Welcome, good evening, good morning, good afternoon, whatever time zone you're in. And welcome to the plenary webinar, the plenary panel of the first inaugural black trail blazers and engineering workshop here at Purdue. This workshop is being held in addition to as a part of the black trail blazers and engineering program. Today's panel is also being co hosted as part of our engineering rising to the challenge series, where we bring engineering professionals and thought leaders from around the world really leaders in their fields to come together to unpack some of the challenges posed by the pandemic and beyond. And to introduce the proceedings for today, I would like to present our fearless leader, the Johnny Edwards and Dean of engineering monk Chiang was also the Roscoe George distinguished professor of electrical computer engineering. Over to you month. Thank you very much, Arvin. First of all, a mic check. Can you hear me. Great. I still make the rookie mistakes of forgetting to unmute myself, not on this most important event. I'm glad that you can join us here tonight. As Arvin mentioned, welcome to the inaugural black trail blazers in engineering workshops. Three day workshop but tonight we have an outstanding plenary panel webinar. And on the site where NASP was founded, and during the month of black history month. We have Purdue engineering, a proud to inaugurate and present the black trail blazers and engineering workshop to prepare future trail blazing faculty in engineering with a special focus on preparing scholars who are also committed to increasing the success of black engineers. And these fellows as I understand there are 19 of them will attend a virtual four day workshop designed for scientific interactions, career oriented discussions and networking with leading black faculty, starting today through the next four days. We have a sequence of very exciting and important events, including the next hour and a half, but also tomorrow and on Friday. So please join us along with the fellows, and we welcome the widest of participation to these events. I want to thank Arvin and his team want to thank Mark Lundstrom acting dean over the past year, and I want to thank the outstanding teams in the minority in engineering program, not only for what they have been able to do to give us this inaugural but even more importantly, for the tireless work that they have been doing over decades, decades in the past, and decades in the future, and we must act, certainly with a sense of urgency. Now I'm very glad to say that we have in just this month, for example, at least substantial set of resources, human and financial resources to increase our undergraduate representation of African American and black engineering students. Now this workshop is geared towards the other side of this important pipeline and community building. And to kick off this workshop with this plenary panel, we have four truly outstanding trailblazers. And they will be introduced by the panel moderated by our own Professor Barrett Cartwell. So I will have the pleasure to introduce the moderator for tonight's panel. Professor Cartwell is a professor of industrial engineering, and by courtesy of aeronautics and astronautics. He's one of the first few African American professors that our college has been able to recruit. And over the years, he has been a leader in many ways. He's a fellow of the Human Factors and Organomics Society. And since 2002, so for 19 years now served as director of the NASA funded Indiana Space Grant Consortium. In 2016, think Professor Cartwell also served in public service as a Jefferson Science Fellow at the US Department of State. And he was assigned to the Environment Science Technology Health Policy in the Office of Japanese Affairs in the State Department. And as some of you know that Professor Cartwell has been very widely regarded as a leading scholar, teacher. And as you can see, the impact of his engagement effort is also wide and deep. So it is a real pleasure to welcome now to the virtual stage, if you will, and give us this incredibly important evening. Eric Cartwell, Professor Cartwell, thank you so much and thank you to all the four panelists that will be introduced by you now. Please. Thank you Dean Cheng. Thank you for the wonderful introduction. I appreciate it very much in some ways this feels like a gathering of like minded folk who have taken a variety of pathways to the top of, shall we say, several varied mountains that all have their own unique perspectives and each one of them is a thought leader and pioneer in their own right. And we could spend a lot of time talking about the achievements of each and every one of them. I will take just a couple of minutes for each person to introduce them and to provide a little bit of view of their perspective. I'd like to introduce Christine Grant. She is a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at North Carolina State University, and the inaugural associate dean of faculty advancement. And the 2021 President-elect of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers and a life member of Society of Women Engineers, SWE, National Society of Black Engineers, NSB, NCNW, and ASIS. She obtained her bachelor degree in chemical engineering from Brown University and her graduate work, both master's and doctorate from the Georgia Institute of Technology. She's been recognized for broadening the participation, promotion and retention of underrepresented minorities and women in STEM, receiving a number of awards including the NSF Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Math and Engineering Mentoring. She's authored the Elsevier Book Success Strategies for Women in STEM, a portable mentor, and contributed multiple other book chapters to diversity in STEM. Second, Mamon Powers Jr. Mamon has been in the construction industry for more than 40 years. He began his career with Amaco and then joined his father at Powers & Sons Construction Company in 1971 after completing his bachelor's degree in civil engineering from Purdue. Mamon is a registered professional engineer in the state of Indiana and over his time as treasurer and then president and now chair of the board of Powers & Sons Construction, the company switched its focus from purely residential to commercial and industrial construction and grew to be one of the largest African American-owned construction companies in the country. He provides strategic direction and leadership as firms chairman and CEO. And he's also also managed to have been actively involved in various organizations that serve the construction industry and the community as a whole, including as a board chairman for Methodist hospitals. The regional bank board of directors of the fifth third bank Chicago region, world presidents organization, chief executive organization, number of others, but I would be remiss if I did not mention that one of his main services has been to Purdue University as a member of the universities from 1996 when he was appointed by Governor Evan By until 2011. In his final term, he served as the vice chairman of the board. And in 2014, Mamon was awarded an honorary doctorate in engineering. Next, Tony Harris. Anthony Tony Harris is the current president and CEO of Campbell Harris security equipment company, manufacturer density meters and contraband detection equipment for contraband of all types, including explosives and dirty bombs. Harris is a 1975 Purdue graduate with a BS in mechanical engineering, and an MBA from the Harvard Graduate School of Business. Tony was recognized by the university as a Purdue outstanding mechanical engineer in 1999 distinguished engineering alumnus in 2008, and an honorary degree in engineering. A honorary doctorate degree in engineering in 2013. Some of you may also recognize Tony as one of the founders of the National Society of black engineers, and he currently serves on the organization's National Advisory Board. Virginia Lynn booth will make a Hoosier native from Indianapolis, and also Purdue University graduate with a BS degree in industrial engineering and a BA in psychology. After my own heart. 18 years of experience in engineering manufacturing and has decided to return as a PhD student in engineering education. While she is still the director of the minority engineering program, a position that she's held since 2004. She used her engineering background to address retention and academic performance gaps between underrepresented minority engineering students and the majority population. First year retention rates for underrepresented minority students under her leadership has grown from 63 to 95% and first year academic performance has increased 40%. She served as the national president of the National Association of multicultural engineering program advocates, an engineering organization, a broader engineering organization that has a legacy of best practices and effective programming and outreach recruitment retention and academic excellence. Just by going through these background statements, there's a lot to cover today. So I think we're going to get right to that. So, let's start with an opening statement brief statement. I'm going to ask the panelists to share a pivotal experience that served as a turning point for you in your ability to have and share the influences that you are now demonstrating in your career. And Tony, can I start with you. Well, first of all, let me say how excited and honored I am to be a part of this. And I want to thank you Barrett and I want to thank our been and, and Stephanie and my I really appreciate the Nesby shout out. Thank you for pulling this together. I really hope this becomes an ongoing session and not just doing black history month, but a way for us to engage throughout that throughout the year and years to come. Some pivotal turning points in my career that that might fit this discussion I thought I'd go back to while I was a student on campus, and share with you one of those experiences but before I did that I need to establish a context. In the 70s, you know, it was the first time, predominantly white institutions like Purdue were emitting large numbers of black students, following the turmoil of the 60s and the riots and all that stuff and for the first time we were beginning to make comparisons on campuses. There are very few of us out of the 32,000 students are Purdue there were only about 170 African American students total. And in my incoming class of 8,000 engineers there were 25 African Americans. Most of us that come from big inner city high schools. And we, while we were doing really well in those schools we really weren't prepared for the rigor of a Purdue for instance, Chicago public schools where I was from. They did not offer calculus, even in the technical high school that I attended so we were relatively unprepared. There was little or no structured academic support systems in place. There were there are very, very few women and out of the 25 women that matriculated with me or students that African American students and matriculated with me there was only one African American female. There were no black faculty and very few black students going into grad school companies were beginning to start trying to recruit African American graduates but they really claimed to not be able to find us so there were very few job opportunities, even upon graduating. Several universities have begun to organize clubs, the black student unions, like societies of engineering