Truth in 18 Minutes
The Lies Our Social Scientists Tell Us
Forty years ago this month TED launched. It was a technology conference exploring Technology, Entertainment, and Design. In 2006, the first TED Talks were posted online. They brought us inspiration and some terrible ideas like the growth mindset, grit, emotional intelligence and celebrated social science grifters backed by unreproducable studies. But Sir Ken Robinson’s 2006 talk about schools killing creativity is still fire!
Why should we care if social scientists or psychologists are spinning tales? If only bad ideas didn’t lead to bad outcomes and even worse policy. It sure is enticing to have answers that align with our own biases and beliefs. In a recent talk the social psychologist Jonathon Haidt draws conclusions about social media and smartphones and the rise of depression especially in teenage girls. Anyone who teaches College students can see the pernicious qualities of the phone, but this is theory and conjecture not gospel.
So, with a healthy dose of skepticism I dug back into Nicholas Carr’s thinking in The Shallows. He mentions introspection and contemplation as under siege in our over saturated media age because we are processing outward—-we are inside out. When your process becomes performance and a public act, we become projections. We aren’t concerned with our image, we are images. In the 1956 Henri-Georges Clouzot film, Le mystère Picasso, the filmmaker films Picasso in the act of making 20 drawings and paintings on paper from the backside of the paper as the image appears. Cigarette smoke, some comments, and the sound of the brush on paper and the image evolutions is all we see of Picasso in the film. At one point, Picasso loses the thread of a piece, he exclaims, “mal!” Then he asks the filmmaker if they can stop, even Picasso had bad painting days. Process is not performance it is hard work, riddled with mistakes and failed attempts.
The most critical aspect of theories and ideas is the practice they lead to. Remote work, especially in creative fields has grown exponentially and this ofcourse leads art school administrators to push for more online offerings to emulate the industry that students will be entering. There is just one slight problem. Remote work and remote learning are not the same thing. Remote learning (beyond learning how to make slime—YouTube’s top tutorial) is not effective, especially in a field like Illustration (the pandemic gave me the receipts). The professional creatives loving being home with their cats and avoiding commuting to clogged urban centres were LIKELY EDUCATED IN PHYSICAL CLASSROOMS WITH PEERS, there is a critical muscle memory that is learned. We continually make these category errors because we are biased towards closed loop narratives and ideas that are marinated in a truth we hold dear. More than ever today we need to be critical of our priors, question our credulity and seek out viewpoints that maybe can’t be easily summarized in a 18 minute video or a 3 minute Substack for that matter.