The more I read about how our mind works and how we evolved and the more I observe that we are going far away from the understanding of first principles; it seems like we keep “biting” things, quickly tasting everything in the information buffet of the all-you-can-eat world built in the the Knowledge Era.
We don’t deep dive searching for hidden treasures, we float to the surface, constantly looking for new places to reach, but always horizontally, without asking “Why are we floating? What’s underneath?” and so we lose the beauty of the marine fauna, algae, corals, ship wrecks, chests full of riches and maybe also a complete underwater world with mermaids. Ok, let’s now leave the sirens of Atlantis and return with our feet on the mainland. Why are we so superficial?
If they don’t teach you to ask for more…
“Start with why”? Nah, start with “how” with a simple tutorial, basically copying everything like some monkeys do (I don’t want to offend monkeys, some of them are more capable to questioning). Some teachers ask you to memorize the formula for solving a quadratic equation, without explaining why. Perfect for developing a corporate order-executioner mentality. To find the proof of the formula, I had to search through schoolbooks from two generations ago! Obviously no one had asked me, I was just curious to understand why it was resolved that way.
Ask “Five (iterative) whys” like children do, in an attempt to better understand all the mechanisms underlying a certain action? Nah, the first short answer you get is enough. After all, during the school years, you learned that knowing a single notion to answer the teacher’s question “When the French Revolution happened?” is completely fine to pass the exam with flying colors, you don’t have to “waste” your time to investigate further and connecting the dots. Not only are we limiting the potential of so many kids boxed in multiple choice quizzes, we’re creating generations of young over-confident people that mistake notionism for knowledge and culture.
I can tell you that the best learning period in my life was neither in the school years, nor at the university, nor in the many courses I followed afterwards. The best time I had was when I was with a mentor (a colonel working as an expert in intelligence and cybersecurity) that “invited” me and a dozen colleagues of mine, selected and trained, to solve problems on weekends, going to the extra-mile. The fact that it was during the weekend was an advantage: we were volunteers doing those activities while we worked, so Saturday and Sunday were profitable days to do research and “deep work” to better analyze the problem and find solutions. It was not about reading a lesson and answering related questions, but understanding what was given to us, without explanation, and solving it. Critical thinking, lateral thinking… in short: thinking. I spent the most intellectually stimulating summer of my life: many sacrifices, a lot of frustration, but a lot of satisfaction and many results even in the long term. Thanks again, “G.”.
Take the Information and Run
You have probably caught the quote from the first film directed (as well as written and starring) by Woody Allen, “Take the money and run”. In the movie (no spoiler), the protagonist had no “solid foundation” and therefore the result is often tragicomic.
I found that the same happens with a lot of people. With a book of aphorisms, you can develop a superficial culture suitable for some “bar chat”, you can entertain superficial people on an evening and even maybe appear smart and impress some potential casual partner for the night, but that doesn’t make you a man/woman of culture, since you won’t have a clear understanding of what you’re talking about. At the first serious question from an educated person, your facade will collapse, like the cardboard buildings of a Hollywood set at the first gust of wind.
If we talk about work and you are good enough to sell yourself well enough to pass the interviews, when you get the job position you will not be able to understand the processes of what you will do, but in most cases you will survive. And you will always be at the beginning of the ascent of the Dunning-Kruger effect, so your self-esteem will not be affected, you will not see that behind the hill there is a world of things to study that you do not even imagine.
No need here to follow the Feynman technique, Feynman won the Nobel prize in Physics in 1965, it reminds us of a black and white period and Physics is a boring matter for nerds… why don’t you follow instead some fancy guru that tells you just to buy a quick course from him to quickly grab the secret to become an expert in whatever you want and start make big money? Behind my sarcasm, there are also all the 2-hours courses with a “certificate of completion” (without even a rapid test) that a lot of people proudly show on their Linkedin profile and on their résumé.
Western society aims to live fast, burn everything, don’t waste your time asking “useless” questions to find some deep answers. Philosophy is only good as it can be used to write some misused quotes below a picture showing a pair of buttocks on a fancy “exclusive” party (where the “excluded” is generally the brain, since they put much stress on the outfit and the body, but not on what’s in it).
