The Anti-Education ERA by James Paul Gee

Author:James Paul Gee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2013-09-22T04:00:00+00:00

14

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When Not to Trust Experts

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IT IS OFTEN SAID THAT ONE AREA IN WHICH MANY humans are intellectually challenged is mathematics. Consider the mental addition problem below:

What is one thousand plus forty?

Now add another thousand to that,

And thirty more,

Plus one thousand,

Plus twenty

Plus a thousand,

And finally an additional ten.

When they try to do this problem in their heads, the majority of people arrive at the answer 5,000. The correct answer is 4,100. When I first saw this problem, I did it in my head over and over again and always came up with the answer 5,000. I just could not see how it added up to 4,100. Many humans, me included, are not good at mentally keeping track of decimal places. In frustration, I picked up a pencil and did the problem on a piece of paper. Then I readily saw that the answer was 4,100 and was amazed at how clearly it had appeared to be 5,000 when I did it in my head rather than on paper. Now it was obvious that the answer was 4,100.

This shows, however, that humans are not bad at math. Indeed, they are good at math if you let them use a pencil or a calculator and don’t ask them to do it all in their heads. The genius of human beings was and is the invention and use of tools to make themselves smarter. It is misleading to talk about human intelligence and think only of unaided humans. Humans are tool users. The real unit of analysis for intelligence ought often to be human + tool. If you want to know how much a human can lift, pair them with a forklift. If you want to know how much information they can store, pair them with a computer. If you want to know how far they can see, pair them with a telescope.

There is a name for the ways in which knowledge and ability can be shared between a human mind and a tool. It is called “distributed cognition.” The ability to see far is distributed (shared) between the eye and the telescope; each does part of the job and together they are powerful. The knowledge of mathematics is shared between the human and the calculator, and they can be powerful together, as well.

Human + tool is a winning combination. Part of what makes humans stupid is being left alone without tools or without collaborations with other people (people can be “tools” for each other). In many cases, we can transform human performance when we invent a new tool to share the job with the human mind and body. Humans certainly can plow a field a lot better with a plow than with their hands. Because this is so, it would not be correct to claim humans are not good “plowers.” They are good at inventing and using plows and so, in reality, humans are good “plowers.”

The human ability to build tools really took off when we learned to build tools to build tools.

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