Two books I have read recently have had a massive impact on me: Yuval Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, and Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (Incerto). And insights gleaned from both underscore the question of this piece: in the 21st century, who can we look to for wisdom?
Part of Taleb’s thesis is that education (in the formal, university-based sense) does not create the ideas that lead to the technology that our cultures benefit and profit from; or that there is a low correlation; rather, on his account it is dropouts from university like Steve Jobs who do the creating—and that the process of innovation (not just an idea, but bringing it to market, more widely) requires a vast array of additional skills that education only tangentially touches upon, if at all. The main tool of innovation is trial and error—not complex theories. “Tinkering” is a word Taleb uses often. The further point is that increasing access to education (individually or collectively) does not increase the wisdom of those so schooled either—if anything, it reduces the capacity for novel or independent thinking by schooling more rigorously in any discipline. Back in 1970, Neil Postman claimed that “universities are suffering from a hardening of the categories” and that trend has increased. The most novel ideas occur at the interstices between disciplines, yet in this era of outcome-directed research (where “relevance” has to be demonstrated if funding is to be bestowed), interdisciplinary research is becoming rarer.
This claim against the alleged value of formal education (claimed by universities, mostly, but implicitly valued by most Westerners) is made amid a much broader salvo aimed at the traditional holders of wisdom in our modern culture who are the products of these systems (like the head of the Reserve Bank of the US, or Nobel-prize winning economists, or senior academics, or…), and he demonstrates conclusively that most of the “wise” are anything but. For example, not one of the involved parties was able to predict the two recent financial crises that wreaked havoc globally, and all experts relied on predictive modelling but without grasping the huge potential errors that are inherent in this process. Taleb argues persuasively that the assumptions of modelling more generally simply cannot grasp, hence predict, the outlier (or “tail”) events that can have such a destructive impact. His suggestions? Minimise downside (risk or exposure); maximise upside (or potential gain); and get out of debt.
It is not about Taleb’s brilliant thesis I wish to talk about today, though; I mention these two book simply because they have made me think about a number of my embedded beliefs (and hence unexamined until recently). As an aside, I feel that all one’s most deeply held beliefs need to be dusted off and looked at critically—especially deeply cherished ones!
Traditionally (here I mean pre-industrial humans, brilliantly drawn in Harari’s wonderful book Sapiens), wisdom was held to exist in the collective memories of the elderly. Proof of that wisdom was held to be embodied in the old, still existing, humans and that their very existence was sufficient evidence of it! This no longer obtains in any Western culture, though traces may be found in those few groups where generations live under the one roof or in close neighbourhoods. And part of this trend, no doubt, comes from the twin celebration of two concepts, “individual” and “freedom”. This has come at considerable cost, as well as benefit. In most Western cultures, the elderly are ignored as non-productive, and are experienced as a burden—and they are moved out of view into assisted housing or worse. Canteen-grade pap is fed to them; they are largely isolated and they are assisted in dying as neatly as possible, in a way that creates as little inconvenience as possible for their survivors. And that most significant of passages for each of us is sanitised to the nth degree (recorded music in the background; unctuous intermediaries to the fore—and so often these people have not even met the deceased).
Can we look to politicians for wisdom? Or the clergy? There might have been the odd statesman or woman in earlier eras, but it’s hard to think of one… And when I recall the reverence with which my grandmother spoke of the role of the priests in her rural, Irish life, where they were universally held to be wise (by believers, in any case) it is difficult to reconcile her views what we see and hear today.
So where do we look for wisdom? It’s clear, I think, that it will not be to Facebook or Twitter, or prime-time TV, or newspapers in any form. In fact, the sheer proliferation of information is itself a problem, and that problem has concerned many thinkers since it was identified—philosophy, according to the ancient Greeks, is properly concerned with distinguishing between episteme and doxa (truth and opinion). In the face of an information barrage available at the click of a mouse, sorting the wheat from the chaff is harder than ever before, I feel—what the Greeks identified as the pressing question of their day remains.
