Issue 3 | 23rd July, 2022 (8-10 minute read)
Greetings, people of the internet, and welcome to a much-delayed issue of Multitudes, your (extremely) sporadic source of fun trivia and intriguing ideas. I'm Shantanu Kishwar, your internet friend who wishes you good coffee, great beer, or whatever else you might be drinking as you read this.
A couple of years ago, I started a newsletter as way to indulge my curiosity. I’d read, watch or listen to interesting things, and then write to share them with others and understand them better myself. In the last year, this instinct and ambition was put on hold as I tried to be a fully grown adult with a job and a house to take care of.
I’ve recently tried to resurrect my reading habits, dragging them back up the cliff they fell off in the last year. While doing so, I came across two books that reminded me why I valued my curiosity in the first place, and why my yearning for learning felt as rewarding as it did.
The first was How to Make the World Add Up by Tim Harford. An economist by training, Harford’s a master narrator who’s been weaving stories and statistics together through articles, podcasts, and books. One of the best storytellers I’ve come across, his mission in this book is simple - in an age where people drown in information, he wants to give them the tools to navigate the choppy waters of fake news, alternative facts, and social media outrage.
An ode to the power of well-drawn data and sound statistics, each chapter teaches lessons through carefully-crafted stories. The first, for example, warns of emotional responses to information. Told through the tale of Abraham Bredisu, the world’s foremost expert on the painter Vermeer, gushing over fake paintings and being duped by an artistically gifted Nazi sympathiser, it shows how easily expertise can be manipulated by emotion.
Another chapter highlights the shortcomings of biased samples, as demonstrated by side-effects of a drug called Sildenafil on erections and period pains:
…many studies still do not disaggregate data to allow an exploration of whether there might be a different effect in men and in women. Sildenafil, for example, was originally intended as a treatment for angina. The clinical trial – conducted on men – revealed an unexpected side effect: magnificent erections. Now better known as Viagra, the drug hit the market as a treatment for erectile dysfunction. But sildenafil might have yet another unexpected benefit: it could be an effective treatment for period pain. We’re not sure, as only one small and suggestive trial has yet been funded. If the trial for angina had equally represented men and women, the potential to treat period pain might have been as obvious as the impact on erections.
While I can wax lyrical about almost everything in the book, what really stands out is its epilogue - an homage to inquisitiveness. Curiosity, Harford says, is at the heart of all of his rules to be a better consumer of information. It accompanies and encourages intellectual humility, and is the most powerful “antidote to tribalism” that afflicts public discourse today. It’s far more valuable than knowledge alone, as he shows by citing research from the psychologist Dan Kahan:
[E]xpertise is no guarantee against this kind of motivated reasoning: Republicans and Democrats with high levels of scientific literacy are further apart on climate change than those with little scientific education. The same disheartening pattern holds from nuclear power to gun control to fracking: the more scientifically literate opponents are, the more they disagree…
…After a long and fruitless search for an antidote to tribalism, Kahan could be forgiven for becoming jaded. Yet a few years ago, to his surprise, Kahan and his colleagues stumbled upon a trait that some people have – and that other people can be encouraged to develop – which inoculates us against this toxic polarisation. On the most politically polluted, tribal questions, where intelligence and education fail, this trait does not.
And if you’re desperately, burningly curious to know what it is – congratulations. You may be inoculated already.
Curiosity breaks the relentless pattern. Specifically, Kahan identified ‘scientific curiosity’. That’s different from scientific literacy. The two qualities are correlated, of course, but there are curious people who know rather little about science (yet), and highly trained people with little appetite to learn more.
To read Harford is to understand why a burning desire to know more makes us, as individuals and societies, better. But the ability and desire to learn may be even more powerful than that. Beyond making us better consumers of news and civil conversationists, it might have been foundational to our survival (and dominance) as a species on Earth. In How We Learn, Stanislas Dahaene, a French neuroscientist, starts by answering why we learn, explaining its centrality to our existence.
