Eric Allen: Thoughts

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education

Jun 23, 08:17 AM by Eric Allen

I just ran into an article from The American Scholar that confirms many of my fears about top-tier schools. Having blatantly and publicly resigned from the whole pre-school system and headed off to an essentially vocational school (okay, engineering is a pretty awesome vocation, but still), I have found an interesting path. Unfortunately, most of the people around me at RPI are even less interested in being intellectual. Not only did they play by the rules, but they “lost” the game. Come on, guys! I, for one, and thoroughly enjoying the activities on campus, including a College Democrats club that has zero political science majors and a student-run sound reinforcement crew. I mix rock concerts! There is a significant handful of people at my university who do what they do because they enjoy it, not because it will get them good scores.

A little bit of sunshine

Jun 20, 08:58 AM by Eric Allen

My dad had an interesting experience the other day that I think is worth sharing. Here’s what he has to say.

Today I tried something new with regard to panhandlers. Usually I shake my head in the negative way; ooccasionally I give some money. Today I said “No.” A few steps later I remembered that I had a bag of apricots in my messenger bag that I had picked from my backyard and brought along for snacking on. I went back to the panhandler and asked if she would like an apricot. She smiled as I handed it to her, and we both felt better. These happen to be very flavorful apricots and I smiled as I walked away thinking of the small moment of pleasure she would get when she bit into it.

I haven’t spent much time in really urban environments, so I’m still somewhat confused by the behaviors and values surrounding panhandling. I really like the idea of giving the delicious fruit, though! Not only did it appear to make this woman’s day, it made my dad’s day, too!

The polar bears are done for

May 7, 06:52 AM by Eric Allen

Two weeks ago the Student Sustainability Task Force here at RPI ran an exhibit around campus called Face the Waste. They set up six large plastic containers with various amounts of food waste, trash, aluminum cans, etc. and asked students to guess how long it took to build that much up. Okay, cool, they’re trying to raise awareness about how much we waste. All they ended up doing was pissing off a bunch of students who didn’t enjoy passing the large pile of food waste rotting in the sun on their way to class. At least they tried, right?

Wrong. This kind of environmentalism, the awareness-raising righteous environmentalism of the twentieth century, has no place in the terrifying reality of 2008. People are already experiencing the effects of climate change, and every time we come up with some new technology to reduce environmental cost, Americans simply use it to increase their luxury consumption. Telling consumers to consume less cannot solve the problems of the scope we suffer today. Peak oil, peak food, peak phosphorous, what next? The hippies and treehuggers have lost, and we are probably beyond the tipping point for a great deal of environmental issues. It’s not about the polar bears anymore; it’s about sustainability. How many people can this planet support? At what standard of living? Hurricane Katrina could have been a wake-up call. Heck, the Larsen-B ice shelf could have been one. Maybe food riots in Haiti? I doubt it.

I believe we must face the greatest question of our time: how does a global society based on an assumption of virtually unlimited natural resources cope with finite limits? As we were talking about this last semester in my Environment & Politics class, a lot of the students had faith that technology would save us. I don’t know about you, but I’m definitely not seeing the kind of changes we desperately need. Looking at the Chinese government’s purchases in Australia, there are clearly some world leaders who fear what is to come, and are making non-technical preparations. I sure hope the people in charge have a plan for this. Sadly we’re seeing either pitiful or no discussion of such critical issues on the campaign trail. It may not get bad over the next eight years, but my life sure won’t be boring!

Twitter: how to avoid caring about people

Apr 4, 01:03 PM by Eric Allen

I’m struck by the attitude taken in an article I just read about how Twitter is changing lives. To be honest, I remain very skeptical. How can you really connect with people when all you’re doing is seeing their broadcasts and making your own? It takes the caring out of communicating, allowing people to ignore each other at will. In particular, the author says:

Because Twitter has allowed me to meet and converse with people all over the world, without much of a commitment. The tweets come in as a stream, and if I see something engaging, I answer it. If not, I don’t.

That scares me. So we all feel “interconnected,” but none of us are actually connected? What happened to sitting down with people and talking? While you were whiling the time away sitting in your room “feeling the interconnectedness,” did you ever consider calling a friend up and going for a hike or something?

Generation Me, we can be better than this.

Financial Meltdown: Time for a Holiday From Progressive Politics?

Mar 24, 11:44 AM by Eric Allen

Truthout has an interesting story on how progressives should be dealing with the ongoing financial meltdown. I am most definitely not an economist, but from my perspective down here in reality (at least I think it’s real), it seems that the government could easily take steps to protect us small guys while letting the big guys suffer from their own mistakes. If we continue to privatize profit and publicize loss, this cycle of the rich siphoning money off of the rest of us will continue, most likely at an even greater rate.

Running a small organization

Feb 6, 08:33 PM by Eric Allen

Disclaimer: This is written entirely off the cuff. I just got back from a club meeting and need a place to pontificate with no interruptions.

How do you run a relatively small organization, say a club on a college campus? How do you make decisions? How do you handle disagreements? In some clubs this is hardly an issue, but in others it is crucial to the clubs survival and success. I see two extremes of organization, with some possible leeway in between. On the one hand you have what my friend John describes as “a craigslist.” The club’s executive board is effectively nonexistent, and members simply use the club as a forum for organizing activities and discussing events. On the other end is a complete autocracy, where the club president (and possibly the e-board as well) has complete power, and decisions are made by him/her alone. Both work well in their own situations, and both have merits and disadvantages.

As it is currently configured, the Progressive Students Alliance here at RPI operates essentially as a craigslist-style organization. The recent few most successful club events were spearheaded by determined club members, and the club did little to support the events as a whole. This worked well, because the interested members formed their own committees and had zero interference. The regular meetings of the PSA are mostly random debates on specific issues. This can be quite entertaining, but rarely is a productive conclusion reached. The debates are not begun with the intent to take action as a club, and rarely is action taken as a result. For a bunch of kids talking politics, this works quite well. We have a regular attendance at meetings of around 15 members, and the discussions are interesting. It’s worth my time to go!

At the other end you have clubs in which the membership has little say. I haven’t been in any that are all the way to this extreme, but the closest was probably my high school robotics team. The policy there was “it’s a democracy, but only one person votes.” This allowed for discussion and input from the members, but all decisions were made by the club president with complete authority. It was basically a benevolent (well, at least I think I was benevolent) dictatorship. For a small robotics team, this was a wonderfully efficient organization. When hard decisions had to be made, we could make them very quickly, and only one person had to take the hit if the decision was a bad one. As long as the president (me) generally did what the members preferred, things ran smoothly.

As well as the autocracy of the robotics team worked, I’m leaning toward craigslist-style organization these days. The one problem that plagued me as president every single year was motivation. If I tried to get the group to act as a single group, it was hard to get everybody on board. Other opinions and other engagements made life hard, and we ended up with a very small core of members. Now that my organizations have no critical deadlines or goals to meet (well, UPAC Sound has shows, but they’re not that hard), it’s much easier to simply let the members do what they want to do. In the case of W2SZ, the amateur radio club, we are working on several projects as individual groups of members, and it is working quite well. When we needed to pull together as a group for the recent VHF contest, we marshaled plenty of members. Nobody’s feelings are hurt, and the club moves forward at a comfortable pace.

Club organization is an interesting topic to me because it is so closely bound to leadership. A single club president can drastically alter the operation of a club, and shift it toward one of these two extremes in a fairly short amount of time. A good leader needs to understand his or her options, and take appropriate actions. These two strategies each have their place, and I believe it is imperative for me, as a club leader, to understand their strengths and weaknesses.

Eric Allen

The ramblings of a geek off to college