Learning

Hard Learning, Soft Learning

2000 10 14

I'm afraid this file will have to be a place-marker till I can make time to develop it properly. The goal is first to distinguish between hard learning and soft learning: then to review Gregory Bateson's meta levels of learning: learning₀, learning₁,learning₂ ... [Waterman has access to lots of material on the latter meta levels: keep watching, it will be readded. Meantime, curse the forces that knocked it offline in the first place.]

You see the toddler near the stove. "No, no. Hot, hot." If the kid backs off, that's soft learning. Much of the mind's computing for it is done in the fore-brain.

You're talking on the phone. The kid is left to his own devices. He burns his hand off. He never goes near the stove again, won't even come into the kitchen. That's hard learning. The fore-brain isn't needed in the computations.

Some things simply cannot be taught;
they can only be learned.
Robert Anton Wilson

Hard learning may well be fatal. Fatal or not, it may still be effective. Monitor the biosphere: if the same error kills enough species, over time you'll see fewer new species with that error. Nature is not stupid, however "unconscious."

Experience teaches effectually, but brutally.
Frederic Bastiat

If we crash but some few survive, maybe those few will avoid overpopulation, surplus food, environmental degradation, kleptocracy ... in future. If not (but there's a biosphere left), other species will evolve. Maybe there will be some other monitor noticing the degree to which they learn the lesson.

The illiterate of the 21^st century
will not be those who cannot read and write,
but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.
Toffler

---

Notes

Toddler Near the Stove:
I was sixty-three and a half before I discovered a wonderful antecedent to my own example. See Relations Between Parents and Children by Clara Dixon Davidson [from Liberty #235, pp.3-4]. You'll find it at a site for Benjamin R. Tucker.

---

Learning Scrapbook

Existing learning limits new learning.

2005 12 14 I repeat from the file (not yet mounted) on Aptitude:Bucky Fuller told me a story I’ll repeat here. He told me that the Army had some committee that had some slush fund, a few extra million dollars beyond anything needed for payroll, tanks, or ammo. The army committee wanted to use its extra cash benefit genius: the army recognizing that success was somehow correlated to intelligence, and "genius" we all know is some super form of intelligence. Now the military had already influenced millions and millions being donated to MIT, to Stanford RI, etc. This time they wanted to try something different. So the Army used part of its millions to hire consultants to advise them on the disposal of their surplus. The consultants researched the problem. The consultants went to recognized geniuses, people with patents the Army respected for example — maybe some guy with a better transistor — and asked outright: "how come you’re so smart?"
The consultants concluded that the common thread seemed to have something to do with small Liberal Arts colleges and with anonymous instructors, not with tenured faculty. In other words, the Army got more than one answer that went something like, Well, I went to Hamilton College, and I remember one day in Freshman English the instructor, reading Frost’s poem about snow in the woods, said ...
So what did the Army do? They gave another couple of million to MIT and SRI!
Bucky grinned. "They refused to learn what they had learned."

---

2002 03 03Does "God" learn?
Does evolution learn? Do species?
(See how much easier the question is if it’s phrased in lower-case?)
If God is perfect, then what is there for him to learn? Ditto the biosphere, ditto the universe.
Lacking a sophisticated sense of topology as well as cosmology, theology has hitherto been a profession for dimwits (i.e., some of the smartest people in (ahem) civilization).
The idea that learning may be appropriate (and possible) for more than babies undercuts Manichean-Christian dualism more deeply than even Bishop Wilberforce (or Huxley), even William Jennings Bryan (or Darrow), realized.

---

Now, very fast. Learning₀ is learning that the genome has accomplished: the female bird knows how and when to make an egg; the male mosquito knows how and when to find a female ...
Learning₁ is accomplished by the phenotype: how to tie your shoelaces, how to read ...
Learning₂ is as different from Learning₁ as depth is from length. Meta levels are mutually orthogonal. Learning₂ is learning-to-learn. No, it’s not what you do in school: that’s 99.99% Learning₁.
Gregory Bateson’s example is exquisite. Animal handlers had taught a female cetacean a bevy of tricks. Accomplishment, and thereafter, repetitions, were rewarded with fish. One day the handlers wondered if they could get the porpoise to do something new. They signaled for the tricks, got them, but gave no reward. The porpoise got so agitated (wouldn’t you?), they put her back in her pen. After a time her agitation there increased dangerously: they let her back into the big tank: where she performed a series of new behaviors including behaviors never before observed. That porpoise was a Newton.
I attribute Learning₂ to Newton, to Shakespeare: on occasion. Mostly I see such geniuses as having been exceptionally good at Learning₁. I attribute Learning₂ to myself on occasion. (You of course may have your own opinion.) I certainly attribute Learning₂ to Gregory Bateson.
Learning₃ would be learning-to learn-to learn. Who or what does that? "god"! Evolution! (Perhaps.) Perhaps the biosphere itself. Jesus? Jehovah? I doubt it.
I agree with Bateson that schools harm us and themselves by imagining that Learning₂ is what they engage in. Jared Diamond spends his career in Borneo. He has a post at the University of California. He publishes scintillating new theories. Who should take credit? UCA? Or god? Or Diamond (and Darwin) alone?

---

Bateson’s levels of learning and Bateson’s soft vs. hard learning also get mentioned at Macroinformation. [links not yet added] I’ll be giving them more and better treatment there before I return to make many improvements here, much of the two sites destined eventually to merge.

---

There’s always one important question in evolution:Will learning take place in time?