What Stops Learning?

think about removing barriers

In my world view, the concept of learning plays a central role. Later in this post, I will restate the case that humans’ superpower is the ability to learn, both individually and collectively. For now, I assume you agree.

How can we become better at learning, individually and collectively?

When faced with a problem that calls for a creative solution, one approach is to turn the question “inside out.” Formulate the question as how to make the problem worse, and answer that question. Then see if by reversing his answer you can solve the problem.

So, how do we stop learning, individually and collectively?

Individual barriers

Innate Limitations

Do you have a gorgeous singing voice? Do you have an aptitude for advanced physics? Neither do I.

Until we can safely manipulate human genes, all of us will be limited by our innate abilities.

Bad Health

It is difficult to learn if you are hungry or sick or otherwise in a struggle to survive.

People are more likely to be able to learn if they are healthy.

Bad People to Copy

Suppose that the people around you are bad role models. With them as your information source, you do not obtain helpful knowledge.

I suspect that people need access to good teachers and good role models in general. But remember the Null Hypothesis, which is that plausible interventions to improve outcomes generally fail to pan out.

Lack of persistence

YouTube has many outstanding guitar lessons. With enough practice, you could probably learn to play guitar pretty well. But it is likely that most people who try to learn to play guitar give up before they develop much skill.

Learning requires motivation.

Lack of new experiences

If you just do the same things, in the same way, every day, then you will stop learning. Note that there is a tension here with the need to practice. If you do not play guitar enough, you will not get better at it. If you just play the same sequence every day, you will not get better at it. And if you spend all of your time playing guitar, you will miss out on other things that you might learn.

Lack of time

Human culture is well developed and varied. No one has time to learn more than a small sliver of it.

People have to make a cost-benefit calculation in determining what to try to learn.

Closed Mind

If you think you already know enough, you will not learn.

Solutions

I think about my grandchildren. It is too late to affect the abilities that they were born with. Their parents will try to keep them healthy. Parents can try to ensure that children have friends and teachers who are good role models. And we can try to guide children to good role models outside the immediate neighborhood by helping them to use the Internet and other sources of information. We can try to help keep them motivated to learn by being optimistic and realistic about their potential. And we can try to be good role models for other traits, like having an open mind. But again, we are up against the Null Hypothesis: interventions that are proven to work are hard to find.

Barriers to Collective Learning

Repression

A repressive society is going to inhibit learning. Authorities may believe that they are only keeping out misinformation, but sooner or later the repression is going to weaken collective knowledge.

Dogmatism

A group of people can be determined not to learn. Taking a dogmatic approach to a topic will suppress learning on that topic.

Disorder

A society that is rife with crime and violence is unlikely to enjoy much cultural learning. We need social cohesion. There may be a tension between maintaining order and having the freedom to innovate. There may even be a tension between maintaining order and avoiding dogmatism. Do people need to share sacred beliefs in order to trust one another and enjoy the benefits of order?

Bad ideas able to win

You don’t want a judicial system that reaches a lot of unjust verdicts. You don’t want an economic system that sustains organizations that generate high costs and low benefits. You don’t want a research community that uses shoddy methods.

Note that I think that the biggest, most durable organizations that generate high costs and low benefits are non-profits and governments. For a profit-seeking firm, high costs and low benefits show up as losses, and the firm goes out of business. But a wasteful non-profit only has to keep funders happy. And a government that does more harm than good can survive by fooling enough people or by using force.

Why Learning Matters (a lot)

No other species is able to create, transmit, and accumulate knowledge as much as humans do. Joseph Henrich, Kevin Laland, and other anthropologists argue persuasively that this is what makes us qualitatively different from other animals.

Let me quote from the introduction to my self-published book of essays from twenty years ago, Learning Economics. Note especially the last two paragraphs of this excerpt.

Each year, thousands of people study economics, but not many learn it. Most of them leave their courses ignorant of basic facts, such as the differences in the standard of living over time or across countries, as well as basic economic principles, such as the way that a global market renders meaningless the notion of “energy independence.”

…What is frustrating about the deficit in economic education is that it afflicts journalists, policy analysts, and other professionals whose work requires basic competence in economic analysis. Their failure to learn economics is equivalent to the failure of a physician to learn basic human anatomy.

…Looking over the list of best-selling books or the roster of columnists at top-drawer newspapers, success appears to correlate with mean-spirited attacks and heavy-handed rhetoric…

This book attempts to express what I call passionate reasonableness. By reasonable, I do not mean centrist, indecisive, or compromising to settle differences…I mean trying to persuade rather than mock those who take a different point of view…

In addition to an absence of reasonableness, today’s economic journalism lacks perspective on technological dynamism. When I gaze into the future, I see rapid economic and technological change. While the economy as a whole will grow rapidly, the majority of today’s companies may disappear in the next twenty years! Entire industries will be born, thrive, and die within a decade. Children born in the early part of this century will grow up with totally different concepts of privacy, mental and physical well-being, and the relationship between humans and technology than what we are used to.

…William Gibson, the science fiction author who coined the term “cyberspace,” has been quoted as saying “The future is here. It just hasn’t been distributed yet.” Today, it feels to me as if the future has been distributed to only a select cadre of science fiction writers, technology executives, and a handful of economists.

The title Learning Economics has a double meaning. It suggests a book that is intended to have educational value. However, it also refers to the economy itself as a system for learning…Economic growth is due primarily to the accumulation and successful application of knowledge.

This concept of economic growth as a learning process, which might receive offhand mention in mainstream textbooks, is central to the thinking here…

Since I wrote that, some of my ideas have changed (because I have learned in the meantime, I hope), and others have matured. On the economy as a learning system, I now boil that down to experimentation, evaluation, and evolution. That is, a society must run a lot of experiments—think of start-up businesses or new initiatives from incumbent firms. Those experiments must be evaluated—most new business initiatives do not work. Finally, evolution has to take place—obsolete enterprises and unsuccessful new initiatives must be shut down.

Those of you familiar with Tyler Cowen know that he is obsessed with economic progress. In a similar way, I am obsessed with individual and social learning.