Learning can be deciding
Consider the following questions:
A: “Will it rain in Paris at midnight tonight?”
B: “Will I blink in the next 5 seconds?”
If I wish to find the answer to question A, I might need to look at the conditions of the atmosphere over Paris and then use knowledge of how climate evolves. I might need readings of temperature, wind speed, humidity, and pressure, and I might also need complex mathematical models of the weather.
If I wish to find the right answer to question B, I can just decide to blink now.
There is an activity that I would roughly describe as “figuring out how the world is like.” This activity is to be understood as a collective endeavour, not a personal one. Simple acts of information gathering, like opening a box to see what is inside, are examples of this activity. More impressive examples are Science and History, systematic disciplines that evolve across generations and produce large bodies of knowledge. The end goal of this activity might be a theory of everything.
I often hear people (particularly academics) speak as if figuring out how the world is like must always look like the process described above for answering Question A: science-y, focused on gathering data, distilling models or regularities, and applying them to particular cases.
However, Question B illustrates that in some cases, figuring how the world is like simply consists in deciding, or at least it includes a decision. This occurs when we pose questions about ourselves or about changes in the environment that occur as a consequence of our actions. For example: what will the temperature of this room be in the next 10 minutes? That depends on whether I will open the windows, turn on the AC, or set the furniture on fire.
Sometimes it’s not quite as straightforward as that. People often find that they didn’t decide what they thought they would decide. They also often ignore this, but if they don’t then it can result in learning not just about the external world, but about themselves.
With how I use the language, I’d call your examples A and B both tasks of “predicting”. I view predicting as distinct from learning in that predicting deals with the future, whereas learning deals with synthesizing data about the past.
When I hunt for examples of what I call “learning” that hinge on deciding, the results I find are of the subset of learning that I call experimentation. For instance, to learn whether peaches will grow in my yard, I planted a peach tree and then will observe it for several years.
This sounds like the individual version of EY’s explanation of how Schwarzenegger became governor of California.
It also sounds a lot like Scott Alexander’s explanations of predictive processing.
I’m new so don’t expect great logical construction or ground breaking insight! But I wanted to jot a few thoughts your piece provoked in me.
It’s reminiscent of Jordan Peterson rhetoric regarding personal responsibility.
However when applied to environmental matters we’ve seen corporate entities manipulate or even invent our belief of personal responsibility in tackling climate change and pollution such as big plastics blaming their waste on the public adding near meaningless recycling icons to products putting the burden of recycling on the consumer even if the consumer doesn’t have facilities capable of handling products of a certain icon/number in the vicinity while the consumer makes a futile attempt to sort items that will never be recycled in their locality. Or Big oil devising the carbon footprint campaign in order to put the onus on us to reduce our consumption while they surpassed information for decades of how deadly and disastrous their product was and is. The point being I can take personal responsibility and decide to recycling but ultimately its out of my hands once the bin man comes. I can’t think of an analogue for my Big Oil point but I’m sure there must be one!
Perhaps this is just a Question A scenario but we’ve been told that it’s a question B scenario for decades now.
In any case I enjoyed your article and I hope others can make a better point of my thoughts than I did :P