and math around the country so this was the context with which I'm about to share so in my junior year I became president of the student chapter of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, ASME. And as president had an opportunity to attend their national conference with several other students at Purdue, and the conference was held in New York City and Madison Square Garden. So the first time I had an opportunity to experience a national organization up close and personal at the national conference there, students and professionals were networking they were sharing work experiences they were sharing projects they were working on they were sharing study habits they were there was even a small job fair so they were there were job opportunities that were leveraging these experiences all around the country. And this was a huge eye opener for me you know I was truly excited about this and as we began to come back to Purdue. I began to talk about wouldn't it be great if black students had an opportunity to do this kind of networking and leveraging all across the country. It was exciting times and as I talked about the vision and not the process. You know people would get excited about it if you talked about as I talked with others about the end game of what would it look like if we did this, and I talked about how we would get to do that. People would get excited and develop a lot of buy in. That was a true learning experience for me. As we got back to campus with the support of what was in freshman engineering, ultimately became the minority engineering programs office. I was able to identify who's the deans were of the accredited universities across country, right. Each of them a letter asking them to put me in touch with someone on campus and talked about wouldn't it be great if we could do this on a national basis and in 1975 we were able to try 80 students from across the country to Purdue University to form the very first conference of the National Society of black engineers. What they say is history, and as we as now 30,000 plus members and allies, we've got over 400 chapters, there are 4000 international members. There's a 40 full time paid professional staff in a building that the organization owns with a $14 million annual budget, impacting minority students from K through 12, all the way through the pipeline and into the professional arena where there are 3,800 professional members as well. So that small opportunity for me as a Purdue students and ASME as resulted in what I now get to share with you all as a part of the history of the National Society black engineers. Thank you Tony. Virginia, can I ask you to go next since you seem to have had a very close seat for some of this activity. So my experience at Purdue, pivotal experience. So I came in as a psych major, because I wanted to solve the world's problems. And until I met Tony, he told me I weren't going to get paid. He said, you're not going to make no money unless you get your PhD. And I was like, Oh my God, you know, I thought about 12 years I said, Oh no I can't. And so I didn't know a lot about college, you know, I'm one of five children, and the only one that graduated from high school, and the only one that went to college so it was just alien to me I was walking around on campus totally clueless about the college experience and definitely not aware of what engineering was. I learned about engineering I met the Chicago six, and I met other engineering students that were also on campus. And I learned that engineering would open up opportunities for me that I wouldn't have been able to dream of, you know, in my younger years. It changed my major, and it was a challenge because like Tony I did not have preparation for engineering but I had the desire to be successful. And it was when when as we were started, I was there, and it was amazing to see all the students come from all over the country. It was a very exciting time for engineering students then. We were able to fellowship with each other and learn about each other's situations on different campuses. And after Tony graduated and some of the others I think Ed Coleman graduated to the same year. I kept Nesby going. And it was an initiative to start at Purdue but there were a lot of schools that were doing similar work. So eventually, President Hanson, who who was an advocate for Nesby during my time at Purdue, he challenged me to run for a chair.  But he gave me his backing and let me know that if I won, he provide us with an office and he would support the effort and serve as a mentor. And that was the conference that year. And I won a one national chair. And I think what really made it sale for the other students was the fact that I had a university president behind me, and we needed that type of advocacy in that day. And to his word, he supported me. He had me speak at the National Academy of Science, which was a very intimidating opportunity. But at that particular conference, I think it was the National Academy of Science, they were doing a research for how do we get more engineers involved in engineering in stem fields. And because Nesby had been started, they wanted to hear a student's perspective. And that opened the door for me to talk to a lot of corporate CEOs, and other educators that attended that event. And it was amazing how things developed from there I got a standing ovation, and a lot of corporations began to look at Nesby as an investment opportunity. So I served as national chair for two consecutive terms in office. It never happened before. Of course, we were young. And I found myself totally immersed in the advocacy for the program. It wasn't something that I wanted to do, because it would give you a lot of attention. It was something I wanted to do because I needed to be successful. And I wanted to make sure that when you're talking about student success, listen to the students, because they are in it, they're going through it. I would say that's the most pivotal experience that I've had. I've got others, but I don't want to take too much more time.  Thank you, Virginia. How about you? Again, thank you, Barrett and certainly thank you to Mung and Arvin and all those that helped put this program together. I'll just echo Tony's opening remarks. It's certainly a pleasure for us to be able to share our experiences and relive some of those exciting times that we've had as we've built our careers. Other than Virginia and Tony, I was actually here before them. I started in 1966. So my experiences were very similar to Tony's. There was no calculus offered in my high school, so you started off very much behind when you came to Purdue. There are pivotal points for me. And there are probably two of them that brought me to Purdue and one that continues to motivate me today that I talk about almost every time I speak, because it's still his motivation to me, is that in my 10th grade geometry class we had an African American student teacher from Purdue. He was a math major. And he pulled the smartest young man in the class aside, which was not me, but it was a friend of mine. So I just simply ease dropped on the conversation. And he told the young man that he ought to consider going to Purdue majoring in engineering. He said because there are no African American registered professional engineers in the state of Indiana. And so he's dropping on the conversation I decided that was something I was going to do and set that as a go when I was in the 10th grade. Following that when I told my parents my father specifically that I want to go to Purdue and major engineering. And he found three African American engineers for me to meet to serve as I'll call it mentors, if you will, or inspiration. And two of them could never get a job in corporate America. They worked in one worked in the steel mill one worked in the post office is just basic labor jobs. The third though, actually went to Purdue and majored in civil engineering. And I tell all the time. And he shared with me that when he was a student at Purdue. He could not live on campus, but he had to be back across the river by sundown every night into the black community of life yet. And yet he graduated in civil engineering. And ultimately started his own firm because he. He right now everybody does, if you will, telework, and maybe he invented that because he did get a job with an engineering firm downtown. But they wouldn't let him come into the office so we had to come into the mail room get his assignments and take it home and then turn it back in. But the motivation for me was the fact that he was able to graduate, could not live on campus, could not go to the library after sundown. Could not eat in any of the dining facilities, but yet he still graduated. So every time I'd become a little disappointed with how the world was treating me and the challenges of Purdue and calculus classes of physics classes, etc. I thought about him and the fact that he was able to graduate and couldn't even live on campus and I could go to the library every day.  This is not that hard, you can do it. So that was a pivotal thing for me that I still talk about today that still motivates me today. Thank you. That's, that's a powerful story. Thank you. Christine. Thank you. Well thank you to the organizers and Barrett for moderating this panel. So I wanted to, to talk about mentoring. So I think for me. The concept of mentoring and coaching has been one of the pivotal things that's been a theme throughout what has happened to me along the way.  You know whether it was Dr Howard Adams coming to General Electric Research Development Center. In the summer when I finished my freshman year at Brown University to talk to us about being Jim fellows and going to graduate school that was back in 19. Oh my goodness 1980, 81, probably 1981 that that we first met. Or whether it was Matt Terrell at University of Minnesota and David Terrell at Cal Tech, two white males who were brothers who took me under their wing. After I got tenure at NC State to come and do many sabbaticals and supported me. Or whether it was the mentoring that I got in the American Institute of Chemical Engineers over the years by people who didn't look like me that encouraged me to continue to participate that now I find myself as the president of the organization, which has, you know, 40,000 or more members in 110 countries. So there's a lot of mentoring stories I know we all have them. I think that that's a theme for me. I would say that though that the once one thing that happened to me that was really pivotal I shared with this group, and I was trying to find a way to make it pivotal so it is pivotal. I was at the emerging research network conference in Washington DC. Last year, last January, February. One of my colleagues who's at NC State, Joe Ducast. We had a booth it's it's basically a conference for individuals to go and present their research, whether it's via poster presentation or oral presentations competition, mostly minority underrepresented students from a number of different institutions from a number of different programs it's probably I don't know 1000 or two people that go to this meeting. And so NC State had a booth there. His colleague who went to RPI was talking to some different people and so he went over to the RPI booth. He's a professor now at NC State, but he went to RPI as a student. He went to the RPI booth, and he met these this woman and span, and he said, Oh, I think you might know someone that Christine Grant