Review of "Surpassing Ourselves" - A profound vision of a problem solving culture

My recent review of Carl Berieter and Marlene Scardamalia's wonderful 1993 book "Surpassing Ourselves" on Amazon. 

It is about how the underlying concept of expertise needs to be rescued from our inaccurate commonsense epistemology and  from the negative connotations of speciallization and elitism and instead applied more broadly to processes and groups to make our education and culture in general become more supportive of better thinking and problem solving.  It builds from the individual psychology of ability, creativity, and wisdom to the application of the same principles to groups and culture.

http://www.amazon.com/review/R35GNAAFEFWRF1/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

This is a remarkable book: deep in its insights, prophetic in its foresight, and profound in its implications. The most amazing thing is that this book was published in 1993, the same year the first commercial browser became available. That was long before science writers had popularized the research on expertise and long before most people had any idea what sort of thing a "social network" might be. Yet this book captures some of the most promising ideas of the modern information age, such as the use of technology to facilitate knowledge-building communities and the possibility of a wider problem solving culture. Having only the relatively limited technology examples of the time to draw from by today's standards, such as desktop computers with local databases, the authors express their vision in terms of concepts and processes rather than getting caught up in the details of technology. That turns out to be what makes this book most useful I think, because it makes the arguments very general.

A lot of my enjoyment of this book is admittedly because I had come to many of the same conclusions independently and felt reassured to see the same ideas expressed so eloquently. I do think they get a lot right here and that their core concepts have only become more plausible and more important over time since the book was written.

The driving themes of this book all revolve around a single idea: an expanded concept of expertise. I think this is a bigger leap of faith for most people than is at first obvious. Expertise has come to have very strong connotations in popular culture with specialization and elitism, which is exactly the opposite of the message in this book. The book is about how everyone can benefit from what we know about expertise, and how necessary it is to have schools and a broader culture suited to solving increasingly complex and difficult problems. It is not at all about specialization or elitism.

The disconnect between the expanded concept of expertise and the popular is not just about the politics and economics of specialization. It is also about how the research on expertise is interpreted. For practical reasons, most expertise research has focused on the difference between novices and high performers in a given domain and how much time and deliberate practice is required to make that journey. The authors recognize that body of work and draw from it, but they also recognize, critically, that there are other ways to look at expertise. We can also compare experienced high performers with experienced low performers. And we can compare novices who later become high performers with novices who later become experienced low performers.

The authors expand and elaborate on the concept of expertise in several ways:

1. Think of expertise not as an end state of ability but as an ongoing process of knowledge acquisition at increasingly high levels of performance rather than as an end state of high performing relative to other people.

2. Think of the expertise process as being a cycle of learning at one level until it requires less cognitive effort, and then reinvesting the surplus cognitive effort in reformulating the questions and addressing them at a higher level of difficulty and complexity, always working at the edge of our current ability.

3. Think of experts as people who actively engage in the process of expertise rather than as high performers, so we have expert (or "expert-like") learners even when they are novices.

4. Think of expertise as something that is done by groups as well as individuals.

5. Think of creativity as a particular kind of expertise, where we take greater leaps and risks in working at the edge of our competence and in building and drawing on our knowledge of what options are most promising.

6. Think of wisdom as another particular kind of expertise, drawing on our knowledge of human beings and what sorts of things are most promising in human lives.

The result is a vision of individual ability, education, and culture that is profoundly progressive in what it takes on, nothing less than creating the conditions for every student and citizen to either become or participate constructively with expert learners, to everyone's benefit, resulting in a broader culture of problem solving rather than one of stagnant political and philosophical stances. This is a 1993 vision for the challenges that beset us today, asking us to make better use of technology we already have available at this point, even though we did not at the time the book was written.

The authors recognize that even in 1993, most of these ideas were known and accepted by many educators, but they were very rarely put into practice effectively. The authors theorize that this is because of how self-sustaining the usual educational systems and in comparison how much constant vigilance and effort is required on the part of teachers and administrators to maintain a different sort of environment, what they call a "second order environment" that sustains the process of expertise for both individuals and groups.

One valuable prototype for second order environments is the research community, in which shared objectives and various intrinsic social rewards drive the team members to work together to increasingly more knowledge of their subject and tacking increasingly more difficult problems.

Compare this self-sustaining, actively learning expertise process with the simple use of technology to connect people to share knowledge. The difference is profound. Simply using technology to connect more people has some limited value, but it is a long way from the expertise process. The authors predicted this long before the "Personal Learning Network" became a promising but so often unimpressive reality. The gap between connecting people and knowledge bases, and people actually striving to make increasingly better use of available resources can be huge, and that is what the authors of "Surpassing Ourselves" identified in 1993, the way we use the technology and the way we communicate is critical as well, we can't just connect ourselves and our databases and expect to use all that potential effectively without facilitating and maintaining the process of expertise.

Does the term "expertise" itself limit our ability to make better use of these ideas because of its negative connotations? The authors point out how terms like "excellence" and "quality" have often been used for essentially the same idea, but those have their own misleading or easily abused connotations and limitations as well, and they lack the depth of individual psychological research found in the expertise literature. In the end, what we call it doesn't matter so much as whether we understand how it happens and how to create the conditions for supporting it.

