How Intelligent People Solve Unsolvable Problems

A friend shared a really interesting post with me few days ago. I'm not going to waste space here repeating everything that the post said, because it's much better if you go and read it for yourself.  It was especially interesting to me, not because it talks a lot about Richard Feynman, although that is reason enough in and of itself. The reason that this article piqued my interest so much is because it goes on to talk about mental models.  For those that don't know what mental models are, I'll clip a small excerpt for the article, although there are many others to be found on the Internet.

Put simply, mental models are the set of tools that you use to think. Each mental model offers a different framework that you can use to look at life (or at an individual problem).

This is the same method that folks like Charlie Munger of Berkshire Hathaway, and Elon Musk use.  Although Elon Musk has sometimes been referred to as an "expert generalist", it essentially equates to the same thing.  Whereby if a person is taught how to think creatively and critically and is extremely well read across many different subjects and disciplines, they are able to creatively make mental links, and potentially solve problems in a novel way, that create breakthrough moments.  These people aren't necessarily savants or anything like that, they've simply laid the foundations, with the right raw materials and honed the ability to make abstract connections with what if questions.

There have been several articles that discuss how Elon Musk, learns and reads, like this one here;  and another one here.  There are also book lists for Charlie Munger on blogs like this link here.  There are many more, and people continue to list the books that shaped him and helped to create his world as it exists today. But to encourage people to read the books that honed his path completely misses the point of what happened with him.  The concept isn't to spoon-feed the reader with a list of books to be like Elon Musk; he whole purpose of this post is to encourage people to get children to read widely and read deeply.  Not to become an expert in any subject, but to become knowledgable,  in the basics of a wide range of topics, and then practice asking what-if questions (no matter how whacky) to encourage your brain to make connections that maybe weren't there before.

Both of the men I talk about here are experts and huge successes in their own right in completely different fields of expertise; however both used the same basic method to get there.  Surely we owe it our children as parents to encourage habits like this, and especially the schools.  For as long as every teacher is teaching the same curriculum, from the same books, at the same time, in school rooms that never deviate from the curriculum, surely each pupil will graduate with the same basic information and skills, to answer the same set of problems with the same answers.  The end result of a childhood of schooling is capable young adults, not nuts and bolts, not widgets.

The School of Adulting

When I first read about The School of Adulting, my initial assumption was that it was some kind of satirical website based on the current educational environment that turns out unprepared. I was wrong.  There really is a school of adulting, and it turns out that parents and schools are failing it's customers (the kids) so badly that we need a kind of finishing school to help the kids navigate the real world after education.

Clearly we've spent so long teaching the kids to memorise the answers to tests, that the kids no longer have the capacity for thought; so the schools and teachers can all look good in the "league tables" and gain accolades for successful regurgitation of irrelevant, commodity information.

It would be easy to say that demise of classes like "Home Economics" and other such practical classes are the reason for kids lacking basic adult skills.  I personally think it runs much deeper than that. You see, if you have never cooked before in your life, then certainly, you've watched your parents make dinner at some time?  Offered to help out with dinner?  Surely at least looked up from your iPhone while you were waiting for your burger at Five Guys and watched them take care of your meal?  So this is where the parents are failing, there really are kids that are growing up in middle class neighbourhoods and schools that have no idea what a tomato is (but that's another topic for another time), but I digress.  Where the schools are failing is with removing the need for thinking in their day to day school lives.  Because even if the parents have done a crappy job raising little Timmy, and let him sit on his playstation 12 hours of each day, the school should have been teaching them to think and act based on researched information that isn't spoon fed to them. If the school has done an awesome job, then by the age of 16 little Timmy should at least have the skills to find a basic cookbook, or find a website, or youtube video on basic cooking techniques with simple recipes.  Should be able to pick up a book like Personal Finance for Dummies, or one of the many blogs, on personal finance like those by Dave Ramsey, and be able to extrapolate, ingest and apply that information.

This is where the rubber truly meets the road.  No school or parent can possibly know every skill that  child will need will when they progress to adulthood, let alone teach them everything they'll need.  This is why teaching kids to understand information, assimilate it, and apply it in a real world context is absolutely vital. This is what schools and some parents do not do.  This is what needs to change most urgently.

Here's a link to the original article in The Guardian, where I originally saw the story.

The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling. 
Thomas Sowell

The Rise of the Machines

Today whist discussing politics with someone (there's an election happening don't you know?), that conversation came up, the one that goes like this...

"You know, massive unemployment is heading our way, as machines and AI start to replace jobs, we will have people out of work and the economy will crash, the world will fall into ruin and the four horsemen of the apocalypse will reign supreme!"

Ok, so maybe I embellished a little, but I'm sure you know the conversation I mean. There's a few things wrong with this assertion, because it makes an assumption without examining some underlying variables. 

People have been predicting this tale of doom and gloom since the advent of the printing press if I'm not mistaken.

The first problem is the assumption that the workplace is static, this is simply not the case, we no longer have wheelwrights to fix our carriages or Coopers to build our barrels for us.  Automation happens, roles change and new jobs are created as requirements change.

The second is that people can't adapt when the need arises.  If a job becomes redundant, and people are faced with either adaptation or destitution, generally people adapt.  This is simply life, the only thing that is inevitable in life is death and change.  People adapt or people perish, the vast majority do the former, not the latter.  As the the adapters change according to requirements, the educational system should also change, otherwise excited graduates find themselves coming out of education and needing to adapt right away because the education system failed to prepare them adequately.

The third is that automation and Artificial Intelligence are bad. They're not, our brains are evolving all of the time; a recent talk with an esteemed neuro-psychologist I know recently led to him explaining that kids are getting smarter all the time, literally decade by decade.  The reason that educational testing is updated and revised constantly is because the intellectual norm is trending upwards with significant speed.  Personally as a someone who works works extensively in the field of the "Internet of Things", I look to the future with only excitement and optimism, to a time when our future leaders, and workers get to use their brains for creatively solving complex, and multi-faceted problems.

But the crux of this, as I just mentioned, is whether the new additions to the workforce (kids currently in high school and college) are prepared for the task ahead.  Indications are that the majority of them are not!  To be clear, the jobs that are in jeopardy (subjectively speaking) are those that are easily replicated and require repetitive tasks performed or where the job uses commodity knowledge.  As an example a lot of the legal research work for litigation previously done by lawyers, is often now performed by para-legal staff.  The knowledge is commoditised, and with more and more data being digitised, and search algorithms being tweaked and improved continually, I suspect it won't be long before accredited administrative staff will be able to do the same work, in the style of the Mechanical Turk, as we already see with transcription and other services as provided by Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

The value for employers provided by workers of the future is not in commodity knowledge, it's in the ability to solve complex problems in a contextually creative way.

As a side-note the ultimate end for this progression of automation in the workforce looks something like an asymptote style graph, which would eventually take us to a zero marginal cost society.  This essentially means as new technology is invented and adopted it becomes cheaper and more accessible, which means that eventually, a great deal of work will be done almost for free, and as a result, money becomes less important to society as a whole.  As an example, think of Star Trek, where almost everything is "replicated" (so no need to buy food and other items.). There's a great discussion about the Star Trek post-scarcity economy here and this post doesn't need to spend space repeating it, so you can read about it here.

In short, the future is exciting, the Internet of Things will fundamentally change the way that we interact and consume the world around us in a beneficial way. Self-driving cars are already upon us, in the next decade they will be commoditised.  As the parent of visually-impaired children who otherwise would have no chance at personal transportation, this alone brings me excitement.  The future is bright, are the leaders of the future up to the challenge?