More on the Ills of Academia and Excessive Schooling

Intellectuals are so plagued by unwisdom three seven-to-ten-page posts didn’t afford me ample opportunity to fully explain its origins. This is the first sequel to the intro, especially Part Two: “Knowledge (alone) isn’t Power.” It might require an additional one. Previously, I discussed the ills of knowledge idolatry and the intellectual debilitations that accompany excessive schooling. This essay will further expound the deleterious effects of the mindsets encouraged by university education.

If people pursue school and general learning optimally, they can still get a great net gain from higher education, but that’s a much bigger IF than most think. People’s unwitting insistence on believing in guarantees, including guaranteed benefits, could make IF one of the most underappreciated words in the English language.

As stated in the intro, it’s impossible to cultivate a type of learning without cultivating a type of MINDSET. Because of the powerful psychological components of thinking and decision-making, mindset plays a central role in how people apply knowledge. Both the psychological elements of thinking and decision-making and the importance of mindset are dangerously underappreciated. 

Engaging in too much theoretical learning fosters a more “detached” and abstract perspective that’s often incompatible with the effective application of knowledge, even if the learning is premised on some of the very same principles. When people are accused of “trying too hard” or “overthinking it,” this is caused by a weak link in a person’s understanding of what’s required for proficiency at the activity or task, which, in turn, is almost always a flaw in mindset (for the relevant activity). As I know all too well, there’s very much such a thing as an overly philosophical mindset when it comes to life. This is the price I pay for being who I am and doing what I do—especially in the decades before I worked it all out. Philosophers, especially young ones, focus too much on correctness, untested theories and principles, and abstract reasoning and not enough on what’s proven to work (learning that you don’t always have the luxury of being meticulous about how you make decisions, as opposed to opinions, was a tough one for me).   

Extralogical reasoning principle: People tend to be more influenced by what they’re CONDITIONED to believe than what they’re straightforwardly TAUGHT or TRAINED to believe. The conditioning need not be intentional, either. You can easily TEACH one thing and CONDITION someone to believe something else entirely. Since the human thinking organ is ninety-percent primitive, unconscious, and self-inconsistent and endowed with powerful social and psychological needs, there’s often a big difference between people’s working, intellectual, and conversational beliefs. Conditioning has the biggest effect on working beliefs; teaching on intellectual; and general and immediate environment on conversational. But for the most part, a cultivated mindset can only be CONDITIONED (that is to say, altered from the mindset someone takes into something).

Obviously, this is not to say people’s intellectual beliefs are completely unrelated to their working beliefs and decisions, but there are still additional motives for believing things. Extralogical reasoning principle: People evolved to survive, not to philosophize. But it’s not ACTUAL survival so much as what they PERCEIVE as survival. Today, since mortal survival is all but guaranteed, what people perceive as survival is PROFESSONAL survival, or making a good living. A person’s beliefs must be reasonably compatible with their goals, motives, and circumstances; if not, their motivation and happiness are greatly jeopardized. 

There are mindsets and beliefs school cultivate that detract from the application of both SPECIFIC knowledge, as well as knowledge IN GENERAL. Their idolatry of knowledge, as opposed to respecting it and treating it as important, is an enemy to their understanding of knowledge and especially its application. As mentioned in the other posts, school must make topics “well-behaved” enough to always have ascertainable answers and explanations—usually the opposite of what you find in the real-World. There also must be SOMETHING TO TEACH. And not everything CAN or NEEDS to be taught. But academia does and, given how things are, MUST think otherwise. And learning that cultivates a certain mindset also tends to ATTRACT a certain personality type.  

Complex systems, for example, are characterized by unpredictability (or mere “guess-ability”). Ecosystems, economies, and societies are examples of complex systems. They have countless relevant variables, many of which can’t be quantified, identified, or even articulated, that have just the right amount of independence and dependance to greatly limit the predictability of their collective behavior. Although some things can be known or guessed, they can’t be understood reductively, or just by analyzing the parts. Understanding requires what extralogical reasoning calls scientific holistic thinking, which is bottomed on complexity theory, intelligent humility, and informed ignorance: Compensating for weaknesses in thinking and knowledge as well as knowing what you DON’T KNOW, especially relevant in problem PREVENTION. Much of the thinking required for extralogical reasoning, including statistical and scientific holistic thinking, doesn’t come entirely naturally to people (as previously discussed), and studying artificially well-behaved topics often makes it worse.   