Further Reading:

The books of David N. Perkins offer various proposals with a very similar and consistent vision to the one in "Surpassing Ourselves." "Outsmarting IQ" for example offers an expanded vision of individual expertise that in some ways builds on that of "Surpassing Ourselves" by providing a model of expertise as the process of navigating intersecting realms of knowledge, using the principles of far transfer to generalize expertise among domains and identifying some of the conditions for acquiring it. "Smart Schools" suggests a way to transform education along these lines. "Making Learning Whole" looks in more detail at the common process of expert learning at all levels of ability.
Outsmarting IQ: The Emerging Science of Learnable Intelligence
Smart Schools
Making Learning Whole: How Seven Principles of Teaching Can Transform Education

In "Rethinking Expertise," Harry Collins looks more specifically at the social dimension of knowledge underlying the group process of expertise.
Rethinking Expertise

In "Dialogue Gap," Peter Nixon elaborates on what is distinct about the sort of communication that brings out the different knowledge of each individual and in so doing facilitates what "Surpassing Ourselves" considers the group process of expertise, as opposed to simply arguing or conversing on a less constructive level.
Dialogue Gap: Why Communication Isnt Enough and What We Can Do About It, Fast

Maria Konnikova's "Mastermind" explores the role of a specific critical factor in individual process of expertise allowing us to work continually at the edge of our current ability. This is the ability to focus attention in a particular way in order to actively engage our thinking rather than just passively observe the same things in the same way. "Surpassing Ourselves" describes this only in the abstract as actively engaging higher levels of problems, but the concept of mindfulness offers a possible way of modeling the process in more detail.
Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

A lifetime learning approach, more than a course in "critical thinking"

Review of --> Critical Thinking: Learn the Tools the Best Thinkers Use

by Richard Paul

A lifetime learning approach, more than a course in "critical thinking."

I enjoyed this book and got a lot out of it. For such a high level book it isn't easy reading because it requires you to think about your own thinking while you are reading it in order to get full value out of it. If you skip that exercise, in my opinion, you will not appreciate the value of this book. So if you want to grow from what the authors are offering, be prepared to take a long term vision of your own abilities and to do a lot of work. In spite of the somewhat misleading title of this book, it is not really about what most people would call "critical thinking," it is a much deeper and more useful view of thinking abilities in general.

This book presents a relatively accurate (in my opinion) and very usable model of how human reasoning works in practice and how we get better at it. In addition it offers many simple but practical drills for identifying how well you are thinking and what sorts of things would be good to work on. So I do recommend this book.

Having gotten that positive impression from my reading, I also noticed the many very negative reviews here and that made me pause and think a bit. It may be helpful to expand on what I think it good about this book and what the negative reviewers are seeing.

(...)

Link to complete review on Amazon

Book Review: David Perkins' must-read brilliant map of human thinking ability and its improvement

Review of David Perkins’ “Outsmarting IQ: The Emerging Science of Learnable Intelligence,” 1995, Free Press.

Link to review on Amazon --> http://www.amazon.com/review/R3AYGZV7G7AUTO/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

Profound Thinking By Example

This is the single best book I’ve come across on the potential for improving human thinking ability. I give it my highest recommendation; I think it should be read by everyone interested in problem solving, decision making, and human abilities in general. It is amazingly broad in its coverage of data, profoundly deep in its treatment of specific lines of relevant evidence, and ingenious in its vision of the future.

What impressed me most about this book is that the author, David Perkins, demonstrates the power of deep reflective thinking by his own example in the organization and treatment of evidence throughout this book, in his critical treatment of his own evidence and ideas, in his creative original ideas, and in his effective consolidation and filtering of massive amounts of research. Showing how asking the right questions can help us understand seemingly contradictory data about intelligence, Perkins gives an engaging plausibility proof for the kind of reflective intelligence he argues for in this book.

The Concept of Realms of Thinking

To give away the ending, the book culminates in a model of problem solving ability based on the metaphor of a map. Human thinking ability results from learning our way around. Navigation is fundamental to all sorts of human thinking. Perkins suggests that all intelligent human thinking results from navigation of various kinds, which can be thought of in terms of levels of realms. Perkins organizes the realms in an overall map or “mindscape” from the lowest level of specific contexts of thinking to the highest level dealing with thinking itself.

In learning to solve problems we not only learn our way around physical realms geographically, but we learn our way around specific contexts we find ourselves in such as the realm of buying a house or the realm of choosing a career. We learn our way around different situations like resolving conflicts or making purchases in general. We learn our way around professional fields like law, physics, and mathematics, and areas of technical expertise such as probability and statistics, game theory, and business. We learn our way around the use of tools. We learn our way around various basic kinds of challenges like problem solving, decision making, planning, and learning. Finally, at Perkins’ top level, which he calls thinking dispositions, and we learn our way around thinking itself in terms of the qualities and attitudes that make it more or less effective.

Perhaps the central thrust of this book is that in organizing human problem solving areas into navigational realms, Perkins is not just providing a training map for learning problem solving skills a million different areas, he is also making a case for the learning the critical skills of navigation itself.

Perkins’ realms are very similar to the traditional concept of domains of expertise, but different in one critically important way: realms emphasize the central skills of navigation rather than just the use of repetition or rote memorization or even just the use of deliberate practice. The concept of realms makes it more explicit that all areas of ability that we learn share some commonality in terms of key skills and attitudes we need for navigation itself.

It is learning to be a better navigator; in all realms of human thinking and not just certain subset of them; that is the central message of Perkins’ book. This is encapsulated in his concept of “reflective intelligence.” Reflective intelligence is the aspect of intelligence that can be most improved for the greatest effect across the range of all realms of thinking. Perkins reviews a number of different attempts to improve human thinking and makes various suggestions based on their results regarding specific kinds of changes that can be made to educational curricula in order to teach children to be better navigators in all areas.