In some ways, it’s a miracle that we humans have extended our dominion over all living creatures. At least at birth, we’re terrible equipped to do so. We’re born with basic instincts, so we don’t need to learn to breathe, make our heart beat, or even to fight or take flight when confronted by danger. But we’re also born prematurely and are utterly dependent on the kindness of our caregivers for years. Meanwhile, most animals can become self-reliant in a much shorter time. To quote an article from Scientific American, “by one estimation a human fetus would have to undergo a gestation period of 18 to 21 months instead of the usual nine to be born at a neurological and cognitive development stage comparable to that of a chimpanzee newborn.”
How, then, did we come to rule the world? Shouldn’t we have perished at the hands of our primate cousins, been trampled by elephants, or devoured by jungle cats? To quote Dahaene, “In the Darwinian struggle for life, shouldn’t an animal who is born mature, with more knowledge than others, end up winning and spreading its genes?”
Our saviour as a species, he says, was our ability to learn. Learning is, at its core, a process of understanding a problem and devising an appropriate response. It is, in a nutshell, a process of adaptation. This ability to adapt is built into all species, but for non-humans generally plays out through natural selection. Again, to quote How We Learn,
Darwin’s remarkably efficient algorithm can certainly succeed in adapting each organism to its ecological niche, but it does so at an appallingly slow rate. Whole generations must die, due to lack of proper adaptation, before a favorable mutation can increase the species’ chance of survival. The ability to learn, on the other hand, acts much faster—it can change behavior within the span of a few minutes, which is the very quintessence of learning:
Think of this through the following (admittedly simplistic) thought-experiment: a group of humans and a mess of iguanas (yes, that really is that collective noun) are air-dropped into the Siberian Wilderness. Iguanas, utterly unsuited to this climate, will likely perish soon. As a species, they’d be dependent on mutations over millennia to develop a thick fur and survive. Humans, though, could potentially learn to survive, maybe skinning a bear and using its fur to keep warm in just a few hours, days, or weeks.
This isn’t to say that animals aren’t put through an education of their own. To quote three examples from this piece in the Washington Post:
“Predators — or animals that live by killing and eating other animals — play-fight with their siblings as babies. This instinctive behavior develops their muscles and the coordination they will need to hunt. But when it comes to the specifics of catching and killing prey, they learn a lot from mom.”
“Seals, sea lions and dolphins catch fish and release them in front of their young. They repeat this behavior many times until the baby learns how to grab and eat the prey before it can get away.”
“Herbivores don’t kill for their dinner, but they still need an education to survive. Orangutan babies stay with their moms for eight years. Mothers teach their offspring what foods to eat and where to find them depending on the season of the year. There’s a lot to learn because orangutans eat leaves, flowers, a variety of insects and lots of fruit.”
Still, animal learning seems more limited than human learning (though I’ll admit, this is just me hypothesising as a complete non-expert). All of the above are acts of repetitive learning. They can help an animal succeed in the same circumstances that their forbears have lived through, but may make them less able to adapt to new ones. To learn as we do might be distinctly human. To lose our sense of curiosity, then, might be rallying against one of our most foundational instincts.
I hope I’ve left you in the mood to better understand our world. If indeed you’re inspired to ransack your nearest bookshop and spend the next few months inhaling literature, you could start with Tim Harford’s work. Cautionary Tales, his newest podcast, includes some stories from How to Make the World Add Up and teaches similar lessons. A personal favourite episode was The Art Forger, the Nazi, and “The Pope” (which I referred to briefly above). The conclusion to How to Make the World Add Up, which I earlier described as “an homage to inquisitiveness” is also available as an episode (one which I can’t recommend enough). (These links are to Spotify, but the episodes are also available wherever else you get your podcasts).
If all you’ve got right now are 4 minutes but you really want to keep your sense of wonder and awe burning bright, watch Hank Green’s profound commentary on the stunning images released by the James Webb telescope last week (the video below). He’s at his scientific and philosophical best here, and I can’t think of a better way to start the weekend than with his voice and words.
Anyway, that’s it for me with this week. If you’re new here, you can subscribe above. I’d really appreciate it if you could share it with other curious people you know.
Till next time (which is hopefully only weeks, not months, away).
Shantanu