Let me explain my train of thought

This is going to be a fairly straight-forward blog. Although we spent the entire class period discussing this issue of the runaway trains, I think it can all be summed up and explained as follows:

In the first situation, you are driving the train and the only choice that you have is to kill five people or kill one. Of course most of us are going to choose the one person; we are acting to minimize damage. In the second situation, from an outsider's perspective, we are still faced with the same choice: kill one or watch five die. This time, however, the choice is radically altered by the fact that to take the one-death option, we have to actually push someone off of the bridge, directly causing the death of one very obese person. Thus, most of us would choose to let the five die, not because we think it is better that five would die than one, but because we are not willing to cause damage. Therefore, it becomes irrelevant whether we think it is better that one would die or that five would die, since only two of us have the stomach (or sadistic hatred of obese people) to actually push someone in front of a moving train, no matter how many lives it could save in the end.

In the movie, Wanted, the plot revolves around a group of assassins with the motto, "Kill one, save a thousand." It may be true that if the Hitlers, Stalins, bin Ladins, and other less sinister baddies are eliminated from the world, millions of lives can be saved in the end, but does that make it right to kill them? Or let me use a less extreme example: when we live in a country where 85% of the wealth is controlled by the wealthiest 20% of the population (citation), and the poorest 40% of the population controls considerably less than 1% of the money, thousands of people go hungry and have to sleep on the streets of America with no place to call home. Wouldn't it be better to kill off a few high-level corporate execs (starting at the top for maximum positive impact), and redistribute their wealth to save thousands of people from malnutrition and exposure? Isn't it always better for one to die than five? I think not.

P.S. I'm still waiting on that comment I'm supposed to get on one of my blog entries. I won't hold my breath.

Well, let me start off by saying that even in a country with universal health care, John still would have had an issue. THERE'S A TUMOR IN HIS BRAIN! That qualifies as an issue for me. But at least with universal health care, he could have had the tumor removed, which is always a plus.

The health care debate confuses me. It sure seems to me like universal health care would be an amazing thing to have, a great step forward for our country. A healthier country is a happier and more productive country. Everything about universal health care seems good. Yet, there are still people that oppose it, and I have a hard time believing that they based their opposition to a great social reform like health care on something as trivial as a higher sales tax, particularly when the people who typically oppose universal health care (the right wing) for the most part are already paying for health insurance. It's true that the right wing has their thing against giving out handouts, "teach a man to fish," and all of that, but surely health care ought to be an exception. If you give a man a fish, you can feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, you can feed him for a lifetime, but if you let him die at age 30 of cancer or heart disease, malnutrition or exposure, he won't be catching too many fish, will he?

I've heard some pretty wild arguments against universal health care. I heard one guy try to make the point that universal health care takes the burden of financial responsibility off of the individual, so naturally, people will all stop taking care of themselves, take up skateboarding and smoking, and become extremely obese, since they want to get their money's worth out of their health care system, thus drastically increasing the cost of health care. It doesn't take a rocket psychologist to figure out that people probably won't do that. I've also heard that universal health care systems are typically lower quality than private ones. This idea at least has some basis in reality, considering that government-subsidized VA hospitals are not exactly renowned for... anything good. But according to my very reliable sources, there is no real difference in quality.

It seems to me that only good can come of universal health care policies. I understand that it would certainly have an impact on other costs, and for me especially, since I don't currently pay for health insurance, nor do I have a steady source of income. But universal health care may be just what this country needs, because NO ONE should ever have to be denied health care -- be it a life saving surgery or just a trip to the doctor's office.

What am I supposed to be writing about?

Ummm... well, dear readers, it seems that we have got ourselves into somewhat of a pickle. You see, today is Tuesday, and we don't have a journal topic! How in the world am I supposed to write a journal with nothing to write about?! Am I supposed to write a journal with nothing to write about?!

And what happened to our poor topic? Perhaps it got lost somewhere on the way from last week's class to Blackboard, took a wrong turn down a dark alley, or somehow slipped into the Twilight Zone. Maybe it ran afoul of the local mafia. Maybe it just had a lot of homework this week. Or perhaps it's just a little piece of Assessment Day magic that we don't have one.

I hope it's OK.

Anyway, dear readers, it's been a while since I was able to post anything really personal, since I've been all covered up in blogs about venereal disease, multiple choice testing, and the future of the university. And although I am considered to be somewhat of an expert in these fields (not so much on the venereal disease as the others), I do like to write for myself every once in a while.

So, today is Assessment Day, which means that today is the day that some people take a really lame test and I spend time assessing what I want to do with my life. For a while there, I was on this PreMed kick, thinking that it would be fun to spend half of my life in med school pursuing a high paying job and the coveted authority to prescribe medication. But then I realized that I have no real desire to do that. I thought for a while that maybe what I really want to do is be a lumberjack. But perhaps not.

Are you sure it's a good idea to have a Muppet with HIV?.. "I'm positive"

Pat Buchanan doesn't like it. He says that it is immoral to have a Muppet on Sesame Street who has HIV. Typically, if Pat Buchanan doesn't like it, it's OK with me (keep in mind that this is the guy who blamed 9/11 on homosexuals).

