Should we all re-emphasise effort in learning?

Something that I’ve recently come to accept as a possible truth is that an individual is more the cumulation of seemingly random experiences and less the result of any structured or intentional impartation. I’d attribute about ninety percent of my self as it exists today to a fairly short list of: good cricketing shots, things that fictional characters have said or done, and a handful of conversations. Amongst that handful of conversations is one I had with my grandfather, more than a decade ago, about a particularly controversial series of political episodes. Was I too young to understand rogue political machinery and extrajudicial encounters? Absolutely. Was I still made to go through the motions if only to take away lessons about the failings of democracy? Yes. Now of course, I failed on the front of actually understanding the whys and why-nots of representative government, but that conversation has stuck with me over the years.

For its detail. For its structure. And of course, for the underlying conviction that enabled it — that knowledge was power, but also that it was to be acquired in a certain effortful way. (yes, that’s a word – all antonyms for effortless don’t carry negative connotations) To merely lament over the headline was one. To read through all of the investigative columns and obscure books, stitch together the timeline, and reproduce that in careful detail? That was a whole other thing — possibly a thing he did because he was a librarian. Now it might be a stretch to attribute my borrowing of that conviction entirely to that one conversation – but in pinpointing the origin thereof, I’m otherwise at a loss.

The conviction has served me well — for the most part. Of course, the aversion to superficial competence means that I’m always under the gun (my own) to learn, and it means I’d rather not know until I have the time to know it the right way — but if you asked me, temporary ignorance is a small price to pay for being thorough. I’ll spare you the details of the manifest ways in which this now-visceral conviction has expressed itself, but a singular testament would be that nearly three months after the new labour laws were notified in India, despite it being ubiquitous in my line of work, I don’t know ‘enough’. I’ve paid no heed to the summary decks and “What You Need to Know” compilations. Because one must go through all 295 pages of the Gazette Notification. And until one can do that, one does not know the labour laws. And no claim shall be made to such effect.

It is an undisputed fact that we’re living in an age of not just information abundance, but also of unprecedented ease of access thereto. And while the earliest premise of the internet may have certainly been “we should all know more”, I refuse to believe it was meant to usher in an era where everyone knows everything, but only enough that they can get by — at work, and at school, and in conversations. Or one where bluster is everywhere, but not so much informed, defensible opinions. Or one where bias reinforcement has become the why of social media platforms. To say the least, all of that sounds fairly antithetical to effortful, or thorough. And so, in this essay, hot on the trail of a research proposition that Gen Z might officially be less intelligent than its predecessors, I attempt to navigate through the perils of learning in the age of the internet — and the resulting de-emphasis of effort.

(I would, of course, also jump on the chance to lay into how AI has absolutely, beyond redemption, caused more than its fair share of damage, but AI and I are on a bit of a … detox break, if you will. So, I will fight my urges to asperse the AI overlords — unless it is required incidentally.)

Before the proliferation of social media and AI, if you expressed an opinion, it implied that you’d read maybe a newspaper editorial, gone to the trouble of making sense of the facts presented therein, and then formed said opinion within the boundaries of your own value system. One couldn’t just say or write something worthy. Expression, then was the mark. We valued a person’s ability to write or to partake in conversations because it implied a past investment of time and mental faculties in the acquisition of knowledge — an investment that we deemed intrinsically virtuous. It was a neat system, by all measures. Was. We valued expression because of the effort it implied. Now, when that effort is no longer a prerequisite, does the system still work? No, it doesn’t.

And continued emphasis on performance — of fluency, eclecticism and confidence — when it is no longer something to be achieved with effort is part of the reason we’ve reached a collective consensus to not probe for genuine understanding or depth. (Don’t do unto others what you don’t want done unto you, after all.) We all sound smart — but we don’t care to find out if we really are.