The problem is deeper than this, though: there is an asymmetry of respect for kinds of knowledge, or skills: since Miss O and I have been closer to the processes of building a house than ever before, it struck me recently that the more abstracted the knowledge, the more it is valued in our culture—yet when watching someone lay a row of bricks, or apply paint to a wall, it’s clear that immense practical/tactile skills are involved—why are these skills so undervalued in our culture? On another axis, why are university lecturers paid so much more than kindergarten teachers? (A personal aside: in the Stretch Therapy system, only the most experienced teachers get to work with beginners, because I believe that beginners, like young children, need the best teachers—the initial interactions literally set the context of how the beginner relates to the processes of learning itself). If that experience is benign, or positive, the beginner learns to teach herself—and once that is achieved, the attitude to learning, as well as the learning experience, is altered forever. The beginner learns to learn by herself and, as I have said many times, as teachers, our goal is to render ourselves unnecessary in this way.
The fact that the capacity for abstract thought is valued over practical skills is at the heart of many of modern civilisation’s ills, it seems to me. And this is what’s behind the blindnesses Taleb identifies in Antifragile: the further you get from hands-on making of things, the more inherently unreliable the constructions—necessarily increasingly mental or conceptual—become. This is simply because when you work at the hands-on level of constructing, the materials themselves are a real constraint on what can be done. I feel we need a return to a more master/apprentice approach to learning; the term “master” (and mestre, maître, or maestro share the same root, and are gender neutral) simply means someone who has mastered a skill; invariably this means embodiment of physical capacities as well as having an understanding of a discipline. Embodiment is missing from much of the knowledge that our culture values and this is one of our deepest problems. Not coincidentally, the same asymmetry is at the heart of the difficulty one has in the search for wisdom. It is also the root of our present environmental problems: increasing distance from the source (both of what we use and the nature of which constrains us, if we pay attention). Modern mental constructions have enabled such distance from Reality (in the Wilden “big R” sense) that economists can describe the Earth’s capacity to absorb human waste as infinite—and thereby not appear as a cost on the balance sheet. How insane is this? I stop this thread here; I hope the direction is clear. As Korzybski noted so profoundly long ago: “The map is not the territory.”
My personal journey in seeking wisdom within the realms of academia ended with well-funded PhD research (I was looking at the limits to science and logic); a breakthrough came one day when I realised that these disciplines have literally nothing useful to say about the experiences of daily life and how to make these experiences more real. The same disciplines were completely silent on how to live a more authentic life, too, and when I realised that I did not have much of my life left (one of the advantages of entering university as a mature student) I decided to look elsewhere.
I have been extremely fortunate in having met, and spent considerable time with, a number of remarkable teachers. The teachers I refer to here work in the ‘spiritual’ realm (this term is even more fraught than the term ‘traditional’, but for the purpose of this note, by “spiritual”, I mean inward looking and contemplative in direction), the direct opposite to scientific, whose purview is outward and whose intent is to uncover the nature of, and structure of, the world we live in. And it’s not coincidental that the perspective that science explicitly proscribes is the subjective (I will not go into the subjective–objective distinction here, except to say that any individual’s most important information and direct experience on a day-today basis will be found in the former and not the latter domain).
There is a long tradition that holds that contemplation and/or meditation can be a reliable method to uncover wisdom—held to be inherent in us all and which will manifest once various ‘obscurations’ are removed. And this may well be so—but which school; which teacher; which lineage? A partial solution to this problem is offered by Buddhism, in a three-part combination of the teaching itself (damma); the historical figure of the Buddha himself (how he lived; what he said) and a group of like-minded people who are interested in the same (sangha)—the Triple Gem. I feel the last part, the group of like-minded individuals, is a crucial element that is missing for many people in today’s world—face-to-face interaction with people you care about. Facebook does not count! (For brevity, I mention only Buddhism here, but other ‘direct realisation’ schools, like Daoism, or the Tantric schools of Yoga offer similar approaches.)
So—where am I going with all this? At the most fundamental, I am arguing for the necessity of embodiment of knowledge as a precursor to wisdom. Embodiment is a physical/mental process, and we know something about this.