Getting Perspective on Intelligence through 3 Dimensions

In giving away Perkins’ final model, I’ve skipped over two very important and interesting aspects: his argument for the model he uses and for the prospect of learnable intelligence through better navigation, and his predictions for important areas of the evolution of learnable intelligence.

The bulk of Outsmarting Intelligence deals tightly with the subject of the title, the legacy of how intelligence has been envisioned and researched so far. Perkins deals in equally deep, reflective, careful, and often fascinating manner with: (1) the evidence for a single common problem solving ability from psychometric data, (2) the evidence showing us how novices think differently from experts, and (3) the evidence showing us what happens when we try to learn general skills and rules for solving problems in general and how computers solve problems.

From these three bodies of evidence, Perkins derives three corresponding dimensions of human intelligence: (1) a neural intelligence dimension which respects what psychometric data gets right and is most closely associated with what we typically assume IQ tests are measuring, (2) an experiential intelligence dimension which respects what expertise research data gets right, and (3) a reflective intelligence dimension which respects what we have learned about metacognition and from the various programs that have tried to teach thinking skills in general.

Neural intelligence, Perkins concludes, is a real dimension of human ability and very important in some situations especially, but it is simply the wrong target for attempts at improvement for various reasons.

Experiential intelligence represents most of our actual problem solving abilities in practice.
Faced with novel and complex situations where we have no relevant experience, our neural intelligence gives us our best chance at solving the challenges presented. But once we have been acquiring experience in an area, a difference in expertise will make people better problem solvers in that area than will a difference in general intelligence.

So experiential intelligence and neural intelligence work together to make us the generally good problem solvers that we are in most situations: neural intelligence helps us deal with novelty and complexity, and experiential intelligence helps us acquire the knowledge and skills we need to deal with specific domains.

So the obvious question is: what role does reflective intelligence play and why does Perkins consider it so important?

The Significance of Reflective Intelligence

Perkins reviews various lines of research into the wide variety of situations where otherwise powerful problem solving abilities seem to fail us in systematic ways. He looks at social psychological effects, cognitive shortcuts, and so on, similar to other reviews of blind spots in human thinking by many other authors except that Perkins attempts to characterize these foibles specifically in terms of side effects of our experiential intelligence.

Perkins suggests that the human mind is mostly akin to a pattern seeker and pattern-driven problem solving engine and as a result its weaknesses are also those we would expect from a pattern-driven process. The human mind often tends to be hasty, narrow, fuzzy, and sprawling.
HASTY. The goal of a pattern seeking intelligence is to find the right response that most closely matches the current situation rather than making an exhaustive search. As a result, our experiential intelligence tends to mislead us to jump to hasty conclusions when the situation is an unusual variation of a known situation.

NARROW. As a result of efficiently seeking patterns we have already seen, the domain-specificity of expertise tends to make us think in narrow ways when we think we have grasped the situation rather than to broaden our thinking.

FUZZY. Part of the power of pattern-matching is that we can so often generalize the lessons from one situation to another similar one. In situations where the appearance is very similar but the underlying principles are different, again our pattern matching effectiveness leads to mistakes: we overgenerallize from our experience.

SPRAWLING. When a pattern-seeking process does not have a single clear path to follow, as often happens in very complex situations, it will tend to follow one path after another and keep switching back and forth rather than working toward an overall goal.

Experiential intelligence, Perkins concludes, is an elegant system for long-term moderate success. When situations are new to us or complex, we get help from our neural intelligence and we have also learned various tricks for getting around our weaknesses, and these are largely accounted for in reflective intelligence. Reflective intelligence represents realms where we think about our own thinking in order to avoid settling on hasty conclusions, to broaden our thinking beyond the initial scope we assumed, to use precision to distinguish similar looking but different things, and to stay on track when notice we are sprawling.

This explains why reflective intelligence is so important to us in tricky situations where we have inadequate experience and where experience misleads us. But it also helps explain, in Perkins’ view, why reflective intelligence is so important for us to learn to be better thinkers in general. Neural intelligence does not replace experiential intelligence, it tends to reinforce it.

When we don’t have experience, neural intelligence helps us grasp the situation, but when we do have experience, we tend to use our neural intelligence to reinforce what our experience already tells us. That’s one big reason why genius is not simply high IQ. That’s why reflective intelligence is so important, it is the tool we use to remind us of the weak points in our own thinking and help us compensate for them regardless of our experience and general intelligence. The abilities and traits we need in order to overcome our blind spots are learnable. A large and crucial aspect of intelligence is learnable.

Existing Approaches: How they Compare

There are various approaches to teaching reflective intelligence, and Perkins reviews the best known and the best studied among them such as Project Intelligence, Reuven Feuerstein’s Instrumental Enrichment, Edward de Bono’s CORT, and Matthew Lipman’s Philosophy for Children, and others, reviewing their approaches and their results and comparing and contrasting them in order to get a sense of what it takes to enhance reflective intelligence.

One of the things that distinguishes Perkins as a deep reflective thinker himself is that he anticipates, researches, and deals fairly with opposition to his arguments. The very idea of learnable intelligence has in the past come under attack from several angles such as past failures of various programs which tried to teach improved thinking, the implications of expertise and psychometric research data, the apparent weakness of general methods for problem solving, and the challenge of transfer between learning domains. Perkins addresses each of these concerns in turn, resulting in a very persuasive case for the very real improvability of intelligence through changes in education.

