The past five years have seen a string of popular books discussing the future of the economy, labor, artificial intelligence, and our failing education system, but perhaps nobody explains it better than Joi Ito and Jeff Howe, both of the MIT Media Lab. Whiplash, a series of nine basic principles on how to interact in this mercurial new world, breaks it down for those of us working to find our fit. As someone who has struggled to balance entrepreneurial excitement with the security of a day job, the simplicity of the explanations and the profoundly new way of thinking had me sitting back and re-evaluating my whole life plan. Here’s a chapter title: Compasses over Maps. These three words challenge the fundamental principles of blindly accepting the knowledge passed down to us as a finished product. Just like roads are built, populations shift, cities grow and rural towns die, knowledge is ephemeral. It comes and goes, it morphs into something else and escapes our grasp once we thought we had it all figured out. There is a fascination today with handing down “packets” of information, in essence giving us both the problems and the answers in an easy to digest formula, but adds little to our intrinsic development. Granted, these “packets” can be incredibly useful if taken apart, analyzed in different contexts and then re-applied to real-world problems. But this reliance placates our curiosity, it calms our racing mind, puts us into a state of acceptance. After all, everything we need is right there, why go searching? Why question it? We are then steered to continue segmenting knowledge into specific realms, producing “specialists” and systems that favor those that have experience following specific procedures.
Why do we still break education into segmented classes, at set times, with set curriculum, based around repetitive lectures and an artificial dual-semester format? Can we afford to tell our children that checking off a few boxes and moving on to yet another random, mass-produced curriculum is the way to succeed in the gritty real-world? Or perhaps ask why so many companies hire with such specificity. Take a look at a typical job description, and you’ll likely see ten pre-requisites, with a few ambiguous platitudes about integrity and creativity. Here’s an example of a mid-level management position at a large pharmaceutical company; “Master's degree in biostatistics, epidemiology or biomedical engineering, five years' experience in statistical methodology, five years' experience in a clinical environment, three years' experience with SAS, four years' experience with health data, three years' experience project development, three years SAP development experience.” For argument’s sake, let’s say there are 25,000 “Statisticians” in the workforce (earlier estimate of 20,000 in 2010, by the Bureau of Labor Statistics), and maybe 15% of them are Biostatisticians or epidemiologists, leaving 3650 people. For argument's sake, we will double that number to 7000, considering that some biostatistics graduates have gone into other fields. Out of a nation with 300 million people, this company has already narrowed down its pool of applicants to .002% of the population. Add in this arbitrary blend of “experience”, and you can probably count the number of possible applicants that meet all the requirements to a few dozen. Those with this experience are often already in good jobs, and those that might be interested will likely miss the job posting. This is absolutely unsustainable, unrealistic and debilitating, both for our economy, innovation and our own personal development.
We need navigators, explorers, people that can weave their way in and out of complex topics, learn new things rapidly, and then reapply them to the next adventure they go on. The impact of the multi-faceted intellectual with the courage to go out into the world and make an impact is profound. We continue to celebrate the myth of the young savants that immediately latch onto a research topic and follow that until the inevitable Nobel Prize and adulation from the masses in awe of their razor-sharp determination. Yet, listen to many of the foremost researchers, writers, scientists and activists of our time, and virtually everyone will talk about how they “stumbled” into the field that won them fame. This isn’t an accident, this is the reality of knowledge exploration. Great thinkers initially take the closest road of knowledge, which will lead to an infinite number of intersections; some of these intersections lead nowhere and might require backtracking, while other paths may lead to untold opportunity. Epistemology is a journey that rarely provides a straight path forward. Education should revolve around the need to explore a wide range of topics and figure out how to put them together, careers should be a rapid churn of knowledge and movement. Research and obtain the minimum amount of information that you need to explore the topics on your own, and start the journey.
--Compasses over Maps.