The World Beyond Your Head by Matthew B. Crawford

I read The World Beyond Your Head by Matthew B. Crawford.

The book was a bit beyond my head at times. I thought much of the writing was too fancy for its own good, standing in the way of good ideas. Maybe that’s unavoidable in philosophy, I don’t know. But the ideas were good, and sticking with it was worthwhile. I kept pausing to think and write things down, which is one sign of a good book. It was published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux—the same publisher that Tim Berners-Lee worked with on This Is For Everyone, Robin Sloan for all (three) of his books, and John McPhee for his 30-something. I’ve had my antenna up only recently for who publishes what, and so far I tend to like FSG’s taste.

On silence as a public good

Just as clean air makes respiration possible, silence, in this broader sense, is what makes it possible to think...the availability of silence surely contributes to creativity and innovation. (11)

I’m interested by this idea of silence as a public good, like water and clean air. If silence isn’t provided as a public good, it becomes a luxury good that the wealthy pay for, e.g. in airport lounges. Paywalling silence creates a virtuous cycle for the wealthy and a vicious cycle for the masses. The wealthy have silence to think and create (wealth), and they are the arbiters, the C-suite decision makers, of what goes on in the rest of the world. They decide to place ads on the bus stop (or the Facebook feed) to command rider attention, preventing their own wealth creation and transferring it back to the wealthy instead (12, 13). That’s my interpretation of Crawford’s argument, and I think he’s onto something.

On attention

Much of this book is about attention. Reading it triggers an overly self-aware observation of my own attention. I’m reading on an airplane, with The Menu playing on the screen one seat over in 28D and some Scarlett Johansson thriller in 27D. Both keep stealing my attention. Things beyond the plane compete for my attention, too. Like the half marathon my brother is running at this moment...mile 9 by now, probably. Or whether I should stick with the working title of my book. Even now, I let my attention shift to writing notes about this book rather than reading it. The whole thing feels like mental exercise, which Matthew Crawford would probably love to hear. Reading a book is eating broccoli when I have Cheetos, and broccoli is an acquired taste.

When we inhabit a highly engineered environment, the natural world begins to seem bland and tasteless, like broccoli compared with Cheetos...What sort of outlier would you have to be, what sort of freak of self-control, to resist those well-engineered cultural marshmallows? (16-17)

This is after he cites the famous Stanford marshmallow experiment that studied delayed gratification. That study is ever interesting, and I really like “eating marshmallows” as a mental model or metaphor for the moment a stimulus commands your attention. I can decide to eat the marshmallow, or I can leave it on the table. A text notification from a friend I like would be a marshmallow. The ’mallow represents a good thing asking for your attention. Something you can attend to now or save for later. You can extend the mental model to all sorts of things that seek your attention: a work email, an advertisement, a phone call a stranger is having near you, or a movie playing across the aisle on an airplane. I think there’s an essay to be written called “Eating marshmallows.”

On phones as a crutch

For the last ten years (since I started college) I’ve been bothered by the use—including my own—of phones as a crutch in public spaces and social situations. This resonated and made me laugh:

You are sitting at an airport bar by yourself, feeling a bit antsy, and go through the contact list on your smartphone. You find one or two people who might appreciate the witty observation you just made, and fire off a couple of texts. Even before getting any response, you feel validated...Armed with your list of text buddies, each of whom appreciates a particular side of your multifaceted brilliance, you also won’t be called upon to respond to the person on the stool next to you at the bar. This is nice, because in such a conversation you may get an inkling—conveyed by the voice or the eyebrows—of some emotional register that was not on your agenda...Maybe he’s sizing you up for some investment pitch, or getting ready to share the good news about Jesus Christ. Thank God for your phone. Then again, maybe he’s just another weary traveler looking to connect, offer a wry take on the TSA, and share a chuckle. (176-177)

To cut ourselves some slack, our phones are not the only holes that suck our attention away from our immediate surroundings in meatspace. Crawford’s epilogue includes this call for silence:

Please don’t install speakers in every single corner of a shopping mall, even its outdoor spaces. Please don’t fill up every moment between innings in a lazy college baseball game with thundering excitement. Please give me a way to turn off the monitor in the backseat of a taxi. Please let there be one corner of the bar where the flickering delivery system for Bud Lite commercials is deemed unecessary, because I am already at the bar. (252)

On skill and abstractions

Crawford published this in 2015, but it’s not hard to imagine that he’d totally hate the AI-everywhere world we’re in now. He’d hate the TV ads to think less at work (Apple) and in the kitchen (ChatGPT). He points to Mickey Mouse Clubhouse now teaching children to depend on technology—an abstraction—rather than skill in problem solving. Abstractions defeat skill, and no skill means no agency.