The Future of Learnable Intelligence

Toward the end of the book, Perkins reveals the ingenuity of his vision through his discussion of several areas for the future evolution of reflective intelligence: areas which ended up being (remarkable for a book written in 1995) accurate predictions of areas that have since become central areas of interest for science and human improvement in general:

1. Intelligence can become distributed -- good thinking depends upon artifacts to offload the limitations of our attention and memory, and we can use our symbol systems and tools to help us keep track of things we could not track individually. This is a wonderful general description of how we are attempting to use computer networks to help us manage complexity (as opposed to some of the more superficial books in recent years which imply that networks somehow replace rather than enhance individual thinking).

2. Intelligence can embrace complexity -- through information visualization tools, effective use of classification, tagging, and finding things by meaning, consolidation, filtering, the mathematical tools for finding large scale patterns in complex phenomena, and by eliminating narrow information silos, we can use our intelligence to solve increasingly complex problems.

3. Intelligence can be dialectical -- this means raising the level of thinking from lower level more concrete concerns to higher order patterns by recognizing the properties specific to complex systems. Perkins offers Peter Senge’s “The Fifth Discipline” and Murray Gell-Mann’s “The Quark and the Jaguar” as exemplifying ways of understanding dialectical intelligence.

Perkins covers a massive amount of data about intelligence and problem solving, summarizes it effectively, and applies it to a practical, powerfully supported, and exceptionally understandable approach to improving human life by teaching ourselves to be more intelligent. Thinking well in general is an unnatural act but we can learn to do it. All that is left is for us to overcome the ideological and political barriers. This book would make a wonderful, gentle manifesto for that grand effort.

Book Review: "The Shallows" by Nicholas Carr

Beautifully written reminder that each medium has its tradeoffs
by Todd I. Stark

Amazon review --> http://www.amazon.com/review/R2Z3CVIADXIWI1/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

When I first came across this book I noticed that a lot of my friends on social media were expressing disgust or boredom with the thesis of "Is the Internet frying our brain?" After all, who but a curmudgeon would claim that the most vital and transformative technology of our time might have a dark side? Especially at a time when leading edge educators are working furiously to bring their field up to date by incorporating the best of the latest technology in a way that improves education.

Against this background Carr's book seems reminiscent of those poor backward folks who opposed the printing press. As the brilliant and funny curmudgeon Neil Postman once said about himself, Carr is indeed playing the role of the Luddite in some ways. Still, neither Postman nor Carr were trying to dismantle the Internet or just shriek an alarm with their work. They are trying to help us understand something important. With that in mind, let's take a more careful look at this book. The Shallows is a thoroughly and broadly researched and beautifully written polemic which I found to represent two different things. First, it is a media analysis and culture critique. Second it is a pessimistic theory about the overall effect of web media on our thinking ability over time.

The first aspect will be a delight for those interested in the evolution of human cognition, those fascinated with media effects per se, the traditionally minded book scholars, and assorted geezers. It is a very satisfying cultural media critique very much in the spirit of Marshall Macluhan and Neil Postman even though it lacks Macluhan's showmanship or Postman's remarkable ever-present humor. It was this aspect made the book a worthwhile reminder for me, introduced me to some fascinating recent cognitive science work supporting the view that different media encourage different ways of thinking, and helped tie together a number of broad ideas for me regarding the evolution of human cognition and the influence of the tools we use.

The second aspect, for the more technically psychologically minded, and the more alarmist and pessimistic part, is a clever argument for competing and mutually destructive habits of attention allocation: (1) the nimble web browsing mind that constantly reserves attention and working memory for making navigational decisions and is exposed to massive amounts of information, and (2) the sustained attention ability that we learn with great effort over time for the purpose of reading and reflective thinking.

The second aspect is the one that most of the articles and marketing have been pushing, a thesis I'll call "Help! The Internet is Frying My Brain!" Carr argues that the nimble web mind better exploits our more natural "bottom-up" or stimulus driven attention mechanisms, which is why we find it so powerful. He also argues that the undistracted reflective mind is far less natural but has unique advantages for human cognition. So it is worth retaining, he argues, _and_ we need to keep working deliberately at it in order to retain it. That alone would be an important point. Thus far, I think the attention argument is completely consistent with the media critique, and supports it. None of this so far says that our brain is being fried by the Internet.

Now comes the trickier part, and the part of Carr's thesis that to me is most controversial, the two ways of using attention may not only compete but may actually be mutually destructive. Carr offers his own experience and that of several other serious book readers to show that they are having increasing trouble reading for prolonged periods. Carr says that there is neuroscience data showing that this may be the result of web reading rather than just advancing age or other less ominous explanations.

This "fried brain" thesis is the part that is either revolutionary, or becomes the fatal flaw in The Shallows, depending on whether or not it is true. So is it true? Does Carr persuade us that not only are we thinking differently with different media (a very strong case I think) but that the Internet is frying our brains?

Today we remember the iconic wise curmudgeon, Socrates, only through his students. That's because old Soc didn't believe in writing. It seems he was a great proponent of contemplative thought and taught that contemplation depends heavily on memory. He thought it would seriously hurt people's memory to rely too much on writing things down. His criticism seems perverse today, even as we remember Soc fondly for his deep reflection and his provocative teaching methods. That's the historical role into which Nicholas Carr has cast himself, the media critic who invokes wisdom and reflection and plays them against seemingly unstoppable cultural trends towards greater convenience, efficiency, and information distribution.

Carr is the guy who wants to warn us about the hazards of writing on our memory. About the damage that the printing press will do to culture. About how TV will change us for the worse. And now about how the Internet will shift our values, instill bad habits, hurt our reading and thinking skills, and even destroy our powers of sustained concentration.