knows, and they said, Okay, let's go meet her. We went back over to the booth, and we started talking. And it turned out that we all knew another person that some of you may know Janet Rutledge who was a student there so when I was the president of NSBE at Brown University back in there, she was at either at RPI or she was on the national stage I can't remember which one. But anyway, we had this connection and I looked at this woman and I said, You look familiar to me I don't know why but you look familiar to me she had a very distinctive look. And I thought, and she said no I don't think we know each other and so, then I said to her where you know you went to RPI and they said did you go to RPI said no I didn't go to RPI. And I said to her, Wait a minute. Did you used to go from RPI in Troy, New York, which is on one side of the river to the other side of the river to Albany, New York to tutor young people in the inner city at the Urban League. And then they looked at it and they said you know what we did and they said then they started recollecting how they used to they got a van, and they drove over to Albany, and they met these students. One of them was me sitting in a in a classroom I was probably a freshman in high school. And I was eager to find out about what engineering was, and either to be tutored in math, and they were the ones and so here we are I can't do the math I should be able to do it. But 40 something years later that met, and I was able to thank them and they were still doing the work and I'm doing the work alongside them. So where does this come back together. It comes back to what Tony said initially, is that when they were doing this work at Purdue, there were students at RPI that were doing the same work, and paving the way and mentoring and providing a pathway for students to come behind them so pivotal to me pivotal events have been mentoring and coaching my people who look like me and people don't look like me who took me under their wings. And it has inspired and encouraged me to do the same thing. And it's just great to be on the panel with these thoughts too. So, thank you Christine. I love to hear those stories. We could tell those stories all night, I promise you. But the time clicks on. So thank you all for those experiences and with an easier question from the list of possible questions. And often we talk about mentors and admiring heroes. And I would like to ask you all. Who do you admire as a black hero was stem hero, who may not be the best known but is definitely the real McCoy, and I have to throw that out because Elijah McCoy is one of my heroes for the automatic oiler, which I liked even before I got to Purdue, but one of the most profoundly transformative engineering inventions to advance railroad transport. But how about the rest of you. Anybody. I'd like to mention mine. So I have a male and a female. The male is father barn if it's hard and he was not an engineer, but this is his picture. I moved my head over. He actually looked like Frederick Douglass with white hair. This man gave me a job when I was in high school, working at Martin Center College. And now Martin University is in existence in the city of Indianapolis. It's, I think it's it's an HBCU, but father Boniface saw something in me and told me I needed to go to college and I didn't even, I had never thought about college.  And that's how I got here he provided a scholarship. Had it not been for him. I don't know where I'd be today. And the other person I just wanted to mention that is not known as an engineer but it's Harriet Tubman. When you think about what you did to get all of those people transported from where they were to safety. That is just amazing. And I will forever be indebted to the, the example that she said, not only for women but for the, for the struggle that we all have to be willing to sacrifice in order to change the future. Well, I'm glad Virginia picked to because now I get to pick to also. The first was my draft is high school drafting teacher ash will write with his name he's the first person I ever heard use the term engineering, and he established a chapter of the jets junior engineering technical society at Robert T. He's a huge high school 4000 students there. And through the jets we got to visit Northwestern and Chicago Circle, you got to talk to engineering students and really got a chance to understand a little bit about what engineering was. And I wanted to be an architect.  He says the way engineers make money is by being smart. He says you can be smart. The other I got to say is that another Purdue alum Dr Arthur J by Dr bond was a graduate engineering student at Purdue, while I was when I enrolled meticulously as a freshman, and he took me and several others under his wing and kind of taught us more of the social mannerisms and mechanisms to get through Purdue, he told us not to wear stocking caps and don't raise your hair in class and, and those kinds of things that help us navigate between the lives. The ultimate became one of the faculty supporters of mesby and is considered one of the founding fathers as well. I'll go next if that's okay.  So, as I indicated earlier, I came a registered professional engineer, and about eight or nine years ago. I started requiring that you do continuing it. And I thought, well, I really don't want to do continuing yet I think, you know, I'm about ready to retire and that's just a lot of work. I'm not going to do it. I happened to play golf with a gentleman that was about 85 years old and he was a doctor and he said to me. I've got to stop this afternoon and I've got to have to take my continuing ed class. And I said, well, you're 85 years old, why are you still taking continuing it. He said, I worked too hard to get that medical degree to let it go over continuing it. So from that point on I've always studied and taking taking my continuing it classes for my registered professional engineer license. I encourage all of you to do the same in the process of doing that you pick classes and I happen to pick a class and I think it was on inventors I can't remember. Exactly. But I was amazed to find that there was a gentleman by the name of Lonnie Johnson, who was from Tuskegee. And he invented what's called the super soaker water gun. And I think this was actually by accident because he was in the rockets and things of that nature, but he was a pro he wasn't as a prolific inventor. And so from that super soaker water gun and I went right away to my closet to find out that I had one of those with my children. And I also invented the nerve gun. And then he was a student enough to patent his invention and then market it. And so one company. He actually bought the marketing rights to it. That company was acquired by has Hasbro Hasbro then began to continue to market it. And Hasbro actually tried to cheat him out of his royalties and he was to receive so he had to sue Hasbro. And they paid him 73 million dollars about eight or nine years ago. So, many of you are going to be the fellows are I'm sure will be inventors and so make sure that you patent your products, but the super soaker was invented by an African American male from Tuskegee Institute, who actually ended up with a degree I think in nuclear engineering, PhD in nuclear engineering so great story. And he is an inventor for a living as a facility and he has other scientists working with him. Thank you Maiman. Christine. So, following Virginia and Tony's lead I'm going to do too. So, my first one is Dr. Shirley Malcolm. Dr Malcolm is the head of education and human resources she's almost retired semi retired at the American Association for the advancement of science and I had met her over over the years. I was one of the authors, along with a group of other women of color of the double bind talking about being a woman and of color in the STEM Academy or the stem, not just the Academy but in the stem field. And I met her at a few meetings and I remember actually there's a Purdue connection. There's a Purdue connection for everything right Purdue people. Yeah, so I was at a Purdue meeting for early career faculty. I was doing a keynote at a dinner, and I think she was also a keynote at another session and I was just so impressed with her that Virginia we're talking I like to make jewelry and so there's a shop in Purdue some of you know, on one of these side streets and a lot of girls beads and lots of other stuff. So I remember going down to the shop and buying something and making her a brooch or a pendant, you know, and giving it to her at this meeting because I was so impressed with her I really enjoyed interacting with her and several years later I approached her about coming to do a mini sabbatical. I said you don't have to pay me, I just want to, you know, just want to follow you around and so I had an opportunity to go to triple as in Washington for part of a year and just, just be in meetings with the White House just follow I paid my own way, you know, it was just it was amazing. And I really enjoyed that experience and then the second person who I've met once or twice is John Slaughter, some of you may know him. John Slaughter was the African American was the first director, first African American director at the National Science Foundation. He was the president of University of Maryland College Park he's in the National Academy, and wrote a book a few years ago with a group of people that I had an opportunity to edit on African the history of African Americans and engineering. And so that's somebody who I just was looking up last night for something else and so these are folks who some of them are well known some of them, not so much but for early career engineers and for students. They're not known to you then they're unknown right so you should go look them up. So those are my two. Okay, thank you. So, as some of you may know we've had some discussions on the Purdue campus about the response of the campus and the response of the students on the campus to the social justice conflicts and concerns of the past year. Which for some of us was not just the past year. And I'm going to direct this question of Virginia. What do you see as similar and different between your student experiences interacting with hub D hall Purdue administration. During your early Nesby years. And you've gotten also experienced the current student experiences including some of the students that were involved with the Nesby call to action and other student engagement with the administration. Weeding to and through the Purdue equity task force. What do you see that that connection. How do you see that that evolution mute Virginia you're muted again. Sorry. I don't know why I do that. Well actually my husband was making noise so I had to mute that time. Okay, great question. Very thank you for asking. It's a very deep question. I'll try to answer it succinctly without at, you know, without doing too much talking. But I was here in the 70s. I was here when as we was founded in 1974 ever 27 African Americans in the College of Engineering. As freshmen in 2000. And 20. The number was 23. So I've seen an actual complete round circle. And the question is how did we get there. Nesby was founded here. And then the year after Nesby was founded the number of African American freshmen went up to 75. The number of years where the numbers went as high as I believe 92. As a freshman incoming class. Of course we had affirmative action. There were a lot of funds that were available. And