We are stardust, Billion year old carbon,
We are golden, Caught in the devil’s bargain,
And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.
(Joni Mitchell, “Woodstock”, 1970)
It’s an old song. Comments very welcome.
Update: I perhaps should have read past p. 375 in Antifragility before writing this note; embodiment is what Taleb goes on to elaborate in his discussion of “skin in the game’, and the relationship between antifragility and ethics. Same idea; and better done in his book! Please read the original; it is the best book I have read in 20 years.
My thanks to Dave Wardman for insightful comments, and Miss O for correcting a typo or two; any remaining silliness is my fault.
And you may care to read Dave’s earlier pieces on his blog that inspired this one:
http://physicalalchemy.blogspot.com.au/2015/01/the-agile-lifestyle.html
http://physicalalchemy.blogspot.com.au/2015/01/the-agile-lifestyle-part-ii-deathstyle.html
References:
“Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind”, by Yuval Harari
“Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (Incerto)”, by Nassim Taleb
“System and Structure”, Anthony Wilden
“Science and Sanity”, Alfred Korzybski
Colin said:
Great insights.
I’ve been thinking about this myself recently, particularly the high volume, ever present stream of knowledge that flows from the internet. Which simultaneously informs us and threats to drown us in the same instant.
I’m making more efforts now to work and learn directly with real people. Going to the Piacenza workshop vs learning from the internet was a dramatically different experience.
“I feel that all one’s most deeply held beliefs need to be dusted off and looked at critically—especially deeply cherished ones!”
Solid gold.
Ross Dixon said:
Thankyou for sharing Mr Laughlin.
Very nice piece of writing about where we find ourselves in 2015.
Jim macAirt said:
Spot on Kit … We are stardust 🙂
x
kitlaughlin said:
My dear friend! An email coming your way very soon. Yes, we are stardust. My favourite Joni Mitchell line, though is:
“They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot”
Dave Nicholls said:
Reblogged this on Critical Physiotherapy and commented:
A great blogpost on the virtues of innovation in education, courtesy of Ciaran Regan (CPN).
Adam said:
Kit asked me to post my question here…so others could benefit…and I agree…so here it is:
I have a question about your blog post…and it is a “can’t see the woods for the trees” kind of thing.
Firstly…I really enjoyed the article, so thank you…I also enjoyed anti-fragility and black swan.
It is the “Steve Jobs” argument that leads me in circular arguments with myself.
Exceptional man in many respects. But he represents the dreamer, who could see the potential. He could not create any of it…captain of the ship, leader…not the doers or peons.
Others, Wozniak and the thousands of brilliant computer engineers made the products. And they could not have done any of that without thousands of years of systematically created and layered knowledge of maths, physics, chemistry, material science, computer science to name a few. It is universities and modern western scientific methods that allowed this knowledge discovery to accelerate.
Without buying into the value of these in contributing to our current standards of living and the inherent social contract to continue that quest…without them we’d be more worried about our next meal and the thylacoleo or Smilodon…are we not free loading on the constructs that have provided for our benefit?
You made the argument of your own PhD work not being of value…but surely it is part of the very matrix (not lost on me) that raised us to have time for these pursuits that are higher up maslows hierarchy?
kitlaughlin said:
You may be more familiar with Steve J.’s capacities than I; I really have no idea the extent to which (in the beginning; there are many Steve Jobs) he and Woz built the first computer and who contributed what—and as Einstein said (talking about Newton and Copernicus) “we are pygmies standing on the shoulders of giants”)—we all begin with the knowledge and technology we have inherited from forebears (and this is why I am not worried about thylacoleo as I sit here and write).
