BARSAMIAN: Let’s talk about propaganda and indoctrination. As a teacher, how do you getpeople to think for themselves? Can you impart tools that will enable that?CHOMSKY: I think you learn by doing—I’m a Deweyite from way back. You learn by doing, andyou figure out how to do things by watching other people do them. That’s the way you learn to be agood carpenter, for example, and the way you learn to be a good physicist. Nobody can train youon how to do physics. You don’t teach methodology courses in the natural sciences. You may inthe social sciences. In any field that has significant intellectual content, you don’t teachmethodology. You just watch people doing it and participate with them in doing it. So a typical,say, graduate seminar in a science course would be people working together, not all that differentfrom an artisan picking up a craft and working with someone who’s supposedly good at it. I don’ttry to persuade people, at least not consciously. The way you do it is by trying to do it yourself, andin particular trying to show, although it’s not all that difficult, the chasm that separates standardversions of what goes on in the world from what the evidence and people’s inquiries will showthem. A common response that I get, even on things like chat networks, is, I can’t believe anythingyou’re saying. It’s totally in conflict with what I’ve learned and always believed and I don’t havetime to look up all those footnotes. How do I know what you’re saying is true? That’s a plausiblereaction. I tell people it’s the right reaction. You shouldn’t believe what I say is true. Nobody isgoing to pour truth into your brain. It’s something you have to find out for yourself.BARSAMIAN: Let’s talk about propaganda and indoctrination. As a teacher, how do you get people to think for themselves? Can you impart tools that will enable that?
CHOMSKY: I think you learn by doing—I’m a Deweyite from way back. You learn by doing, and you figure out how to do things by watching other people do them. That’s the way you learn to be a good carpenter, for example, and the way you learn to be a good physicist. Nobody can train you on how to do physics. You don’t teach methodology courses in the natural sciences. You may in the social sciences. In any field that has significant intellectual content, you don’t teach methodology. You just watch people doing it and participate with them in doing it. So a typical, say, graduate seminar in a science course would be people working together, not all that different from an artisan picking up a craft and working with someone who’s supposedly good at it. I don’t try to persuade people, at least not consciously. The way you do it is by trying to do it yourself, and in particular trying to show, although it’s not all that difficult, the chasm that separates standard versions of what goes on in the world from what the evidence and people’s inquiries will show them. A common response that I get, even on things like chat networks, is, I can’t believe anything you’re saying. It’s totally in conflict with what I’ve learned and always believed and I don’t have time to look up all those footnotes. How do I know what you’re saying is true? That’s a plausible reaction. I tell people it’s the right reaction. You shouldn’t believe what I say is true. Nobody is going to pour truth into your brain. It’s something you have to find out for yourself.
Source:Liberating the mind from orthodoxies
Noam Chomsky on learning by doing
Finding the right size
You’ve seen that effect even in modern times. Twenty years ago, a few idiots in control of the world’s most populous nation were able to shut down the educational system for one billion people at the time of the Great Cultural Revolution, whereas it’s impossible for a few idiots to shut down the educational system of all of Europe. This suggests, then, that Europe’s fragmentation was a great advantage to Europe as far as technological and scientific innovation is concerned. Does this mean that a high degree of fragmentation is even better? Probably not. India was geographically even more fragmented than Europe, but India was not technologically as innovative as Europe. And this suggests that there is an optimal intermediate degree of fragmentation, that a too-unified society is a disadvantage, and a too-fragmented society is also a disadvantage. Instead, innovation proceeds most rapidly in a society with some intermediate degree of fragmentation.
Source: How to be rich by Jared Dimaond
Isolation is innovation killer
“So these stories of isolated societies illustrate two general principles about relations between human group size and innovation or creativity. First, in any society except a totally isolated society, most innovations come in from the outside, rather than being conceived within that society. And secondly, any society undergoes local fads. By fads I mean a custom that does not make economic sense. Societies either adopt practices that are not profitable or for whatever reasons abandon practices that are profitable. But usually those fads are reversed, as a result of the societies next door without the fads out-competing the society with the fad, or else as a result of the society with the fad, like those European princes who gave up the guns, realizing they’re making a big mistake and reacquiring the fad. In short, competition between human societies that are in contact with each other is what drives the invention of new technology and the continued availability of technology. Only in an isolated society, where there’s no competition and no source of reintroduction, can one of these fads result in the permanent loss of a valuable technology. So that’s one of the two sets of lessons that I want to draw from history, about what happens in a really isolated society and group.”
Source: How to be rich by Jared Dimaond
And then what?
Experts, be they economists, ecologists or linguists,have been aptly described as individuals who know moreand more about less and less. Since the world is toocomplex for our minds to remember every detail and toeasily encompass the whole, experts employ filters to setaside certain dimensions of reality as trivial or assomething to be dealt with by another expert. Sincedifferent filters alter the total picture of reality in differentways, we need to know the characteristics of theintellectual filters used by experts as well as by ourselvesin solving problems.“Experts, be they economists, ecologists or linguists, have been aptly described as individuals who know more and more about less and less. Since the world is too complex for our minds to remember every detail and to easily encompass the whole, experts employ filters to set aside certain dimensions of reality as trivial or as something to be dealt with by another expert. Since different filters alter the total picture of reality in different ways, we need to know the characteristics of the intellectual filters used by experts as well as by ourselves in solving problems.”
