A Way of Thinking: Answers and Actions
Image by RAEng_Publications from Pixabay
This season of podcasts and blogs is all about questions. We are wired from our earliest years to ask questions. The incessant “why” of the two and three year old is a real desire to know. Their questions probe reality and result in constantly refined categories called concepts.
It is notable that the child asks “why” and not “what.” Unfortunately most education deals almost exclusively with “what” and seldom with “so what.” Answers to “why” questions establish cause-effect relationships that lead to concrete actions.
An approximate transcript of the podcast “Answers and Actions” is found below along with links to sources and resources.
Thinking is meant to answer questions. The kind of questions we are equipped to answer authoritatively are shaped by our point of view and the conceptual framework that it creates over time. All of us want answers, even if our own expertise can’t get us there. When a plane crashes we want to know why. What went wrong? How could it have been prevented? These dispositions reflect our desire to understand and, through understanding, our desire to control—to make life more predictable.
Join me today as I unpack the outputs of our thinking: Answers and Actions.
This is part 3 of a Way of Thinking. In part 1 I considered the core of thinking and likened it to the core of an apple. The core consists of point-of-view, motivation (what you are trying to accomplish through your thinking) and questions you believe you can answer from your perspective. Part 2 is the working layer, and our thinking is mostly accomplished there. I equate it with flesh of the apple—the reason we eat apples. The working layer consists of the assumptions you make, your fact base, and the framework of interconnected concepts that you reason with and remodel as you grapple with questions you care about. Today we’ll consider the skin of the apple—the output layer. This consists of the answers we give to the questions that have powered our thinking. Other outputs include short-term implications and long-term consequences of those answers.
Answers are important. Answers should be the result of disciplined logical thinking in the working layer. Answers should be based on a network of ideas that can be examined further if the answer is challenged. Too often, however, we give answers that are the result of someone else’s thinking and not our own. “They say that taking a daily baby aspirin is a bad idea.” Who says it and on what basis? Why are they saying “don’t take one” when they previously gave the opposite advice? Consumers of news frequently have no answers for such follow-up questions.
Answers are important in academic assessment. Unfortunately, students are often not taught the thinking that leads to the answer. Teaching thinking would slow things down substantially and there is so much to cover, so they say. The result is an education that has been termed “a mile wide and an inch deep.” Here’s part of an old song from youth:
“Don't know much about history…
Don't know much biology…
Don't know much about a science book …
Don't know much about the French I took …”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfzpAv1hi2Y
Bruce Alberts, past president of the National Academy of Sciences, talks about this same problem in his essay called “Failure of Skin-Deep Learning.” https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1233422
In our apple analogy this is particularly appropriate since the skin of the apple is the output layer of our thinking.
The answer is not nearly as important as the process behind the answer. Surface learning is a misnomer because it isn’t learning at all. It is temporary fact acquisition with a very short half-life. Really learning is durable because of the intentional thinking that precedes its answers. Learning how to think is infinitely extensible through the development of richer concepts and multiplied connections. It is also extensible through purposeful reasoning from alternative points of view. This is the only kind of learning that is truly lifelong. Remaining curious is a great starting point as you age but attempting to collect a broad range of facts without developing the thinking that justifies them is a recipe for transience. Lifelong learning that is deep and wide is akin to the principle of compound interest which Einstein called the eighth wonder of the world. Deep learning multiplies itself. Satisfying knowledge that leads to understanding and wisdom in future decision-making motivates similar learning in additional domains of human knowledge.
