In Beijing, a debate took place between billionaires Jack Ma and Elon Musk. There was no moderator, it was just two unrestrained egos dueling. Some moments were awkward, almost comedic, but inadvertently so.
The debate was about the future of jobs and life: what skills are going to be needed, and what we should be worrying about. Neuralink is a nanotechnology company founded by Elon and others, the goal is to create a human-AI interface that would exponentially increase our bandwidth (according to Elon, the current pace of our output bandwidth is shameful, and if we don’t try to merge with AI, we will soon find ourselves in a similar situation to chimps observing us today).
Elon was also interested in Mars, and the future of space travel. Jack Ma was more focused on reality in the here and now. He didn’t think AI posed a threat, and anyone who was worried was just over-educated and not very practical (practical folks are too smart for AI, but not as clever?). He found Elon’s Mars idea amusing, and something that should be pursued, yet the more important problems of the next 100 years are going to involve the 7.4 billion people living here on earth, and not the million people that may find themselves embarking on planetary adventures.
Elon commended China on being the world leader in renewable energy. Jack Ma doesn’t worry about the future, Elon only cares about the future and thinks that our window of opportunity is quickly running out.
What I noticed in the exchange, is the same thing I always notice, when people try to talk about anything, they can only see the world from their own perspective.
Each person invests themselves into a line of knowledge, and then they are guided by that knowledge, and try to generalize what they know to everything about the world.
Psychoanalysis
Travel through time, and witness the rise of dynamic psychiatry, and what do you see? A lot of nonsense, opposition, controversy, and confusion.
Each person was trying to advance their own strain of thought, but each person’s thought was informed by their idiosyncratic experiences. Freud’s Oedipal Complex related to his life, he had a young mother. Jung’s mother was older and had a different kind of relationship with him, so he rejected the Oedipus Complex. Both these thinkers inherited their ideas from a creative illness they experienced. Janet and Adler had different opinions, that were more objective, and based on observations – they belonged more to the Enlightenment school rather than the Romantic School that Jung and Freud were more influenced by.
You Think What You Do
Nassim Taleb does this with statistics. To Taleb the statistician, the salvation of the human being can only be reached through mathematical rigor and a deep understanding of ergodicity. To Sam Harris or Dawkins, anything outside the realm of science should never be taken seriously. To Harari the historian, all ideologies and beliefs and financial systems are merely stories we tell each other – which is exactly what history is (a story).
So what?
The problem isn’t that each of these people have specialized knowledge and cannot see the world beyond it, but that they generalize their knowledge to everything, thus devaluing other disciplines and traditions because these conclusions may contradict their own.
This is certainly a form of cognitive dissonance, but it is more pernicious than that.
Since each person is held hostage by their expertise, they cannot honestly engage in dialogue with others of different backgrounds with a truly open mind. The mathematician cannot listen to the psychologist, and the historian cannot listen to the philosopher.
What we have is not only conflicting paradigms, but conflicting interpretations resulting from subjective interpretations of the paradigms themselves. Mathematicians disagree with each other, and so do psychologists. But mathematicians especially disagree with psychologists (completely different paradigm).
This problem is exacerbated by the fact that each person is drawn towards their domain of expertise quite arbitrarily. For whatever reason, environmental or biological, people are drawn to some kinds of knowledge over others, and since to them it is so meaningful, they assume that it must be just as profound for everyone else.
What happens when people from different backgrounds debate each other? If they are engaging speakers, then an interesting dialogue might be the result, but nothing that would leave the viewer any less confused.
To avoid cognitive dissonance themselves, each viewer will pick a side, and become emotionally invested in it. They feel they must. Everyone, including the debaters themselves, may acknowledge the problem of cognitive dissonance, but few are willing to contend with its implications.
There is an Aesop fable that tells the story of sour grapes. The fox, after realizing he cannot reach the grapes, determines that they must be sour. This is a powerful psychological mechanism that helps people deal with what cannot be, but what happens when everyone is its victim?