Socrates wasn't entirely wrong even though he bucked a trend that in retrospect was downright silly to oppose. People who don't specifically practice remembering things and instead devote everything to writing do find that they have weaker memories. That's the reason for all those memory courses, the best of which essentially just teach the same methods socrates would have used. The widespread distribution of news did have negative consequences in terms of reinforcing bias and propaganda on a massive scale.

There are some adverse consequences of all the TV watching we do. However none of these things has had the dire consequences that culture critics predicted, we have adapted in turn in some way to each of them, more or less successfully.

So Carr isn't entirely wrong about the tradeoffs involved in using modern technologies. He is not a "Luddite" and he does make a number of valid points.

Carr is not telling us to dismantle the Internet. He fully recognizes the value of technology. He is rather playing Socrates to the modern students. Most people, desperately trying to keep up with the amazing new technologies and learn new ways of getting better information with them will ignore Carr's message pretty much out of hand. "Carr is the only one affected negatively by the Internet, the rest of us are thriving."

Those folks who ignore culture critics out of hand are taking for granted the skills and expertise that many people have cultivated through sheer effort using sustained concentration. They are buying into the attractive fashionable modern viewpoint that just being exposed to a lot of information via technology will make you smart. The majority of people, the ones who go along with that implicit confusion of information and personal knowledge, will indeed lose some of the things we take for granted today. I think Carr is right about that, and that is the most profound message in this book. LISTEN TO IT. Even if you think, with good reason, that it is silly to imagine that using search engines and hyperlinks will hurt your concentration.

Still, the message that the Internet will make us stupid isn't quite right. Writing didn't entirely destroy our memory, it just shifted the habits we need to cultivate to preserve it. It seems like the wisest among us will recognize the value that culture critics like Carr have always had, they will appreciate the detail and care that good media critics like Carr put into their warnings, and they will remember the real tradeoffs between different kinds of media and take responsibility for the cultivation of their own minds.

Just as wise modern students still practice the methods used by Socrates, they will still learn to read and think deeply using books or the electronic equivalent, the wisest will still turn off the TV and other distractions when sustained concentration is called for, and they will understand the difference between various conditions and different kinds of media in general and will use each to its best advantage.

So long as we aren't stupid enough to stop cultivating our individual minds regardless of technology changes, media itself will not make us stupid. Listen to Carr's message, learn it, and then apply it to your use of technology. It's easy to dismiss the claim that the Internet will somehow fry your brain. It's another matter entirely to dismiss the value of cultivating your mind through personal reflection.

Update 5/14/2013:  Dan Willingham had a brief post on this topic.  His view seems fairly close to mine in most respects.  He concludes that sustained attention may not be the skill of greatest importance in the future,  but it may well be the one in shortest supply!

As moderate and reasonable a critique as that seems to me (he does not seem to agree with Carr's more radical point about web tech physically or unavoidably changing our attention) I noticed that some of the comments to his article seem to exemplify the problem.    Some people do seem to see the concern about sustained attention as some sort of old-fashioned culture critique ("you darn kids get off my lawn!"), so much so that they won't bother reading the details of the actual argument.

Dan Willingham: The 21st century skill students really lack


Related background reading:

On the evolution of cognition and symbolic thought (and secondarily, the role of reading):[[ASIN:0393323196 A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness]][[ASIN:0393317544 The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain]]

On reading and the brain:[[ASIN:B003H4RAOU Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention]][[ASIN:0060933844 Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain]]

On the role of tools in cognition:[[ASIN:0195153723 Adaptive Thinking: Rationality in the Real World (Evolution and Cognition Series)]]

On the role of media technology in culture:[[ASIN:0262631598 Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man]][[ASIN:0679745408 Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology]]

On the trend to rising IQ scores in modern times:[[ASIN:0521741475 What Is Intelligence?: Beyond the Flynn Effect]]

On the practical limitations of human working memory:[[ASIN:0061771295 Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long]][[ASIN:0195372883 The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory]]

Good riddance to "Deep Reading?"

My previous post highlighted Nicholas Carr and Clay Shirky's recent books which seem to agree that Internet and Web and related technology are changing our daily habits and also the way we think.

Carr suggests we are gaining a lot but also losing something important. Shirky counters: "good riddance!" to whatever we might be losing.

Maybe it's just a touch of reactionary temperament in me, but for me this brings to mind this sage advice about change:
"Don’t ever take a fence down until you know the reason why it was put up."

I'm not exaggerating Shirky's view, nor is he the only one to hold it, so I think it is worth looking at this question in a little more detail.

What is it that we agree we are losing in order to gain faster, more agile, more network-literate minds, and why does Carr think it is important and Shirky does not?

What's the Argument About?

The essence of Carr's argument as I interpret it is that:

1. Our daily habits, the tools we use, and the ethic with which we use those tools has a considerable shaping influence on the way human beings think.

2. This shaping of our thought by our tools is not an empty metaphor, it has a literal aspect because of the "plastic" nature of the brain that has been discovered in recent decades.

3. Prime examples have been the shift from oral to written culture, the use of maps, the use of clocks, the widespread availability of books, the use of audio and video media, and culminating most recently in mobile constantly online hyperlinked multimedia networking.

4. As each type of media proliferates, the people who use it gain new ways of thinking through new habits, new patterns of attention allocation, new ethics regarding how information and knowledge are related and what it means to be smart and informed.

5. These gains do not generally co-exist with the previous ways of thinking, they greedily force the old ways out. This happens for two kinds of reasons: (1) the economics of production and aquisition of technology, and (2) the plasticity of the brain. Over time our habits carve increasingly deeper ruts that shape the way we think. New habits replace old and new ways of thinking replace old, essentially as a matter of making efficient use of brain tissue.

