Reading and Thinking
Our attitudes to thinking and to one another are changing in remarkable ways
The universe is entropy.
But sometimes in the randomness, bits fit together in astonishingly clear ways.
Piece in The Atlantic titled “The elite college students who can’t read books.”
[The course] often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told [the professor] hat, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.
This is not a new complaint in one sense. People old enough will remember John Houseman in both the movie and television series about law school telling his first year class that they came into his classroom with a skull full of mush and he’d teach them to think like lawyers.
But in other ways, this is something else.
There are always students who “read insightfully and easily and write beautifully,” he said, “but they are now more exceptions.” Jack Chen, a Chinese-literature professor at the University of Virginia, finds his students “shutting down” when confronted with ideas they don’t understand; they’re less able to persist through a challenging text than they used to be. Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet.
Another one. The Supreme Court of Canada won’t translate decisions that came before the Court began translating everything it issued. That was 1970.
That’s not so curious as to the reason offered by the Chief Justice. Richard Wagener gave three butr the ifrst oine was that the “old decisions are of purely historical interest.”
No practical value because they are old. Weird idea for courts, which are supposed to be about precedent and the history of laws. Now we are into current, only, which is also transactional as opposed to consistency. And it’s a bit like the students who told The Atlantic that reading books was a quaint hold-over from another time. Some people may do it, but it’s not relevent.
But the law is a changing business in these modern times. Conversation with a friend this week about a seminar he’d attended on the impact of artificial intelligence on legal practice. AI can analyse a mountain of data on specific topics, write briefs, draft responses and more. The thing that stuck out in the conversation was the comment that law schools in Canada have already started shifting their teaching to make sure students could correctly “prompt” the AI systems to deliver what they wanted.
And in the background of all this is the hype about artificial intelligence, CHATGPT, or services like Grammerly that promise to take all the intimidating part of emails away. These suggested texts have turned up everywhere in the most annoying ways. predictive text or autocorrect is just one. As for that intimidating part of emails, it’s the part that involves figuring out what you want to say and how you want to say it.
It’s about thought.
Thinking, which is intimidating and frightening and bad.
So, less thinking. More productivity and greater happiness if you let the machine do all the nasty thinking for you.
More rote.
More automatic.
More stimulus-response.
Like that bit about teaching young lawyers - all now given doctoral degrees, by the way, J.D rather than the beginner’s degree, the baccalaureate they used to get - teaching them to know how to prompt the machine to spit out an answer. Less on how to think like a lawyer and more to act like someone who can stimulate a response and then accept whatever comes out as authoritative. Correct. Not to be questioned.
The thing is, in order to know how to ask the right questions - how to prompt the machine correctly - and also how to evaluate the answers coming out the back end of it, you have to have the skills needed to do the grunt work yourself anyway. It’s not good enough to teach you a simple skill like prompting. That’s like teaching you to writing in cursive or to use a keyboard.
This is like calculators and basic math skills. You have to know how to do the work yourself first, otherwise you’ll never know what a wrong answer is. But it’s also related to the idea David Dunning and Jacob Kruger introduced is to almost 30 years ago, namely that people with high skills in a particular field tend to underestimate how high their skills are compared to other people. You have to know what you are doing first to understand whether you are doing it correctly and what you could be doing wrongly.
John Cleese has long popularized this idea but by flipping it around. He stated it in another way a couple of years ago in his criticism of the Republican Member of Congress, Marjorie Taylor-Green:
She is the perfect example of someone who is not intelligent enough to realise that she’s not very intelligent. Hence her enormous self-confidence. Sadly, her supporters are even less intelligent than she is. Hence their confidence in her.
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What you are seeing here is not the front edge of a new trend. We are not just started down this road. We are well along the path. It’s here already. And it’s not just the idea that happens in every generation where the olds think the youngs are just not up to the job.
There’s been a shift in the way we relate to information and thinking and ideas and one another. It’s been going on for a long while. As I noted this past year in a couple of columns things like audience fragmentation for news media are actually much old ideas than we would think if you only listened to what people are saying today. we can trace it back to the 1980s at least.
In another one, I tackled the idea the Internet has rewired our brains or that our attention spans are shorter. Not so. People still read. People can function with books, which is actually what that new Atlantic piece says. Still lots of great students who think and read and write easily. But there are many others who do something else. They are not victims of some external force. They opt to act like they do:
“We live in a jet ski world, skimming over words, ideas, and entire cultures not because the machine we use is so fast but because we choose not to take a deep dive. We choose not to think.”
