A Crucial Next Step For Progress

[theboombody]

I'm not sure how much further we're supposed to go in the technology revolution before we move on to the next big thing, but I think the next big thing should be the intuition revolution. A lot of the things we've discovered in the past century are extraordinarily complicated and often counter-intuitive, and probably less than a half of a percent of people in the world understand these advances that have been made. That kind of scares me. I think when society advances, it shouldn't just advance with a half of a percent of people being the only ones knowing what the heck is going on. I think a pretty substantial portion of the population should be capable of understanding how the world around them operates, otherwise we put ourselves in a bad position.

Go back 500 years ago, and by the age of eight, a person was intellectually capable of doing most available jobs (forget that the jobs were primitive, at least people didn't need so much training in order to contribute). Right now that isn't the case of course, but it can be, if we work on building our intuitions. If we find ways to make very complicated things much, much simpler to understand, I think it will be a huge step for overall societal progress (not just technological progress). I figure if we're capable of designing microscopic electrical circuits, we're capable of increasing our intuitions so that young people learn a lot at an early age. That's sort of happening right now, but I think it needs to be kicked up a lot of notches to keep up with all that's going on. We just need to make it more of a priority. I think it's more important to focus on empowering our intuitions right now more than it is to rely on 0.0001% of the population make already small computers even smaller. We've got a lot of people sitting idle right now because they aren't qualified for these freakin' complicated job openings. That's not good. Slow up on the technological progress and increase the overall mental capacity of the population so it won't be sitting idle and poor. Find ways to make hard learning easy. And unfortunately throwing money at the problem isn't enough. Half of Texas sales and property tax goes straight to schools, with not near enough effect.

 

[Keoul]

I don't believe intuition is something you can teach, it's something you're born with.
You won't ever see an Artist who is also an Olympic Athlete and a genius computer programmer who also bakes amazing cakes on the side. People like to specialize, and that's why you can't just say 'let's make everyone smarter', Some people just don't want to learn how to make super tiny computers, why do you think some kids don't turn up at school or flat out drop out?

The people who are making these technological advances are those that want to make these discoveries, you shouldn't dumb these things down for those that don't understand because it's unnecessary, people like to understand the bare minimum to get what they want done. It's why every single driver isn't also a car mechanic.

This is probably getting confusing since I'm just barfing my ideas at the screen so basically.
-Can't teach intuition
-Shouldn't dumb things down since people don't care
-500 years ago jobs were easier and people couldn't sue you.

 

[Ten Foot Bunny]

This is probably getting confusing since I'm just barfing my ideas at the screen so basically.
-Can't teach intuition
-Shouldn't dumb things down since people don't care
-500 years ago jobs were easier and people couldn't sue you.

Ironic that you essentially did a tl;dr mentioning that we shouldn't dumb things down.

My revolution wish list includes common sense, civility, courtesy, and the elimination of willful ignorance. I'm a little tired of so many people blowing off the willingness to sit down and understand something, even if it's just a basic understanding. We almost have two different languages now: one that's unafraid of jargon, and one that's almost monosyllabic.

 

[Keoul]

Ironic that you essentially did a tl;dr mentioning that we shouldn't dumb things down.

Haha yeah, I guess I should have phrased it better. I meant we shouldn't dumb down the super complicated things like quantum physics or mechanical engineering, to a level everyone can understand because these things are hard for a reason! When you dumb things down you're cutting away important information and for complicated things like that, less information is the last thing you need.

 

[Ubiquitous Duck]

I'm not sure what you mean by teaching intuition.

I mean, you can have better informed intuition, by acquiring more knowledge, but isn't the idea that it is more a feeling than a worked out thought/process? A feeling backed by previous experiences or a knowledge-base.

I know that the conversations around what we teach young people in the UK have centred around the idea that we need to teach young people the subjects that are marketable in today's world.

One of these initiatives is the push to teach people programming language from a young age, as it is very important and valued in today's market and there is only thought for it to increase in importance.

This is just actively evaluating the subjects/content of subjects we teach to people. It is a need to check what the purpose of them learning the content is and what gaps there are that we should currently be teaching.