However important, Gaussian distributions (e.g., the bell curve) are the exception in Nature. Nature is dominated by “fat tail” distributions, “power laws," and nonlinearites resulting (at least in part) from the prevalence of multiplicative, rather than additive, change. Gaussian distributions, more linear and less volatile in character, are a frequent exception and, more importantly, something well-behaved enough to fit into school courses. “The illusion of linearity,” as I call it, is largely a product of human memory, namely the HTO’s tendency to continuously summarize and simplify their INTERPRETATIONS of events while deleting the raw facts over time (in addition to simplifying reality in general). Gaussian distributions are probably more attractive because of the linear illusion, and its emphasis only reinforces it—and not by a small amount.   

The same is true of solvable differential equations, especially before the emergence of chaos theory/nonlinear dynamics. Most differential equations don’t have solutions, but school courses and theoretical mathematicians tend to study ones that do. There’s an infinite number of both, but the non-solvable are the greater infinity. It’s hard to have a basic course in differential equations that are too poorly behaved, and, even when it comes to advanced ones, theoretical mathematicians have very distinct tastes in problems and techniques: extremely challenging but with “elegant” solutions. This became problematic during the burgeoning years of chaos theory when most mathematicians had apparently been “trained” not to see the chaos—and gross “misbehavior”—in the theory’s nonlinear differential equations.    

School also must make MAJORS fit in within university STRUCTURES. Nowadays, almost everyone’s training occurs in universities. Oftentimes, this requires taking courses that cultivate the wrong mindsets. For example, exercise science majors take scientifically-based courses on exercise and nutrition, which usually have science prerequisites. As a former personal trainer, competitive weightlifter, and wrestler and student of science, I can tell you that it is helpful to have a good working knowledge of high school biology, physics, and chemistry, which everyone should have (sadly, few do, including exercise science majors and most academics). Future posts will even demonstrate the utility of said knowledge. But the “scientific training” they acquire is heavily based on anatomy and physiology. I’ve never needed to know more than basic high school science. I know almost nothing about anatomy. It never came up. And studying it engenders an impractical mindset without imparting actionable knowledge.

Just because something EXPLAINS a concept well doesn’t necessarily mean it ought to have much effect on how you make DECISIONS. In other words, a piece of knowledge may have much greater explanatory power than decision-altering power (action-worthiness, applicability), but the former can easily be confused for the latter. Discerning between them is an essential epistemic ability—and it must be actively ACTED UPON. Moreover, whether they admit it or not, many of their principals and analyses are designed to impress potential clients, and although this isn’t NECESSARILY wrong, distinguishing between the decision-altering power and PERSUASIVE power of a piece of knowledge is also an essential epistemic ability.

Exercise science courses, like those in other fields, are based on what Bishko called make-believe analysis: Analysis that’s neither decision-altering, nor improves your understanding of something in any meaningful way. Make-believe analysis isn’t just pseudo-intellectual; it erodes one’s understanding of these fundamental epistemic abilities—both in the specific areas and IN GENERAL.

The knowledge of the overwhelming majority of exercise science majors vastly exceeds their understandings: They know many facts but have a much lesser understanding of how they fit in with each other. This is a knowledge set prone to misuse, and is revealed when trainers have clients do all kinds of questionably beneficial exercises (often executed with completely arbitrary criteria) at the expense of ones that are most important. They have no idea how to prioritize exercises and have no concept of trainability, or what strength/athletic attributes can be improved and by how much. They throw around fantasy terms and have all this “scientific” training even though they know little about the science that matters.

A field must have principals, terminology, and, in one form or one degree or another, propaganda. In an overpopulated, overindustrialized society, there is fierce competition for employment and patronage. Many fields are forced to CREATE expertise. Courses often, in the words of Nassem Taleb, “lecture birds how to fly” by teaching commonsensical ideas adorned with aggrandizing terminology, promoting the idea they must be taught. This, in turn, fosters passive thinking, which manifests itself in an over-reliance on academic knowledge, rather than active critical-thinking and thinking and decision-making wisdom.     

