Sokal Cubed
What if you could create university that was mostly about learning?
The Sokal Squared hoax was one of the most important events in the culture wars of 2018. Its name is derived from the original Sokal hoax, done by Alan Sokal who hoaxed an academic journal called Social Text devoted to postmodern cultural studies. In his paper he claimed that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. In 2018 a much more massive “Sokal Squared” hoax of 7 accepted papers and 4 published papers was perpetrated by the trio of activists for science: James A. Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose.
They wrote together 20 papers and wanted to attack, what they call, “Grievance Studies”, in their opinion a set of disciplines that tries to redeem societal grievances. For example, Fat Studies that want to change the norms of bodily beauty to be more inclusive to overweight people. The trio of activists hoped to give a fatal blow to this type of disciplines, because in their opinion, these “grievance studies” prepare activists and not scientists and thus they interfere with hard sciences and corrupt the academy.
But nothing much changed. One can ask why? Maybe the activist trio would claim that it is due to a strong ideological power that these disciplines and narratives have over the minds of academics. But just maybe we can go a level deeper and contemplate the possibility of Sokal Cubed.
The problem is their naïve belief that education and university is mostly about learning and truth. But university is mostly not about learning and truth (collective sense-making). So the Sokal Cubed would be an inverse hoax — actually creating a place that would be mostly about learning. Maybe the real world precursor could be Santa Fe Institute where complexity science was born through a true collaboration by scientists from different disciplines. Or for example CIDOC, the radical think tank and free university in Mexico, founded by Ivan Illich in the 1960s (who is famous for the concepts of deschooling and counterproductivity).
As many other areas, Education is mostly about signaling
In the last two years there were at least two books that claimed education is mostly about signaling of intelligence and diligent work (e.g. that you can do math and have a will power to graduate at that). Signaling itself is a concept from biology and you can complicate it by the concept of counter-signaling.
Bryan Caplan’s The Case Against Education documents how around 80% of the value of a university degree comes from the diploma and graduation itself. What economists call the “sheepskin effect”. Now, everyone knew that graduating Harvard has benefits beyond learning stuff. Like getting to know people from rich and powerful families. But not everybody knew that the effect can be so large — the vast majority of the value. If we internalize that than we can understand why some universities with bad reputation can actually create negative value. Everybody understands that driving a Jaguar is not only about getting from place A to place B. But appearing in a destroyed looking car might be worse than arriving on foot. Another book that tries to apply this thinking of hidden motives (A is mostly not about B) is a book Elephant in the Brain by Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler.
(I think both books might be interesting to understand the concept, but I would not overindex on such thinking and especially their libertarian prescriptions. It is enough to internalize that education is mostly not about learning.)
Universities mostly don’t create knowledge, they collect it and study it
This is one of the main takeaways from Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile. You can read the chapter here. The idea is simple: People shouldn’t lecture birds how to fly. And much of the academy needs to be much humbler about their role. Which is mainly about “studying how birds fly” and not “lecturing how they should fly”. The main idea is that it took thousands of years for someone to apply the invention of a wheel to a suitcase. And maybe another 30 years for someone to put it finally on a school bag (well school is mostly not about learning and comfort, otherwise we would let kids sleep longer and maybe invent a schoolbag with wheels sooner). Practice beats theory big time. There are exceptions like the invention of a nuclear bomb, etc. But for example, Bayesian statistics, that underlies causation theory behind science itself, was discovered by a priest with a hobby.
Universities are mostly about creating middle management workers for imperfect and very rivalrous meritocracies
Peter Thiel talks over and over how universities are something akin to an exclusive night club, a pure zero sum game, where everybody shows off, parties hard and then is quite poorer when it is over. It doesn’t make sense to him why would Harvard limit their pool of graduates to a few thousands a year, if they are the best school in a country of 325 million people.
So for Peter Thiel the alternative explanation is that universities are an insurance policy for when times get bad and suddenly there will be a big competition for jobs. Or that their business model is similar to exclusive night clubs, that serve to protect, show-off and enhance prestige. Or that they are the successors of churches that sell indulgences (certificates, diplomas, the sheepskin effect).
Don’t get me wrong. This insurance policy is working and there is a new aristocracy of the 9.9% highly educated experts, bureaucrats and middle managers who grease the wheels of the current globalized economy. And the divide between highly educated with a degree from prestigious institutions and the rest is growing as documented by this great article from the Atlantic. But they are mostly middle managers or highly paid consultants for others.
There is also The Gervais Principle, an interesting book-long argument based on The Office series, that tries to explain how there are three distinct groups in the corporate hierarchies and how they map on the saying that “some people talk about other people, others talk about events, and yet others talk about ideas”. And this middle management group, that the author Venkatesh Rao calls Clueless, talks mostly about other people, and is mostly inspired by other (great) people and wants to emulate other (great) people. Nassim Taleb calls the very elite of them name-droppers at Davos.
And (I would add) therefore they follow current top trends and go to top universities. But this creates zero-sum dynamics and intense competition and jealousy. Peter Thiel described this well in his book Zero to One. It is interesting to note here that despite Peter Thiel being a libertarian, he is connected via Stanford to his mentor Rene Girard and thus to his friend Jean Pierre Dupuy who was close to Ivan Illich (famous for concepts of deschooling and counterproductivity).
Exponential technologies plus collective stupidity equals civilization will self-terminate
This argument is deep and is well explained by Daniel Schmachenberger for example here. Basically if you combine ever more powerful technologies like CRISPR/Cas9 and AI and neuroscience you expand the possibilities for both good and bad tremendously. But we need collective sense-making and collective choice-making to be also on an exponential improvement trajectory, otherwise the civilization will self-terminate (existential risks will become reality). We need to embrace the Game B, or an economy based on anti-rivalrous foundations. That hasn’t been tried much yet (no it’s not communism, it was still rivalrous). But again places like Santa Fe Institute and The Centro Intercultural de Documentación (CIDOC), and your local hacker space or maker space can be precursors to it. To make this the norm would be Sokal Cubed. Displaying how not only grievance studies, but whole university wasn’t until now mostly about learning but about prestige and hierarchy. Well because until now, almost everything was about those things. But civilization needs to undergo a phase shift — where most of the economy will be about anti-rivalry. The great metaphor for that is a caterpillar to butterfly (via a liminal stage of a cocoon). You wouldn’t predict a butterfly from the behavior of a caterpillar that eats and destroys the environment in the quest to get ever bigger. But the butterfly pollinates plants and has very different behavior and look.
We need new cocoons — makerspaces and hubs and organizations like Santa Fe Institutes, CIDOCS and FabLabs… that will help to create a new anti-rivalrous economies and inventions while being anti-fragile to the current rivalrous economy and use good game theory foundations.
And we need new meta-modern values that combine what we have learnt via modernity and postmodernism into something more productive with the future generations and survival of the planet in mind.