Berlin AquaDom. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AquaDom
When I speak of an answer to a question, I really mean an explanation. To explain is to account for something, usually in cause-and-effect terms. On December 16, 2022 the world’s largest freestanding cylindrical aquarium failed catastrophically. Prior to its disintegration it measured approximately 46 feet tall and 38 feet in diameter and contained more than 264,000 gallons of water and 1,500 fish. It was a feature of the lobby in the five-star Radisson hotel in Berlin and contained an internal glass elevator for slow rides through the core of the tank. It was a marvel of German engineering—until it inexplicably exploded.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/12/berlin-aquarium-explosion-germany.html
https://www.cnn.com/videos/travel/2022/12/16/aquarium-burst-berlin-fish-contd-lon-orig-na.cnn
On one level the existence of this cylindrical tank was an anomaly. A reporter for Slate said “A central part of the novelty and attraction of sitting beneath the aquarium was staring in slack-jawed wonder that the entire monstrosity didn’t explode, that the plexiglass walls managed to hold against the weight and pressure of all that water.” But this anomaly persisted for twenty years.
In the aftermath of this colossal failure with frozen fish all over the street in front of the Radisson our reflexive instinct is to ask for answers. To be precise we want an explanation for the failure. What went wrong? Was this faulty engineering? Flawed plexiglass? A maintenance issue? Were corners cut in construction? Was the tank damaged over the years since it was installed twenty years prior?
An explanation for this collapse will call for the interaction of many different perspectives including structural and materials engineers, the fabricators of the plexiglass cylinder, maintenance personnel and building inspectors, etc. Each will reason from the point-of-view of their expertise bringing to bear assumptions made that perhaps are now in question, facts that may need revision, and a conceptual framework that probably needs to be modified. Where previously each of these components of thinking approved of this design, now reality shows that the thinking was flawed.
The ripple effects from reality checks like this one fall into two categories: immediate implications, and long-term consequences. Immediate implications would be to inspect plexiglass in aquaria throughout the world and to recalculate the loads they are under. Long-term this aquarium failure will affect the design of structures in the future. It is unthinkable that a replica of the failed Berlin AquaDom will be constructed. Hard questions will be asked of designs that will result in greater margins of safety. This event may provoke polymer chemists to create stronger transparent materials as successors to plexiglass. It is hard to forecast exactly how far the ripples will go, but we must change when reality pushes back against our answers.
My family has done a bit of genealogical research to probe our roots in Scotland. The trip my wife and I took in June and July of 2022 was helpful in understanding why my forbearers left Scotland in the first place. We visited the beautiful, but sparsely populated Isle of Arran for three days. William Gray, the last member of my branch of the Gray family left Arran sometime in the 1800’s and headed to eastern Canada with the promise of land for farming. His exit apparently was catalyzed by a shift in agriculture on the islands and in the highlands. This was a shift from tenant farmers who focused on growing crops to an emphasis on raising sheep on the same land. The needs of sheep were minimal compared to the requirements for farming and created more income for the landlords, some of whom were deeply in debt. This phenomenon has come to be called the Clearances. Finding themselves without a livelihood and without a place to live on land most had occupied for generations triggered migrations to other parts of Scotland as well as to America and Canada.
Although details are sparse for my ancestor, the upheaval of the Clearances is a plausible cause-effect answer to why my forbearers left Scotland. This decision would have had immediate implications for his family and obviously had long-term consequences since my ancestors from that point on were Canadian, and eventually American.
teosinte (top), maize-teosinte hybrid (middle), maize (bottom)
By John Doebley - http://teosinte.wisc.edu/images.html, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3082050
Another major shift in agriculture occurred several thousand years ago. The development of corn (aka maize in most of the world) is a captivating story. Studies show that the corn we eat today was derived by selective breeding that started with a grassy plant called teosinte. Teosinte plants produce ears about the length of your thumb and those ears contain perhaps ten kernels with a very hard coating that make them difficult to chew. Several thousand years ago farmers in what we now call Mexico pushed teosinte in new directions. The National Science Foundation summary says, “By selectively breeding each generation, ancient farmers drastically changed teosinte's appearance, yield, grain quality and survivability—culminating in today's "corn." In fact, teosinte is so unlike modern corn, 19th century botanists did not even consider the two to be related.”
