Science Fiction is for the Renaissance Men
Deliver science fiction from any necessity to have purpose and value. Science fiction is far above the utilitarian yardsticks of the technical minds, the agency minds, the teaching minds. Science fiction is not for Squares. It’s for the modern Renaissance Man… vigorous, versatile, zestful… full of romantic curiosity and impractical speculation.
-Alfred Bester, Redemolished, “Science Fiction and the Renaissance Man” (quoted from here)
Crisis happens when we fail to look at the large picture, but who is standing far enough away to see?
Not much can be said that hasn’t already been said about the economy. But debts and bad loans aren’t just the fault of poor forecasting, it’s also due to acute specialization. Listen only to realty trade publications, driven by deadlines, ad revenue, and PR releases, and you might be convinced home prices are on the rebound. Healthy skepticism comes from a wide media diet.
Perhaps we are to capacity with lawyers, politicians, lobbyists, realtors, and economists — and what we really need are Renaissance (wo)men. But to be a Renaissance man in today’s workforce almost guarantees nothing better than a temp position in data entry at $13.50 an hour. And that’s the worst possible place for a highly active brain to be. A new report out from the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences explains how boring jobs turn our minds to autopilot no matter how hard we fight it, guaranteeing an increase in “careless” errors. Researchers are now designing headgear to train the brain not to make boredom-induced mistakes (a muzzle for one’s mind?)
Artist Fritz Haeg thinks we should follow Buckminster Fuller’s advice. “Basically, his theory is that the powers that be want us to be specialists,” he tells this month’s Art Review, “Because they don’t want us to see the big picture, because the more you see the big picture, the more you are apt to question things. He’s saying that decades ago, but I think its even more true today.”
Fuller was bankrupt and suicidal at the age of 32, before his life turned around. He began to wonder “what a single individual can contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity,” and that question turned his life around. “Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them,” he said.
Maybe what we need are more efficient ways of remembering what we learn. There is a profile of Piotr Wozniak, creator of SuperMemo, in this month’s Wired. The article explains how he is really the first to make use of the “spacing effect” method of learning, known by psychiatrists since the 1880s:
The spacing effect is “one of the most remarkable phenomena to emerge from laboratory research on learning,” the psychologist Frank Dempster wrote in 1988, at the beginning of a typically sad encomium published in American Psychologist under the title “The Spacing Effect: A Case Study in the Failure to Apply the Results of Psychological Research.” The sorrrowful tone is not hard to understand. How would computer scientists feel if people continued to use slide rules for engineering calculations? What if, centuries after the invention of spectacles, people still dealt with nearsightedness by holding things closer to their eyes? Psychologists who studied the spacing effect thought they possessed a solution to a problem that had frustrated humankind since before written language: how to remember what’s been learned. But instead, the spacing effect became a reminder of the impotence of laboratory psychology.
SuperMemo helps users retain what they have read by offering it up in small bits spaced at optimal intervals of time:
We are used to the idea that normal humans can perform challenging feats of athleticism. We all know someone who has run a marathon or ridden a bike cross-country. But getting significantly smarter — that seems to be different. We associate intelligence with pure talent, and academic learning with educational experiences dating far back in life. To master a difficult language, to become expert in a technical field, to make a scientific contribution in a new area — these seem like rare things. And so they are, but perhaps not for the reason we assume.
The failure of SuperMemo to transform learning uncannily repeats the earlier failures of cognitive psychology to influence teachers and students. Our capacity to learn is amazingly large. But optimal learning demands a kind of rational control over ourselves that does not come easily. Even the basic demand for regularity can be daunting. If you skip a few days, the spacing effect, with its steady march of sealing knowledge in memory, begins to lose its force. Progress limps. When it comes to increasing intelligence, our brain is up to the task and our technology is up to the task. The problem lies in our temperament.
Public Service Announcements have always provided hackneyed obvious information (”Give a hoot, don’t pollute.”) We should have Public Education Announcements: 30 seconds of Spanish phrases, Newton’s Laws, or basic geometry theorems. Everyone would be able to explain the second law of thermodynamics as quickly as we can say “Shoulda Hada V8.”
There is one place a Renaissance man can succeed in life, according to Alfred Bester, and that is writing science fiction. Everything you can think of can be a futuristic thought experiment. Bester was the consumate dilletante, and like Fuller, experienced a lifetime of failures before making his name. “The Stars My Destination” isn’t even one of my favorite books (I need a much more sympathetic protagonist,) but it’s impossible not to appreciate his sweeping intellect. From the SFW review:
In Bester’s view, any halfway intelligent craftsman can master the technical tricks of storytelling. But it’s only force of authorial personality and its mysterious translation to the printed page that makes any tale unique. In this day and age of cookie-cutter SF, such ideals are too easily forgotten. As William Gibson later echoed, much SF feels as if it’s written by careerists who might as well be practicing dentistry.
Being able to identify patterns and potential intersections, and creatively exaggerate current situations; these are all the gifts of a wide-ranging intellect. That’s what this weblog celebrates.
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