late 90s of coming of age, to the open skyline of Kasai this summer, Malmö has always held a special place in my heart. Today, I got to race 42.2 kilometres through its streets.

For the first half marathon, I lived the dream of running in under three hours and thirty minutes, even if my heart rate was well above 170 bpm. Having passed the 21k mark in one hour and 43 minutes, it only took a few more kilometres for reality to catch up with me. With my knee hurting like hell and my stamina simply not there, from 32 kilometres onwards it became pure suffering, often with my pace dropping to between six and seven minutes per kilometre. Finishing in 3 hours and 53 minutes, I felt horribly nauseous but, luckily, both my parents were at the finish line and took extraordinarily good care of me.

A few hours at a Parisian café later, all parameters were back to normal and I could take the train back to Halmstad. Looking back on the race, I am still happy about finishing in under four hours and having had such a beautiful day by the water. Contrary to the forecast, the sun broke through the mist in ways that almost reminded me of California, and it is no exaggeration to say that I could see myself living in Malmö again sometime in the future, when the kids have grown up.

200 papers

According to the Washington Post, a tenured professor at the University of Chicago managed to produce more than two hundred papers in just nine months, largely thanks to generative AI, before fellow academics started raising questions. As such, I should perhaps not be surprised that I recently had to wait three months for a journal to even decide whether to send my manuscript out for review. Luckily, they did, so now I have one more article out there awaiting its fate.

Hopefully, I will have another one joining it next week, as Kalle and I are wrapping up our co-authored article on the board game När då då?. Compared with my work in environmental ethics, pedagogical research really is such a blissful world of encouragement and supportive comments. I mean, few people are going to object to students learning the history of political thought or being exposed to voices outside the established canon.

After spending six hours in the classroom, I stopped by Nordic Wellness for a quick gym session before making a massive carb-loading feast of pecorino meatballs and spaghetti, served with a glass of Argentinian red (as per tradition). Tomorrow, at 7:37 a.m., I will take the high-speed train down to Malmö, where the gun goes off at ten sharp at Ribersborg, sending me everywhere from Limhamn to Värnhem before eventually bringing me back to Ribersborg – hopefully with the clock showing something under three hours and thirty minutes.

Kennedy

After twenty years of blogging, I might be forgiven for thinking I have written things here on Rawls & Me that I in fact have not. Talking with Linnéa yesterday about the not-so-clear-cut distinction between democratic debate and foreign influence operations, I was reminded of a speech John F. Kennedy gave in 1962, which I was certain I had mentioned on the blog. I searched in vain, but I remember the quote as speaking directly to a democratic ethos that seems all but lost these days:

"We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people"

Much like Linnéa's wish to raise her kids as world citizens in a time dominated by chauvinism, many of my values (such as the idea that everyone on this planet deserves a reasonable material standard of living) would, I often feel, have been plain common sense sixty or a hundred years ago. But as the discourse has shifted, they, like Kennedy's words above, have come to seem almost like fringe positions, now that "safety" and group egoism have taken precedence over everything else.

När då då

Today, I finally got to test my latest pedagogical innovation in the classroom. Inspired by the boardgame “När då då?”, I have created hundreds of cards with different political philosophers, works and events that the students are to place along a timeline, making their knowledge and reasoning visible to each other as a form of collaborative learning. While attendance was not the best, the students who did show up seemed to really enjoy the game.

And, for once, this impression was not entirely based on wishful thinking on the part of the teacher. At the end of the seminar, I asked the students to fill out a digital exit ticket.

On a five-point scale, the students gave the game an average of 4.47 for helping them get a better sense of the chronological order of political thinkers, texts and events. The group discussions scored 4.20 for helping them understand how the different pieces of intellectual history fit together. Even more pleasingly, the statement that the game required them to actually use their knowledge and reason about where to place the cards, rather than simply guess, scored 4.60. But the real triumph came with the final question: would they like to do this kind of activity again in another course? Average score: 4.80 out of 5. Thirteen of the fifteen respondents simply ticked the maximum score.

The free-text answers were perhaps even more interesting. One student noted that the history of political thought somehow tends to exist entirely “before 1900” in their head, and that seeing everything on a timeline made it apparent that many philosophers and ideas are actually not that old. Others mentioned suddenly seeing how interconnected the different political thinkers were, how ideas influenced one another, and “how quickly development happened”. Another wrote that the game made them reason their way towards plausible conclusions from the different texts.

Obviously, fifteen enthusiastic exit tickets do not demonstrate that playing a homemade board game produces superior learning outcomes. There is selection bias, social desirability, a teacher standing next to them who seemed to really like his game, and all the other things that tend to ruin causal inference. Still, as a first classroom experiment, it worked remarkably well. More importantly, walking around the room and listening to the discussions, I could hear students doing precisely what I had hoped they would do: not asking “what year was this?”, but reasoning from what they already knew. If Hobbes wrote after the English Civil War, and Locke comes after Hobbes, and The Communist Manifesto surely has to be somewhere around the revolutions of 1848, then where on earth do we put Mary Wollstonecraft?

Which, pedagogically speaking, was exactly the point.

Flower power

Taking the train down to Malmö to pick up my bib in preparation for next week’s marathon, Linnéa and I got to eat some highly authentic Malaysian nasi lemak at Cantin (which is closing for the season this weekend) and have a cup of coffee at Solde. Best of all, there was the Dahlia Festival at Slottsträdgården and clear autumn skies across Öresund.

Being both public transport super-users, we found ourselves reflecting on geography and how monthly tickets (especially this autumn, when they are available at half price) contribute to regional enlargement, making it possible to wake up in Halmstad, have a full day in Malmö, and still be back in time for a sunset half marathon out to Tylösand.

Perhaps there is a rebound effect of sorts here: as trains become cheaper and more convenient, we simply get used to travelling ever greater distances. In my case, 260 kilometres today.

Duplex

With much trepidation, I made one of the biggest financial decisions of my life today as I signed the contract on a duplex apartment in Gothenburg. Located in Munkebäck, it will let me once again follow the seasons around Delsjön and go for early morning forest runs among all the deer. More importantly, it will mean that I can be an active parent and share in the everyday lives of my two boys as they grow up.

When I brought Eddie along to see the apartment, we were both blown away by its charm. Built in the 1940s, the apartment is split between two floors, with unobstructed views to both the east and the west. With the move-in date set for 2 November, I will give notice to my landlord at Hallandsgatan tomorrow, although I am afraid I will be on the hook for two months of paying for two homes.

Now on the train back to Halmstad, I am forever grateful to my mother for making all of this possible and for being there when I need her most. As for work, I wrapped up my last statistics class of the semester earlier today, so now I just have a brutal amount of marking and supervision to get through over the coming weeks.

Phase change

With mathematicians talking about something of a phase change in the ability of leading AI models to tackle hard problems (the most spectacular example, of course, being the apparent solution of the Navier–Stokes problem), the road towards AGI appears to be shortening by the day. While recursive self-improvement may still lie in the future, AI is already writing more and more of its own code, and there is clearly room for concern.

Oddly enough, at today’s project group meeting, I realised that some of my colleagues who are more sceptical about technological solutions to climate change, tending instead to emphasise the need for behavioural change, were also less worried about AI. The irony is that it feels as if we have come full circle here: I, historically the techno-optimist in the room, have come to fear the future and distrust our ability to regulate the AI industry, precisely because I believe in the transformative capacity of technology.