The question, then, is if the continued existence of the system, in spite of its obvious weakness indicates a de-emphasis of effort. And what the risks of such de-emphasis are. Does it matter that someone’s understanding of a social issue derives from a 50-word social media post (and the comments under it), instead of a verbose newspaper editorial? What is so wrong about reading an ‘All You Need to Know’ deck, as opposed to laboring through a 295-page Gazette Notification? And at the end of the day, if all expression is rewarded the same way — either barely, within the constraints of the everyday (when was the last time any of us had the time or the real estate to anatomize a conversation down to its last strands?) or weirdly by an abstruse social media algorithm — does what came before (or didn’t) make a difference?

Moralization of effort was my earliest premise for this essay. By all means, it is a nice little conflict to unwind myself from — somehow, I’m both — one, averse to any moral proposition not already in my compass, and two, deeply, deeply convinced about the right ways in which to learn and to work. It is a good place to start the discussion on the downside to de-emphasis except for the fact that in a world that’s increasingly defined by output, and how fast that output is created, to still argue for the virtue of effort seems fanciful, and almost Luddite-like. Which is why I turn instead, to an examination of the possible faultlines of the not-effortful type of knowledge (either sourced from social media, or collated from AI’s regurgitations), and this time, I rely on (arguably) more solid bases: the principles of epistemology, as outlined in the entry titled ‘Epistemology’ in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Side bar — For the uninitiated — not unlike me before this essay — epistemology is the branch of philosophy that deals with knowledge: inter alia, what it means to know, or to understand, and how we acquire knowledge. If that feels abstract, it is, and that’s okay. For the limited purpose of seeing my argument through to the end, you’re just going to have put up with it. And as compensation, I offer comedic relief from Reddit’s Explain Like I’m Five page —

One user says: ‘But do you really know what epistemology is?’

Another: ‘Sounds like something that can make you schizo. hard pass.’

And still another, and this is my favourite: ‘It's a good way to take stock of what particular types of bullshit you might be incorporating into your worldview without good reason, and what good reason even is. If that doesn't sound useful, then I have a bridge to sell you.’

The essay uses the term ‘cognitive success’ and while it does not define it, basis the context clues I’d interpret it to mean the worthy outcome of mental effort, that state where one knows something. Now my argument all along has been that there is a certain correct way in which to achieve cognitive success — but maybe not:

“Cognitive success does not require us to be perfectly cognitively optimal in every way. If cognitive success is ever achievable even in principle, then at least some degree of cognitive sub-optimality must be permissible.”

Long way of saying that it is (at least in theory) possible to take the short(er) route to Point A. (if we say Point A is cognitive success.) If that is indeed the case, then maybe I’m better off pivoting to Point A in itself, rather than the route — or, when is it that cognitive success is achieved? Is anything less than absolute surety over a subject matter— and I say surety, not mastery — cognitive success? Perhaps not:

“Knowing, understanding, mastering—these are cognitive successes. But being 70% confident in a proposition is not, in and of itself, a cognitive success, even if that state of confidence may be partly constitutive of an agent’s cognitive success when the agent holds it in the right circumstances and for the right reason. What makes the difference?”

The essay outlines three different definitions for cognitive success:

1. The contractualist view, which deems a given state as successful because it serves wide practical interests (as an example —we describe a person as “knowing” something as a way of signaling that her testimony with respect to that thing is to be trusted.)
2. The consequentialist view, which deems a given state as successful if it promotes the ‘crucial benefit’ of having true beliefs and lacking false beliefs.
3. And the constitutivist view, where cognitive success is achieved when an aim is achieved. (“practical wisdom is a kind of cognitive success by virtue of being the constitutive aim of all human activity.”)

Now I’m not inclined — or qualified — to go through the nuances of each of these different viewpoints, but I’d like to isolate an important thread that seems to tie the three together, in examining the follies of sourcing our knowledge from social media platforms. 

In making the claim that somebody ‘knows’ something, we signal that they can be trusted, and by extension, we vest extraordinary power in them to shape social constructs. And power can be misused. In philosophy, that misuse is called an epistemic wrong, or an epistemic harm.

“Insinuation, inattention, and indoctrination can all constitute epistemic harms or epistemic wrongs: each one can obstruct, and sometimes wrongly obstruct, an agent’s cognitive success.”

