Notes Towards Day 19: Zero-Sum or Not?

Notes Towards Day 19 of Food for Thought

I. to share:
story from working group on "choices & constraints":
Choosing Our Limits
quotes from Andrea Zittel: take one and write a response

II. Moving on now to final section of the course,
on ethical choice-making
Bring home exploration of eating habits,
scientific data-gathering, literary interpretation,
to questions about how we live our lives

III. For Friday, write proposal for your final paper, identifying an ethical dilemma you'd like to spend the next month thinking/writing about:

* what's the issue?
* why are you interested in it? (what motivates you to explore it further?)
* how is conventionally/currently framed? (for example: is it zero or non-zero sum?)
* how might you experiment with framing it differently?
* what will you need to research, to find out more about the issue? how will you do that?
* list three sources, in standard bibliographic form, that you will consult

IV. what was is like, writing a 6-pp. paper?
frustrations/satisfactions?
give yourselves credit:
include the last draft in your portfolio!
paginate! (also: italicize!)
also: don't use cliches!
re: what's the difference between belief, opinion, argument?

V. Today reading/comparing two papers
both by "Paul Grobstein" on ambiguous figures....
Longer: so read silently, write answers to four groups of questions
(following Juana's guidelines):

1) what's the thesis? how provocative is it?
what's the single most interesting idea in the paper?
what's it's relation to the thesis?
2) how would you describe the structure of the paper? what' s the logic of its organization? how dramatic/subtle/suspensefu/cleverly is it organized?
3) word choice and sentence structure: does this essay "love language"?
(give an example yea or nay)
4) pizzazz: what's surprising/moving/
productive of further thinking here?
what does the essay add to what you already know?

VI. For today: asked you to play Prisoner's Dilemma
(non-zero-sum game);
For Thursday, read classic 1968 essay on
"The Tragedy of the Commons" (zero-sum game) and
NYTimes report on "pulling the switch"

Post on-line tomorrow night:
describe what happened
when you played Prisoner's Dilemma--
and give an example of a "prisoner's dilemma" in your own life!