it was sort of a mandate that we do that. And times have changed there have been a lot of legal court cases against affirmative action now. And we've seen that hit California, Michigan, and other areas and you know legally universities are really taking a conservative stand and I understand that. But we are determined to do better. Dean Monk has already mentioned it. The university has has a call to action. And one of the stimulators for that call was the National Society of Black Engineers in a very strong way. I see students reacting. I see students standing up their organizations on campus and they're very serious about being active in and looking for change and demanding a change. And I'm seeing a response today that I don't think would have happened back in the 70s. We were fortunate to have President Arthur Hanson, and he was an advocate they called him the students president. He was an advocate for diversity and I think we have advocacy now for diversity is just a lot of things have changed and we're seeing the impact of the structural nature of exclusion. And yes, we can say the structural nature of how exclusion and systematic policies, literally support racism, whether directly or indirectly. So there are a lot of things that we need to do different. I do see a strong student mindset to make sure that things are done differently. We're not there yet, but I'm very, very hopeful for this semester's incoming class. Yes, we, we look for all students to want to come to Purdue and be successful. And as a minority engineering program director we support African Americans, Hispanic Native Americans will support any student that will come to us, looking for help but we're really looking at these numbers. No, not only can we do better, we must do better. There have been alarms that have stepped up a lot of support has really come to the forefront, and I'm happy to see that that's not something that I think I would have seen in the 70s. So I think we're in a good place, but we have to see what happens, you know the proof they say is in the pudding, but the proof is going to be in what actually happens this year. Yeah, we've seen this in the past, you know as I mentioned as a result of the riots of the 60s and the burn baby burn era. That is what caused universities and other institutions to open their doors in some way and let a bunch of us rush in. I personally benefited from that. The problem though I think is that then everybody said, Okay, the problem is fixed.  And here fast forward 45 years later, we found ourselves again at this situation, as opposed to treating this like any other engineering problem, where we have milestones that are measurable that we track on an ongoing basis and continue to project into the future. This is not a one time event it's got to be a long term solution. So Tony, really you're anticipating my next question because you're talking about success criteria and success processes. And what do you what do you say you've had this history as a student you've had this history as a successful businessman. What do you see as the top three items for ensuring success and growth of black businesses and maybe even for black students and engineering. Yeah, I think the criteria for success for black businesses is no different than criteria for success for any businesses. And I can't narrow it down to three that I think are the most important. Number one, particularly for entrepreneurs from entrepreneurial business number one is a high tolerance for risk and a high ability to accept failure. I for instance started three other companies that started that failed before I ultimately acquired my current business that proved to be very very successful. And I believe I've learned more from those failures, in terms of what I was good at what I enjoy and how I wanted to structure my business I learned more from those failures that I have from from any successes. And as I've talked to other entrepreneurs. That is true for them to the second particularly enlarge corporate organizations is the ability to delegate and I think that is the single most difficult leadership attribute to develop. Because it's so much quicker to want to do things yourself, and you have personal skin in the game so you want to make sure they're successful so you want to do them yourself. But when you're leading and managing large organizations, when I was executive at Pacific gas electric company. My purview was 4000 plus people, and the only way you can manage largest numbers of people like that is to delegate. So the secret to delegating is to know that when you're managing professional people you can either tell them what to do, or you can tell them how to do it. But you can't tell them both, because now you eliminated in responsibility and degrees of freedom from them. The third I think is access to capital, and you know the challenge for black people. And typically is that we don't have access to large resources of individuals that can contribute to our business ideas. We generally don't get well received by banks, but the one thing to remember about capital is that there are always more money than there are good ideas. You have debt capacity. Basically if you have good credit, then you are able to attract finances to a good idea so being able to articulate a good idea, having decent credit which allows you to personally have skin in the game will help you to attract capital. Thank you, I wish you had told me the delegation thing when I was going through tenure and trying to get promoted. I think there's a lot of challenges that we see in many of these circumstances now of the students, you know, learning skills, the faculty, trying to apply their skills in a large organization. I joke about that is things they didn't teach us in grad school about how to manage a large organization known as a university. One of the most important things though, is that students, faculty administrators have very different time scales. And they think about the pace of the university in very different ways. Christine.  How do you think about communicating and even bridging the gap between students, faculty and administrators, and their concepts of what fast response might be. And then at events such as last year's social and racial justice protests. Yeah, that's a really great question. Well, first of all, I'm an associate dean not a dean but I'll take the promotion if you'll give me a pay raise. But no worries. So I think this is a really important and a very complex question and what I really enjoyed about preparing for this, for this discussion is that we as a panel got to talk about a lot of elements of this and I'm going to try to bring some of those into my answer. You know, each, each campus has a different response so I'm the only person on this panel that is not from Purdue and suffice it to say that North Carolina State and other institutions who are having the same questions and the same challenges. It depends on how much work they've done before as to how quickly they can respond. You know, we also as a group talked about the fact that the sum of this is generational, some of it is personality in terms of the elements and an understanding, you know what your superpower is or what, as Virginia said, you know understand the importance of trying to move. That's really important in this whole, this whole entity. So, you know you mentioned that the timeline, you know for students students are on campus for four years and so their dwell time is four years, right and so something happens in a year and they're not even there the whole year right I mean they're not even there for six months. And so the amount of time that they spent on campus is different and so they are really wanting to see things happen quickly and I understand that I, I did the protest for MLK day and to free Nelson Mandela for those of you who remember that free Nelson Mandela from prison right. You know it's, there's so many things that have to happen when we talk about making change. We all have different roles to play so for example if you want to get more black faculty on campus, not just get on campus but have them get tenure retain them, promote them. Then there's a lot of things that have to happen you have to have search committees that are aligned with best practices or promising practices to recruit faculty to bring them to campus to successfully get them on campus and then at a level just like Purdue, you have to be able to keep them there right. I've had an opportunity to coach some of the women faculty at Purdue through some programs that you all have and you know that is something that's really important is how do you keep people there. So the question is, you know who does what and how fast does it happen. I believe it's critical to have folks that can speak at the interfaces of these different groups so folks who can speak to students and speak to faculty who understand you have to have an intentional meaningful strategic strategic management of the conversation when you're talking about communicating the action items and the levels of accountability. You know if you set a goal for Dean or the department head or Chancellor or President sets a goal. So who's going to keep them accountable. Is it the Board of Trustees, is it the alumni, is it the students, you know what, what does that mean to set a goal, or just to put out a statement that says how much we hate that George Floyd Floyd died. You know everybody does right well hopefully everybody does. But what are you going to do about it now just a statement and I think that that's where your accountability piece comes in. And then there's also a degree of training informing educated that is needed by those in the trenches. The allies, the people leadership and the community so if you want to get more black faculty, you have to make sure that the search committees in the departments understand best practices for not having unconscious bias, or some other things that that may be present right and so that doesn't happen overnight you have to, you have to change minds one person at a time, and there have to be allies and someone in leadership has to mandate that we're going to do this. One group certainly can't do it all and ignoring it is not an option. So, I think it's important to respect the contributions to the conversations, so that we move forward. So for example, you will not see me out marching right now, I'm probably too old to do that. However, what you will see me doing is you will see me at the American Institute of Chemical Engineers talking about things that we need to do to help the organization, or you might see me trying to recruit faculty, or sitting on the running that process at the college level, and making sure that people have the right information and that they're treated fairly, but you're not going to see that visibly and I don't think students, as Virginia said, students don't necessarily know all the dimensions of what goes on the university and how the needle has to be moved. And at the same time, they need to continue to press us on the issue. That doesn't mean that they should just not do anything. So Maiman, question for you. You've had the experience of the family business. And if I understand you've managed to get some of your own children to join you in the family business. Sometimes we hear these debates about continuing industry, more blacks in industry, and then you also, as Christine was just saying, talking about the processes