You know nothing, Jon Snow

Information is a nice thing. The title of this post comes from George Martin’s saga A Song of Ice and Fire. For those living in another planet, HBO’s Game of Thrones is based in these books. Jon Snow is a character whose entire life revolves around the concept that there are things he doesn’t know that later he must face and conquer to preserve mankind and stuff. Yes, that awesome. Now, Jon Snow does know nothing, therefore one may think he’s an idiot, but he’s not. Jon Snow is, on the contrary, one of the cleverest characters in the book, considering his young age and strong morals and the fact that there’s some really weird stuff going down in Westeros. So, can you know nothing and still be smart? Well, your school teacher may tell you that you can’t, but considering the state of the art of telecommunications, everything revolving around our educational system is based in a misconception.

I witnessed the birth of the internet as a social tool. Before the internet we, junior high students at that time, had to write essays about different subjects in school, and it was basically a hand written copy-paste from paper books. Then the internet came and we were prohibited to copy this information from Wikipedia or Encarta, yet we could without any scolding copy it from our paper books. The educational system was designed to make you digest the information by repetition, in this case the repetition of writing everything down. Time has gone by and we still consider using information from the internet somewhat cheating. Our children are being forced to learn information rather than methods for digesting it and for some stupid reason everything does not revolves around digital information. And this could halt down the world just as bad as religious fundamentalism. We are not leaping into the cloud yet.

There’s no way that someone in the world will ever consume all of the internet content and memorize it, yet I do know people that can search and eat through data in a way that you may think impossible. Recently Watson kick the crap out of everyone in Jeopardy, and Watson is not a person, is a computer. Watson knows nothing, literally, but he won, how so?

If I ask you a question regarding a static event, you will look into your brain for the answer, and your brain could lie, could be busy with more important things, and the credibility of the question will be based mostly in your reinforcement. Let me explain, if I ask you: when did the WTC was attacked? You will know the answer because it has been continuously reinforced through discussions, events, publicity and popular culture. But if I ask you what was the name of the Pilot of the first plane, your brain will fail you, unless that pilot had the name of a strongly related piece of data connected to you (your father’s name, your name, a funny joke). Now, if I ask a 15 year old geek, he could find the answer in seconds by googling the name of a 9/11 movie on IMDB and seeing the role a famous actor played. Who is smarter? Watson is.

Our educational system has to understand that our children will always know nothing, but they can handle it. The difference between looking in your brain and looking in the web makes no difference nowadays. Enter: Wolfram Alpha. Wolfram Alpha is far from being a perfect or even functional product, but it’s a perfect example for this. The thing about Wolfram Alpha is, just like Jon Snow, it knows nothing. Wolfram Alpha computes in real time your questions and delivers an approximate answer. Funny that a million dollar product can’t do what a 12 year old can. The human brain has the ability to run through problems in a non-deterministic way that is out of reach, right now, for computers. You may be thinking I’m contradicting myself, I just praised Watson! Yes, but let us roll Watson over to Who Wants to be a Millionaire… it’s basically the same idea, yet it would take months of work to change the game format. But if you take a teenager with a laptop to both shows, he will kick the crap out of anyone, just like Watson, and we didn't invest millions of dollars on him. Actually, we called him a cheater and accused him of plagiarism.

Our schools instead of pushing this limit in data interpretation are stuck in a monkey-see monkey-do format. We don’t need to memorize anything at all. Our mail is in the cloud, so is our true knowledge. You don’t believe me? Check your social feed after an important event. Suddenly everyone becomes a sports analyst, a political activist or an art critic. These people, you, they reach out and grab the digested information, and in a matter of seconds concludes a strong and solid position regarding any subject; a subject they knew nothing about minutes past. Sure, many of them are idiots, but some of them do have very good arguments. Of course they do, someone had them first and they just had to agree.

The issue is the formula. Today the educational system is focused in a problem-to-solution approach. The system gives you a problem to solve, and make you work your way to the answer to that problem that already exists. Then, from that problem, you elaborate the analogy to similar problems, to which you could use your given answer. But what if work it the other way around? Just like physics or logic and math. Everything in math is based in axioms, the basis of knowledge. And through there you evolve your idea to create a complete model. The wrong part here is that most natural problems in life are instantly resolved, and are not problems to begin with. A problem is only a problem if you don’t know the solution. The natural way to see them is a direct consequence.

My point is: we don’t need to ask our kids to memorize things, we need to ask them to create an opinion and explore, to interpret. We don’t need them to solve physics problems about stupid skiers and boxes moving around. We should teach them the very basics and elaborate their models and ability to extend them to stupid skiers and boxes moving around. And when they have the basics don’t go back over and over again, then we enhance the ease of access to this once natural and simplistic approach to information. I know how a differential equation works, and mi ability for using Matlab is far more important than the arithmetic techniques I used during three months of my life to solve them. I’d rather hire someone who can find the answer to anything in 1 minute than someone who knows a little about a particular subject but it takes him forever to come up with new ideas. And like these there are a million examples of wasted time. We are not running, and we can be flying.

We should never rule out specializations and the ability to internalize information, but just as your computer that has a cache, ram, hard drive and they’re slower as they grow in size we have our memory, what we save and what we can look for. The thing is that we can look for is infinite.

So, my friend, if you know nothing, you can still be Jon Snow.

okbye!