The examples for each of these are striking — not least because if you only take one step back, they are omnipresent in our consumption of content:

“Insinuation: I can mislead you into drawing false conclusions, even if what I say is true: for instance, when I say “the victims were killed by an immigrant”, even if what I say is literally true, it can mislead my hearer into thinking that the killer’s being an immigrant was in some way explanatorily relevant to her crime.

Inattention: I can harm you, and perhaps even wrong you, by getting you to think poorly of your own capacity to grasp a subject by not paying attention to what you think or say.

Indoctrination: I can harm you, and perhaps even wrong you, by indoctrinating you in a view so strongly that you lose the ability to consider alternative views.”

Insinuation and indoctrination have become something of a staple in the modern propagation of information. All communique is coloured. Any hope of that bias not pervading a consumer’s perception of the situation hinges on their discernment. Discernment that we’re never taught. That insinuation and indoctrination survive — and thrive at that — despite their obvious downsides can be reasonably attributed to the machinations of social medial algorithms. If you’re an internet figure, tight socio-political boundaries are invaluable in building a brand identity. If you personally would never get an abortion, it pays to go on the Internet and say that no one should be able to, either. And it pays even more to extend that narrative to tradwives, anti-vax and raw milk. Keep at it long enough, and you’ll be recognized as a radical right-winger — recognition that is more than enough to make excellent money. Tempering viewpoints or moderating stances or updating your beliefs to accommodate new information — they don’t generate money. Screaming the same bluster from the rooftops does. That’s epistemic harm. On this side of the interaction on a social media platform, at this point, we’re all victims of our own reinforcement biases. Each of our timelines is our own echo chamber, where we take comfort in repeated validation, and in deluding ourselves about how much we know. And that’s our subscription to epistemic harm.

And so, as effortless as it might be to doomscroll our way to knowing, it would not be cognitive success, by any measure. It would be akin to being distributed glossy brochures of several micro-cults — and unless you’ve been engaged as a recruiter by said micro-cult, forming views or opinions based on what an internet figure says seems foolhardy. The problem, however, is that inherently, we are wired to accept testimonial (i.e., the views of others that we perceive as those that know) sources as ‘reliable and tend to attribute credibility to them unless we encounter special contrary reasons.’ I did not write this essay intending for it to be didactic in any way, so I will refrain from offering solutions, but maybe we should also read those verbose newspaper editorials. As a backstop.

So that’s the social media and bias-colouration bit. There’s another pitfall to learning in the age of the internet and artificial intelligence. A foundational principle of epistemology is that three conditions—truth, belief, and justification—are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for knowledge of facts.

“Whenever a knower (S) knows some fact (p), several conditions must obtain. A proposition that S doesn’t even believe cannot be, or express, a fact that S knows. Therefore, knowledge requires belief. False propositions cannot be, or express, facts, and so cannot be known. Therefore, knowledge requires truth. Finally, S’s being correct in believing that p might merely be a matter of luck. […] knowledge requires a third element, one that excludes the aforementioned luck, and so that involves S’s belief being, in some sense, justifiably or appropriately held.”

Justification is what negates luck in the acquisition and demonstration of knowledge. And while philosophical theory might take a different — and frankly complex — approach to defining this justification, I’d implore you to look at it for its simplest meaning: ‘show or prove to be right or reasonable’. In my (limited) experience, what is learnt without effort is almost never easily justified. Which is not to say that we must be combative and cross-question every fact or opinion that is presented to us before deeming someone as smart, but the occasional grilling would serve us all well in exiting this collective consensus that we’ve established to not probe. After all, our system, as it exists today, of rewarding expression, is not necessarily replaceable — so maybe it needs guardrails.

And that’s the second bit. It’s a dangerous proposition, by all means, the imploring of the audience to probe. It means that I’ve effectively signed up to be cross-examined for more than 70% confidence at every little opportunity, but in my experience, effort withstands cross-examination. Least of all because it is earnest. And most of all because in Krishnamurthy’s words, ‘effort is the dissipation of passion.’ And a life without passion is not worth living at all.

[Image credit: The Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio, CC0 1.0]