17. What Do They Know of Cricket Who Only Cricket Know?: How to Rejuvenate Your Openness
You're Very Well-Read, It's Well Known
You Put Your Eyes in Your Pocket and Your Nose on the Ground
Sometimes, you have to feel sorry for the experts. Even among the smartest people, tunnel vision is a hazard. D. S. Wilson cites a passage from Darwin describing a fossil-hunting excursion. Looking back, Darwin says he was clueless about the obvious evidence of glaciers that surrounded him, evidence he couldn’t see because he was too busy looking for fossils. In the classroom and in our own writing, too, we often can’t see key evidence because we have only fossils on (and in) our minds. This leads to certain selection pressures, favoring a specific result or product, thus leading to self-fulfilling prophesies and false validations.
When certain traits have priority, others are easily overlooked. Intelligence that is more easily quantified is favored over other, more intangible kinds that might develop in a different environment. As a result, mistakes are just mistakes, and innovation and alternative thinking methods are seen as disruptive. Often in learning environments, individual achievement is more highly valued, and anything that doesn’t fit that mold is discounted.
Imagine if my professor in that long-ago workshop had focused on individual abilities rather than on the class as a group. There would have been a few “stars,” and the rest of us would have been unable to measure up. We would have been left to marvel at the high-achievers’ works and to lament the fact that we didn’t have whatever it took to reach their level. We would have learned that we were not really writers and had little to offer those who were. Instead of using “How Smart Is So-and-So” in our class lexicon, the language would have been more along the lines of “Be Like Mike.”
But the stars also would have been cheated. They would have been robbed of the chance to learn important lessons from us.
Say What? How could the writing stars learn from the average Joes? As we saw with Dinner Party Math, a student who failed an exam can teach test-makers something about their own test while helping other students to pass. Her alternative frame of reference taught people that there was another angle to the problem that they hadn’t considered.
Various forms of tunnel vision abound even in places we normally don’t consider. Test makers, dogs barking at delivery trucks, chicken trainers, writing teachers, even geniuses like Darwin are vulnerable. In fact, you may be more likely to fall victim to this problem the more experienced you are in your particular discipline.
Those Poor, Washed-Up, Thirty-Something Physicists
In Monkeyluv, neurobiologist Robert M. Sapolsky wanted to know why in math and physics it becomes difficult to be innovative past a certain age, usually, your thirties. He found his answer in the work of psychologist Dean Keith Simonton. As Sapolsky put it, “It’s not chronological age, but ‘disciplinary’ age” that can limit people’s creativity. “Scholars who switch disciplines seem to get their openness rejuvenated,” he says. We easily get locked into certain ways of thinking and of seeing the world.
One of the key ingredients in innovative thinking, says W. J. J. Gordon, is the ability to “make the familiar strange” by “playing” with the problem to “upset” its “inner consistency.” This is similar to some solutions for the 9-dot problem. Test makers think in their test-maker ways, and good test-takers think in their good test-taker ways, and fossil hunters think in their fossil-hunting ways, all with their eyes in their pockets and their noses on the ground. Lacking other perspectives, they risk becoming trapped in their own small world, in one of Mr. Palomar’s thick-walled “fortresses,” placing limits not only on themselves, but also on what can be achieved in their field.
C. L. R. James wrote about how his experience with cricket gave him insights into race, history, and politics that included fresh takes on all of the above and, in turn, fresh takes on the game, leading to his famous question in Beyond a Boundary: “What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?”
Don’t Be a Ridge-Dweller
If you are a high-achiever, Sapolsky warns, you may be in danger. Even experts (especially experts) desperately need their openness rejuvenated and need practice with upsetting inner consistencies and making the familiar strange. As with thirty-something physicists, there is an additional obstacle to consider when exploring how to learn or write, something Steven Johnson in Emergence calls “false peaks.” For instance, the designers for a number-sorting program noticed a problem—a ceiling developed on progress. The program could learn but only up to a certain point. Johnson explains,
Once the software climbs all the way to the top of the ridge, there is no reward in descending and looking for another, higher peak, because a less successful program—one that drops down a notch on the fitness landscape—would instantly be eliminated from the gene pool.
The problem was that these climbers were all too happy to be on the ridge with no incentive to search for higher ground. (In origami it would be, “Nice crane!”) The idea, then, is to get the high achievers off their false peaks and down into the valleys where they can find routes to even greater heights. (“Make a change; see the result.”) For the number-sorting programmer, says Johnson, the solution was to introduce a new element: “Any time the software climbers decided to rest on their laurels, a predator appeared to scatter them off to find the higher elevations.”
What Do They Know of Baseball Bats Who Only Baseball Bats Know?
The reason Darwin was upset that he hadn’t noticed the evidence for glacial science on that fossil-hunting day was because he was being a ridge-dweller, which was unlike him. No one had come up with glacial theory yet even though it seemed so obvious after the fact. It’s like the arrow solution in the 9-Dot puzzle, the one where you ask yourself, “How did I miss that?”
Recently, I read the story of physicist Aaron Leanhardt who also plays amateur baseball and who invented a new-style bat called a “torpedo bat.” “Damn, I wish I would have thought of that,” said physicist Alan M. Nathan, because “it seems so obvious.” Another physicist, David Prichard, said, “Yes, that’s the reaction to a lot of good science. Why didn’t I think of that?”
You might never think of something like that if you don’t hop down off that ridge or get outside those fortress walls sometimes and maybe listen to that Dinner Party Math student for once.
As we saw earlier, predators in guppy environments caused selection pressures which limited characteristics; however predators can serve as incentives as well. With the ridge-dwellers, predators encouraged the highly successful number-sorters to become risk-takers. How do you get the origami-folder who makes the most beautiful cranes to take risks? Make it a disadvantage to make beautiful cranes and an advantage to create other kinds of figures which, though potentially imperfect, could pave the way for new designs. What kind of predator/incentive you want and where depends on the outcomes you value most.
Perhaps when designing your assignments, consider providing incentives for risk-taking, thus reducing the risk, and making it riskier to play it safe.
Groups, David Sloan Wilson says, “must be judged by the behaviors they motivate.” Do you want a bunch of play-it-safe ridge-dwellers? Is that what you are after? What kinds of incentives would lead to new outcomes? For writing students, maybe certain questions, alternative viewpoints, readings from outside the fortress walls, and observations of other writers’ choices, even from the non-stars in the group, would serve this purpose. Maybe strong encouragement to “make a change; see the result” would help. How does it change a learning environment when a non-ridge-dweller such as Miss Dinner Party Math is celebrated? What might those high-achievers learn if they took the time to understand how she arrived at her answer, and how would the group as a whole benefit from this?
What if the rewards are higher for making the familiar strange than for doing the familiar well?
Or are you happier in a room full of people who only cricket know, where something is happening, but no one notices what it is?
Notes
Next, we’ll pay attention to “an art nowadays neglected,” because that’s what we do here