cormack12
Gold Member
Source: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/...2?shareToken=4477e9bcc3b786ee90b50da5073e586d
I abridged the more political stuff to make it a more general discussion.
Through pride we are ever deceiving ourselves,” Jung wrote in his book Synchronicity. “But deep down below the surface of the average conscience a still, small voice says to us, something is out of tune.” I am guessing all of us are hearing this voice at the moment, a persistent whisper that tells us that we are heading into an age of crisis, our political systems impotent to avert it, and perhaps actively contributing towards it.
“We are drowning in information but starving for wisdom,” wrote EO Wilson, the great biologist who died last year. Rarely have those words felt more true.
It is sometimes wise to step back and examine how human knowledge has been transformed in the past two and a half centuries. In the 18th century David Hume wrote treatises on everything from politics to philosophy and history to economics. Denis Diderot and Jean-Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert claimed to have encompassed all knowledge into a single set of books, their Encyclopédie. Little wonder that one scribe said that “a single individual could hold all western civilisation in their minds”.
Today things have radically changed. The “web of science” database contains 171 million papers and previously broad subjects such as physics and chemistry have splintered into thousands of subdisciplines from cryptozoology to fuzzy logic (important for AI). Across Whitehall there are experts in hundreds of policy areas, while think tanks curate their own fields of expertise. Nobody can hold all this knowledge in their minds, not even a genius. In a sense, knowledge is a bit like Polynesia: lots of islands, with their own language and customs, but which no one anthropologist can grasp.
But the sheer quantity of information creates a fundamental challenge when it comes to our most complex problems for, as Isaiah Berlin noted in his great essay The Hedgehog and the Fox, wisdom is not about narrow expertise, however impressive. Rather, it is about bringing insights together, breadth rather than depth, the wood rather than the trees. This is why as knowledge grows and fractures, wisdom becomes ever more elusive.
Science, for its part, has made strides towards grappling with the information explosion. Researchers in related disciplines have started to build unified frameworks of explanation, common standards of proof and shared language. This is enabling scientists to work together in multidisciplinary teams, to integrate information, to test broad hypotheses and to combat groupthink. It is as if the islands drifting apart in our metaphorical Polynesia are being connected through an intricate set of viaducts, tunnels and bridges — leading to that unified system of knowledge that EO Wilson termed “consilience”. He wrote: “The search for consilience might seem at first to imprison creativity, but the opposite is true. A unified system of knowledge is the surest means of identifying the still unexplored domains of reality. It provides a clear map of what is known, and it frames the most productive questions for future inquiry. Historians of science often observe that asking the right question is more important than producing the right answer. The right answer to a trivial question is also trivial, but the right question is a guide to major discovery.”
This is why the only way out of our political crisis is to take consilience seriously, to recognise that the growth of information has made policymaking harder. Crucially it shows that we need a new breed of leader. Instead of showmen and salespeople (or PPE graduates) we need “synthesisers”: people capable of putting together the right information at the right time, thinking critically about it and making crucial choices wisely.
...this is a problem that starts with us, our culture and consciousness. We swelled with hubris as we surveyed our technological splendour, conflating knowledge and wisdom, information and insight. This is the category error that defines our age, the false consciousness from which we must liberate ourselves.
I abridged the more political stuff to make it a more general discussion.
Through pride we are ever deceiving ourselves,” Jung wrote in his book Synchronicity. “But deep down below the surface of the average conscience a still, small voice says to us, something is out of tune.” I am guessing all of us are hearing this voice at the moment, a persistent whisper that tells us that we are heading into an age of crisis, our political systems impotent to avert it, and perhaps actively contributing towards it.
“We are drowning in information but starving for wisdom,” wrote EO Wilson, the great biologist who died last year. Rarely have those words felt more true.
It is sometimes wise to step back and examine how human knowledge has been transformed in the past two and a half centuries. In the 18th century David Hume wrote treatises on everything from politics to philosophy and history to economics. Denis Diderot and Jean-Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert claimed to have encompassed all knowledge into a single set of books, their Encyclopédie. Little wonder that one scribe said that “a single individual could hold all western civilisation in their minds”.
Today things have radically changed. The “web of science” database contains 171 million papers and previously broad subjects such as physics and chemistry have splintered into thousands of subdisciplines from cryptozoology to fuzzy logic (important for AI). Across Whitehall there are experts in hundreds of policy areas, while think tanks curate their own fields of expertise. Nobody can hold all this knowledge in their minds, not even a genius. In a sense, knowledge is a bit like Polynesia: lots of islands, with their own language and customs, but which no one anthropologist can grasp.
But the sheer quantity of information creates a fundamental challenge when it comes to our most complex problems for, as Isaiah Berlin noted in his great essay The Hedgehog and the Fox, wisdom is not about narrow expertise, however impressive. Rather, it is about bringing insights together, breadth rather than depth, the wood rather than the trees. This is why as knowledge grows and fractures, wisdom becomes ever more elusive.
Science, for its part, has made strides towards grappling with the information explosion. Researchers in related disciplines have started to build unified frameworks of explanation, common standards of proof and shared language. This is enabling scientists to work together in multidisciplinary teams, to integrate information, to test broad hypotheses and to combat groupthink. It is as if the islands drifting apart in our metaphorical Polynesia are being connected through an intricate set of viaducts, tunnels and bridges — leading to that unified system of knowledge that EO Wilson termed “consilience”. He wrote: “The search for consilience might seem at first to imprison creativity, but the opposite is true. A unified system of knowledge is the surest means of identifying the still unexplored domains of reality. It provides a clear map of what is known, and it frames the most productive questions for future inquiry. Historians of science often observe that asking the right question is more important than producing the right answer. The right answer to a trivial question is also trivial, but the right question is a guide to major discovery.”
This is why the only way out of our political crisis is to take consilience seriously, to recognise that the growth of information has made policymaking harder. Crucially it shows that we need a new breed of leader. Instead of showmen and salespeople (or PPE graduates) we need “synthesisers”: people capable of putting together the right information at the right time, thinking critically about it and making crucial choices wisely.
...this is a problem that starts with us, our culture and consciousness. We swelled with hubris as we surveyed our technological splendour, conflating knowledge and wisdom, information and insight. This is the category error that defines our age, the false consciousness from which we must liberate ourselves.