And I’m inclined to doubt that most personal trainers retain much more than the TRAPPINGS of the learning that DOESN’T matter. Appreciating what you’re learning as well as knowledge in general play a central role in what and how much you retain, especially in the months or years after learning the relevant concepts. You must know what to remember and why—an essential epistemic ability related to learning. It’s been my overwhelming experience that most university grads spend four years and thousands of dollars taking courses without developing any worthwhile ideas of their own, then within a couple years of graduating forget all the ideas of OTHER people. One of the most salient traits of a pseudointellectual is the tendency to be meticulously correct about stuff that doesn’t matter at the total expense of what does, especially when they still fail to get the unimportant stuff right.

That school, and especially certain majors, take on this form of mindset tends to ATTRACT people who either already have it, or are inclined to accept it, which only gets reinforced.

The above, along with overestimating the utility of academic knowledge in general, exacerbates the reductionistic thinking inherent to the HTO. As discussed throughout the intro, humans evolved in environments where understanding reality required dealing with far less variables/factors; there was no need to account for and filter through even a fraction of the amount of information people must today. Academics, most of whom are leftists, have demonstrated time and time again that they think society and its institutions are like pieces on a chessboard, able to be shifted around independently of the others. Life’s far more dynamic than that. They don’t understand that complex systems can only be INFLUENCED by people in power and are much easier to harm than aid. The governmental intrusions they vehemently demand often backfire, causing or exacerbating many crises (see the works of Taleb and Thomas Sowell), of which they’re never held accountable. Yet any favorable events or data (such as economic improvements) not attributable to their preferred measures are dismissed as if they never happened at all. As rife with group think and dogmatism as religious institutions, they’re even quicker to dismiss intellectuals or data that cast doubt on their academic theories.

Throughout numerous periods in the twentieth century, academics blindly, and unfortunately successfully, promoted military disarmament in the name of peace with a near-total disregard for whether tyrannical governments would comply with “peace” agreements, influencing the lack of preparedness of France and Great Britain in WW2 and inhibiting America’s ability to fight Vietnam (see the works of Sowell). Churchill said, “You get disarmament from peace, not the other way around.”

In the 90’s and early 2000’s, academia brainwashed thousands of high schoolers into believing they couldn’t get jobs without going to college—resulting in billions in student loans that many still struggle to pay. And it hasn’t gotten much better. One would think that if they appreciated the seemingly obvious notion that the quality of a decision or conclusion depends on the circumstances for which it applies, they’d realize that when an endeavor requires four years and an upwards of a quarter million dollars, the burden of argument should be on the person who thinks someone SHOULD do that thing, not the other way around (not to mention that in most cases they’d miss out on four years of saving money from working full-time and gaining job experience). People have different goals, strengths and weaknesses, resources, values, and responsibilities.

In fact, even if over half of people should go to college, it’s still pragmatically preferable (see the intro about “belief policies” and “pragmatic preferences”) to treat it that way because it helps prevent the “blind leap” into it. No matter how well-suited someone is for something, there’s still any number of ways it can go wrong. They still must choose the right school, choose the right major, take the right classes, take the right courses, pay for it the right way, make an intelligent decision whether to work during school, etc. Too often, these highly relevant factors aren’t sufficiently considered—and academia is largely responsible.

However, the reasons stated above do not fully explain the actions of the leftist intelligentsia. There are psychological factors that make academics prone to a collectivist mentality that go beyond the epistemic--and, therefore, this essay.        

As stated in the beginning, the pitfalls of passive learning in universities don’t necessarily mean someone can’t get a great net gain from school education. But it requires two things (aside from choosing fields not bottomed on make-believe analysis): One, sufficient time learning in an unstructured environment where they can engage in active learning without having to worry about rampant self-doubt/confusion (preferably BEFORE grad school) and, secondly, an anecdote: extralogical reasoning. As stated in one of the earlier posts, in some ways, learned people need extralogical reasoning more, not less. With the active employment of extralogical reasoning (or equivalent epistemic methods), most of the side effects of years of passively learning artificially well-behaved topics can be offset.