Comparing the genes of modern corn with teosinte, scientists have found about 1,200 out of about 59,000 total that were selected for in the shift from the grass teosinte to the tall stalks of corn bearing ears each of which contain 500 or more tender kernels. Of course, these ancient Mexican farmers knew nothing of genes. Instead, they focused on visible attributes of variant plants and selected those with more desirable characteristics as the parents for new generations. Doing this repetitively over hundreds of years led to increasingly divergent plants until they arrived at modern corn.
This is an unexpected answer to the question of how corn came about. It also has implications for today that will be unsettling to some. The reality is that the history of agriculture is a history of messing around looking for useful novelty.
If you want to read more, I suggest the 2011 book Hybrid: The History and Science of Plant Breeding. The Introduction is available free on Google books and will be worth your time— I guarantee it. Here’s a summary of the book from the publisher, “Disheartened by the shrink-wrapped, Styrofoam-packed state of contemporary supermarket fruits and vegetables, many shoppers hark back to a more innocent time, to visions of succulent red tomatoes plucked straight from the vine, gleaming orange carrots pulled from loamy brown soil, swirling heads of green lettuce basking in the sun.
With Hybrid, Noel Kingsbury reveals that even those imaginary perfect foods are themselves far from anything that could properly be called natural; rather, they represent the end of a millennia-long history of selective breeding and hybridization”This is a direct challenge to our modern concept of “natural.” There are no modern remnants of the Edenic originals. Heirloom status creates an arbitrary time stamp that won’t withstand serious scrutiny. I call this unexamined view of agriculture eco-romanticism. Its naivete has serious negative repercussions for modern consumers as well as for the task of feeding the world’s malnourished.
The implications of the real history of our modern vegetable diet are a direct challenge to the labeling I see daily on my breakfast cereal that proudly proclaims that what I am about to eat is non-GMO certified. To the contrary, it has been extensively modified genetically only the techniques that were used were the hit or miss that characterizes the history of agriculture. Wheat, oats, rice—all of these breakfast grains have been extensively modified for thousands of years for the simple reason that the needs of plants growing in the wild are quite different from our reasons for growing and consuming those plants. As a result, we tilt the agricultural table in the direction that we find desirable. We always have.
By the way, I think modifying crops to maximize their productivity and nutritional value is precisely in line with the biblical command in Genesis 1:28 to subdue the earth and have dominion over it. This verse demands careful stewardship of the latent potential in the living world as well as other non-living resources. Stewardship demands an understanding of what you are called to steward. Stewardship also implies accountability and wisdom that thinks about the implications and long-term consequences of our choices. Failing to act is simple negligence and it is not an option.
The output of our thinking is not the mere recall of facts or even the quoting of aphorisms that have served our ancestors. The gift of rationality carries with it the expectation that we will use it to gain understanding. Understanding is demonstrated by the ability to respond to questions with cogent explanations. True understanding recognizes immediate implications of our learning and avidly explores its long-term consequences. Implications and consequences are components of wisdom.
Wisdom has been defined as “the best means to the best ends.” The Bible commends wisdom as the “principal thing” in Proverbs 4:7. Psalm 90:12 in the ESV reads “So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.” Surely one indicator of wisdom is intellectual humility. Humility is the only appropriate stance in view of our propensity for flawed reasoning and the fixations of our unconscious biases. And then there is the reality that a lifetime barely allows us opportunity to scratch the surface of what there is to learn. Will Rogers was surely right when he said, “Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.”
Conservative writer David French just became a columnist for the New York Times. In his inaugural column on February 5, 2023, he extolled intellectual humility in a thought-provoking essay. Here’s his summary:
“Any time my tribe or my allies are under fire, before I yield to the temptation of a reflexive defense, I should apply my principles and carefully consider the most uncomfortable of thoughts: My opponents might be right, my allies might be wrong and justice may require that I change my mind. And it may, in all likelihood, require that I do this again and again.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/05/opinion/memphis-police-academia-partisanship.html