I woke up this morning realizing that I prefer to communicate with my parents only by text messages. This way I can hold them accountable for what they say.
Why should I need to hold them accountable? Because my parents don’t mean the same thing when the use the same words at different times. Their intended meaning is whatever’s convenient for the situation. I want to pull my hair out every time I speak with them!
We Indians tend to eulogize the aural tradition. The Argumentative Indian even makes it sound enjoyable. But when each person means the same words differently (and self-servingly), communication can be stressful. In the best of times, I’m “just” second guessing what they said. In the worst of times, my furious mind is losing its grip on reality. This can make for an intriguing Shakespearean play (no risk of boredom!), but leaves little ground for trust or relationships. In any case, relationships are not something you control. They’re handed to you like food and water.
The starkest difference between my life in India and the U.S. is that I can reasonably predict what the other person will hear, how they might react, and what they’ll do. In India, I am mainly rolling the dice and surviving on my instincts.
Power of Printed Words
Where and when did Western civilization diverge from oral traditions anyway? Not too long ago, the written word was merely an aid to memory. Why do you write when you can remember, they asked. Instead of memorizing them, monks read manuscripts aloud. Universities in the 12th century taught oratory and debate, and later in the 14th century expected students to scribe lectures as teachers read from books or introduced new concepts.
The printed book in the 15th century seems to be the first break in tradition. It seems to have homogenized language and instruction. Words now had standard spellings and meanings. The book became a teaching machine. The Guttenberg Galaxy ascribes all kinds of institutional revolution to the printed book. I do buy that it kicked off the world’s first consumer age, but I’m less certain that it levelled individuals the same way war levelled classes and feudal distinctions. Consumers do tend to copy each other and look more alike than different over time. With printed books, it’s plausible that more folks acquired a shared threshold of scientific knowledge and a better understanding of the world. Some developed the ability to scrutinize their understanding more than others. A subset learned to apply this knowledge to the problems they observed. And a further subset organized human effort to solve these problems at scale. Each of these leaps required human ingenuity that was not homogenously endowed, nor universally acquired from books. I have no instinctual basis to predict if generative AI will be a great equalizer or a great amplifier, but looking at the way books have shaped us, it could be both.
Power of Self-service
Among the cognitive powers that books have dilated, the most powerful to me is the ability to self-teach and self-reflect, to arrest a snapshot of analysis from a book and scrutinize its merits on your own terms. Some are adept at live scrutiny during a conversation or argument, but I’m much slower than that. I tend to scrutinize my understanding by writing it down and then speaking about it when asked. Often I agree with the author, but sometimes when I connect the printed word with something else I’ve read, I discover a satisfying “nuance” that the author has left untouched.
Almost everything I’ve learned has been through self-service. A vanishingly small fraction of what I’ve learned is from a tutor. I see no reason to believe that a chat interface will replace self-study as the primary mechanism for acquiring applied knowledge.
Exams Shape Study
The second most powerful teaching aid for me has been subjecting my understanding to external inquiry. Even preparing for this makes me better at appreciating the complexity of a topic. Claude can be good for this, but its inquiry can be narrow and superficial, and highly sensitive to the context that I must provide to get it going.
Even more valuable than the test is a critique of my answers. To deliver this well, the examiner must know the subject matter, they must know the variations in human understanding across multiple dimensions, they must be able to identify the root cause of these variations, and they must be able to articulate these root causes productively (at my current level of understanding). This is where I tend to need the most help from others.
Maybe Claude will get very good at this over time, but I imagine that human critique will become even more valuable than it is today, especially when the relevant human has context that’s not easily replicable. Likely they have also built instincts on the most rewarding areas for further exploration. There will be few humans with this kind of context and instincts.
Does this mean that testing and guidance will become even more scarce and centralized? Those who have good tests and guides today will have better tests and guides in the future? Grrrrrr.