To pursue the fantasy of escaping heteronomy through abstraction is to give up on skill, and therefore to substitute technology-as-magic for the possibility of real agency...The design of things can facilitate embodied agency or diminish it in ways that lead us further into passivity and dependence. (72, 78)

No agency feels to me like a loss of control. It changes the nature of the job. But it’s not just loss of control in our jobs. It’s at the gym, in the kitchen, and in our cars:

More broadly, the design of automobiles has tended toward insulation, offering an ever less involving driving experience. The animating ideal seems to be that the driver should be a disembodied observer, moving through a world of objects that present themselves as though on a screen. (80)

Modern cars abstract away the skill of driving with lane- and park-assist technologies, not to mention full self-driving. There’s also the danger of driving way too fast, which feels easy—or you don’t feel at all—in modern cars. My 2005 Subaru might actually be safer because I can really feel it when I do 80 on the highway. I’d like to think so. I also love the visibility that thin-framed, big-windowed older cars have compared to the blind spots (blind regions?) of newer cars. He also discusses the roads themselves:

Some traffic engineers find that more dangerous seeming roads have fewer crashes because drivers are more alert. (81)

Bike lanes! Drivers often complain about cyclists (I’ve been cursed at for simply biking along my share of the road), but cyclists might paradoxically make roads safer. Which, again, maybe that’s wishful thinking, I don’t know.

I like his take that it’s a failure mode of techno-optimists to blindly embrace new technology and assume it’s better than what’s old. He was talking about (un)safety in modern cars and comparing new-age electronic church organs against centuries-old ones, but it reads pretty on the nose about AI now. He covers a rebellion by organ makers where they rejected conventional wisdom and rethought how a state-of-the-art organ ought to be built.

The organ reformers’ discontent with the present loosened their deference to it, strengthened their opposing critical muscles, and prepared them to be turned in an unexpected direction.

Re current AI backlash, “discontent with the present” might just be “loosening deference” to Big Tech and “strengthening opposing critical muscles” in a measured response, leading us in “an unexpected direction.”

On being an individual

Arguably, what it takes to be an individual is to develop a considered evaluative take on the world, and stand behind it. Doing so exposes one to conflict, and in the conversations with others that follow you may revise your take on things. Such development can’t occur if you’re not attached to anything to begin with, or never put it forward to others as being choiceworthy. (184-185)

This is a case to write in public, unafraid to share your opinion. I respect others who do and view it as a sign of experience or intelligence. As he says, the worst thing is that you can get corrected, which is actually the best thing. I’d like to get better at this. I’m often overly worried about planting an opinion as a non-expert before I’ve had time to research more. Or I end up caveating my opinions ad nauseam.

On the fallibility of memory

The supposed infallibility of the ‘eyewitness,’ for example, is an entrenched assumption, but psychology has in recent decades become sophisticated about the limitations of this kind of testimony. Awareness of these limitations hasn’t much penetrated the legal system, however, as it is at odds with a judicial culture that often seems to value sheer volume of convictions over justice, and therefore favors rules of evidence predicated on simplistic views of cognition. Given the uses to which they get put, bad epistemologies are not culturally innocent. The phenomenologist Alfred Schutz pointed out that our sensual memories, such as that of the eyewitness, fade quite quickly, but they also get idealized according to social norms, and in doing so they actually become more vivid (even if false); they become something that one can hold on to. Language plays a decisive role in this process: we articulate our experiences...This may help to explain how social stereotypes, which we articulate in speech, infect eyewitness testimony. Or consider the fact, now widely known, that the web of norms and expectations that get conveyed in conversations with social workers and other therapeutic professionals can implant false memories in people—most wrenchingly, about child abuse. Through social typifications in language, our memories get bent toward whatever is allowed or encouraged by authoritative voices or by the larger swirl of democratic opinion.” (147-148).

I have wondered how the legal system will correct for the fallibility of our human memory, if it ever will. People misremember their personal experience on 9/11, with conviction. I was four, and I have no memory of that day, but I’m certain I have plenty of other memories that are not. Any memory is bent in some way when it’s encoded in your brain with incomplete input. Maybe Brian Williams wasn’t lying after all.

On depression

His discussion of depression (165-166) bothers me. I think he grossly oversimplifies it and seems to say that depression is a scapegoat and excuse for our external problems in the real world; that we can blame neurotransmitters as a cheap out instead of our actions or circumstances. I’m reading between the lines a bit here, but I think that’s what he’s suggesting. My layman’s opinion is that depression is very much about both the internal/chemical and the external/environmental. It’s similar to how I’d say it’s not nature versus nurture, it’s nature and nurture. I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, though. I bet if we had a conversation I’d better understand where he’s coming from and what he means.

On gambling

The gambling stuff (90-107) is fascinating. Disturbing, really. Addiction By Design is the book he draws from, and I won’t reproduce it here (a) because I’m running out of steam and (b) my third-degree take would be worse than the first two, anyway.

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Good book. Would’ve liked to book club it.