Choices and Constraints: How We Decide

Our discussion opened with a discussion of the work of Andrea Zittel, who has experimented extensively with the creation of compact "live-work" spaces, in accord with the notion that "What makes us feel liberated is not total freedom, but rather living in a set of limitations that we have created and prescribed for ourselves." To choose limits, it was suggested, is to be invested in those possibilities.

Discussion ranged from the sonnet form (a thinking about limitations rooted in aesthetics) through choices about what we eat (being vegetarian), how we get around (being carless), to decisions about where to go to college, where to work, whether to have children or health insurace--as well as some questions about the implications of being privileged enough to choose voluntary poverty.

The conversation then turned to what it might mean to advise our students about learning to limit their choices--and how that might differ from asking them to "step back" and consider their choices from a larger perspective. How careful must we be in the messages we give, as we model our lives for our students?
Coming to a women's college, they have chosen--some more consciously than others--a whole set of constraints. How useful is it to talk with them about the "roadblocks" ("checkpoints"? "tollbooths"?) the college sets up: those moments of assessment that are required of them, against which they might chafe? It may be helpful to get them to see that they are making choices even when they don't perceive that they are--that they are participating in constraints they may see as imposed. For example, it is not the case that "they don't have the time"; rather, they (and we) are choosing to "find" or "make" the time to do some things and not others. What happens if--having brought all our resources to guiding them--they "mis-choose," make choices that are ill-advised or even harmful? If they don't choose the necessary restraints, should we choose for them? And what of the fine line between embracing our constraints and being resigned to them?

It was suggested that much of what people do is constrained internally (if one elects to take one's own life, is that a choice?). Why might two siblings, from the same modest background, make very different choices--one living as a maximalist, the other as a minimalist--in the ways they live their lives? Is there another way to conceptualize choice than as denying oneself the "huge basket of goods" that is life, and so "choosing impoverishment"? Perhaps by thinking about each choice we make as opening up a range of possibilities, rather than closing off others? This would be choice not as denial, but as openness. Think, for example, of the honesty of wedding vows with "no endpoint," but an open-ended commitment to learning with another. Mention was also made of the "beggar's bowl," of "liking to work with little," of "radical dependence," of "coming to college with only an empty pillowcase" and what it could hold--and seeing how far you could go with that.

We need to learn to see as choices the things we think are necessities. (How about re-writing "when in the course of human events, it becomes necessary...." in terms of making a choice?) When students feel they have no alternatives, we need to advise them that they always have some, resisting the tendency to use the lack of alternatives as a justification for (non) action.

Sandy initiated our conversation today by describing the work he has been doing with caseworkers and for-profit contractors, who are collaborating on welfare to work in Florida; this project is framed in terms of institutional and social economics.

He explained that Herbert Simon, a professor of public administration and a polymath who also contributed to work on artificial intelligence, received the Nobel prize in Economics in the 1980s for work he had done on Adminstrative Behavior in 1947: his argument was that people "satisficed," rather than "maximizing." Being constrained in the choices they made, they relied not on "perfect" but "bounded rationality." Simon's work drew on the "new field of social psychology" in making decision models more realistic, because reflective of actual perception, cognition, and behavior.

This led to a "new experimental economics," which replaced classical economic models--that had asked what the rational decision would be, if one had perfect information--with a recognition of the limits of both time and information. These ideas have since been widely applied; recent work on web usability, for instance, references "satisficing": rather than reading web pages all the way down, surfers are likely to "satisfice" with the first link they find.

Sandy contrasted "rational comprehensive decision-making" (a form of planning that presumes universal rationality, with all goals surveyed and weighed in order to maximize objectives) with "incrementalism" (which advocates "taking the next step," in an attempt to improve on what has been done, but without setting long-term goals). Several apt jokes were evoked @ this point: Simon's "marriage rule" (rather than making a comprehensive survey of all candidates for potential soul mates, we prepare to marry by "sampling the market and chosing the next best thing that comes along") was followed by a story, told by Arthur C. Clarke, of a room in which women line up on one side, men on the other. Each group moves, again and again, across 1/2 the distance which separates them. Zeno's paradox is operating here: they never actually reach each other, but do get close enough "for all practical purposes."

Such stories, it was claimed, are insignificant except in light of the concept of "perfect information": without the implied comparison of a perfect world, "good enough for all practical purposes" becomes "just everyday life." This led to considerable discussion. Habermas's ideal speech act was evoked, as an important regulative ideal: we should evaluate our actions based on what we might agree to if we could get "outside of" power relations, even if such positions are not achievable. The science of physics was also invoked: none of Newton's three laws are "true" in real life, but only work in a laboratory where all variables are eliminated. Such idealizing enables us to come up with useful information, and Newton influenced economists such as Adam Smith.

So, we asked ourselves: which is better? A "vacuum, friction-free" model of markets, or a more behavioral one? In the abstract, such a question may be unanswerable. Ideal laws are useful, if they can be adjusted for perturbations, and to individual cases. But perfect information is a fiction, and economics has moved away from predictive models to richer, more contextual ones. The operative premise here needs to be Einstein's: we must "never mistake the ways we have of making sense of things for the things themselves"; there is no ready corespondence between models and the things being modeled. Only the concept of an ideal world makes either the joke about the marriage rule or the one "for all practical purposes" funny.