It depends what you believe the future labour market will look like and on what you believe the purpose of school/college education is. If it is vocationally-driven, then it should be shaped by the job market and prospective market of the future.

 

[Thaluikhain]

Go back 500 years ago, and by the age of eight, a person was intellectually capable of doing most available jobs (forget that the jobs were primitive, at least people didn't need so much training in order to contribute).

That isn't true.

Right now that isn't the case of course, but it can be, if we work on building our intuitions.

Also no.

We have specialists for a reason. I don't know how to build or fly a plane. I don't know how to build a nuclear reactor either. Or at least, in any great detail. But I don't need to.

Pilots don't need to know how to build nuclear reactors. Nuclear technicians don't need to know how to fly planes.

It's not unfair on pilots that nuclear reactors are hard for them to understand, nor is it unfair on nuclear technicians that flying a plane is hard.

The only way to make things so that everyone can easily understand them is by throwing away all our technology. Dunno about you, but I like having technology around. I'm not ever going to really understand how my computer works, but I'm ok with that.

Now, if your point was that people should have a better general knowledge, that's fair enough.

 

[theboombody]

Go back 500 years ago, and by the age of eight, a person was intellectually capable of doing most available jobs (forget that the jobs were primitive, at least people didn't need so much training in order to contribute).

That isn't true.

Right now that isn't the case of course, but it can be, if we work on building our intuitions.

Also no.

We have specialists for a reason. I don't know how to build or fly a plane. I don't know how to build a nuclear reactor either. Or at least, in any great detail. But I don't need to.

Pilots don't need to know how to build nuclear reactors. Nuclear technicians don't need to know how to fly planes.

It's not unfair on pilots that nuclear reactors are hard for them to understand, nor is it unfair on nuclear technicians that flying a plane is hard.

The only way to make things so that everyone can easily understand them is by throwing away all our technology. Dunno about you, but I like having technology around. I'm not ever going to really understand how my computer works, but I'm ok with that.

Now, if your point was that people should have a better general knowledge, that's fair enough.

I think eventually we can mentally progress as a society so that an average joe will be capable of both flying a plane and building a nuclear reactor. May take a while, but I think it can be done. I think we'll pretty much have to have average joes smart enough to do that at some point, or else we'll reach our peak of progress without being able to go further.

I think the best way to do this is for us as a society to continue to technologically progress, but at a slower rate to give our society more time to absorb what's going on around it. So two words sum up what I think we should do to give ourselves time for our intuitions to build. Slow down. But then again, why am I worried? If I think we'll reach a technological peak where we can't go any further without a smarter population, we'll automatically slow down at that point anyway.

 

[Thaluikhain]

I think eventually we can mentally progress as a society so that an average joe will be capable of both flying a plane and building a nuclear reactor. May take a while, but I think it can be done. I think we'll pretty much have to have average joes smart enough to do that at some point, or else we'll reach our peak of progress without being able to go further.

I doubt that...you have to get your average person to invest a lot of time in learning that stuff, which is going to be utterly useless to almost all of them. Why should they not concentrate on learning things useful for the careers they expect to have?

I think the best way to do this is for us as a society to continue to technologically progress, but at a slower rate to give our society more time to absorb what's going on around it. So two words sum up what I think we should do to give ourselves time for our intuitions to build. Slow down. But then again, why am I worried? If I think we'll reach a technological peak where we can't go any further without a smarter population, we'll automatically slow down at that point anyway.

Slowing down isn't really an option, and I can't see why it'd be desirable anyway.

If you want to improve education, fair enough, no reason to try and halt progress until some arbitrary standard of education has reached some arbitrary standard of technology.

In any case, society needs to change to reflect social changes, not just technological ones.

 

[Blood Brain Barrier]

As long as we don't know where we're going, I see no reason for slowing down. Let's get this god damn 'technological' phase of civilization over as soon as we can so we can move on to the next one. Of course, the next one could be worse, but it's much more likely to be better.

 

[Mr Fixit]

My revolution wish list includes common sense, civility, courtesy, and the elimination of willful ignorance. I'm a little tired of so many people blowing off the willingness to sit down and understand something, even if it's just a basic understanding. We almost have two different languages now: one that's unafraid of jargon, and one that's almost monosyllabic.