I think the argument so far is pretty sound, although certainly one could quibble about any of the points. Carr finds examples for which each of these points do seem to legitimately apply.

The example that is most relevant, the one Carr starts with and the one for which he is most dimetrically opposed with Shirky, boils down to the concept of "deep reading."

What is "Deep Reading?"

Deep reading refers to the tradition of reading long, structured written content in an a focused, undistracted manner while using active learning skills. This is not a particularly natural mode for human beings, and so deep reading refers to an ability that requires considerable expertise to be developed. Some reading skills that are naturally difficult must be automatized so we don't have to think about them and can devote precious cognitive resources to thinking about the subject matter.

The cortical resources for maintaining attention on linear written material without allowing distractions to derail us are significant. We all agree on this. Carr makes a point of it and it is also a big part of why Clay Shirky finds web technology to be so freeing. Linear reading is very difficult until you become extremely expert at it. Many people faced against their will with the intellectual ethic of book scholarship have felt the same way Shirky does, that it just isn't worth all the effort to do without the expertise. And furthermore they can't understand why it would be worthwhile to acquire the expertise if it is so difficult and takes so long.

To read effectively, reading has to become second nature so that the basic reading skills are applied without thinking in a matter of milliseconds. Like all forms of expertise, this takes many years of training and most readers probably take that for granted. Some people enjoy the process much more than others. My baby book records my first sentence as an infant as being a complaint: "I can't read!" With my parents help, I put a lot of time and effort into solving that problem, so although I enjoyed the journey, I appreciate why people who don't enjoy that sort of thing find it so intimidating to contemplate crossing that chasm of years of training to get into deep reading.

Why do some people care about Deep Reading?

What deep reading refers to in terms of cognition is "an array of sophisticated processes that propel comprehension and that include inferential and deductive reasoning, analogical skills, critical analysis, reflection, and insight." (Educational Leadership, March 2009, Wolf and Barzillai)

I think Clay Shirky would argue that the above abilities can be gotten, perhaps better, without the difficulties of deep reading. I hope he is right, but Nicholas Carr and I both suspect he would be wrong about that. There's a kind of "no free lunch" argument here I think. Web hyperlinking works so efficiently with our brain and gives us so much of what Shirky calls "cognitive surplus" because it leverages our natural inclination to get distracted by each new thing and then follow it. Rather than finding ways to fight our distractability as we do in deep reading, on the web we let it drive us to explore new things. So we are exploring, hunting and gathering new information. We all agree that this is often a big rush and exposes us to potentially much more diverse information (and people!) in a shorter time than we would ever achieve buried in books in a libary.

The issue at hand is whether we are learning it in the same way as if we were undistractedly reading.

The Key Question

The key technical question upon which the whole argument rests becomes: Is there an added efficiency of web information hunting and gathering providing an available "cognitive surplus" usable as an attention resource that makes it easier to use the metacognitive skills we need for mastery of a subject?

Or conversely do the distractions of that mode of information hunting/gathering prevent us from using those specific metacognitive skills, and force us to think more "shallowly" in some sense?

For me the Carr vs. Shirky debate breaks down to the potential empirical questions generated by the above technical issues.

Is the Real Intelligence in the Network Rather than in Each of Us?

I suppose another way of looking at this is to question whether we really need to acquire deep expertise anymore, whether there is something "old-fashioned" and quaint about expertise itself. Maybe the new online literacy replaces expertise with some other quality that supports human thinking? I think that's intriguing an there are probably some folks who think that way, just as there are people who say that our intelligence can somehow better be transferred into computers or networks with other people rather than embedded in individual minds.

These are interesting speculations, but they seem very hard to reconcile with the mass of learning and expertise research so far. Not that we can't offload our minds from our own brains, I do think that is real possibility, and something we already do to to a great extent. The argument that our tools shape our mind is partly based in this idea of offloading memory from our brain to external tools.

I just don't think it's an entirely good thing to eliminate individual intelligence entirely. I think we still have good use for the processing we do inside our own skulls. Maybe that's where Carr and Shirky really differ most fundamentally? Maybe Shirky really wants to get rid of the individual mind and replace it with a node in a web, similar to the way ants work together in colonies?

Different Experiences with Books

Clay Shirky offers Tolstoy's War and Peace as an example of great literature (though I think it is popularly better known for its length than its literary merit). He says, "boring, too long, and overrated." Why should we care about such quaint things as novels? Although I think Shirky is overly glib on this point, I won't argue it here.

I will however agree completely with Carr that Shirky either isn't what I'm calling a deep reader, or if he has cultivated that ability he chooses not to use it very often anymore at least not on books. "Being able to read" is very different from deep reading. In an interview he admitted to spending his childhood mostly entertained by Gilligan's Island and only much later finding technical books and presumably reading them in a piecewise manner to learn specific practical skills.

Quaint artifacts like myself who spent so much time and effort learning to read deeply and actively striving to understand the mind and knowledge of authors have a different experience of books than people who read in a more passive manner. I don't think there's any doubt of that. So even if War and Peace were something he could appreciate, if he had never developed the expertise for deep reading wouldn't be able to get through it in a manner that really engaged the author as we do in deep reading. Without that different experience of books he may not feel he is missing anything important (that is precisely the point at stake afterall) but I think we all agree that some people do still manage to immerse themselves in a novel and so clearly engage a book differently than Clay Shirky does, and that tradeoff is a key point that Nicholas Carr is making.

Hypnotized!

