Professional Ethics

For four days, live according to a military routine. Before the week begins, choose a simple "uniform" that you will wear every day. Wake up at exactly the same time every morning. Immediately make your bed to inspection quality. Complete the Seven Minute Workout before doing anything else. Keep your room orderly throughout the week and eat your meals at predetermined times rather than whenever you happen to feel hungry. Do not improvise. If you are late for a meal, do another Seven Minute Workout. The point of the assignment is to replace moment-to-moment decision-making with routine, dicipline, and material consequences.

In your reflection, discuss whether discipline made your life feel more constrained or more free. Did routines reduce decision fatigue? Which parts of the routine became easier over time, and which never did? What kinds of people are likely to flourish in a highly disciplined institution? Why don't you live this way? 

For four days, keep a complete ledger of your life. Track every dollar you spend, every hour you use, every mile you drive, every meal you eat, and every commitment you make. At the end of each day, balance your books and try to identify "margin" in each category. Where could you save money? Where could you reclaim time? Where are you wasting energy? Where are you carrying unnecessary commitments? If your life were a business, where would you cut costs or improve efficiency?

In your reflection, discuss what became visible once everything was measured. How do you make tradeoffs? When does efficency in one domain have costs somewhere else? Were there important things that resisted accounting? How does measurement and accounting change what you pay attention to?

Find someone who has clearly done something wrong. It could be a friend who cheated on an exam, a public figure involved in a scandal, a fictional character, or even yourself. Your job is to defend them by creating an 8 slide Powerpoint presentation where you present their testimony (if possible), all the evidence, and the strongest moral defense you can construct in good faith, without lying. You are not trying to prove they are innocent. You are trying to explain why should not be blamed or punished. For example, you might explain why mitigating circumstances mattter. 

In your reflection, discuss how it felt to be a Devils Advocate. Do you think you could represent someone you knew was guilty? Did arguing for the defense change your own opinion about the person or about punishment? 

Purchase three notebooks and sell them in three different ways. Each time, do not sell the notebook for less than the price you paid for it. For the first notebook, do not modify the product. Instead, sell an unmodified notebook to soemone. For the second notebook, you can modify the notebook in any way you want, and you must sell it for more than the first notebook's price. For the third notebook, you must pair the unmodified notebook with an additional notebook relaed service (e.g. a warranty, study support) and sell it for more than the first notebook's sale price.  

In your reflection, discuss your strategy for each notebook. What did this teach you about sales? 

Teach another person a real skill that they do not already have. It should be something that can be demonstrated rather than merely explained. Teach them with the following procedure: 

1. Pretest: Evaluate their current skill level. 

2. Teaching: Teach them the new skill 

3. Assessment: Evaluate the new skill level

4. Reinforcement: Have your student teach the skill back to you.

5. Evaluation: Have the student write a teaching evaluation for how well you did as a teacher. 

In your reflection, discuss when you realized they did or did not understand. What made your explanations effective or ineffective? Did teaching deepen your own understanding of the skill? Was the teaching evaluation helpful and informative? 

Complete one ordinary interaction with government or a large bureaucracy on your own behalf or on behalf of someone you know. For example, you can apply for a permit, compile a complete file of your medical records, ask for an estimate of costs for a medical procedure, request public records, dispute a bill, register a car, apply for a government benefit, apply for pre-check, or some other administrative task that requires forms, waiting, or going to an office. Keep a record of every form you complete, every website you visit, every office you contact, every wait, every transfer, and every unexpected obstacle.

In your reflection, discuss the purpose administrative sludge. Do administrative requirements protect privacy, ensure fairness or maintain accountability? Or was all the sludge unnecessary?  Reflect on the nature of the administrative state. 

Identify one small physical problem in your everyday life. Design and build something that solves it. Your invention does not need to be sophisticated. It might be a storage solution, a phone stand, a tool, a piece of furniture, or any other object that makes some aspect of daily life work better. You must build a working physical prototype and test it in the real world.

In your reflection, discuss how many times your design failed before it worked. Did building the object teach you things that planning alone did not? How does engineering differ from simply having good ideas? Connect your reflection to readings on intellectual property or the labor-mixing theory of value.