This so much... I think I'm in love....

OT: Well I really like my "specialists", I don't want my doctor to have a plumbing job on the side, seems like that wouldn't be an exactly sanitary mix.

What you seem to be wanting would basically lead to everyone being mediocre at everything & no one being excellent at one thing. Again with the doctor, I'd take one excellent doctor over 10 mediocre ones any day.

 

[theboombody]

I doubt that...you have to get your average person to invest a lot of time in learning that stuff, which is going to be utterly useless to almost all of them. Why should they not concentrate on learning things useful for the careers they expect to have?

That's the beauty of intuition. It assists in learning tremendously. If someone already has an idea implanted in them, teaching them the details doesn't take near as long. The reason some things take so long to teach is they're not intuitive. Intuitive stuff is much easier to teach. So if we have more powerful and more accurate intuition in the future, we'll learn much, much faster without having to work through so darn many examples and problems.

 

[TheIceQueen]

Go back 500 years ago, and by the age of eight, a person was intellectually capable of doing most available jobs (forget that the jobs were primitive, at least people didn't need so much training in order to contribute).

That isn't true.

Right now that isn't the case of course, but it can be, if we work on building our intuitions.

Also no.

We have specialists for a reason. I don't know how to build or fly a plane. I don't know how to build a nuclear reactor either. Or at least, in any great detail. But I don't need to.

Pilots don't need to know how to build nuclear reactors. Nuclear technicians don't need to know how to fly planes.

It's not unfair on pilots that nuclear reactors are hard for them to understand, nor is it unfair on nuclear technicians that flying a plane is hard.

The only way to make things so that everyone can easily understand them is by throwing away all our technology. Dunno about you, but I like having technology around. I'm not ever going to really understand how my computer works, but I'm ok with that.

Now, if your point was that people should have a better general knowledge, that's fair enough.

Thaluikhain has the right of it. I'll have my Master's in Psychology soon. I don't need to know how to operate a plane or a nuclear reactor to be a psychologist. I don't want to know how to operate a plan or a nuclear reactor. Knowing either of these is not going to help me. What I need to be is constantly reading current, and past, research into the given areas that I plan on specializing in so that I can eventually make my own foothold so that I can develop and add my own research to the pool as the many concepts in psychology evolve. Or alternatively, I need to be researching into the many therapeutic systems and the empirical evidence for them for given areas of use.

Will having the knowledge to pilot a plane help me do research in cognition? Will being able to operate a nuclear factory further a potential career in therapy? No, it won't. These have nothing to do with me or my career prospects and I have enough knowledge-searching on my hands just as a psychologist alone, which is a field that requires you to heavily specialize yourself in.

Furthermore, the concept of intuition has been given so little study that we're barely past the point where Metcalfe and Wiebe (1987) were able to possibly prove its existence. In fact, just six years prior, Weisberg and Alba (1981) claimed that there was no evidence for it whatsoever. It was only upon Metcalfe and Wiebe's study that some support was given to the credence that intuition exists and what they found with regards to it is that it seems to be a fundamentally different process than what problem-solving is and that functional analysis has little to do with intuition.

In other words, learning to pilot a plane, learning algebra, and et cetera is a process possibly removed entirely from intuition and a so-called "intuition revolution" (though I scorn and laugh at the word "revolution," even when cognitive psychologists use it) is not going to be able to help you learn these multi-step, functional problems. Again, though, we're barely past the point where we've got some evidence for the existence of intuition, let alone the practical applications for that, but that's going to require specialist know-how to understand. That's some deep metacognitive shit right there.

 

[Esotera]

The problem is that a lot of complex things just aren't worth learning for every day life, or only need to be known by those few specialists who want to work on the problem. For example, there's no point spending the time to make my university research project easily understood by the general public, as they are not remotely interested in its implications. It will only be used by people in academia (if at all) so it's targetting a different audience.

I definitely think that for important scientific achievements we need greater public outreach. Basically, if every paper had to write a simple abstract for a layman, that would be really helpful. But a lot of these things are inherently complex and sometimes there is no way to simplify concepts without losing detail.