And I think that Taleb does draw a longish bow in this part of his thesis—because I know that some of the essential engineering and materials technology you mention was created in the university setting. But (and this is where his ideas lose a little traction, no doubt in the necessity of getting the larger points across) working (say) in wafer technology VSLI is completely different than creating economic predictions and prescriptions: in the former example, the material themselves constrain what may or may not be done; in the latter, the very people (the market) being theorised about changes as it becomes aware of what’s being talked about. “The market is nervous” is real, as our understanding of the properties of silicon, but with one massive difference: silicon’s behaviour at the human scale of interaction does not change through the interaction. Schrödinger’s cat is not relevant at the Newtonian scale.
i wrote about this extensively once, but in essence, once the subject of study includes humans themselves, the reliability of the information decreases dramatically—and as Postman wrote, people who do sociology or psychology are not doing science, they are telling stories. Useful stories, but stories, none the less. This distinction in kind is never made clear, but is at the heart of Taleb’s book too: the more elaborate the theory, the more abstracted from its physical (embodied) domain, the lower the inherent reliability of its predictions. There’s more, but that’s the gist.
Now, to your and my uni work: it was immensely valuable to me, because the process simply stripped away more and more (Taleb’s *via negativa*) to leave what is important. This process taught me how to write and how to evaluate, and how to think creatively—through the sheer necessity of grappling with many different problems. At the same time as working in supervenience theory (among others) I was running the classes and an oriental medicine clinic—and one day an epiphany: I realised that all three were dealing with parts of a much larger problem set—and that was the beginning of Overcome neck & back pain and ST more generally. I agree completely with your last point: the years I spent in research are exactly what led me to focus on what I am doing now. And it gave me the courage to step away from a lecturer’s job at the uni too into the uncertain antifragility that has been my life for 20+ years!
kitlaughlin said:
Adam replied:
I might add having studied economics at a masters level.
Economics is a quantitative skill set to understand trade and human behavior by examining how we value things.
It has always been a retrospective tool…a forensics.
It is Adam Smith and capitalism that is responsible for it being used as a speculation tool. As part of the booking making scam we have going on called investing that includes controversial instruments such as futures, and derivatives and even shorting.
It maybe the perversion of legitimate domains of knowledge for selfish personal pursuit that is a real issue.
Economics as above.
Law for frivolous damages, rather then justice and protection
Cosmetic surgery for boobs rather then burns
One last thing is that all these pursuits have been overrun by “productivity”. Which at the heart is the real constraint on work life balance.
The computer scientist lives in front of a computer and eats bowl noddles…to meet the deadline.
Society still hasn’t truly valued the experience of life…which is one reason we ignor and stigmatize mental health.
People just don’t have time, regardless of pursuit…to cook, clean, enjoy company, enjoy themselves, take care of themselves (3-4 weeks a year to cram that it)…they are too busy making widgets…regardless of them being wafers, discoveries in prime mathematics or the next must have pandora charm bracelet.
Colin said:
Regarding Steve Jobs, I thought this was informative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFeC25BM9E0
In essence, he claims that Apple just acquires patents and assembles the components of other people to make new products. Its process of invention is more about legal and financial skill, over actual technological innovation.
I think your fundamental point about the current model of school not being capable of fostering creativity and inventiveness to still stand. Steve Jobs was still able to be a force in business, without a formal, high level education. But I thought this was kind of an interesting thing to watch regardless.
Adam Durst said:
Leadership and creativity will always inherited or developed in formative years/experiences in my opinion.
I’ve done enough (practical and academic) in the field to realise you can train someone to be a manager, but not a true leader. And to some degree I believe this is true with creativity. You can teach a person the technical elements, skills…but not the innate elements…or it is much harder as an adult…maybe like gaining flexibility x10,000
I’m fairly well informed on the history of Apple. Woz invented the computer tgat made them…jobs saw the potential and future…and guided the technical people that direction. I wouldn’t say jobs was even a good people leader…he burned up people by the dozens…but he had a vision that was real and understood what people actually wanted in terms of technology.
I think again capitalism can be blamed for our current issues within universities. The pie eating contest, where the reward is more pie!
Professors have to publish more papers (“productivity”)…so now they break up what was one paper into three or four…this has caused increasing information fragmention. Which is one reason why results are increasingly misinterpreted…because the findings are not complete thoughts.
This is not an issue with universities, but the way we’ve come to expect them to be businesses.
