The knowledge trade off

Life is a series of Trade-offs

Life is a series of various trade-offs, from choosing what to wear to choosing what to study, trade-offs abound us. You can take a pause for half a minute and recall all the trade-offs you made today. I’ll go first. I sacrificed some hours of sleep to get milk for the house in the morning. I then traded off eating a couple of biscuits because I’m trying to be in a caloric deficit for my diet. Trade off(s) involve letting something go in return of the promise of receiving something else in future or at the moment itself. The calorific deficit trade-off is trading off present cravings for a future better and healthier body. Or, when you choose to spend your money on an ice cream instead of a pastry, that’s a trade-off whose payoff is delivered at the moment itself. If you’re following me until now, you’d have recognized that our brain is a specialist in trading off, or at least it should be. Essentially it is an ancient tool which is a product of evolution. Many a times our intuition plays a large role in the kind of trade-offs we make in life. But it’s easily hack-able, much like most of our senses. Social media hacked our attention spans, FMCG’s hacked our dietary systems, big tobacco and alcohol industries hacked our sense of self-preservation – you get the idea. As a thumb rule, if it is human, it is hack-able. Interestingly enough, it is an open question as to what technology can and cannot hack. If not, then why not?

Moving on to trade-offs and hack-ability, and how that distorts the perspective of life (which is what I’ll focus on in this piece), the first thing we need to be clear on is that trade-offs are unescapable. You cannot escape these tough decisions. As one moves across the prosperity index, one is presented with even more choices as to what existed prior. As a linear function of time, future always holds more options that past across almost all verticals of life – career, food, travel etc. With time you’ll have to make more and more trade-offs, and not all trade-offs are created equal. Some are tougher to call than others, such as which college to go to versus what to wear tonight. But maybe you’re asking yourself right now – “So what? This isn’t anything new, I don’t even need to think about this. I do what I do and for once I do not want to psychoanalyze every decision I take!”. But you do. We do need to think about trade-offs more often and develop a perspective on not only how often we engage in them but also what are the important trade-offs we have to face.
The perspective on trade off(s)

It is not only technology that hacks our senses and perceptions, sometimes culture and society hack too. In essence to hack is to short circuit a process that would otherwise have happened in a different way. The most relevant forms of hacking are done by corporations in a way so as to contribute to their profit motives (That being said I want to clarify that I’m principally a capitalist and I’m not arguing against the existence of such profit motive or either the companies that are run by it. A case for capitalism some other day too). I call such hacking, profit induced hacking. But as I’ll argue it is not always the corporations that hack, and it is not always the profit motive that such entities hack for.

I now want to bring your attention to the subject at hand i.e. the trade-off that exists between gathering knowledge versus being social. There are multiple issues with it. First and foremost is the sheer non agreeableness to the very idea that such a trade-off exists. Most people will argue that you can do both at the same time and achieve your desired goals with respect to both. I’ll argue later as to why you cannot, but first I want to explain how this is an example of a society indulging in what I call cultural hacking, which is to hack our senses and perspectives according to its own interest, the larger interest. In his book, The Selfish Gene, author Richard Dawkins makes the argument that the essence of our life is to be mere carriers of our genes and the only purpose we have is to ensure their survival. He argues that we have been modelled by our genes to act and behave in certain ways which make us indulge in patterns that ensure the best chance for its (gene’s) survival. Our society (read: genes) have hacked us to do two things. First is to deny the very existence of this trade off, and second to prioritize our social life over gathering knowledge and/or being curious. On denial of the trade-off – the first step to engage in rational calculations about whether to do one thing or other and then to dive deep into introspection involves first the realization of the existence of an either/or choice. If I think I can have have both, I will never pitch the options against each other to decide which one to prioritize. The first way by which the society blocks such rational deep dives is by convincing us that such a trade-off does not exist and that both things can be done simultaneously. It is achieved through stories, conversations, notions, legends and hearsay; the regular consensus manufacturing devices of society. But of course this denial is only a cultural denial, it doesn’t make it go away. It is not the flashy device from MIB series that makes humans forget about these concepts and thus cannot prevent us from thinking upon these issues. One such pondering session produced this piece. So how does society deal with these (for a lack of a better word) rogue thoughts? Remember Dawkins and what he said about how genes basically dictate our lives? Turns out he’s pretty right in this aspect as well. A society’s core and most fundamental aim is to not amass wealth, or to innovate, or to build huge castles or to think about far away galaxies. Its main aim is to reproduce and survive. And when I say society’s core aim, I really mean how the genes manipulate and manifest our behavior to actually ensure their survival, their proliferation. For our reproduction is nothing other than the passing down of genes. You might ask if all that we aimed for was to reproduce, then why did we develop into such a sophisticated society? We could’ve just lived in the jungle commons and reproduced. We’ve come here because of advances in technology. The first technology ever built were the man made weapons built in order to protect oneself and one’s band from the state of nature. Protect so as to self-preserve, protect so as to protect the next generation, protect as to extend our life span so that we could reproduce more (It is up for debate if the act of protecting oneself was done for purely selfish reasons and that the birth of more children was just a causal result of the humans having a longer life span, or not). Since then, we’ve went on an arc to fulfil other ancillary ‘needs’ and desires. But even now, the core of whatever we do is in order to reproduce. You’re all smart enough to make that link, so I won’t make it for you.