This reminds me of the situation I discovered when I engaged the hypnosis research years ago. I discovered that there was a big difference in technical theories of hypnosis. Some of them took the phenomena of hypnotic suggestibility for granted and tried to explain them in psyhological terms. Others assumed that the phenomena were faked or pretended and tried to explain that in psychological terms. When it came down to the difference, it was really mostly a matter of whether the researcher responsible for the theory experienced the phenomena themselves or not. Researchers who had interesting experiences with hypnosis knew the phenomena were real and wanted to explain how they arise. Researchers who didn't experience the same thing assumed everyone else must be faking it as well. It turned out from the research that there is a stable trait-like quality, "hypnotizability," that makes the experience of hypnosis very different for different people. Each researcher was originally working to explain their own personal experience, as if it were universal.

The hypnosis story is perhaps not just a metaphor. One of the theories, proposed by researcher Josephine Hilgard, was that hypnosis involves an immersion similar to that found in some kinds of reading.

Deep Reading, Non-Fiction, and Expertise

Deep reading is most certainly not just about immersion in a story, however. Although I've read a small number of novels, each of them made a major impact on me, so for me it seems the experience of immersive fiction is something we should not take lightly, it can be part of a formative process in our development. But although I have a deep respect for literature, I am not primarily a literature geek, I am primarily a non-fiction geek. And for me, that is where I get the most concerned about Shirky's dismissal of deep reading as "old style" literacy.

What deep reading typically means to a non-fiction geek like me is essentially sitting down undistractedly with a book for an hour or so, making a concerted strategic effort to understand the mind of the author, who I assume has knowledge and ways of thinking about the subject at hand that I don't yet have. So the goal of deep reading is to treat a book as if it were a conversation with the author, where I start out confused about the subject, ask questions, look for answers, take notes, keep track of useful other sources (without actually reading them yet!) and in general try to create new representations in my mind regarding the subject matter, using the author as a guide.

This is the central skillset and habit set of the "auto-didact," the person who wants to live a life of self-determined learning. Sure we do browse a lot, and we do learn the skills of hunting and gathering information on the web as well as in books and journals and other people. But, to the critical point regarding Carr's argument, we also develop ways to pull ourselves away from the distractions and focus on learning new things more deeply when we recognize that need. If Carr is right, we are making ourselves increasingly unable to use that option.

The tradition of deep reading says that this kind of process of engaging a book by actively asking questions rather than just passively skimming content is a good thing. And I know from experience, both my own and that of many others, that it is far more difficult to do this in an environment of constant distractions. We just don't have the attention resources, it is too demanding a process and our brain has finite attention capacity.

The expertise research says that it this kind of engagement not only a good thing for learning but absolutely essential for mastering new and different concepts. We don't just pile data into our brain, we have to create new representations of the material by active engagement with it. We know that passively skimming large amounts of related information does not accomplish this. This is the key technical point on which Shirky's glibness about the quaint boring linear mode of reading becomes most dangerous.

I'm not saying it is impossible to become an expert in anything without deep reading. I'm saying that deep reading greatly facilitates the process, and if we lose that ability which Shirky finds quaint, we will indeed have to learn new skills and habits and create a new intellectual ethic to replace it so that we can still acquire deep expertise without deep reading.

Carr's argument is that the shift in media technology will actually change our brains in a way that will make it either impossible or extremely unlikely that we will replace the level of cognitive processing we now enjoy through deep reading. I'm not sure I would go as far as Carr there, but I think we need to be far less glib than Shirky about it, and take the change seriously.

Experts on a subject don't just have more information in their head about a topic. They represent the information differently. That only comes from extended periods of thinking about the subject actively and coming to new insights. That means a particular way of using technology, not just leaving it to chance. No amount of following links to good sources and reading each of them superficially can accomplish what thinking about the material deeply and asking yourself strategic questions can do.

Physical Books Aren't Really So Special, Are They?

I think there are unique qualities to physical books that many of us have learned to exploit particularly well, but that doesn't mean that people can't learn to do similar things with other technologies.

I do think you can, under the right conditions, manage to acquire deep expertise from web technology the way many of us have traditionally done with books, and in some ways it even gives you significance advantages. You have better access to good sources, access to experts, interactive learning technologies, and the potential for quality feedback. These are all advantages of web technology, and some smart, motivated students have learned to make wonderful exemplary use of it.

But organizing the material for yourself and getting your sources together is not enough for real learning. You also have to know when to think about the material you are learning, to ask the right questions to achieve new insights, to use what learning researchers call metacognitive skills to evaluate your own learning and figure out the best thing for you to read or practice next, to find your own weaknesses and figure out how to improve. That's where the scarce attention resources are required, and where we need new habits and a new intellectual ethic to remind us how and where to focus on thinking about the material.

I think the Clay Shirkys of the world probably assume that the unburdening of the mind that comes with efficient use of web technology either allows them to accomplish this in a different way or else renders it obsolete.

And quite obviously people can and do learn many things without deep reading.

One argument is that the sorts of things they are learning may be different, and the depth at which they are mastering them may different. I honestly don't know if that's true, and I don't think Carr has answered the question adequately with the evidence he presents in The Shallows.

I do know for a fact that the unique habits and intellectual ethic of old-fashioned "book scholars" lead to contemplation of a subject in greater depth. And I know that the manner in which we (with vanishingly few exceptions) use web and mobile technology are not at all conducive to that kind of contemplation. Is this nostalgia on my part to find this a little worrying, or is there a meaningful tradeoff going on?