of getting more blacks into academia. And a lot of people turn that into an either or debate in the community. Rather than turning that into a debate. I'd like to think about a both and how do we build stronger relationships between universities and industry to provide more synergistic, collaborative opportunities for black undergraduate and graduates, engineering students and even black faculty as well. You mute it. Thank you Virginia. One more question I'll do the best that I can to to answer it and it's not a real, it's not a real easy answer but I think if there's an open collaboration between if you will, industry and the university. And the universities with the president, the deans, etc. To develop. If you will a collaborative environment, so that ideally if some faculty can take sabbatical and then work in industry for a given period of time I think that gives a certainly an insight on what students should expect and how they can best mentor students to be involved in industry. I think the university being involved in the communities. Just maybe even, for example, we used to have the president of the university, come, come to come to the community actually come to high schools. And that is a very profound experience for students to see the president of the university like Purdue at a high school, encouraging them to come. I think that makes a big difference, and is great motivation. To have that engagement with the community. Probably even looking at those companies that are most successful with recruiting and advancement of African Americans and retainage retention become maybe the bell whether of the corporations that the university should look at, and work with them to make their doing. They also have the best practices going forward. My real heart is, is an entrepreneurship, and it's pretty simple that entrepreneurs are the ones that are going to hopefully make create the wealth, so they can give back. And we have a lot of PhD students on the call which I think is absolutely excellent, because then there's that little bit of a, do I go into academia, or do I go into business, and sometimes many can do both. You can be an academia, certainly inspiring other students who will then maybe become entrepreneurs or and or you may become an entrepreneur with inventions. And a number of black inventors that I would encourage the PhD students to track and just be motivated by them. I'll tell you myself that I'm motivated by reading the stories of African American business people. I know I'm on Tony a little bit. Pick on Tony a little bit, you know, Harvard Business School will teach you how to run a business, but it's a little different one in African American on business. There, you need to know everything Harvard has to teach but they're also some, I'll call it street skills that you need to learn. And I've learned those just by reading the stories and the strategies that African American entrepreneurs have to use, and you still use today, in order to be successful. And in that word success. You know, in my mind. Your success is really not based upon how smart you are. It's really how much passion you have to relentlessly pursue your dream. That's what really makes a difference. And being able to take that risk and, and as Tony said, you know, to some extent throw caution to the wind.  But then you might be successful. And that makes a huge difference because you can do a lot for other people, developing wealth in the community. That is truly what we should be about. And I continually see that in other communities and we need to be able to develop more wealth in our communities and that's that's really through entrepreneurship. And for that question, I appreciate it and look forward to further discussions and questions. Okay. Thank you so one of the things that makes my job as moderator easy or easier is when you start answering the questions that are already showing up in the Q amp a. So, so thank you because there, there was a question about programs and platforms to help prepare graduates students and postdocs for the transition of their ideas to a startup. I think both Tony and main and you've talked about that. I will have to put in a plug for the faculty world because when I was coming through. That was part of the TQM model of the brand of you and being able to think of every faculty member as the CEO of their own startup. And how would either of you talk about other programs or platforms that you might envision. Well, you know I'm here in the Northern California Bay area right down the street from Silicon Valley. And one of the big retention tools now for tech companies is to grant employees sabbaticals anywhere from three months to a year sabbatical and I think it would be it would make sense if those were more structured says that a tech exact could spend that 369 12 month period at a place like Purdue, either teaching entrepreneurship or just is somehow some way. By using the the faculty there to kind of give them an idea of what's going on in tech. So, so I think, you know, I think tech companies would be receptive to that sort of thing as a way to make sure their execs aren't just taking, you know, six month vacation, but doing something that it could help develop them as well as develop the pipeline to fuel for the tech businesses. I think that's good cost of living is a little bit cheaper here too. The reason for that is this stuff called snow you got out there. You know, is Tony mentioned earlier that one of the challenges and barriers to entrepreneurship is access to capital. There's no doubt about that. And so my suggestion to all the undergraduates, if you will, is develop a lifestyle now that will allow you to save some money. One of the advantages that I had. What I have when I was at Purdue is I sent my tuition and women board bill home, just like everybody else did. And three days later it was back in my mailbox. And so I called home and said, did you all get this. And they said yes we did. And their response was we think you should pay for. I got angry I got mad I got upset, but also got determined, and I said, I'm going to show you, I'm going to pay for this. And so, thanksgiving I went home to work Christmas you go home to work spring break you go home to work over the summer you work. And it also, but it also taught me how to handle money. Which is most important. So when I was ready to graduate I knew how to, if you will handle money so that you could get more out of it. And the interesting part of the story is access to capital is that in my last semester, my last summer session because I had to go to summer school because I was behind and started behind. And it was $300 short. And I could have called my parents and asked for $300, but I was determined I was not going to call them. And so I beat my head against the wall trying to figure out what in the world can I do that how can I get. I couldn't have no more jobs I was working as many hours as you could possibly work. I walked by a building that said be a NK on it. It's like a bank. I'll go in there and ask for money. I went to the bank and I asked, can I borrow $300. And the gentlemen said I remember today he said do you have any collateral and not being a business student I said what's that. And he just started writing and writing and writing and just like a police officer when you're about to get a ticket there they're writing but you don't know what they're doing. And he tore off and handed me a check and say here's $300 be it back in 60 days interest rate is 8%. You know, that was my first unsecured bank loan, and I learned from that, how to handle money, how to get money from banks. And that was the last time I actually went to ask a bank for money, and it really needed it. The thing for banks is you want to ask them for money when you don't need it. So when you have so when you have a little money, go borrow some money. It's really how this whole thing worked is reverse psychology, but don't be afraid to save some money have a little net worth and let be able to leverage that contacts and relationships that you'll have their private equity people out there their funds out in this day and age because of George Ford probably funds from African American businesses, or, or ideas. Robert Smith, who is the biggest African American private equity person in the country and I don't know. But that's one of the things that they do their private equity, people that have graduated from Purdue that do private equity and look for businesses to buy and acquire or start. So there are opportunities out there you just have to start finding the right people and develop some some personal network.  The other is, never have debt on a depreciating asset. I know that's hard to do but if you can accomplish that, it starts your financial independence going forward and that's what you want to be is you want to be financially independent you don't want to be dependent on anyone. So, those are my thoughts. You know personal financial management should be a requirement class at Purdue and everywhere else. Yes. Yes, absolutely. Okay, so I wanted to ask one of the questions in the chat. It's somebody said how can black engineers leverage our unique experiences to contribute to science policy. And what I didn't mention when I was talking about Charlie Malcolm is that why I really enjoyed that experience because the American Association for the advancement science really does a lot with science policy, which as a faculty member for at that point 25 years, I did not have any experience in that realm and so that gave me an opportunity to actually learn about science policy. You know, while I am not officially representing the organization here I am actually working at the National Science Foundation for a year in one of their programs and so I am getting to see front and center kind of what's going on there, but it was because it was because I am, I had that experience. So if you want to get involved with science policy, lots of ways to do it I mean I hear that there are very few people who are scientists associated with the government, right and not like NSF but I mean, you know, like in Congress and all of them. You don't have to do that. However, there are lots of different ways to get involved. And then the way you contribute is you got to learn what it is and what the issues are and so once you learn what they are find an area that you want to work in and volunteer or, you know, pivot and do some consulting there or whatever so there are lots of different things that you can do. You just have to be intentional and start, you know, it's much easier than when we started right well there was no internet. You just got to type in some of you seen you looking down it's because I was trying to figure out okay where what's showing up in this position. Let me figure out the phone right so you can find this stuff easily out there, and then just call people up and Oh yeah so I'll say, why was it so important that I gave Shirley Malcolm that broach why did I mention that, because you, like he said you need to get alone before you need the money. You need to create relationships and connections with people before you need them. Right. So that broach was kind of my entry point to her. And then it wasn't until years later, I didn't know why I would be interacting with her later, start forming those relationships now so that later on you can utilize them when you don't even know so always be on on point we're trying to make relationships with people. And that's a great point, especially your reference to Shirley Malcolm and the triple as when I was in DC. That was actually a lot of the younger scientists and engineers were triple as fellows that they were fresh out of their PhD program, and they were working in the state they were working at USA ID, they were working at OSTP that there are a lot of those opportunities sorry office of science and technology policy. There are lots of those opportunities that are available to people. And it's not just for early career, we have a number of people at the National Science Foundation, who are deep into their career decided they wanted to pivot and do something else, and they went back and became a triple as fellow. They may be in their fifties, you know, so it's never too late to become a triple as fellow or do one of these Jefferson fellow somebody in here was a Jefferson fellow was it. No it's very yeah I mean so there's lots of different things. Just get online and keep looking and keep on keep on looking and, of course I would be remiss if I did not mention that Dean Chang had just has just gotten back from a year in DC. And I will say it's curious because it's clear that other policymakers don't think like engineers do. And so what one of the great phrases is sometimes you need a scientist or an engineer in the room to know if you need a scientist or engineer and I actually have to credit that one to Tony Boykin. I'm going to use it.  