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COLLABORATIVE THINKING

written December 28, 2020 // 6 min read


TABLE OF CONTENTS

 1. Collaborative Thinking
 2. Knowledge illusion
 3. Rebalancing our blob of knowledge
 4. Learning communities
 5. Wiggle room

Recently, I’ve been reading 21 Lessons for the 21st Century written by none
other than Yuval Noah Harari, and have been enjoying the book. Its approach to
weaving together insights from a vast number of disciplines to create something
novel is extremely refreshing. I just read a section on learning, the knowledge
illusion, and collaborative thinking and wanted to share some of my thoughts
that have been bouncing around and marinating for a few days as well as some
learnings that I’ve applied to my own life.


COLLABORATIVE THINKING

> Humans rarely think for themselves. Rather, we think in groups. Just as it
> takes a tribe to raise a child, it also takes a tribe to invent a tool, solve
> a conflict, or cure a disease. No individual knows everything it takes to
> build a cathedral, an atom bomb, or an aircraft.

It is no secret that the key to the rise of Homo Sapiens and the anthropocene
wasn’t due to the rationality of any individual human, but rather our collective
unparalleled ability to think and share knowledge in large groups. This concept
has arisen in the form of specialization of labour.

As a society, we consistently rely on the knowledge of others to live our own
comfortable lives. I may not know how to grow my very own russet potatoes, but a
farmer in Alberta might. Similarly, a plumber in Massachusetts may not know how
to build their own website, but I might. Through being able to supplement each
other’s knowledge of the world, our collective knowledge is much greater.

Left: Collective knowledge of the group. Right: My subset of knowledge

I like to think about collective knowledge as a big blob. Each individual
contributes a unique subset of knowledge. We get the entirety of human knowledge
by taking the union of the knowledge of all the individuals in the group. Of
course, as these groups of individuals grow ever larger due to globalization,
each individual may choose to specialize in a narrower subset of knowledge as
generations go on to reduce redundancy. Why know how to build your own car when
you can buy it yourself? The adoption of globally accepted currencies has made
this easier than ever.


KNOWLEDGE ILLUSION

Humans also have this ‘knowledge illusion’ where we think we know a lot, even
though individually we know very little. We treat the knowledge of the human
collective as if it were our own, even subconsciously.

A crude illustration of a jacket zipper

An example Harari used was the sweater zipper. If I were to ask you if you knew
how a zipper works, the vast majority of you would exclaim “yes, of course!”
Yet, if asked to describe in detail every single step, most would fail to do so.
Even with something that seems so basic and intuitive seems to elude an explicit
explanation. We have begun to stand on the shoulders of giants yet refuse to
acknowledge their presence.

Although we may have increased the overall area of our collective knowledge, the
surface area of each individual has also shrunken, turning from balanced and
broad to narrow and unwieldy.


REBALANCING OUR BLOB OF KNOWLEDGE

Another interesting property about the knowledge blobs of individuals is that
they are magnetic. I mean this in the sense that individuals that have one blob
of knowledge tend to attract and be attracted to individuals with similar
orientations and shapes in their blobs of knowledge, much like how magnetic
dipoles align in a magnet. As humans, we tend to want to minimize our cognitive
dissonance and surrounding ourselves with like-minded individuals is the easiest
way to do that.

Individuals in these clusters experience a sort of echo chamber effect whereby
the magnitude of their knowledge is amplified through the mutual alignment of
their knowledge. However, this also poses a unique challenge where movement only
happens in one direction and there is little to no room to deviate from that
direction and try something new; something incredibly dangerous for innovation.
This, in a sense, is turning collaborative thinking into groupthink.

> People afraid of losing their truth tend to be more violent than people who
> are used to looking at the world from several different viewpoints.

Blue: Previous ‘specialized’ knowledge. Purple: broad foundational knowledge

What we can do to counteract this extreme alignment is to build a broader
foundation of knowledge. When you come across an individual with differing
views, hopefully you will at least have the base fundamental knowledge to
understand their perspective.


LEARNING COMMUNITIES

This, at least in part, is why I’ve recently become more certain of wanting to
go to academia in the future. I used to have tunnel-vision in thinking that all
I wanted to do in the future was to just work in industry CS. Recently, I’ve
started to realize that CS not a single discipline, but rather it’s a tool that
can help solve uniquely human problems, and these human problems are inherently
multidisciplinary.

I’ve started to read and learn more about the world around me outside of my
little bubble of CS-related topics and it’s been eye-opening to see issues I
read about in my philosophy class come up in a linguistics lecture which in turn
comes up in a book I’m reading. I’ve found that the best way for me to cement my
learning and understanding is through discussion with people, rather than just
sitting and ruminating on my own – a very different pace than the typical
code-Stackoverflow-copy-repeat self-learning cycle that most programmers
(including myself) are familiar with.

The important part of learning communities like colleges is not necessarily the
alignment in what you’re studying, but rather in the shared mindset of
discussion, learning, and understanding. To broaden my foundation of knowledge
is to read more about the opinions and findings of others and to critically
discuss these among peers who may have different views. If we want our
specialized knowledge to be applicable in a wide range of situations, we need a
broad foundational base that can support that.


WIGGLE ROOM

> If you want to go deeply into any subject, you need a lot of time, and in
> particular, you need the privilege of wasting time. You need to experiment
> with unproductive paths, explore dead ends, make space for doubts and boredom,
> and allow little seeds of insight to slowly grow and blossom

For me, learning is very close to a zero-sum game. I can only expand the area of
my knowledge blob so fast. If I want to broaden my foundational knowledge base,
I need to reign in the amount of time spent growing purely technical strengths
and to stop saying ‘yes’ to any and every opportunity that comes up.

Slowly but surely, I’m learning to value my own time and to set it aside to just
absorb more about the world and to extend the reaches of my knowledge just a
little bit further. To dilly-dally among the Wikipedia rabbit holes, cultivate
my digital garden , and faff among the ridiculously long list of side projects I
planned to start. I’m experimenting with what I previously thought were deadends
and little seeds of insight are starting to grow. Maybe I’ll find something
interesting to share among the construction of this broader foundation.

Acknowledgements

A big thank yu to Anson for always being a sounding board for fresh dough
(half-baked ideas would be too generous of a description for these). Thanks to
Anne and Joice for also giving feedback on rough drafts :))

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

← 2020: An Imperfect Palindrome Machines and Intelligence →

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