In this story, I argue, Luria’s peasants are indexical geniuses, who refuse to engage in unproven syllogistic games. They are not interested in a global, universal game. Their children, however, are easily introduced to this game by the process of schooling and literacy.
I’ve noticed a weaker version of this effect when interacting with people especially not like me, for example in my zen practice. By “not like me” I mean not the sort of person who readily plays the “global, universal game”, looking to find abstract models to explain every situation and apply them in new ones. All these people still went to school, all these people can play this game to some extent, but not to the extent I’m willing to (they didn’t spend 10 years on voluntary higher education in mathematics and then work jobs where they are paid to create abstractions).
The differences are impressive. Here’s just a very small sample of what I have in mind.
In the chant books for our zen center we have little marks showing where to do things like ring bells. Depending on what chants are being done that day and in what order, some of the bells change. For example, we always start with the same sequence of bells but then the transition from one chant to another can vary depending on what came before.
A few months back someone, not me, updated the chant book and thought to abstract out some of the details of this, marking in a separate section how those things work and putting in notes referencing that section. I saw it and thought “ah, finally, someone made this clearer by abstracting away the complicated details”. Other people were confused, and the less like me they were the more confused they were. In the end we had to change it back.
Creating abstractions, while natural to me and some others, was extremely confusing to those on the other end of this spectrum who didn’t know what to do when the details were not directly there for them to interact with. I expect this cognitive difference between people goes a long way to explaining some kinds of conflicts we see.
I’ve noticed a weaker version of this effect when interacting with people especially not like me, for example in my zen practice. By “not like me” I mean not the sort of person who readily plays the “global, universal game”, looking to find abstract models to explain every situation and apply them in new ones. All these people still went to school, all these people can play this game to some extent, but not to the extent I’m willing to (they didn’t spend 10 years on voluntary higher education in mathematics and then work jobs where they are paid to create abstractions).
The differences are impressive. Here’s just a very small sample of what I have in mind.
In the chant books for our zen center we have little marks showing where to do things like ring bells. Depending on what chants are being done that day and in what order, some of the bells change. For example, we always start with the same sequence of bells but then the transition from one chant to another can vary depending on what came before.
A few months back someone, not me, updated the chant book and thought to abstract out some of the details of this, marking in a separate section how those things work and putting in notes referencing that section. I saw it and thought “ah, finally, someone made this clearer by abstracting away the complicated details”. Other people were confused, and the less like me they were the more confused they were. In the end we had to change it back.
Creating abstractions, while natural to me and some others, was extremely confusing to those on the other end of this spectrum who didn’t know what to do when the details were not directly there for them to interact with. I expect this cognitive difference between people goes a long way to explaining some kinds of conflicts we see.