Along these lines. I mean there are lots of formal ways, but can can you give me an informal way to think about how do we bring other people. How do we train encourage additional, not just allies but as Christine you said during one of our prior meetings accomplices. That was Virginia. That was Virginia. Yeah, yeah, yeah, because I remember writing it down. My apologies Virginia, because now you're going to come after me again. The accomplice thing that I ship is important and accomplice is someone in a position of power that can affect policy within their realm of influence, and they do so. It's sort of the do the right thing kind of person. And actually I think this event is is that type of activity. When you do something intentional to generate conversation and to look for change accomplices are also and I have to say this, our alums are amazing. And they have stepped up and I'm not talking about African American only. We have alums from all ethnicities that have stepped up to the plate, and they're doing things that I haven't seen done since I've been here. At least as it relates to the minority engineering program. So there's power in all of us to do something to affect policy to create new structures or to dismantle structures that don't work. Some of the things that we deal with and make it complicated for students even to come to Purdue is in using antiquated policies that simply are not relevant to what we're dealing with as you get a more diverse population. Things that used to work for white males may not be appropriate for who we're dealing with today and Purdue is one of the most diverse universities in the world. So we have to look at look at the policies that we use, look at the structures that are historic and and question them. It's okay to do that. You know, and we're needed dismantle and do something that works for the purposes that we're here to accomplish. So I just want to just mention the power that we all have in our own space and understanding the needle. You know, for me for students, your needle is graduate. Finish your degree and move on and make a difference in the world. You know, I have needles to move in MEP. I focused on first year performance. I focus on transition programs. I find my needles and I'm determined to move them. But there are other things that we can do as well in a broader sense. So the accomplice piece is that person that can make a difference that can change your policy at the stroke of a pen. It's time to pull the pens out and just start making some changes. I like to point out. I want to segue from what Virginia said into this question about COVID there was a question about COVID in there and how that is changing what we do and how we do it but back to something that she just said I remember when I was, when I was at Brown and NSB and I was all fired up, you know I went to graduate school at Georgia Tech and I had to take like transport phenomena grad level and I remember talking to my then boyfriend now husband at the time about I want to go out and help my people.  And so now, you know years later I'm able to help my people, so to speak in a different way so I think it's important to piggyback on what Virginia said to understand where you are in the process and what it doesn't mean to help, you know the help for a faculty member assistant that's the world I live in, is to get tenure. So you can be here like Dr. Caldwell is better for a long time, and, and make a difference and be able to do that. And for students like Virginia said to be able to graduate so, but I was trying to pivot Virginia but I had this question about COVID and, and I don't remember what the question was but just you know about rules and different things and this is like change the equation for a lot of people and it's impacting us more for a lot of reasons and generally, generationally, I'm assuming that there are a number of students who either can't go back to work, or got to go back home and help their parents, and their families, or maybe they're not going to be able to go to school, it just, can you somebody asked the question. Well, I do, I do want to say something about COVID. This national this global pandemic to me has biblical proportions I've never seen anything like this, and the stress the students are under is tremendous. And I can talk about students of color we're very social. The academic success center used to be so full that they spill out in the hallways. It's like a desert now. And I'm looking at that statistics and data and I see more students on probation. After last semester, I believe that, you know, I've heard students comments you know they may have a situation that's very stressful. I had a young lady that had to make an emergency trip to Texas because she's got an elderly parent that could not they didn't have he they didn't have money, and and she flew there, and she couldn't get a break on her homework. You know, it's and these are things it's not I don't think it's intentional, but we have to be intentional about dealing with the stress the students are under. You know, you might say well this is our policy. This is the way it is we don't do this there are times to question policy. There are times to say, hmm, we are we want to be fair to all students but here's the situation where if any student is dealing with a dilemma that's very difficult. Is there something we can do different, or we willing to to have a conversation with the right people, so that we can be consistent and do the same for anybody that has a situation, sometimes it's a matter of understanding what's truth and what's not. But we're in a really different place now. And I do think this is a time when we can question whether policy is appropriate. In this COVID space where it and it's not my call. I'm not faculty so I don't call that but I think there's an opportunity there. To speak to this other. Well, I guess my colleagues if they have something and I'm sorry, I already spoke. You're doing well. Actually my cousin just put a question in and I want to, he's 15. What is the importance of having social connections and or mentors when trying to understand the differences of all their different engineers out there so you don't fall into a field you're not interested in. I'll kind of paraphrase, you know how do you make the decisions how do you use your networks to figure out what you want to major and make sure you don't choose the wrong thing. Considering that it's rarely a linear path. There's rarely a single optimally constrained solution. Oh, that's so engineering like. What can I say, I can strain solution. Wow. We don't like to have one and we don't we don't pay a lot of money for them but I'm not convinced that they really do exist. And unfortunately, my optimally constrained solution would be, I would have plenty of time to have everybody answer those questions in exquisite detail and go into all of your experiences and all of your twists and turns. Unfortunately, that may not be the solution path we have available this evening. So I think for the panelists we may talk about something about some some interesting glasses of wine or some, or some other beverages that that we might share that to catch up on some of these stories and follow up on what we've done and what we can still do and some of the rest of us have to figure out what we're going to do next as we're emerging as weeders and trailblazers in the making. I want to thank you all for participating in this. I want to thank the panelists I really want to say that many of the things that we would have said 13 months ago would have been impossible are now exactly how we do things. I want to thank you for having people from all over the country, connecting and interacting on this I think has been tremendously valuable. I, again, want to thank Purdue College of Engineering. I want to thank the panelists. I want to thank, most of all, all the panel of the participants. We got way past 75 at some point. Thank you all. This has been a fantastic evening, a fantastic emergence, let's say let's not lose that energy but it's not waste this momentum. And I want to wish all of you a very excellent Thursday, Friday, Saturday events in the workshops and the other aspects of the black trail blazers and engineering event. Can you take us out please. Yes, I just wanted to offer a few concluding remarks. You know, certainly on behalf of Dean Chiang and the College of Engineering I'd like to add to Barrett's comments of words of thanks to all the panelists. Christine Virginia Tony, Naiman Barrett. You covered a lot of really important touching and motivating topics from black STEM heroes to black student experiences then and now. How to ensure success for black businessmen or engineers. What is the definition of fast versus slow. What needs to be done at what pace, who perceives the pace in response to social and racial injustice for tests. Is it either or with respect to industry and university with respect to tech companies, etc. To respond to all these questions I know that of the many people who were attending today. There are many allies and accomplices Virginia, certainly today, and this discussion I'm sure has been very empowering to all those as well. There are some woven topics of social and venture capital as needed to dismantle structures, Virginia. And above all, through your own sharing your own stories and examples. You have reminded us of the need to sustain the momentum for change for a long time. So, we thank you for these amazing words of wisdom. And for joining us for this. Plenary panel in the inaugural black trail blazers and engineering program. Honestly, I can't wait for you to meet the BT fellows which you're going to be doing now shortly after that. And I know that they will have a lot of questions for you so really look forward to it. And thanks, a special thanks to Barrett for organizing this panel, which he, you know, the whole team worked very hard to make this happen so thank you all very much. Thanks for having us.


