Sorting Grains of Sand
The sheer volume of facts and the speed at which they are accessed today is only equaled by the selective bias and velocity at which facts are considered and discarded.
The Internet Age brought with it a significant upside – but along with the ability to order anything at any time and have a lot of it delivered to your door the same day, it also brought the fracturing of society along ideological lines, so it seems we should stop for a moment and consider these two questions:
Is technology killing wisdom?
Or is it our INABILITY to manage technology that is killing wisdom?
The sheer volume of facts and the speed at which they are accessed today is only equaled by the selective bias and velocity at which these facts are considered and discarded. Studies have shown that we have access to more information today than at any point in the history of the world and yet it seems we are careening helplessly toward idiocracy.
Facts are external and communal, knowledge is the consumption of those facts, and wisdom, the goal, is a fractional distillation of that knowledge at an individual level. Facts are the raw material, separating fact from fiction with reason is the process by which wisdom is created.
The great fault in our stars was the idea that simple access to more facts will make mankind more intelligent and wise - but the fact is that mankind is apparently not prepared for the opportunities that technology created. The reasoning capacity of the contemporary human mind is greatly surpassed by the overwhelming availability of data, and it appears we simply can’t assimilate it all in a manner to organize and make sense of it.
As an allegory, if we view the brain as a factory, modern civilization has increased the raw material available without increasing the production lines. The throughput of reason has not increased maintain pace because there are so many random pieces of raw material coming to the production line too fast. Due to this sensory overload, the output of wisdom has been reduced as the production lines are clogged with too many related and unrelated facts inhibiting the assembly of wisdom.
Some parts fit, some do not.
The roles of intellect, knowledge and wisdom is to sort them out, keep the ones that fit and discard the ones that don’t.
Looking for truth in the Internet Age is like sorting grains of sand on a beach.
Until we learn how to manage the tsunami of facts, they will continue to supplant knowledge and knowledge will continue to be substituted for wisdom. This process makes for an intense interest in politesse as a tool to avoid offense when in practice, this irrational adulation of formal politeness or etiquette leads to arrogant, undisciplined, unorganized thought resulting exactly the opposite conditions – overt hostility to any challenge or correction makes us even less patient and polite.
America has been facing an educational crisis for a very long time. Public education has become regimented and systematized to the point that it has become dogmatic and obsessed with social engineering at the expense of learning. We even refer to our educational services as school “systems”. Socratic learning has been largely replaced with regimented indoctrination, free thinking is not encouraged, and following the “system” is valued over critical thinking. Value is placed on the simple command of facts and not the critical “why’s” behind them. Being good at “googling” is not the same as being wise. We do appear to be more focused on teaching what to think and not how to think.
As a result of this dogma, it certainly appears many people have lost the ability to separate facts and truth from opinion and conjecture. Objective truths and established facts are dismissed as “just your opinion”. Direct, vigorous debate and defending a position seem to be alien to most, just “sharing” passionate opinions or presenting a list of facts (even if those facts are unrelated to the argument) is good enough, and a substitute for reasoned argumentation.
Emotional reasoning is alive and well in our public discourse. Much to our detriment, emotional reasoning has created an ecosystem where strongly held opinions are equal to facts and truth is measured in how passionately and desperately one believes rather than actual hard data.
We also appear to lack important overarching historical context, preventing us from viewing modern issues in proper context and facilitating understanding of the importance of historical context. The conventional wisdom that so many current events are “unexpected” and “unprecedented” when they are entirely predictable and painfully common is perhaps the greatest example of mankind’s collective and increasing ignorance.
Enter stage right, George Santayana writing about those ignorant of history being doomed to repeat it.
I believe the following is perhaps some of the greatest advice I ever received from my mentor, and I see no reason why this isn’t appropriate advice for general consumption.
He has taught me to:
Make the fewest decisions possible by helping others to understand and decide for themselves, and
Take every second necessary to decide – if you are given 96 hours to take a decision, never decide before hour 95, and
Not all decisions will be correct, but one should strive to be directionally correct to maintain momentum along a desired trajectory.
I struggle with these because my personality is Larry the Cable Guy oriented – just “Git ‘er dun”. To slow my roll and manage my behaviors, I have these words written on the first page in my personal notebook and printed out and taped to the top of my computer monitor where I can see them every day:
“Stop. Think. Consult. Decide. Act.”
In this age of drowning in opinions and drinking facts from an Internet firehose, these words have served to save me from myself countless times.
Right now, it is the best advice I have to give.
We have access to more data (information) today than ever before, but are no better equipped to develop the "meaning" of that information than we did before. So we are in a chaotic time, as you describe. In the very near future I expect the emergence of mature AI "bots" that will assist us in this endeavor, however expect the algorithms of those bots to be subject to manipulation and control - see the Facebook and Twitter algorithms that have done just that, promoting propaganda and false reality. There's a rich market available for truly trusted agents that "get it right" - though I'm unsure how that would be done. Maybe Elon will figure that piece out.