It’s not that people’s brains work differently or they’ve become addled. They simply aren’t given skills they need to think critically, reason, and do all the other things those professors told The Atlantic about. And other aspects of their lives reinforce the conditioning they receive in schools to act in certain ways. Choice is still involved - they could become aware something is amiss and change themselves and many likely do - but it really is about how education, social prompts, and other aspects of daily life reinforce a change in the way people behave.
I first encountered this 20 years ago teaching public relations writing and research methods to a group of recent university graduates. They were generally not curious and inquisitive. They were used to having things spoon-fed to them even by their teachers and professors. In the intervening couple of decades, I’ve come across this more and more often and teachers and especially professors report it as well. The result is that we have several generations of people whose relationship to thoughts and information and even the act of thinking is transactional. Short-term. Task-focused. One and done.
The Internet made it even easier to prompt the machine to give up enough material to slap together for a course paper or some other task. Smart phones made it even easier and carried over the practice of looking it up even easier, rather than carrying around the information or even a set of ideas about how bits of information relate to one another.
This same behaviour is repeated in multiple places including news media and politics. Look at Premier Andrew Furey as the very best example of this transactional way of thinking and behaving. He’s an orthopedic surgeon so he comes by it naturally. He’s trained to think that way. Transactional. Stand by the table, wait for someone to wheel the next skeleton in front of you, do the work, then roll that one out and another one in. As much as his love of photo-ops are a great and easy source of jokes, they reflect both the way he and his audience think. There’s a reason why you’ve never heard him deliver any great-thought speeches or why he actually has no plan for anything. He’s a transactional thinking kinda guy. One and done. There’s nothing about him and his work as Premier - as he understands the work - that requires any more.
Just to really see the point of how much Furey typifies the world we now live in, go back to the year-end Saltwire interview mentioned in that January column. Maybe five hundred words and none of it more than filler and platitudes. Both sides of that transaction - interviewer and interviewed - only needed stuff to fill up space. Poof. Needs met. And there’s no one around Furey - by his careful choice - who thinks any differently.
The people in The Atlantic piece or anyone else mentioned even obliquely in this column are not stupid. They are very bright people and are certainly neither more nor less intelligent generally than people were generally in the past. The thing is their environment gives them both the stimuli and the appropriate responses and they act accordingly. They are capable of being aware and understanding and certainly some of them may well be aware on some level of the differences in how people think and operate or that there are alternate ways of being and thinking today. They just don’t see it as important or useful. They just understand that the world they live in rewards the behaviours and outcomes, like the chutes of a slaughterhouse, even if that would not be the metaphor they’d come up with.
The two columns this week fit into this as well. Incidentally they drew 50% more traffic than usual around here and it is odd that two back-to-back did that let alone do so one two widely different topics. The connecting thread to this column - especially the one about the offshore - has to do with the way people think and behave these days. A couple of decades ago, I was involved with the proposal to develop a marine protected area under a federal initiative. There was money for it from Ottawa and lots of opportunities for new tourism businesses along the whole of the south coast. There’d be fishing as well, although the quotas would be set by committees of local fishermen rather than the federal government.
As far as other resources went, the provincial energy department wasn’t too keen on an MPA because it would not allow for subsea mining or oil development. The key thing on the mining side of it, though was that officials right up to the deputy minister knew the results of the 1983 decision and that the seabed out at least three miles was theirs to control. Flip ahead 20 years and no one on the provincial side seemed to know anything about the 1983 Court of Appeal decision and what it meant. As proof, just look at the convoluted mess they created with the deal reached with Ottawa last December. No one who knew the facts, let alone understood the history and the context and who could think critically could produce such a convoluted mess.
On the federal side, they might have been aware of ‘83 but if anyone did know, they kept their mouths shut. Odds are high though that they didn’t know. Certainly, as evidence, understand that an inquiry to the Library of Parliament for background turned up no mention at all of the 1983 Court of Appeal decision let alone an explanation of what it meant. Other individuals who ought to have known better didn’t, either.
My friend with the lawyers and AI would find it hard to believe that no one was aware of this 1983 decision but it’s not all that difficult. Remember, we are not at the beginning of a process when someone writes about students who have not read a whole book and - here’s the really big thing - cannot think their way through challenging ideas or complex texts. We are well into the phase. Quick answers when someone else did the grunt work. A lack of time or interest in doing anything but following the course already set. It all fits a well-established pattern of which this slavish use of machines passed off as intelligence is simply another step along the way, a natural evolution.