Man, I used to turn out these videos weekly, but it's taken me like three weeks to put together a decent critique of piecewise analysis. I can't believe I've been reduced to this. In Episode 237, we talked a little about the gap between large language models and artificial intelligence, as well as some of the problems that can arise from mistaking a digital Ouija board for a source of well-reasoned information. But some folks have a different interpretation. You could ask me the question, some people say that these big models are just auto-complete. Well, on some level, the models are auto-complete. We're told that the large language models, they're just predicting the next word. Is that not so simple? No, that's true. They are just predicting the next word. And so they're just auto-complete. But ask yourself the question of what do you need to understand about what's been said so far in order to predict the next word accurately? And basically, you have to understand what's been said to bring that word out to you. So you're just auto-complete, too. Hinton isn't the only one in this boat. In his 1969 book, Continuances of Reinforcement, B.F. Skinner quipped, the real question is not whether machines think, but whether men do. Four days after chat GPT was released, open A.I. CEO Sam Altman tweeted, I am a stochastic parrot, and so are you. The thrust of the idea is that for all the objections raised about how shallow an algorithmic these predictive text programs can be, we aren't categorically different. As much as we'd like to believe that there's something unique and mysterious about our intelligence, human minds are nothing more than machine learning algorithms at their most fundamental level, spitting out the next token in a sequence according to a strict deterministic set of statistical operations. The only meaningful difference between us and auto-complete is a matter of scale. The assertion that human minds are nothing but sufficiently powerful predictive text dimensions is an example of reductionism, a sort of analytic strategy that claims some phenomenon can be explained in its totality by adding up a set of lower level phenomena, each of which can be understood independent of the whole. Like a tricycle is composed of a few dozen parts, each of which could be considered in isolation. A petal is shaped like this, a handlebar grip is shaped like that, they each have this or that set of properties, shape, strength, elasticity and so on. If you add up every one of those individual parts and how they interact with each other at their boundaries, you'd end up with an array of properties that fully describes a petal-powered machine with three wheels, and you'd have a reasonable answer if anyone were to ask you how it works. Reductionism is so integral to how we approach certain problems that we usually don't even notice or acknowledge it, nobody would be confused if you started planning a party by breaking it up into food, decorations, games and so on. As natural as reductionism can be, there are contexts in which it's obviously inappropriate or applied in the wrong way. If someone tried to compose the most beautiful symphony ever by just stapling together the prettiest moments from a dozen other symphonies, they'd rightly be laughed out of the concert hall. But it's not always easy to tell exactly when a reductionist argument is or isn't warranted. Philosophers have been arguing about it since at least the time of Plato, and many have tried their hand at drawing a bright line that will differentiate tricycles from symphonies. Scientists and philosophers of science who lean heavily on reductionist arguments seem especially keen to defend the strategy by denouncing improper uses of it. Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins and others have taken stabs at what makes a reductionist argument invalid, implying that everything else is above board. Unfortunately, despite warning their readers away from giant unjustified leaps in reasoning, which… yeah, I don't think anyone would say that's a good way to arrive at correct conclusions, they don't really give us a robust method to decide if a particular reduction is justified or not. Like Dennett claims that bad reductions are greedy, trying to claim reducibility without a robust explanation as to how that reduction works. Okay, how much is enough? Is the claim that human minds are stochastic parrots greedy? How would we know if it was? More importantly, these accounts seem to skip over why someone would be over-eager to deploy a reductionist explanation in the first place. Why reductionist moves are so popular? Why they go screwy so often? Or why accusing someone of being reductionist is usually meant as a dig in a way that calling them a Platonist or a nominalist isn't. Taking a slightly different approach, philosopher Richard Wurdy argues that rather than trying to enumerate every way reductionism can possibly go wrong, perhaps it would be helpful to look more closely at what it's for. What it does for us when we use it in an explanatory context. A claim like a tricycle is nothing more than this collection of parts suggests that a certain set of words can be replaced in their totality by a different set, words describing separate components, which can help us answer questions that might have been too vague to answer without the new vocabulary. Considered as an irreducible whole, the only thing you'd be able to say about why a tricycle doesn't work is something like, uh, it's not, it's shaped weird. But if a tricycle is considered as nothing more than a collection of parts, each with its own intended shape and function, we can stop talking about the tricycle and talk about the parts instead, which parts are doing the right things and which aren't, like that wheel isn't round. We've effectively replaced tricycle talk with parts talk, which allows more specificity and clarity in certain contexts. The tricycle vocabulary is still available as shorthand if we're in a hurry, but we can switch back and forth between the two levels of description fluently as the situation demands. The thing is, there's an implicit assertion that nothing of value is lost when we eject tricycle language from our vocabulary, and there are two ways to go about satisfying that condition. We could diligently map each feature of the higher level description to the new framework, finding ways to save the appearances we're accustomed to and parse them using the new set of descriptors, or we could simply declare that none of the harder stuff is valuable enough to keep. Like, take the reductionist claim that a human being is nothing more than $160 of chemical elements. It would take an insane amount of legwork to translate thought, morality, sensation, poetry, kindness, and all that into purely chemical terms. There isn't even a reasonable scientific starting point for how we would go about doing that in principle, but a person making that sort of claim doesn't really want to reduce everything about human beings to atomic terms, to facilitate a discussion of poetry by allowing us to talk about this carbon atom moving this way instead of that way and how it really throws off the rhythm of the Third Stanza. What they're really claiming is that only the stuff that can be described in chemical language matters, and everything else is simply not worth talking about. This is where reductionism gets its unsavory reputation. Trying to explain something by replacing dialogue about it with dialogue about its more simplistic parts can be a useful method to clarify otherwise opaque ideas, but it can also be a rhetorical move to minimize or dismiss inconvenient features of the big picture, to sweep anything that might be troublesome for a particular agenda under the rug. You might hear echoes of engineer syndrome here. Folks whose jobs require reducing complex problems to simple models sometimes get into the habit of approaching every other problem the same way, ignoring everything they can't capture in simple terms, no matter how essential, in the interest of building a theory they can work with. We can see evidence of good faith reductionist impulses that do their best to bridge important vocabulary to lower level descriptions, and doing the legwork to preserve and accommodate our common sense understanding in the new framework. Like explaining tricycle writing in terms of components, readily gives us the tools we need to port language like turn left into a more parts level description without losing anything in the process. Reducing heat to the average kinetic energy of molecules also gives us some handy descriptive tools without compelling us to ignore the warmth of a fireplace. But we can also see clear examples of people weaponizing a claim of reducibility to reshape an otherwise unfriendly landscape of discourse. If I don't care about the role morality might play in some context, I can assert that it reduces to neuroscience, and because there's no way to talk about morality in neuroscience terms without shaving off so much of it that it's barely recognizable, I've effectively excised at it from the conversation. That's a risk we have to confront on a regular basis. It's simply not possible to build a perfect one-to-one representation of the whole world in our heads. We all have to make decisions about which details we're comfortable shaving off to achieve our desired outcomes, and which ones we'd rather keep around, even if they come with a fair amount of explanatory baggage. But those are choices, and they're inexorably tied up with our values and goals. Accusing someone of being reductive then is claiming that they're trying to solve important questions they don't really care about by saying, why don't we just not talk about that anymore? This framework puts us in a decent position to answer our initial question. There are clear ways that human minds aren't just large language models. It's an interesting notion that the fundamental operation of the mind is somehow analogous to a very powerful autocomplete engine, but as anyone who's thinking about this subject should be aware, it's obviously more indifferent than that. Jeffrey Hinton, Sam Altman, and similar LLM evangelists don't really offer any account of how to map mental phenomena onto these algorithms in a way that captures prominent features of our own cognitive experience in that new vocabulary, stuff like subjectivity, attention, and agency. They're more interested in declaring those phenomena are reducible in principle to the operation of artificial neural networks, so they can move beyond vague philosophical inquiries about whether LLMs are truly intelligent or conscious or whatever. It's an understandable move. If any fifth grader could ask a hard question that undermines the very cool thing I'd spent my life building, I'd probably also look for any possible way to shift the burden of proof, but it's not an honest move. You can tell by the casual way they turn the things off. Does this linguistic account give us a decent lens to distinguish good from bad faith attempts at reductionism? Does your frontal lobe itch every time you hear someone use the phrase in principle? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to blow up, subscribe, and share, and don't stop thunking.


