Skills, Meaning, and the Illusion of Understanding
JANUARY 8, 2020
As we kick off 2020, many of us are drawing up lists of resolutions: good habits to build, bad habits to break, new skills to learn. We may even have goals around technology — less compulsive or more efficient use, for example. But there is something paradoxical about this reflective New Year mood. Most of us spend our days actively avoiding friction and difficulty; yet, when we consider how we’d like to spend our lives, we’re desperate to introduce difficulty back in. We aspire to build skills not just for their instrumental utility, but for the meaning they give our lives. As Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly write, "Skills reveal meaningful differences to us and cultivate in us a sense of responsibility to bring these out at their best." Where we are skilled, the world presents itself to us as meaningful. But this recognition comes with a warning: “To the extent that technology strips away the need for skill, it strips away the possibility of meaning as well.”
In his bestselling book Shop Class as Soulcraft, the writer Matthew Crawford argues that technology has brought about a deskilling of everyday life, the implications of which we're only beginning to understand. Skills like drawing, pottery, or woodworking force us to encounter the unforgiving physical world directly. The world of digital abstraction that we face on our screens, by contrast, is deliberately frictionless. All unseemliness hides behind the interface. This allows us to be far more efficient, of course, but it also alienates us from the effects of our actions in the world. As Cal Newport writes, citing Crawford, "In a culture where screens replace craft...people lose the outlet for self-worth established through unambiguous demonstrations of skill." Our incessant search for praise and validation on social media, Newport suggests, may stem from this sense of lack.
Of course, not all of us can become craftspeople. But we can all learn from the style of engagement with the world that they model. The potter does not create and manipulate an abstract mental representation of a bowl; she places her hands on the clay. Errors of judgment appear immediately in the misshapen object. Her knowledge of the domain, born of direct interaction, exceeds any that could come through passive consumption. This primacy of interaction in understanding extends beyond physical skills. Unless we have occasion to build or repair them, most of us do not understand everyday objects (like bicycles) nearly as well as we think we do. The same is true of our most basic causal theories about the world: they fall apart under the slightest scrutiny. This "illusion of explanatory depth" (IOED), so dubbed by Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil in a 2002 paper, results from how rarely our explanatory knowledge is actually tested.
Adam Waytz notes that this IOED has grown more pervasive in recent years "given that we have infinite access to information, but consume information in a largely superficial fashion." The newsfeeds and timelines through which we build up our picture of the world are endlessly long but millimeters deep. Anything we cannot process fluently can be skipped over and ignored. But as Adam Alter argues, cognitive disfluency -- subjective difficulty in processing information -- "prompts people to process information more carefully, deeply, and abstractly." Only when spurred by our own sense of difficulty do we interact with material deeply enough to understand it. The digital productivity expert Tiago Forte puts it nicely:
"...the process of developing expertise is not passive accumulation of bits of knowledge. It is running up against the hard constraints of reality. It is contending with the basic relationship of our selves to the world: that it resists our will. As we become skilled, the very elements of that world that were initially sources of frustration, become elements of a self that has expanded."
Skills provide meaning because they deepen our connection to the world and expand the scope of our agency within it. Technology can free us for these pursuits by eliminating drudgery, but it can also blind us to meaningful distinctions and trap us in webs of shallow representation. When we use social media to escape the "social pain" of human interaction, we find ourselves lonely. When we skim our newsfeeds to avoid the disfluency of understanding politics, we find ourselves polarized. Using technology wisely depends on the understanding that reducing friction isn't the same thing as solving problems. Sometimes, a little difficulty is exactly what we need.
Correction: in our last newsletter we linked to Jenn Logg's article on using algorithms to understand bias in organizations. We suggested that she argues "algorithms cans be biased," while in fact she argues that they uncover human bias.