I've got to say, I find it really hard to see his point about Kami being an immoral and evil character. Kami is a girl who was probably just born with HIV; it's not like she's some sex fiend drug addict designed to make every little kid into a bad person.

I really think it would be a good idea to have Kami on the U.S. version of Sesame Street. Although the old myth that you can get AIDS by going near someone with HIV is hardly prevalent in the United States these days, it is very important that kids know about diseases like HIV and what they can do to avoid getting them, and kids need to know that it's OK to hug people with HIV or have tea parties with them.

I don't think that Kami is going to single-handedly clear up the AIDS problem in American youth, but certainly every little bit helps. When HIV/AIDS is a leading cause of death among African-Americans, as well as a serious threat to people of all ethnic groups, it most certainly helps to get kids the knowledge that they need to stay healthy at an early age.

So I say, "Bring on Kami!"

I wish this blog was a multiple choice test

I think it may be a little bit harsh to say that multiple choice testing makes students "not only increasingly incapable but also intolerant of being asked to think in complex ways." Now, it may be true that multiple choice tests are a bit easier on students and teachers than a big essay, but I don't think that multiple choice tests make people stupid, nor should they be removed altogether from curriculum.

As I have expressed during class, I think that multiple choice tests are useful and have their rightful place in the education system, especially in classes that cover a wide range of facts, like biology and psychology. Courses like these don't need many essay questions, since there is only so much you can say about what a white blood cell does, and that sort of knowledge would be impossible to test with essays in a single class period.

At the same time, I can see how multiple choice tests do reduce the amount that a student has to think about a test question. Many of the multiple choice tests that I have taken, I could have quite easily walked in without ever hearing the material being tested, and still done very well on the test. On multiple choice tests, you have a pretty good chance of guessing the right answer to start out with, and you can usually eliminate several possible answers with context clues, etymology, or just dumb logic. Occasionally, you get that teacher that likes to be a jokester and will put choices on tests that are simply meant to be funny.

Who can say really what effect multiple choice testing has on our intelligence. I think what we really need is a good balance of different types of testing, and teachers who are competent enough to write good tests. At the end of the day, the choice of which type of test should be used comes down to the teacher and the material.

Gradumacation

So... the graduation rate here at USI... not the best I have ever seen. At 15%, our four year graduation rate seems shockingly low. Our six-year graduation rate is better, at 34%, but still nothing to be proud of. In class, we have talked a lot about our goals for the university, and one of the goals that keeps coming up from us honors kids is for the university to earn more prestige and respect. It's awfully hard to earn respect as an academic institution with stats like that.

Which brings us to this week's discussion question: what can we do to improve these statistics? There is, of course the obvious answer: hike the entrance standards to "cut the riff-raff," but that would have a lot of negative effects on university growth rate, state funding, tuition, etc. The thing is, there are a lot of people who come to this university because they can't make it in to other schools, or because college is what they are "supposed to do." These students aren't very likely to graduate, but they do increase our growth rates and keep tuition down.

So maybe it's not the best idea to up the standards for acceptance. So that leaves us with two other options: either do everything we can to help those students succeed, or do everything we can to attract more high quality students to USI. Or both. Either of those would be great for the university. But the tough part is actually executing them.

DEATH!

I hate technology. I don't understand why it's so difficult to just make technology that works. There's always got to be something that goes wrong. For instance, when I decided at 11:30 Tuesday night that it might be time to start thinking about writing my blog for tomorrow's HONS class, my computer suddenly decided that it either doesn't want to play any Quicktime files or it just really hates public radio, because if refuses absolutely to play the interview that I'm supposed to be listening to. So... that puts me at somewhat of a disadvantage when answering this question. But I'll give it a shot anyway. If need be, I'll add an addendum after I get a chance to listen to the interview.

I knew that it was going to be a good day when I walked into RL 0017 and saw that most of the local bingo club had showed up to hear Jane Brody speak on end of life issues. It turned out to be pretty interesting, and I actually had a pretty lengthy conversation with my father (who attended the lecture) later that day on the topic of death and all his friends (Living wills, funeral plans, cremation, who gets the loot, etc.). We talked about his and Mom's plans and wishes should any situation arise, and he reiterated Ms. Brody's point that it's never too early to start planning for the end of your life.

What struck me most about the talk was the ease and comfort with which Ms. Brody spoke about the taboo subject of death. She described the deaths of most everyone in her family in the same manner that I imagine she would talk about yesterday's weather. Most people don't share her enthusiasm for dying, so it was a little bit odd to hear her talking about it so openly.

The biggest thing that I took away from the lecture is simply that we have to learn to accept that death is a part of life. There is absolutely no way around it. Billions of people have gone before us in death, and they all made it out OK...

In the literally immortal words of Socrates, "To fear death, gentleman, is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know. For anything that men can tell, death may be the greatest good that can happen to them: but they fear it as if they knew quite well that it was the greatest of evils. And what is this but that shameful ignorance of thinking that we know what we do not know?" (Apology, 32)