Don’t even try to get close to the entrance of some rabbit holes, you can risk some headache: the quest for a sense can end up tormenting yourself with unanswered doubts. Don’t read Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning”, instead distract yourself every moment! If for a moment you have a curiosity, search for the short answer on a search engine, read the first sentence that a shitty SEO-ruled ads-running website provides to you and then quickly close it! You’re done and now you can keep watching meaningless series or going out for a couple of hours of small talks.
It’s like having thousands public library just in front of us, with books about everything and beyond (I’m not exaggerating: try to search a very specific ultra-narrow topic of your interest in Google Scholar and you will see countless pages of academic papers and non-fictional books), but instead we read the first page of the first book we find, then close it, to come back outside the library, where we can find someone ready to amuse us with juggling or dirty jokes.
Further and further away from the basics
Going deep requires time and effort, and some experiments (not exposed too much to the general public) show that some people prefer to feel pain instead of thinking (see “Forced choices reveal a trade-off between cognitive effort and physical pain”, Vogel et al., 2020) or even to receive electroshock instead of staying quiet with their thoughts for less than 15min (as found in 11 studies analyzed in “Just think: The challenges of the disengaged mind”, Wilson et al., 2014 on “Science”). Yes, maybe Blaise Pascal was right when he wrote “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone“.
Better scrolling some dopamine-inducing social network, where you can find gossip, provocative chicks and cute kitties (after all, this is what the Internet and the Web were built for – am I right, dear DARPA and Tim Berners-Lee?).
Oh, talking about socials and the Internet: for some people, those are 2 completely separated entities; someone says “I didn’t used Internet today, I only used Facebook”. In their mind, the model is: “Facebook is a thing, for example it’s something I can access clicking on the app icon; Internet is another thing, for example Internet is the browser where I can see websites that I enter after clicking on a search engine”.
Abstraction, hiding all the underlying levels to the users, can be a good thing, can improve the “user experience”, but we’re ending up like some children: do you know that some little children in poor countries think that the rice grow up over their mothers’ heads since their mothers receive humanitarian aid (like food) from UN and some NGOs then they went back to their home where the children see mothers carrying rise over their heads? If you think “maybe it’s because they live far away from proper basic education”, in our western cities the situation isn’t that different: some children do believe that milk grows from trees, directly in their package, ready to drink.
To me, when I talk with people for example without even a basic understanding of the IT technology they use everyday, it’s kinda strange, I observe those people the same way you can think of the children I just wrote. Maybe, the difference is that, even before studying computer science, I was used to observe and read stuff, like (slow 56K connected) computers writing, at the bottom of a web browser, “resolving address…”, so I was curious about what this “resolution” was (that’s how for example I discovered DNS, IP addresses and a lot of other things that were absolutely “useless” to me at that time). With abstraction, another thing that comes with a “good user experience”, is the reduction of issues and the semplification of problems: when a user see the famous “404”, at least someone can start asking “what’s the meaning of this 404? Why all the websites use this code?”. If, instead, they use an “improved page” in line with their website style, an user will miss the opportunity to know one of the fundamental mechanisms of the Internet (the HTTP responses) that can make the user more aware of what he’s using. Everything now is going to the direction of a black box, like smartphones where you can’t even see that there’s a battery in it. Sure you can still use it, but you miss the “connection” the physical layer, so to the physical world. Again: like children that are missing the connection between cows and the milk they drink.
Lastly, integration: “users” (I still prefer to refer to them as people) don’t see borders anymore. It’s not that we don’t have borders between systems (I am a cybersecurity professional, I can guarantee that borders in systems exists and they are fundamentals), it’s just that the experience is soo “smooth” that a user/person don’t see any “interruption” when he does/sees something, and everything is blended so he’s not aware that he’s using several technologies and several components by 3rd parties. Still talking about the Internet, for example, use browser extensions like Wappalyzer or Lightbeam, to see how many domains and how many technology you’re using for a single major website. Same applies to almost everything of daily use in our lives.
This is not only something that has to do with technicians. For example, one of the most diffused misunderstanding about mindfulness is that this is simply a sequence of rituals and a series of meditations in which you learn to “not think”. It’s actually the opposite: it helps you to gain more awareness. One of the exercises is to start looking at things differently, carefully, more or less like a baby that see and touch something for the first time. We take all for granted, that is the way to don’t understand anything and don’t try to improve anything (or, even worst, to try to improve something without understanding, so probably disrupting something but not for good).