Where we are today has been coming for a while. Teachers changed the way they taught students in primary and elementary schools, the way they focused on measurable skills, and with philosophies like No Child Left Behind and Common Core “shifted from books [and all that can come out of any book] to short informational passages, followed by questions about the author’s main idea—mimicking the format of standardized reading-comprehension tests.” The whole thing is mechanical in form and outcome so it isn’t surprising that people who have been through the “process” operate mechanically.
Not so hard to imagine how easy it is to change the way a society operates - change the way kids think - if we remember that it was less than a decade after 2003 for there to be no one left in the Cabinet Secretariat in Newfoundland and Labrador who could reliably say from their own experience what had *always* been done in that office. Staff changes quickly defined “always” as what had been done for as long as the person you asked had been there.
Through the 1960s to the 1980s there were plenty of books, magazine articles, radio and television programs and movies that explored the idea that mass media could be a way to control public opinion. Marshall McLuhan and Noam Chomsky were everywhere and remain perhaps the best known communications theorists despite, in Chomsky’s case, his ideas being incredibly simplistic to the point of being useless.
All the same, there were other thoughtful commentaries. Being there is a 1979 movie based on a book of the same name. Peter Sellers starred as a simple-minded gardener named Chance who has only known about the world through watching television. He finds himself out of work and in the real world. By a series of events, he becomes an advisor to the American president thanks to his easy-going, inoffensive manner and his tendency to toss out platitudes. Both the movie and the book are comedies but they contain elements of strong social and political criticism, particularly in the way some characters came to believe that the man they call Chauncey Gardiner - with his affability and a lack of any detectable history for opponents to latch onto - was a perfect candidate for high office.
Chomsky, Being there, and many other of the books and movies of the time involved some sort of conspiracy, some conscious effort by a small number of people to control outcomes. What we are describing here is something else. What we are really describing here is a set of events - some unconnected to one another, some reactions to other changes - that come together to produce a result. No one changed the ways schools work so that a generation would appear that behaved a certain way to line up with another development - like the changes in local politics in Newfoundland and Labrador - and so on. These things are unconnected.
But the changes in education *were* connected. People who spend their time thinking about how to run primary and secondary schools came up with a set of ideas to fit their notions of how schools ought to run and how best to teach the widest number of children. It’s unlikely any of the people behind those changes in teaching thought through the wider implications or that any other individual or group did either. The students coming out of those primary and elementary schools that trained to meet specific measurable goals produced students who were unable to function in universities.
Rather than try to reform the entire education system, universities that operated in a highly competitive world had few choices but to adapt. And since many of the teachers who came up with the new ideas were also teaching in universities, adaptation was easier than resistance. That’s a change by reaction, which is also what we’ve seen on campus when other ideas - like overt racism disguised as progressive theory - came to campuses or students showed up about a decade ago demanding to be taught only things they wanted to learn in ways they approved of. So we got trigger warnings and the censoring of courses and professors and the absurdity of students complaining that a class on racial epithets included the voicing of racial epithets.
That same process of small adaptations and changes for differing reasons happened across the whole of society. The Pea Seas cut eight people from the House of Assembly in 2015 because they thought they could win enough to make a majority in a smaller house but couldn’t manage a few more to win most of 48. The Liberals under Dwight Ball recognized it would be easier to win fewer, too so they lazily went along with. They had no attachment to democracy or to the institutions of government so what was in their personal interest was automatically good enough for everyone.
But to make it out as part of a larger grand design to undermine democracy is a bit of a stretch. Muskrat Falls was an easy conspiracy involving a handful of core plotters, with the rest trailing along for their own reasons. But to bring about the larger changes to how politics works in the province, you would have to bring too many people inside the tent for too long a period and count on so many unknown, unpredictable or uncontrollable events and involve people who - in the current political crowd’s case - now routinely throw policy sticks down the road hoping to Jesus they can figure out what their announcement will mean when they get there. The gangs who couldn’t shoot straight are hardly likely to be all closet Machiavellis.
What we are speaking about here is one of a series of decisions over time that produce an effect but it’s really a waste of time to wonder if it is Evolution or Intelligent Design. The former is more likely so let’s work with that: a series of separate adaptations to specific events that cumulatively add up to something else.
That something else has some pretty frightening aspects but let’s save that for another time.
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Have a great weekend and we’ll see you on Monday for a look at what we pay our delegates to the House of Assembly.