Fractally Embracing and Rejecting Ideas

Beyond black and white thinking, beyond nuanced shades of gray, is the gray that when inspected reveals itself to be fractally black and white.

This fall is the first time my daughter will learn in an institutional context. Previously, we did no curriculum, even in the home context. She is curious to go on the anthropological journey of discovering “what is this ‘school culture’ that so many of her peers are immersed in?” and is open to continuing the investigation or stopping it after a year.

This summer we are preparing to enter the slipstream of institutional learning. This means discovering and prepping the expected common-body-of-knowledge in the school where she will start in Fall, in eighth grade, recapitulating seven grades during eight weeks over the summer.

This first week was about gaining momentum. We very rapidly determined what approaches didn’t work well in practice and cycled through alternatives across many subjects. Next week will be about finding rhythm, working with a large mass of material that exceeds the capacity for a fixed daily sequence.

Concentrating in all this material, I can see how the common-body-of-knowledge has evolved in the last 40 years. Not only have some facts changed (birds have become a type of dinosaur), but pedagogical approaches have changed (the question of the role of screens and video material in education differs significantly when they are potentially available 100% of the time, as opposed to be a rare and scarce resource, 10-minute 16mm film reels shipped around between schools via postal mail).

Which brings me to reflect on that much of the wisdom of the past we have retained has great value directionally but is batshit insane in the details.

Aristotle: moral behavior is a golden mean between extremes, and eels don’t reproduce.

The Torah: Love thy neighbor as thyself and occasionally stone people to death

The U.S. Constitution: Federate authority and slaves are not fully people.

On the other hand, much of contemporary discourse is quite harmful directionally, but is completely correct in the details. Turning on any news station with an ideological bent will show this or watching any YouTube meme snowcloned from “person X DESTROYS person with differing view!!!”.

These two polarities of mixed-value directionality-and-details show the value in being simultaneously skeptical and accepting of points-of-view, of fractally embracing and rejecting.

Every embrace, when drilled down, can contain some rejection. Every rejection, when drilled down, can contain some embrace. All of this dynamically, like measuring the temperature of moving water, because the context in which useful and not useful is evaluated is always shifting.

Each day my daughter and I have been considering how to adjust the pedagogical approach from what is presented as the optimum in a particular context. If a curriculum has 48 chapters each with 10 lessons, which ones to include, which ones to drop? If a website has videos, written material and quizzes, is all of it to be engaged with? Is the written material to be deeply understood, skimmed, skipped, or vari-speeded?

One particularly valuable experience has been the grammar book. I have come to realize that it often asks questions that are technically wrong when construed narrowly. To make up an example: “What are the pronouns in the sentence ‘I did it myself’?”. In the overall context of reflexive pronouns, the answer is solely ‘myself’, which, however, is incorrect when the question is construed outside of that context.

This is a blessing. It is an opportunity for my daughter to work with something that is clearly mostly but not entirely correct. In school, she will encounter a lot of information that is mostly true, and some that is mostly false, but in either case, fractally deploying an inseparable mix of trust and skepticism will be necessary.

This fractal mix of trust and skepticism is a fundamental view we can bring to anything. There is no utter crap. Nor is there pure gold. We can ask, “is there an orientation toward this material that is likely to reward my time?”. Often, I find that 30% ratio of gold-to-crap does indeed reward my time, and that the search for pure gold can obscure discovering rich hidden veins of gold mixed in with crap.

I would hypothesize that as we get older, we generally exhaust the easy-to-find veins of wisdom-as-pure-gold that were available to us, and much further wisdom can only be found via shoveling a mixture of gold and crap into a fractal refinement process. Applying the methods of trust and skepticism can increase the ratio of gold-to-crap. But we must stay away from the temptation to refine all the crap away. The fractal nature of the mixture means that this would be a never-ending process, and the whole point of wisdom is to let it inform our activities in the world.

Every day we can take our refined-to-only-20%-crap wisdom and apply it in life. Living from somewhat crappy, sub-optimal wisdom is actually optimal, when the quest for purity is relinquished, yet fractal refinement is engaged.