We don’t have time to investigate root causes, if not strictly required (e.g.: if you’re a project manager using the Ishikawa fishbone diagram to identify some factors, but only for extremely practical purposes in your business).
In the utilitarian perspective of cost/benefit, we can completely sacrifice all the knowledge that is not needed for our work and our hobby (if we have one), discarding all the “unnecessary”: it’s just wasting time, effort and “space in the head”.
Realistically, I am for a tradeoff, with a pragmatic approach: I am not talking about knowing every single principle to the extreme, because otherwise a lifetime is not really enough just to understand why we breathe, but up to a certain level there is a difference between staying on the surface and getting to know the underlying stuff a little bit more, at the point that maybe you can’t touch the corals on the bottom, but at least see them, at least you are aware of their existence!
And if you really think that going into the details is not important, I can say that instead this will be exactly what will make the difference between a lazy illiterate in a repetitive job in a call center (which will be very soon replaced by robots) and those who instead think between complex systems.
Just a matter of (“not having”) time?
Once, there was a lot of time between one event and another, between one information and another; there were not so many books and many info and you had time to reflect calmly (maybe I will deepen on slowness in another post), time to settle down and reflect, time to elaborate the information, to encode, store and link to other information.
Imagine if Leonardo da Vinci or Galileo Galilei had only observed things on the surface without wondering how they worked. Their “genius” was not a supernatural brain, but questioning why some phenomena occurred that way. We are creating people without depth, who watch passively without observing. The attention-span has been reduced to a few seconds, if the video clip does not change constantly, you change the channel, you shake in search of frivolous videos but full of iridescent lights and funny sounds.
We want everything and as soon as possible, a Prêt-à–Porter knowledge, a ready-made packet of essential information quickly and carelessly gathered by an ensemble of Subject-matter experts. In IT, for example, there are now a lot of people graduating in some post-master courses where the title is longer than the content itself. A syllabus that contains dozens of buzzwords according to the current hype, so you have a 3-months course on “Blockchain and NFT and Cryptocurrency and Cybersecurity and Big Data and Data Science and Artificial Intelligence and Social Media Strategy and Internet of Things and Industrial Control Systems and Intelligence and Smart Cities and Mobile Apps and…” (and you will finish your course before you have the chance to read the syllabus). So, basically, recruiters are hiring people that studied law or political science (or casually even STEM faculties, sometimes, but in totally different fields), but then you have someone that is a fake, a strawman that can’t understand what an operating system is. So, they will have someone useless (or harmful) as a middle-manager between serious skilled technicians and the upper management; he never saw a line fo code and can’t understand a single word of what his colleagues say but, hey, he can go to the management to repeat all the fancy words he learned in the 3 months course!
If you’re too focus on starting building on top, before building your foundations, your building will crack down.
Many of us are overconfident about how much we understand things (see: “Reflecting on Explanatory Ability: A Mechanism for Detecting Gaps in Causal Knowledge”, Johnson et al., 2016) and that could explain why we think that a certain amount of knowledge is enough. For example, if you ask a teenager about “Tik Tok” app, the most common answer will be “Sure I know how it works!”, everyone can think it’s a corny question and will soon start showing you all the features and the pages within the app. But probably they don’t have the faintest idea of how the application interact with the operating system and how the data are excahnged between them and the servers they’re connected to (they see the Internet as a cloud, maybe letterally, since they are connected “to the air”, ignoring all the physical network devices and the data centers).
What impress me is the lack of curiosity about how thing works.
Anything, including humans, is a black box, a physical system with inputs and outputs (hoping that the output is more or less consistent, as long as there is no artificial intelligence that provides unexpected answers). You don’t wonder what’s in the box, you don’t care why and how those results come out, that’s just the way it is.
Many people have a morbid curiosity for trivial things, but only a few ones seem to want to scratch all the things that are taken for granted.
