(2021-01-21) Chapman What They Dont Teach You At STEM School

David Chapman: What they don’t teach you at STEM school. What they do teach you at STEM school is how to think and act within rational systems. What they mostly don’t teach you is how to evaluate, choose, combine, modify, discover, or create systems. (systems thinking)

This post sketches a hypothetical curriculum for developing these meta-systematic capabilities

The overall goal is to take you from systematic rationality to meta-rationality as quickly and painlessly as possible

you have to have a thorough understanding of how to work within systems before it’s feasible to step up and out of them, to manipulate them from above

The minimum requirement might be an undergraduate STEM degree; but research experience at the graduate level may be needed. You have to have seen how many different systems work, and—more importantly—how they fail. (systems thinking, Systemantics)

Recognizing that there is no Absolute Truth anywhere is a small downpayment on the price of entry to meta-systematicity.

This curriculum is about how to do STEM better. It is not about taking you out of a STEM worldview into some alternative. Everything here is on top of that view

There is no woo involved—including no STEM-flavored woo, such as neurobabble or quantum or Gödel woo.

In fact, a critical step is letting go of some of STEM’s own woo—quasi-religious beliefs about the ability of rationality to deliver certainty, understanding, and control. (post-rat)

Meta-systematicity requires openness, flexibility, daring, and uncommonly realistic common sense—as well as technical precision.

Some loose definitions

By system, I mean, roughly, a collection of related concepts and rules that can be printed in a book of less than 10kg and followed consciously

There are many different conceptions of what makes a system rational. Logical consistency is one; decision-theoretic criteria can form another. The details don’t matter here, because we are going to take rationality for granted.

Meta-systematic cognition is reasoning about, and acting on, systems from outside them, without using a system to do so. (Reasoning about systems using another system is systematic, and meta, but not “meta-systematic” in this sense.) Meta-rationality, then, is “good” meta-systematic cognition

One field I draw on is the empirical psychology of adult development, as investigated by Robert Kegan particularly. This framework describes systematic rationality as stage 4 in the developmental path. Stage 5 is meta-systematic.

According to this framework, there is also a stage 4.5, in which you lose the quasi-religious belief in systems, but haven’t yet developed the meta-systematic understanding that can replace blind faith. Stage 4.5 leaves you vulnerable to nihilism, including ontological despair (nothing seems true), epistemological anxiety (nothing seems knowable), and existential depression (nothing seems meaningful).

Overall, the curriculum leads from 4 to 5, while aiming to avoid the nihilism of 4.5; or at least to minimize its trauma, by leading you forward from 4.5 to 5.

the key to meta-systematicity is accepting that perfect definiteness is never available

The obstacles to developing meta-systematic skill are emotional as much as cognitive. Everyone must navigate two emotional crises.

When you have watched rational systems fail enough times, you are ready to move beyond stage 4. However, you may also start to sense the nihilism that lies ahead. You recoil in horror from the possibility that all systems may fail conclusively

beyond 4.5 is stage 5, which is more functional than stage 4 (whereas 4.5 can render you practically catatonic if you don’t know how to deal with it).

The second potential emotional crisis comes at 4.5, when you fully understand that systems can’t function in their own terms, but don’t yet have a clear understanding of why they do work.

Systems obviously do work—just not in the way claimed

The syllabus in more detail

4.1 Meta-rationality is a thing and you already do it

4.2 Developing meta-rational skills

4.3 Nebulosity and the limits of systems

4.4 Systems can never “work”

it’s not that rational systems don’t work; much of the time, they obviously do, and are indispensable. It’s that systems don’t work for the reasons ideological rationality claims they do. They do work for quite different ones

Rationality expects failures due to known unknowns

Systems don’t expect, and can’t cope with, unknown unknowns.

Rittel and Webber’s “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning” discusses “wicked problems,” which cannot be solved systematically. In fact, “wicked” problems can’t be solved at all. But they are important, and can be addressed intelligently by other means.

