The forgotten art of strategic forgetting
It happens often that we forget the neccesity of forgetting mechanism. Forgetting is usually interpreted as “failing to remember” rather than a strategic and necessary mechanism.
To reflect on where forgetting mechanism might be in place let’s look at marginal value theorem (MVT). A common example of MVT is illustrated by apple picking. Imagine yourself in a patchy land of apple trees. Patchy means that there is a large enough distance between each tree and so travelling between patches would require some considerable time. Once you’re arrived at the first tree you can pick many apples, yet as time passes by this number goes down sharply and you have to decide when you should move to the next tree. In other words, when should you forget the first tree to move to another one becomes critically important.
Strategies in which too few apples are picked from each tree or where each tree is exhausted are suboptimal because they result, respectively, in time lost travelling among trees or picking the hard to find last few apples from a tree. The optimal time spent picking apples in each tree is thus a compromise between these two strategies, which can be quantitatively found using the MVT.
The optimal strategy in this game can be interpreted as what I’d call “strategic forgetting”.
Another example of strategic forgetting is in sleep theory. In fact some scientists argued that one of the main reasons of sleeping is to forget.
In order to learn, we have to grow connections, or synapses, between the neurons in our brains. These connections enable neurons to send signals to one another quickly and efficiently. We store new memories in these networks. In 2003 biologists proposed that synapses grew so exuberantly during the day that our brain circuits got “noisy.” When we sleep, the scientists argued, our brains pare back the connections to lift the signal over the noise.
This is where our brain uses strategic forgetting. One can think of many other examples where we use this strategy on daily basis without even realising it. Take friendships and networking. We may network with many people, with some we make a connection, yet over time these connections may be ripped, which on the other side pushes us to make new connections.
It seems as strategic forgetting is something necessary if we want to explore and find about ourselves. The question which is more intriguing however is: what’s the optimal way to use forgetting and whether there are conditions to be satisfied prior to it?
Consider Apple’s iPhone in this regard. Since 2007 that the first iPhone was introduced Apple saw growth in revenue, yet in recent years this growth slowed down, due to high competition with cheape — yet of same quality — phones in the market, putting Apple in a situation to think hard to figure out whether it is time to forget iPhone and explore new ventures or shall they produce more of the same phones with slight tweaks.
Such situations are not easy to tackle. For one thing everytime Apple introduces a new line of phones, it forgets the previous line (by not producing them anymore), thus conducting a form of strategic forgetting. Yet, one may argue that this is not enough to push Apple way forward than other competitors — as they quickly catch up. However, a drastic change and opening up a new venture requires making a new market, substantial money and huge risk.
In the case of Apple, it seems regular yet minimal forgetting mechanism helps to keep the company ahead of the game, at least for the time being. Yet there are many other cases where conditions are not the same as Apple and one may have to use a one-time forgetting instead of many regular ones.
The overall point is that forgetting should not be regarded as a failure but rather as a helpful and strategic tool to make advances.
It would be interesting to see if one can mathematically quantify forgetting…
To be continued.