And this is worrying because it underlies critical thinking. Fewer and fewer people will ask meaningful questions, hardly anyone will challenge the status quo. So they will live an unexamined life that is not worth living (as supposedly Socrates said) and they will be easily manipulated by any propaganda ministry or any “ministry of truth” speaking through weapons of mass distraction.
The impact of new media
I think this phenomenon is also related to a trend massively expressed by music videoclips where scenes change every few seconds – not to mention nowadays the splitscreen videos where in half part of the screen there’s the real content and the other part there’s a gameplay or some scene from a fast-pacing cartoons, the only important thing is to provide the viewer something to get trapped into, so to “engage” who is seeing the short video, with the fear of a static boredom. Otherwise, chances are that they will lose viewers in the never-ending race of the brainrot scrolling in which majority of users run.
And this situation is exacerbated also in the “old fashioned” way of communicating: writing. People who are generally less and less used to engage in long and rich conversations, in an era where SMS and then Tweets are frequent but more and more empty, talking about content. We may have the impression that information is just “compressed”, that we can then “unzip” the information in it to rebuild what the other wanted to do, but unfortunately doesn’t work this way. It’s like compressing a sunset on a mountain telling “it’s mainly orange, with a little bit of green and white”: with too few bits of information, the receiver can’t enlarge resolution of the picture described. And this is somehow funny, considering that storage, processing and network capabilities are now incredibly huge compared to the past. We’re just more “comfortably numb” (to quote Pink Floyd), just always distracted, bouncing from one bit of information to another one, with less time to go deep and to build context. I can say the perfect situation is portrayed by comments on social media platforms, including YouTube: we scroll down thousands of short comments from different people, so in a way spreading the possible knowledge from one single deep thought into a lot of fragmented observations that start and end like a shooting star. To make an analogy: we don’t read good essays anymore that cover a topic from preface to conclusions and suggestions, but we consume the same amount of time by reading small quotes – but not the fancy and great ones by poets and great thinkers, selected in centuries, no: extemporaneous sentences improvised within seconds of starting a content. Garbage in, garbage out; not nutritious books, but empty and deleterious calories from salty fat comments by random people that probably don’t know better way to use their limited mortal time. So, be careful in what you feed your brain with.
Dive in and immerse yourself in knowledge!
Yes, I know, it’s not easy. In the words of “Sensorium” by Epica:
“Being conscious is a torment; the more we learn is the less we get.
Every answer contains a new quest; a quest to non-existence, a journey with no end“
Nevertheless, it’s worth it. Take the time and the courage, then submerge yourself.
Don’t stay too much on the surface, wandering around the ocean without even arriving in a port with a precise direction, always attracted by the recent conspicuous points that are fashionable at the moment (skyscrapers built to attract those who do not want to use the stars, which are instead our own trustable deep inner values that should guide us in the right direction): corals and treasures are on the seabed. Take some time to prepare and explore in detail, don’t be satisfied with following the recipe like an average cook: be a chef, try to understand well each element in the kitchen, experiment with ingredients and tools, immerse yourself in deep work in a sublime state of flow, don’t spend 5min following a bit of everything (as the continuous distraction with never-ending notifications made you get used to switch from one superficial thought to another one). It can be okay to collect scattered ideas from various tweets or even from an impromptu news heard on the radio, but collect stuff, perhaps dedicating the end of the day (as David Allen’s GTD method recommends), take notes on pieces of paper and throw them in the zettelkasten of your second brain. But then, when you have time, make your neurons work, take a moment, a chunk of uninterrupted time (use the Pomodoro technique or whatever you like), closing all inputs (whether telephone or other) and connecting the points, to create knowledge as a network, not compartmentalized. The notionism that the school unfortunately teaches: a little formula for the hypotenuse (without perhaps even the demonstration), then a little historical dates on events (which you will forget after 10 years, making you unsuitable to pass an exam now fifth grade; do you want an example? without Google searching, try to remember: when the battle of … a couple of books written by … science, math and more from elementary program happened). We have become like the little kids who try 20 different sports and activities without being passionate about anything and leaving after the first lessons.
“I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding, they learn by some other way — by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!” (Richard Feynman)
Do a favour yourself, stick to the basics and use the ultimate advanced powerful tool: your brain. Now go and explore: a world of wonders to discover is waiting for you!
