In Wanting, Luke Burgis writes,
One hundred years ago, there was a much wider gap in knowledge between someone who had a doctoral degree and someone who didn’t. Today, with the world’s information at nearly everyone’s fingertips, the knowledge gap between people with a great amount of formal education and those with less has narrowed.
. . .Today value is largely mimetically driven rather than attached to fixed, stable points (like college degrees). This has created opportunities for anyone who can stand out from the crowd. This has positive and negative consequences.
We used to think of expertise as embedded in prestigious institutions. But attachment to a prestigious institution no longer guarantees expertise.
Another concept that Burgis introduced to this reader is the self-licking ice cream cone. This phrase was coined by Peter Worden of NASA to refer to an institution whose main purpose is sustaining itself, having lost sight of its higher mission.
Peacetime armies tend to degenerate into self-licking ice cream cones. The CDC and other bureaucracies that were supposed to help us deal with the virus turned out to be self-licking ice cream cones.
Harvard University once had a higher mission of selecting and training leaders for politics and business. But Harvard has degenerated into a self-licking ice cream cone.
We need new and better institutions.
I recommend Stanislaw Lem’s His Master’s Voice for an insightful depiction of a self-licking ice cream cone in action.
“The book can be viewed on many levels: as part of the social science fiction genre criticizing Cold War military and political decision-making as corrupting the ethical conduct of scientists; as a psychological and philosophical essay on the limitations of the human mind facing the unknown; or as a satire of “men of science” and their thinking. The critique of the idea of ‘pure science’ is also a critique of the positivist approach: Lem argues that no scientist can be detached from the pressures of the outside world. The book is deeply philosophical, and there is relatively little action; most of the book consists of philosophical essays, monologues and dialogues.”
Today, with the world’s information at nearly everyone’s fingertips, the knowledge gap between people with a great amount of formal education and those with less has narrowed.
Gone the other way, in some cases; the formally educated filled with poor doctrine?
Maybe it has been all along, to some extent. Religious leaders were usually the best educated in a community; but often held at arms length for problem solving of a practical nature. Many advances in the physical sciences were done by men with little formal training; maybe it helps not to be hidebound by current orthodoxy.
The self-licking ice cream cone sounds like the same idea as Jerry Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy. https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
Or Hoffer
“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
― Eric Hoffer, The Temper of Our Time
The gap has lessened for the usual reasons, but it has also lessened because Ph.D.’s are expected to be hyper specialists rather than general experts in their field. Yes, there was some specialization back then, but physics doctorates could more readily discuss their methods and ideas with each other than today, especially if you are in certain subfields. The same is true for economics. Just listenting to the older gen of economists (Arrow, Friedman, North, Baumol, vs. those under 50) you marvel at how well read they were.
Furthermore, there are a lot more Ph.Ds today, with standards being abysmally low at the bottom quarter of all Ph.D. granting institutions. (Lower still if you look at Ph.D.s worldwide).
And this before noting all the joke Ph.D. in Women’s Studies, etc. Not exactly comparable to the Cavendish lab at Cambridge or Goettingen in 1920s-30s Germany in Physics are they? Even from the Ivies.
“Harvard University once had a higher mission of selecting and training leaders for politics and business” . . . and the professions (law, medicine, the ministry)!
The time when the residential university was a world away from daily business life where a group of students were roughly struggling with the same “questions” at the same time with professors to push them to organize their thoughts and regulate their emotions when dealing with principles and ideas has been and gone. Foregoing the decline in scholarship, just the intrusion of the outside world with the internet, television and ease of mobility to “town” on a week night has destroyed the “world away” environment.
But this I think is the real change that is/has coming to college “education”.
–Econtalk podcast with economist Ed Leamer, April 13, 2020
No longer is “Mr. Memory” a element of being educated. The knowledge is out there, but if you can’t, as Matt Ridley put it, bring ideas together to “have sex” to solve new problems, you are falling behind. And this problem solving isn’t an element of the college experience. Learning the science behind say, how HVAC works, i.e., becoming a thermodynamic energy specialist, can just as easily cause the student to become educated in the sense of discipline of intellect, regulation of emotions and establishment of principles.
In reality, schooling in the US became more about transfer of knowledge than real education which is a training of the mind. Knowledge acquisition, at least until the test, is easy to test, works with machine-readably multiple choice. As Ezra Pound observed: “Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.” Even the vaunted college experience of the 1960s could only prepare a student to become educated quicker than the cooler climes of the working world, but both avenues are only open to those who “insist on knowing” and thinking.
Information is not Knowledge
Knowledge is not Wisdom
Wisdom is not Understanding
On the matter of “new” “Institutions,” refer again to the insights of Carroll Quigley in his classic “The Evolution of Civilizations” (still available at Liberty Fund) describing how “institutions” evolve from the “instrumentalities” or facilities that societies develop to deal with particular needs or objectives.
The operations of those facilities occur through the relationships of individuals and the relationships themselves take on a life and priorities of their own to the point (Institutionalization) where they take own objectives of their own, detracting from or displacing functions of the facility, reducing its effectiveness as an institution.
A prime example is our “Educational System” and the political (particularly fiscal) relationships intertwined in the operations. At some levels we are seeing the beginnings of attempts at new facilities, re-aligned to some of the former objectives.
Post-Secondary “education” presents problems of selecting functions for “new” facilities and some better understanding of what and how the current dominant functions have come to be what they are. The existing relationships (and their operations) are easily observed.
Worden criticizes NASA for being terrible at their core mission but experts at defending their political leverage and funding. Kling says universities are similar. You can add the Department of Education, the CDC, and I’m sure plenty of other government entrenched bureaucracies.
This is a pattern: parasitic bureaucracies are terrible delivering the value they are supposed to deliver, but experts at defending their leverage and funding against threats.
What are you going to do? Threaten to take away their political leverage and funding, which is the very thing they are experts at thwarting?
I would deal with this issue by instituting a sunset law, so that there can no longer be any government institutions with permanent or even long term tenure. To the extent that institutions like Harvard or CDC or NASA have long term value, let them be private foundations without any permanent claim to government funding or leverage; and back that policy up by writing the sunset law into the Constitution. While we’re at it, do away with administrative law so that Congress has to read and pass every detailed regulation that is imposed on us. Hopefully this will keep Congress so busy that they’ll feel the need to cut back on that burden rather than add more to it.
The Republic of Venice developed a mitigation to the “ingrained bureaucracy” in the functions of essential facilities by systems of limitations of service and rotation in the make-up or composition of their operating relationships.
The usual complaints include impairment of efficiency and effectiveness (which occurs with the ossification by “institutionalization” anyway) and the loss of presumed “expertise” (which, if it is acquired, declines as successive careerists act to mitigate “threats” from incoming personnel or loss of “turf.”).
Universities are (at their best) curators of information, acting as filters. With more information than ever in existence the value of curators is higher than ever. That is why someone can now make a living making short (5-10 min) videos on paleontology despite all that information being accessible on YouTube. Where universities have vailed is failing to curate information, to separate the wheat from the chaff and they have steadily become ‘pass on some variant of what I learned’ instead of ‘figure out what is useful in this body of knowledge and pass that on’.
“We need new and better institutions.”
But if this march towards self-licking cone is inevitable, do you build institutions that self-destruct after X years? Or what?