Tag: plato

bill & ted’s unconscious competence

~ ginsu ~ Leave a comment

There’s a difference between having a plan and changing it, and never having one at all.

6th Uncle

I was twenty-one years old when my uncle said that to me in Minnesota, and I’m still thinking about it now, more than three decades later. When he laid these supposed pearls of wisdom on me, I’d been driving aimlessly around the country right after graduating from college. Understandably, my father must have been concerned about whether I knew what I was doing, so I knew I’d have to hear a whole lot of something even before the visit with my uncle, who happened to be traveling through Minneapolis on business while I was there to visit a friend and pay homage to Dylan. 

I enjoyed that wandering burst of my youth, but the only thing that I’ve been turning over in my head ever since is what the heck my uncle was really trying to say. For the purposes of this brief post, I’m going to skip three decades of contemplation, and just write down what I hope it means:

Early in my career, I heard about the four levels of competence – listed here from worst (1) to best (4):

  1. Unconscious Incompetence
  2. Conscious Incompetence
  3. Conscious Competence
  4. Unconscious Competence

I’m not going to describe these levels here, there’s plenty of material elsewhere that explains these levels better than I could. To me, when I heard about those levels, and for a long time afterwards, I simply could not believe in that fourth level. I thought it was just something that old people pretended to exist, because they couldn’t remember how things worked. How is it possible to be unconsciously competent? 

Now, however, I simply know that this level exists, because I understand the simplicity of the insight: if one has consciously ingrained competent practices and corresponding ethical behavior into one’s habits, the result will be as competent as both those practices and adherence to those ethics. You’ll be pleased with your competence, and no one else’s opinion really matters as much. That’s you plural: your teammates all need to be on the same page regarding your practices and ethics too, or the result will eventually become extremely unpleasant unless you just happen to be lucky enough to never need the awesome power that comes from Unconscious Competence.

I mean, there’s probably a better way to say all that, but I’m trying to be precise about it, rather than saying it more briefly. It took me too long to understand that this is what is meant by “Unconscious Competence,” and it would take too long for me to try to say this all more clearly.

But … I think we could come at this from another angle …

This kind of navel-gazing was invented, for the Western world, by our old friends So-crates and Plato.

Socrates is perhaps the most famous name in Western philosophy, and famously never bothered to set pen to paper when it came to his philosophy – he wasn’t illiterate, he simply believed that deep human meaning could not be transcribed. The only way to transmit any truly valuable human meaning was directly from one human being to another, without anything in between to mix the message, without any mediation. And that includes: without any mass media, not even our first mass media, writing.

Plato, on the other hand, was a helluva writer and a smart guy with his own thoughts to add to those of his most famous colleague. And there you have it: two of the biggest names in Western philosophy, fundamentally divided by an extremely important and current philosophical question about whether human meaning can be conveyed through mass media without losing everything important about being human.

I never really had a dog in that fight, but these days I’m leaning towards So-crates, insofar as how I’d ideally live my life. Sure I’m writing on this here personal mass media blog, but I’ve thought for years and years that writing’s not for me, other than as a tool to think. Now we can all see that truthful writing has lost so much of its power in today’s mass media, and Socrates had a great point about the importance of communicating truth from human to human.

Because of the internet and all it hath wrought? Well, yes – but don’t get me wrong, I still think technology can turn around its recent trend, and begin to work for humans again. I know it’s a good thing that Plato decided to write.

But in my personal musings, I’m with So-crates just because Unconscious Competence is something I’ve observed from time to time in others, if not often enough in myself. (I mean, sure I’d like to see it more in myself and others, but that seems unreasonable given that there are, after all, four levels.) And when I see it, when I see someone succeed just because of consciously designed practices and corresponding ethical behavior that become habits – it’s really funny to watch what happens next: Those people get asked, “How did you become such a success?”

And really, the person just can’t give an answer that seems to make sense to a lot of people, because the truth is that a whole lot of what they did was just Unconscious Competence, and there’s no good way to explain that. They just live it, and someone else writes it down if they happened to notice – but that someone else always adds their own humanity, and that’s a good thing too. Maybe we can all be Socrates and Plato; certainly neither could have become who they were without the other.

