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Thread: 15 years ago, the realization that influenced all of my intellectual life was witnessing how incompetent people usually are at solving problems, despite having top-flight education from top-tier universities.
These people seem as though they must be good at solving problems: because they’re knowledgeable in a way that not many people are about the history and the methods that other people have used to be successful at solving problems.
They’ve memorized every jot and tittle of science, math, and history. These people are experts at telling you answers that other people have already found. They can walk you through all of the mathematics that were discovered by other thinkers.
They have an endless capacity to integrate references to great thinkers & schools of thought cleverly into every sentence they type or utter — to the point they almost seem incapable of saying anything of interest without doing so — Still, it’s clear they have a formidable skill.
Yet for some reason when they apply that wealth of knowledge to the pursuit of problem solving, they just don’t get results. This is a serious issue in our society. We’ve mistaken the ability to memorize & recall problems others have solved, for the ability to solve problems.
We have conflated prodigious powers of memorization with prodigious powers of problem solving; and our species is in peril as a direct consequence of this oversight. I’m not saying that knowledge isn’t an important factor in problem solving, I’m saying that memory isn’t.
The neurological processes that are responsible for high level linguistic-symbolic abstraction and problem solving only reference memory to the extent that the information necessary to engage with a problem isn’t directly on hand. Math is an exception to this rule in most cases.
That is to say that an individual’s ability to memorize things has virtually nothing to do with their capacity to solve problems, but our entire intellectual infrastructure is biased towards minds possessing powers of memorization & recall: because those powers can be compared.
This has the unfortunate side effect of excluding individuals who don’t possess those particular powers (but may actually have superior powers of problem solving) from achieving a status in society where they can participate in the collective pursuit of understanding our reality.
Yes. I’m saying that it is very likely that it is the case that our unsolved mysteries in philosophy and science have gone unresolved because we’ve been sorely mistaken in our approach to what kind of minds are best suited to doing that kind of work.
I call the minds with prodigious powers of memorization “Library Minds” & those better at problem solving “Laboratory Minds”. Every so often you find a mind that is a mix of both. I call these minds “R & D Minds”.
If you want to understand how it is possible that after 5000 years of investigating our reality, we still don’t have any of the answers to any of the foundational questions in philosophy & science — none of the infinite regressions have been resolved, epistemology is barren.
We can’t articulate a single sentence to establish objective values, ethics, or morality. We have no clue what our universe actually *IS*. We can’t even figure out how to make sense of our own capacities of experience & consciousness.
And what little we do think we know; we are most assuredly wrong about all of it on at least one level of analysis or another. We are here where we are because Library Minds have been manning the front lines from the start, when what we really needed were problem solvers.
I realized this at a young age, and I dedicated my life to pursuing clarity of thought, and problem solving, almost in complete exclusion to any serious attempt to accumulate a wealth of knowledge that would signal to other knowledgeable people that I should be taken seriously.
I think it is time for me to choose a path. I think it is time for me to find out if all of my efforts were in vain, or if I really have achieved the goals I set out to achieve with my mind. Learning Mandarin was perhaps my biggest lesson in how useless knowledge can be if you >>
Can’t use it in any effective way. While all of my peers and classmates were in fierce competition memorizing vocabulary and grammar and idioms, I flat out refused to learn any words if I could avoid it. I realized immediately that Mandarin is a tonal language.
In Mandarin, if you cannot speak with perfect tonal inflection, nobody can understand a word you are saying. While my peers pursued knowledge, I pursued clarity. I just practiced my tones day in and day out over top of meaningless phonetic combinations.
By the time my peers had memorized thousands of words & phrases, I still couldn’t ask where the bathroom was. But my tones were crisp. In the end, they all had these massive vocabularies & knowledge about Mandarin, but no native speaker could understand a word they were saying.
I, on the other hand, found myself in the heart wrenching position of having to translate these people’s Mandarin into... Mandarin, when they spoke to native speakers and it was devastating. They spent years accumulating all of that knowledge only to realize that they couldn’t>>
Use it in any effective way. Some of them just had to resort to using the written language they had mastered to communicate, like they had been rendered mute. I’ll never forget that lesson. And I am convinced I am witnessing the same phenomenon in philosophy & science at large.
All of these people rushed into the project of accumulating as much knowledge as they could, as fast as possible; and they never took the time to understand what it would mean to use the knowledge they were acquiring in an effective way. Now they can’t communicate with reality.
They’re trying to establish a dialogue with the universe, but the universe can’t understand a word they are saying; it doesn’t recognize its own language in the words coming out of their mouths.
I’m going to try my best to step up and translate for them.
I’m going to try my best to step up and translate for them.