“since we cannot do just one thing we must always ask and answer the question and then what? when we try to ascertain the benefits and costs of proposed courses of action on both the individualas well as social levels. The ecological systems way of thinking employs modern scientific theories and knowledge to study a world of interlocking processes characterized by many reciprocal cause-effect pathways.The ecological systems way of thinking has to become an integral part of the thinking of the well-educated person if we are to adequately control technology rather than fall victim to the forces we generate and are unable or unwilling to control. Ecological systems thinking provides well-educated persons with the opportunity to act more rationally, because they have learned a more comprehensive and more accurate way of estimating the probable costs and benefits of their actions.”
Source: Book reveiw: Filters against folly by Garrett Hardin
Water will be the new oil.
Forecast #6: Water will be in the twenty-first century what oil was in the twentieth century. Global fresh water shortages and drought conditions are spreading in both the developed and developing world. In response, the dry state of California is building 13 desalination plants that could provide 10%-20% of the state’s water in the next two decades. Desalination will become more mainstream by 2020.
Source: Forcast for next 25 years
Economics of knowledge
“This is a question about the future of capitalism, the economic system that arose from scarcity. Ours is the era of expanded copyright systems and enormous portfolios of dubious patents, of trade secrecy, the privatisation of the fruits of publicly funded research, and other phenomena that we collectively term “intellectual property”. As technology has made a new abundance of knowledge possible, politicians, lawyers, corporations and university administrations have become more and more determined to preserve its scarcity.
So will we cling to scarcity just so that we can keep capitalism? Or will capitalism have to evolve into some new kind of digital economics”
Experts vs Think-for-yourself
“experts violate a fundamental rule of probabilities by tending to find scenarios with more variables more likely. If a prediction needs two independent things to happen in order for it to be true, its probability is the product of the probability of each of the things it depends on. If there is a one-in-three chance of x and a one-in-four chance of y, the probability of both x and yoccurring is one in twelve. But we often feel instinctively that if the two events “fit together” in some scenario the chance of both is greater, not less. The classic “Linda problem” is an analogous case. In this experiment, subjects are told, “Linda is thirty-one years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations.” They are then asked to rank the probability of several possible descriptions of Linda today. Two of them are “bank teller” and “bank teller and active in the feminist movement.” People rank the second description higher than the first, even though, logically, its likelihood is smaller, because it requires two things to be true—that Linda is a bank teller and that Linda is an active feminist—rather than one.
Plausible detail makes us believers. When subjects were given a choice between an insurance policy that covered hospitalization for any reason and a policy that covered hospitalization for all accidents and diseases, they were willing to pay a higher premium for the second policy, because the added detail gave them a more vivid picture of the circumstances in which it might be needed. In 1982, an experiment was done with professional forecasters and planners. One group was asked to assess the probability of “a complete suspension of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, sometime in 1983,” and another group was asked to assess the probability of “a Russian invasion of Poland, and a complete suspension of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, sometime in 1983.” The experts judged the second scenario more likely than the first, even though it required two separate events to occur. They were seduced by the detail.”
Source: Everybody’s An Expert
Black swans of startups and science
The result, he suggests, is that science is becoming less a “bottom-up” enterprise of free-wheeling exploration — energized by the kind of thinking that led Einstein to relativity — and more a “top-down” process strongly constrained by social conformity, with scientific funding following along fashionable lines. The publish-or-perish ethic, in particular, strongly rewards those scientists doing more or less routine technical work in established fields, and punishes more risky work exploring unproven ideas that may take a considerable period of time to reach maturity. This is especially damaging given the disproportionate benefits that come from the most important discoveries, which seem to be inherently unpredictable in both timing and nature. As Taleb argues persuasively in The Black Swan, any sensible long-term strategy in a world dominated by extreme and unpredictable events has to accept, and even embrace, that unpredictability. He illustrates the idea in the financial context. People investing in venture-capital start-ups, for example, have to expect continual losses in the short term, and bank on the fact that they will ultimately make up for those losses by hitting on a few really big winners in the long run.
Source: In search of the black swans
Jared Diamond on Synthetic Thinking
S+B: Is there a process that you go through, a way you organize your thinking, to be able to synthesize from such a broad array of fields? Are there lessons you could draw from your own life, from your own way of thinking, from your own way of writing, that could help people in business learn to ideate?
DIAMOND: A couple things. One is that I found that the more things you’re interested in and the more you learn, the richer the framework into which you can fit any new thing. So synthesis, if you do it at all, gets professionally easier with time. It’s no surprise that older people can do better at synthesis, because they’ve been learning their entire lives. It’s the opposite of, say, reasoning skills in mathematics. Synthesis increases with age as you learn more. I’ll show you upstairs one of the chapters that I’m working on for my next book. It’s about the history of Viking Greenland. When I started reading about Greenland, one of the first things I wondered was: Where did their iron come from? Another thing I wondered was: Could grain grow there? So knowing about other things, there were just more questions I could ask about Viking Greenland. As for how I actually go about working with some new area, you’ll see the piles of books and papers upstairs — I do lots of reading, I talk to people, I find out who has written stuff in an area, and then I call them up and I ask them to recommend more things, which I then read and I come back to them with questions. Then, if possible, I go visit the sites. I’m hoping to go visit Greenland this summer. I read the stuff, I take notes on it, I organize, I type up the notes, my secretary transcribes my dictation, and then I organize notes into topic headings, and the topic headings then get organized into different sections of the chapter.