The reason why I called the de facto prioritization of having (or at least wanting to have a ) an avid social life, a cultural hacking is because but for this in grained urge to be social and prioritize social life, it would be left to winds of chance as to how an individual would turn out to be and what patterns of behavior would they indulge in. We have been hacked to think a certain way, and it is a curious mix of evolutionary biology and social conditioning (Bonus question: did we develop social conditioning due to evolutionary biology, or did our understanding of evolutionary biology get shaped by our social conditioning?). Of course how such a society would look like, or the larger question of whether there can even be a society without the inherent notion of self preservation are legitimate questions to consider but outside the scope of this piece.

Second and most important issue is to show as to how a real and valid trade off exists between gathering knowledge / being curious and social life. But what do we really mean by terms such as ‘gathering knowledge’ and ‘being curious’, and of course ‘social life’? Let’s break it down. Interchangeable terms ‘gathering knowledge and being curious’ mean - including but not limited to spending hours in front of a laptop diving deep into a rabbit hole of information, thinking deeply about something you read recently, or about something somebody told you about, writing down your thoughts on it, watching media to understand that issue better etc. But this shouldn’t confuse you to think of these terms as mere acts, instead they are ways of life. A person is not curious for some time in his life and then not. A person is either a curious person or he is not. A curious individual is curious about a lot of myriad things. A non-curious individual can be said to be a realist in the strictest sense. He does not care much about the world that he inhabits other than what is enough for him to get by and achieve his goals. I will refrain from passing a value judgement as to who is ‘better’. My only aim is to prove the existence of the distinction much alike a biologist who proves that a rNA molecule is different from a DNA molecule without saying which one is better. I used this example specifically to show as to how the very definition of better is too complex and thus it would be a futile exercise to even think along those lines. Anyhow, having established the dichotomy of people in this world, let us analyze the trade-off itself.
The knowledge Trade-Off

Being curious is not an end in and of itself, it a mere means to acquire knowledge and information. You can be curious but without the means to satiate your curiosity it is pointless. But what are these ways? To understand this we will have to take a detour into the anthropology of knowledge collection and dissemination. In ancient times before Homo sapiens took to writing, knowledge and information that one needed to survive had to be communicated in person or en masse by someone to others, in person. Thus, acquiring knowledge then was essentially a social activity. You had to be social in order to gain knowledge required to survive.

Writing changed that, forever.

For the first time we could acquire knowledge without the involvement of others, passively. We could now be alone and consume the knowledge gathered and recorded by others. There was no longer the need to be social for the purpose of knowledge accumulation per se. We had been freed from the clutches of forced interaction. Ever since then our arc has been to make the focal point of acquiring knowledge the individual rather than the community. From clay tablets, to banana leaves, to papyrus, to books, and finally the Internet. The individual reigns supreme. The Internet was a second revolution in terms of increasing accessibility of knowledge. It is to the merit of this revolutionary technology that intellectuals like Anand Gandhi moved away from formal education to the internet for better education. Elon Musk has often said that you don’t need formal education to get a job or to be smart. The arc of acquiring knowledge has narrowed from the society to now, an individual. Even though education as a concept is still a highly social activity comprising of real world interactions and real live people. One of the biggest losses of the Covid-19 pandemic was the individualization of education, away from lively classrooms, and nobody liked that. But the fact that we don’t like it only signals our natural reaction to this adversity, it does not mean that it is not possible or even viable. It is very much viable and possible as is evident from so many educational institutes continuing their programs online. The internet was revolutionary because it facilitated an individual to accumulate and access knowledge on scales never possible before. You now do not need to go to seminars and conferences to exchange and acquire ideas and knowledge, the internet is your playground now. Acquiring knowledge is now an inherently individual activity.