4.5 Cloud-treading over the nihilist abyss

You realize you are over the abyss of meaninglessness, with nothing but wisps of cloud between you and the bottomless darkness beneath. This can produce panic, rage, and depression: symptoms of the nihilism of stage 4.5.

Curriculum module 4.5 addresses the danger of stage 4.5 nihilism. Since there never was any ground, you always were walking on clouds—and that worked pretty well! Your eternalistic belief in systems was mistaken, but your activity was relatively effective nonetheless.

Nihilism is just obviously wrong, and refuted by every moment of everyday experience. However, there are dozens of supposedly rational arguments in favor of nihilism, which may suddenly seem compelling when you reach stage 4.5

Oddly, no one in any intellectual tradition seems to have written a clear and accurate explanation of why nihilism is wrong

Friedrich Nietzsche began working on a refutation of nihilism near the end of his working life. His Twilight of the Idols is a preface to that project. I consider it perhaps the high point of Western philosophy. The single-page chapter “How the “True World” finally became a fable” is an intense summary of his summary

4.6 The dance of nebulosity and pattern

4.7 Orienting to a rule: the occasion of use

So how do rational systems work, if they don’t mirror the True World? Module 4.7 answers: through non-systematic situated meaning-making.

interaction orienting to a rule as a resource on that particular occasion

Heidegger’s Being and Time is the root text for non-systematic situated meaning-making. That book is extremely difficult, so I would recommend instead Hubert Dreyfus’s Being-in-the-World.

The nuts-and-bolts understanding comes from ethnomethodology, which investigates the question “how do systems actually work”

In order to “get it,” you have to set aside everything you think you know—in order to actually look, without mistaken assumptions. Otherwise, you hallucinate systems where there are none.

The Anglophone rationalist tradition (analytic philosophy, cognitive science, artificial intelligence) assumes that systems live in your head. They don’t.

Until you set those delusions aside, when you look at people acting, you keep asking “what rule in their head made them do that?”, which prevents you from seeing what is going on.

The Continental social tradition assumes that systems are vast, abstract structures of oppression, with elite-imposed power rules

This is backward. Ethnomethodology reveals social systems as extremely concrete, detailed patterns of interaction. Large-scale social structures are determined by these details, not the other way around.

So, what is going on? Rules work through their interpretation by the participants in a concrete situation. That interpretation bridges the gap between the system’s theoretical vocabulary and the nebulosity of the visible specifics

Such interpretation is inherently, necessarily improvisational and collaborative

In ethnomethodological terms, participants orient to rules. They take rules as a resource for making sense of what everyone involved is doing, but the rules don’t govern the action in any way

For the Enlightenment tradition, Newton’s theory of gravity is the universal prototype

Newtonian mechanics is incredibly cool, but most things don’t work that way

For the Continental social tradition, the enclosure movement is the universal prototype

but most things don’t work that way

4.8 Patterns of meta-systematicity

4.8 and 4.9 may be the most important part of the curriculum. Unfortunately, it is the part that is least-well understood: by me and, I think, by everyone

I have also found relevant insights in diverse not-obviously-relevant literatures

Donald Schon’s The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think In Action examines the interplay of three ways of knowing and acting: technical rationality, non-systematic tacit expertise, and meta-systematic reflection on the first two.

He observes that problem-finding and problem-formulation are as important as problem-solving, and that all these activities are improvisations in collaborative interaction with concrete, hard-to-characterize circumstances

Update: Reader Brian Marick recommends Schön’s follow-on book Educating the Reflective Practitioner over the original; he says it’s clearer and more concise

Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge is one of the two root texts for postmodernism.

4.9 Fluid competence: Creating functional meta-systems

Schön, Kegan, and John Seely-Brown all pioneered theories of “learning organizations” that continually rethink not just their methods but also their goals

The rare discussions by major scientists about how to think—I discussed Feynman’s and Rota’s in “Real Good”—often talk meta-systematically. (2020-12-28 ChapmanHowToThinkRealGood)

5.0 The other dimensions

developing a meta-systematic way of being affects every dimension of life.

Kegan says that an epistemological shift—a new way of making meaning—underlies all the rest