As for the video…it isn’t fair to paint Apple alone in this light…this pretty well how the entire technology industry works at the moment…partly due to patent law being totally f’d up.
Also, The argument isn’t that they invented something new…but that they packaged technology in a new way that was more aligned to the needs, wants, and behaviors of humans. They are also undoubtedly one of the few large companies that actually designs products…really designs…like Braun designed razors in the 60s.
There ultimately is the question of what you’d do if money wasn’t an issue…but sadly, most are not in a position to consider this.
I personally found university to be the most testing of my beliefs, with professors constantly playing devils advocate or challenger…forcing me to either defend my point with evidence or at least sound logic…or consider adopting a new perspective.
When I tee’d up my PhD (which I didn’t start due to family commitments) it was to be on the use of technology as an enabler of innovation by slowing the reframing the historic paramilitary organizational structures, with more web/fluid like structures (as far as ideas go)…creating what at the time I was calling risk prepared organizations vs risk adverse (basically anti-fragility). Organizations that while large are more agile. Sounds oxymoronic but large organizations struggle to innovate due to bureaucracy. They need to use tools like technology to enable ideas to bypass traditional filters and gates. Which ends up being a business process (pipeline) of idea management and innovation. That’s the oxymoronic part…you need more bureaucracy to innovate. But an idea isn’t innovation…it is the realization of the idea that is.
Adam Durst said:
Steve “wasn’t” a good people leader. He burned lots of people over the years.
Can’t seem to edit.
Colin said:
I honestly don’t really recall the overall tone of the video, I watched it a while ago and didn’t re-watch it. I think the point is, as you say, that Apple works just like any other tech company out there. It’s probably far easier and safer to just cannibalize other companies with pre-developed products than to spend time in R&D. Samsung copies Apple, then Apple turns around and copies Samsung, with everyone constantly filing patent suits and counter-suits.
I think whether Apple fills needs or creates them is debatable. They do fill needs to a certain degree, they also fuel mindless desire for their relatively over priced products, all with built in planned obsolescence (another area where Apple certainly isn’t alone).
And while they’re not alone in how they do business, there are certainly a fair share of people that need to re-examine their relationship with the company. People who wait outside a store for a week to get the new iphone, which is almost identical to the one they already have, need to take a really deep breath and realize it’s just a phone. (once again, not unique to Apple, but they are certainly at the forefront of this mental disease).
I’m interested in the specifics of how Apple designs products in a way unlike other companies. Can you expand on that a bit?
I think speaking generally on the concept of innovation and invention is a simple lack of companies and universities engaging in blue sky thinking. My Grandfather (a professor of Chemistry) laments this shift in academia, that modern research is entirely focused on output. Whereas in previous generations, research was often conducted for the simple purpose of discovery.
Olga said:
I just want to THANK you for those two book recommendations. Without reading this post, I would have not thought of reading those two books right now; perhaps I’d put them on a reading list for better times. I have finished Antifragile a few months ago and I am in the middle of Sapiens right now. I have savoured every word of Sapiens so far – I love original and out -of-box thinking. Thanks again. Always open to more recommendations. Olga
Chris said:
Im not sure about Taleb’s critique of universities. It seems reductionist and fragile – the weakest part of his work. You can take a different technology and see the value of universities. Solar for instance has made massive advances in efficiency largely driven by universities. If this technology saves the world then we should all talk about the value of the universities.
kitlaughlin said:
I think he was ‘drawing a long bow’ here, and probably largely for effect (his endorsement of the manual skill sets. for example, and apprenticeship): he himself is university educated. But it is not black and white, either: solar was largely developed at universities, but the internal combustion largely was not. And personally I benefitted immensely from my years of post-grad education (and most of it funded by the taxpayer) as it enabled me directly to do what I do now.
And perhaps he was criticising universities to give them a bit of a poke—I know I left academia when I was told by my Head of Department that I could not fail an overseas student because he was full-fee paying… This is the downside of having to demonstrate relevance to the organisations that pay you. There’s much more, but you get the idea. Thanks for writing, too.