Now, why does there exist a trade-off between acquiring knowledge and having an avid social life? Having established that acquiring knowledge is now an individual activity, we are now faced with a choice. The choice exists because we have a finite lifetime to live, we have to decide between things. We cannot do everything. It is also essential to understand that this dilemma exists in abundance for curious people, and the issue with such people is that their thirst for knowledge is unquenchable. I can now begin to understand why a Faustian bargain seems lucrative. For people who lust for knowledge, nothing is enough. So now we have a person with unquenchable thirst for knowledge sitting in front of a laptop, but with very limited time. If they choose to be social, you know – talk to people a lot, spend a lot of time on social media, go out often, they’ll lose out on time they could have used to gather knowledge and information. And it is important to remember that for curious people knowledge comes before being social. Joscha Bach, a cognitive scientist says that nerds do not talk, they ‘submit their ideas for peer review’. But we must go back to our point of cultural erasure of existence of such a trade off. Therefore even though curious people are insatiably thirsty for knowledge, they still are overtly social because they have convinced themselves that they can have the best of the both worlds. That essentially leads to a severe sense of dissonance, the feeling of running out of time to read everything one wants to read, to listen to all the podcasts one wants to listen to, and watch all the lecture series that one has bookmarked. We experience this because we cannot grasp the problem. The problem is that we think we can engage in all our intellectual endeavors while also maintaining a high social quotient. It is false. A realistic perspective is to realize that the cost of having a busy social life is to become a mediocre intellectual. And we need to understand that. You either settle for mediocre intellectual career and have a rich social life, or have a rich intellectual career and have a mediocre social life. No matter what you do, you just cannot have both.

Therefore, the trade-off is real, and the realization that it exists is more important. But there is one last issue with my reasoning. Due to the sheer number of people on earth, my analysis should mean that there should be a lot more people shunning social relations and gluing themselves to laptop screens in pursuit of knowledge. But that does not appear to be the case. We are a mere aggregate of mediocrity, far from cultivating pure knowledge chasers. Why? Why do even people for whom books and encyclopedias are safe havens turn to being hyper social beings? Why do all curious people in the end succumb to the urges of social cohesion?

Perhaps because in the end, we all are slaves to the selfish genes.

The book(s) I’m currently reading:

I just finished reading the annotated version of the classic Annihilation of caste. This book had been on my reading list for a very long time and I am very glad to have finally read it. Truly, the book lives up to its name and is indeed an eye opener. Arundhati’s essay is simply brilliant. If you were to read only 10 books ever in your lifetime as an Indian, Annihilation of caste should be one of them. Currently I’m reading Political Philosophy: A beginner’s guide for students and politicians. I had borrowed this book from my college library back in February 2020 and it has been with me ever since the lockdown started. I finally thought the moment was opportune to revisit my basics.

The music I’m currently listening:

I want to introduce you all to an amazing artist from Delhi, Udbhav. I started listening to his music sometime at the end of last year, and have been hooked since then. His discography is truly diverse and I thoroughly enjoy listening to his records. My favorite album of his is Nanku Sharma. He is one third of the musical collective Teesri Duniya comprising of Karun, and Kuns. Both of them being great artists themselves.

The podcasts I’m currently listening:

Amidst the complex issues that underline the farm bills, The tragedy of our farm bills is a great explainer of the policy behind the bills. Ajay Shah is one of India’s top intellectuals and he really gets to the core of the public policy issue. I will not tell you what his analysis entails and I would recommend you to listen to this in its entirety to gasp the various nuances.

Please reach out to me with your reaction, thoughts, suggestions, criticism - anything! I’ll be really happy to receive your feedback. I’m on twitter.

That’s it for this edition folks! Hope you liked it.

See you again, soon.