Perhaps there is no important paradox here, but simply the need to acknowledge the distinction between theory and practice ("physicists try to understand, engineers get the job done"). Classic decision-making models have not worked, when applied to government, because they aren't realistic enough; government reform has been naive in its failure to take politics into account. Anthony Appiah developed a similar argument during his lectures @ Bryn Mawr two years ago: philosophy and ethics have become too abstract.

Alternatively, instead of complaiing that models are unrealistic, because they don't work in specific cases, we might instead recognize that all models are imperfect, and engage in incrementalism: noting failings, improving the models as best we can. Criticism of abstraction arises from the same foundation that gives rise to abstraction itself: a belief in the possibility of perfect information. Never expect a model to be applicable in all cases: it is never an end, but can be used instead as an initial step in a continuing process.

There's a difference between mechanical actions and those of people, who have consciousness, and can keep on revising what they do. Steve Toulman's Return to Reason was invoked: this is a critique of abstract rationality--a form of science foisted on social scientists--that requires the balance of "situated reasoning." We closed with some musings about the ways in which the ideal world functions as the source of judgments made in this one.

Alice initiated our conversation by asking why we chose the role of teacher and learning (through the Teaching and Learning Initiative or elsewhere): What (understandings? skills? challenges and difficulties? questions? changes) come about as a result of this choice?

Ibraham, Carol and Tom all spoke to those questions, describing the learning that has taken place outside the classroom as they work one-on-one with students: realizing how easy it is "to forget what I was told, and asking to be told again"; of learning to adjust to radically different time schedules; of moving from the perimeter (where one sees a different perspective, "looking in") to the center of campus, where others might be walking by; of "getting away from the intellectual" and "going into the domain of the physical"; of the "remedial work of getting back into our bodies"; of incorporating a "whole philosophy that goes on here, that I don't understand"; of "learning outside the instructions you are given"; of the "gift exchange" that initiates a TLI; of being invited to different events on campus, and realizing all the ways in which we might be connected with one another. Many of these stories were about "not finishing," not "going as far as we wanted to"; they were "stories of incompleteness, where the outcome was in doubt."

Discussion began with the question of whether, given these descriptions of a different kind of relational learning, "we actually need the books and classes part" of Bryn Mawr. Do we really need to master the classics before developing our own stuff, stepping off from what has been done and expanding on it? How important is it for a teacher to ask students what they are looking for, to find out where people are before starting a program of study with them? Conversation turned to the phenomenon of students saying they "don't know how they are doing" (if they aren't given grades), the likelihood that--unless we center in our own journeys--we will all continue to think that (because of age, training, location in the college hierarchy) we are on the periphery. No one thinks they are @ the center.

This may be particularly true for our students, for whom so many key choices have been made by others. As time goes on, we hope they can become increasingly independent, and able to choose for themselves what it is they seek, and pursue it. If they are not centered in this way, they will feel overwhelmed by, and have no way to distinguish among, the available choices. There may be a correlation between knowing oneself and the ability to choose. Being disassociated from ourselves affects how we perceive our choices.

Being convinced that all our choices have consequences can also make us feel stressed. It would be great if we could engage in more of the sort of choosing Mark described two weeks ago--making choices without thinking about the consequences: choices that feel more "embodied" than compelled by our reflecting on them. There is a difference between learning that is externally motivated by what others tell us we "should" know, and choosing to learn what we want. Students have "not chosen the barometer that measures how they do"; they go through cycles of "exploding choices," then narrowing them down.

Books are a relatively recent invention; learning went on before they existed, and has gone on since without them. Perhaps they negatively influence our sense of how we are doing. When we are making something material, or performing something physical, "how we are doing is evident in what we are doing"; but in book work, what we know might not be so clear. "We don't know what we don't know." This might be key to our shared sense that we are "all on the periphery": the idea that "someone else has to be the judge of our progress," and books may well contribute to that sort of judgment. A "good job" then becomes relative to what others do, and we are inhibited from thinking of ourselves as teachers; we assume that we are only learners.

Perhaps there is a difference, in self-reliance, between those children whose parents "smile @ them because they get it right," and those whose parents smile "because they really enjoy the kid." We can also learn, however, by "brushing up against one another" (think of what Religious Life might learn this year, by sharing their space on Cambrian Row with the Theater Program--and vice versa).

We are failing, so long as our students look to us to know "how they are doing." Giving too many instructions--or offering a review of what is "great"--can have this effect. There are at least two standards here: how much one can learn, vs. looking for others' judgment of where one is, in relation to others. The process is incremental: classroom teachers should be inviting students to make free choices, and students should know that they will not be judged by the choices they make, which should be personalized in their own terms.

However: grades matter. They represent our ability to do work, to produce, to think. Perhaps we need to make a different kind of success--that which is inherent in the performance itself, rather than in others' judgment of it--more modal. Or perhaps that analogy, of winning and losing, doesn't really work, either: faculty can't "win" @ the work they do, for instance; they must keep on struggling.