Be Excellent.

the Internet is making us bad writers

~ ginsu ~ 2 Comments

Over the last several years, many people have engaged in discussion and debate about whether “the Internet makes us stupid.”  What is this debate really about?

The first volley in the debate may have encapsulated the entirety of its substance.  Doris Lessing, in accepting the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature, asked:

How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by this Internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free . . .

As the vanguard and finest defender of the cutting edge, TechCrunch boiled down Lessing’s careful rumination into “the Internet makes us dumb,” and crafted the exquisitely reasoned rejoinder:  “Meh.”

The following year, Nicholas Carr kicked the debate into high gear by asking, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”  Carr noticed that after years of using the Internet as his main source of information, he’d become less able to apply sustained concentration to reading lengthy articles and books.  He found anecdotes and early research that suggested that the constant browsing and skimming of information so typical of Internet reading exercised the brain in a different (arguably more shallow) way than the “deep” reading of books.

Carr himself noted people often feared that new technologies would limit human progress, without being able to imagine the ways those technologies would expand our knowledge and further progress:  Socrates complained that writing allowed people to cease exercising their memories; the Gutenberg press was once decried as a tool of intellectual laziness.

Nevertheless, now two years later, Carr has more firmly concluded that the Internet has rewired our brains to crave new and trivial information, at the expense of deep analysis and critical thinking.  From Carr’s original article through the recent publication of his book The Shallows, the question has become a matter of popular, academic and public concern. TechCrunch continued its proud tradition in this debate, dismissing Carr’s question as merely his “axe to grind.”

This is the kind of debate that can go on for a very long time, because the titular question is ironically stupid, though in a clever, link-baiting, book-selling way.  Knowing what “stupid” is requires defining “intelligence,” which is a concept so malleable that anyone who isn’t stupid (and many who are) can argue without end that the other side is being stupid (or at least, isn’t being smart about what stupid is).  Carr is not actually stupid, and I think his question isn’t designed to be answered.

However, there is one way that the Internet has broken a chain that began thousands of years ago:  for the first time since the invention of writing, good writing is no longer crucial to the transmission of knowledge.

When information is available everywhere from anyone at little cost, the power of good writing is diminished as a vehicle for knowledge.  Think of it this way:  Was Plato the smartest of Socrates’ students, or was he merely the best writer?  If all of the philosophers of Ancient Greece had blogs and Twitter, would we even know who Plato was?  Would we hold any single one of them in such high regard?  I think not.  And yet, I think we would still have the full breadth and depth of Greek philosophy in our human knowledge base.

The constraints of physical media, from stone tablets to wood pulp, meant that only the best writing could survive the culling of editors, libraries, wars and time.  So only good writers could pass their knowledge through the generations.  Now that anyone can publish and everything is stored forever and can be found easily, anyone can transmit knowledge so long as it is relevant, and regardless of whether it is the best-written statement of the concept.  If that were the case in Socrates’ time, we might have heard about the Cave from any one of his students – or maybe a dozen of them would have tweeted about it simultaneously.  So we would know the allegory of the cave without knowing or caring who the author was.

This thought must torture good writers everywhere, including Nick Carr, so maybe that’s what his question is really about.  The Internet isn’t making us stupid, and to be precise, it isn’t really making us bad writers.  But it does make good writing matter less.  Oh sure, you can argue that there’s an art to a good blog post or tweet or status update.  But this isn’t like defining “stupid” – there really is a meaningful standard of good writing that people of taste and discernment agree upon, and people who argue otherwise are stupid, for lack of a better word.

The highest challenge in writing – as an act and art separate from the communication of information – is a lengthy work that commands sustained interest and concentration from a reader who enters the writer’s world, rather than the other way around.  The Internet is a reader’s world, and that probably does make readers smarter.  But it makes good writing for writing’s sake matter less, so people who otherwise would have had to be good writers to communicate their ideas can now just get their ideas out in 140 characters.  Is that a bad thing?

I’ve been in this cave my whole life, but now I’m free. OMG, everything I thought was real was only shadows on the wall!! via @Socrates