Let's bring in a couple of the stars of the game. I'll start with Andrew Searing, four goals tonight. He'll join us now here on Go Mustang Sports.tv. Andrew, congratulations. Thank you. The early goal we're talking about with Coach, the shots maybe just weren't falling. You run into a hot goalie. What does it take to remain patient as an offense and not get too frustrated? Just mind like a goldfish from Ted Lasso. I mean, that's one of our old strength coaches, Mike Sullivan, told me that last year when I was having a tough go at the beginning of the season, and every time I get a shot saved or anything goes wrong, I try to think about that just next play. The heat that you can deliver off your stick, right? When was the first time in your life that you took a shot and you're like, oh, I got something here? I don't know. I mean, everyone said it. I never really thought about it until everyone's like, come here, come to Stevenson, come to high school. I was always like the shooter. That's the way it was. You can fire that thing, man. It's awesome. Andrew, I was just talking about this with Coach, right? The ups, the downs, this team has been through. How good do you feel about where this group is going as you get towards the start of the conference play? I feel like we're going up and up. There's no game that we really went down. Play some bad quarters here and there, but just keep going. And it's working at the moment. Certainly work tonight. All right, we got to get to know you a little bit better, Andrew Singh. Favorite, it's Easter season. So give me one seed for candy for you. What is the go-to Easter candy or candy in general for you? It's got to be Reese's peanut brocups. I mean, we are having a conversation about this tonight. The Reese's peanut butter egg is truly a revelation. It's the smooth, it's just everything you could ask for. So much peanut butter in it. It's like a load, yeah. It's perfect. It's perfection. How many, let's just pretend Coach wasn't listening right now, how many might you consume during an Easter weekend otherwise? Too many. Yeah, there you go. That is the correct answer. Andrew, who can we shout out that's watching at home? It's helped you get here. Mom, dad, and Ashley and Nonna. Congratulations, man. Great performance tonight. Thanks for spending time with us. Happy Easter. Thank you. Happy Easter to you too.


Hey who was that one girl? It was literally like like a hundred followers stream on Twitter or something. There was a girl who was sitting there and the clip was in a group of people. It was like two guys, two girls and they were sitting there watching TV, if they're streaming themselves watching TV or something and it was literally like and it was just like sitting there. Do you guys remember that? The girl that Omega Loader butthole. No, no, yeah you guys remember that? And she was just sitting there. I don't remember what her name was and it was, it was there for like 30 seconds. Don't fall for it again. Okay, Dr. Living caught me, dude. Dr. Living caught me.  What about your vaccine?  One of them facts, yeah, be careful, man. Guys, do your research, man.  Some of them was, hey man, listen. This is gonna get AIDS?  I'm not gonna watch it. This is gonna get AIDS. But frick, I'm gonna see what he says.  Oh no, it's not 100% effective, but it almost works. Roll tide. Make sure you post it on social media after you get that shot too.  Yeah, be careful, all right? That's all I'm saying. Oh my God, be careful. Hey, Bob, I think you need to find this. Do your research. Be careful. I think Nick Merckx is so funny, dude. A hot tip stream, but you're poor. Okay, I kind of want to see this. Okay, that's all I need to see. It's just a toilet. When S-Fan is offline. Yeah, sorry. So what? Three hours a day? Come on. I will do a subodon soon, okay? I will do a subodon. FTO's opinions on Cormor Driving. Oh, here we go. What do you mean you took him out? Well, I got approved from Ripley because I'm an FTO probie. Oh, okay, you took him out. Okay, good. What's wrong? Yeah, yeah, it was great. It was probably the most terrifying experience I've had. Dude, I figured out how to drive. I figured it out. Okay, his driving is bad. I'll give you that. Yes. Okay, so Nick had a me. I stayed after our third day where we did a bunch of this stuff in the proving grounds, right? And I stayed for a couple of hours with him with his driving. He was okay. He was okay. He wasn't smashing as much stuff. He wasn't spinning the car out of control. Anonymous thing.  He hasn't been on duty, but he had learned and he's like he forgot everything. Yeah, it's bad, dude. What do you mean you took him out? Well, here's what happened. Two things happened. One, I think my controller drivers got screwed up whenever I installed the wireless for Mario 64. Something happened. It's not my fault, okay? One, if the controls got screwed up 100%, something happened. But I found out, I had an epiphany.  And I realized, I realized this. Well, here's what you guys got to understand about no pixel. No pixel is not normal GTA five. They've everything is modded, almost every single thing, how things move, cars move, different vehicles, everything is different. So designed in a way to where it's meant to be played on a keyboard and mouse. But my wrist hurts whenever I'm playing keyboard and mouse and I'm trying to talk and it just hurts my wrist. So I switched to keep with controller on top of that having a little bit more control. So how keyboards work is you're either press a button or you don't write W up W down right on off it's binary with a controller. The trigger is it's not like driving is a big part of GTA is fan pains. So so controllers see how it scales. It's not like it's not binary. It's not a or it's not on or off or off or on it scales. It's like da da da da da da da da. So what's happening is because of how controllers work, the inputs that it was sending it was like scaling it.  Now here's what I changed. So there's an output curve on these things. Okay, so so this out works. I was using ease in cubic. This was this was how my controller would work and it would give me control and it would give acceleration here. So if I'm driving slow, it gives me pretty decent control. If I'm driving slow, but what would happen is as the car gets faster, I would have to adjust for the car being faster and then I just wouldn't be used to it. So here's what I changed it to. I changed it to being something like this. So it's just full full go right away. Right? So let go one like that. I changed it to something like this. So that when it goes, it goes. And now it's basically binary. I fixed it. That's what that's what I'm trying to say is that it saved. I think it's I think it's all good now. I'm very excited. I think it's gonna be good. I think it's gonna be great. I parsed 99 and mainly we went past 100 and saying nice. Congrats. So at this point, why use a controller if you do that? It's because of my wrist pain. If I'm barely pressing it, it just it goes now.  Let me just show you. So you know whenever I was driving earlier and I had to make like a 10 point turn to drive, it was because that scaling and I couldn't even flip the car around like that. You see what I'm saying? So this might be a bad car as a truck. It's like an old truck to show you the handling. Okay, so if I go, you just watch. Oh frick. Okay, but I'm telling you guys, of course we're gonna share if the city is ruined. Wait, frick. Okay, chat. This is why you're not supposed to read chat while driving.  Here's the thing.  Like it's obviously like if I had a good car, I would be I know I'm not even gonna say I think I'm going to be I think I am the best driver in the city. I think I am the best driver in the city.  What are you doing? Anyway, back to recap. So anyway, as you can see, my driving has gotten much better. That's definitely true.  I mean, but what else could what else was bad? Tony, he ran over Shelly on a sidewalk and she's in a wheelchair. He did what? Yes. Everyone loves Shelly. How? What else was bad? Tony, he ran over Shelly on a sidewalk and she's in a wheelchair. He did what? Yes. Okay. Was this like a love tap or was this like? No, like 60 miles an hour on a sidewalk. Why? Because he was he was sliding around a turn and just took it too wide all the way onto the sidewalk where she was walking. Dear God. You know what happened was I tried to double clutch out of a turn and I kept accelerating. Surgery in a wheelchair. You said, good news. I'm not going to charge you for a jaywalk. No. That's definitely true.  Yeah, I could I could I could I could imagine.  Listen, he's homeless when he's on his two feet. He might have come and talked to you down at the butcher's shop. Okay. Feel better, Miss Shelly. Cornwood. That was so funny. Oh, wonderful. As a member of Williams Feelings about kids. Wait, what did I say? I didn't say feeding up kids is so funny. True. Aspen has become one of them. Putting on keep Bokini. True. Dude, that's the thing. You just put it on the intro. Waiting for Espen to start soon. Okay. I know what this is about. Actually, I actually had a one hour intro one day because I had to drive from Miss Kiff's house to my house in traffic. Before that, I went to my new house and I had to measure the walls of the of the home gym of the garage for the home gym because what I need to do is I need to measure the walls to sketch out the home gym for power lift. And they said they're going to map the whole thing out. They'll render it. They'll make me 3D render and they'll see like, hey, does this look good to you? Because I'm going to go full ham on this thing. I'm going to go full ham. So yeah, I actually unironically had a trend recs intro.