What I don't know is what the real implications of that "depth" are for expertise, intelligence, and problem solving. Is it really just a quaint linear mode of thinking that we are losing in the post-literate age as Shirky suggests, or are we effectively going back to a pre-literate age in some ways by eliminating an essential reflective aspect of our thinking, as Carr tells us?

I don't know, but I suggest the answer might be available in terms of specific empirical questions, so far as we agree on what we think the mind should best be doing. The problem is that the Shirky side and the Carr side may very well have different perspectives on what the mind should really be doing! I think this issue is important enough to keep a conversation open.

Towards a Resolution?
I'll leave you with the intriguing concluding thoughts from (Wolf and Barzillai):


Encouraging Deep Reading Online

Here lies the crucial role of education. Most aspects of reading—from basic decoding skills to higher-level comprehension skills—need to be explicitly taught. The expert reading brain rarely emerges without guidance and instruction. Years of literacy research have equipped teachers with many tools to facilitate its growth (see Foorman & Al Otaiba, in press). For example, our research curriculum, RAVE-O (Wolf, Miller, & Donnelly, 2000), uses digital games to foster the multiple exposures that children need to all the common letter patterns necessary for decoding. Nevertheless, too little attention has been paid to the important task of facilitating successful deep reading online.

The medium itself may provide us with new ways of teaching and encouraging young readers to be purposeful, critical, and analytical about the information they encounter. The development of tools—such as online reading tutors and programs that embed strategy prompts, models, think-alouds, and feedback into the text or browser— may enhance the kind of strategic thinking that is vital for online reading comprehension.

For example, programs like the Center for Applied Special Technology's (CAST) "thinking reader" (Rose & Dalton, 2008) embed within the text different levels of strategic supports that students may call on as needed, such as models that guide them in summarizing what they read. In this way, technology can help scaffold understanding (Dalton & Proctor, 2008). Such prompts help readers pause and monitor their comprehension, resist the pull of superficial reading, and seek out a deeper meaning. For example, in the CAST Universal Design Learning edition of
Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" (http://udleditions.cast.org/INTRO,telltale_heart.html), questions accompanying the text ask readers to highlight words that provide foreshadowing in a given passage; to ponder clues about the narrator as a character in the story; and to use a specific reading strategy (such as visualize, summarize, predict, or question) to better understand a passage.

Well-designed WebQuests can also help students learn to effectively process information online within a support framework that contains explicit instruction. Even practices as simple as walking a class through a Web search and exploring how Web pages may be biased or may use images to sway readers help students become careful, thoughtful consumers of online information. Instruction like this can help young minds develop some of the key aspects of deep reading online.

The Best of Both Worlds

No one has real evidence about the formation of the reading circuit in the young, online, literacy-immersed brain. We do have evidence about the young reading brain exposed to print literacy. Until sufficient proof enlarges the discussion, we believe that nothing replaces the unique contributions of print literacy for the development of the full panoply of the slower, constructive, cognitive processes that invite children to create their own whole worlds in what Proust called the "reading sanctuary."

Thus, in addition to encouraging explicit instruction of deeper comprehension processes in online reading, we must not neglect the formation of the deep-reading processes in the medium of human's first literacy. There are fascinating precedents in the history of writing: The Sumerian writing system, in use 3,000 years ago, was preserved alongside the Akkadian system for many centuries. Along the way, Akkadian writing gradually incorporated, and in so doing preserved, much of what was most valuable about the Sumerian system.

Such a thoughtful transition is the optimal means of ensuring that the unique contributions of both online and print literacies will meet the needs of different individuals within a culture and foster all three dimensions of Aristotle's good society. Rich, intensive, parallel development of multiple literacies can help shape the development of an analytical, probative approach to knowledge in which students view the information they acquire not as an end point, but as the beginning of deeper questions and new, never-before-articulated thoughts.

Update June 13, 2010: "How to Read a Book" --> an interesting brief article that describes a reading method very similar to the one I taught myself and still use --> http://pne.people.si.umich.edu/PDF/howtoread.pdf

Update June 3, 2013:  Annie Murphy Paul wrote an article on this subject that I found helpful, coming to a very similar conclusion I think.

Update April 8 2014:  A Washington Post article featuring Maryanne Wolf's thinking about "slow reading."

Update April 19, 2014  "Is Reading Too Much Bad for Kids?" - just in case you need evidence that cultural values really are reversing to the point of taking reading for granted, de-valuing reading itself, and de-valuing the ability to do it well. 

Updated Book Review: David Shenk's "The Genius in All of Us"

Review of "The Genius in All of Us," by David Shenk, Doubleday, 2010.

An effective deconstruction of hereditary talent, and clues for a new model of exceptional ability

Link to the review on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/review/R3DGLT1WYK6QRG/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

It is easy to like or dislike this book from a casual reading based on how you feel about the premise: that everyone has the potential for genius, and that heredity is not destiny in any sense. This sounds at first like a liberal political statement, but Shenk's treatment is far more nuanced than that characterization would imply.

In brief, Shenk's book is a very good deconstruction of hereditary talent, a competent but one-sided (or upon reflection I'll say very selectively focused) review of supporting research in several fields, and an interesting but abbreviated practical introduction to the interactionist (gene X environment) paradigm of development.

Just to be clear, this book is not about the psychometric definition of genius in terms of how far down the bell curve one is on Raven's Progressive Matrices or standardized tests of any sort. Nor is it about clever calculating tricks or precocious abilities, although it does do a very nice job putting those into a larger perspective. This book is more centrally about the expansive and inclusive sense of genius meaning people that accomplish something truly special and significant, and the potential that any given person may be able to get to that point. Somehow. And that's where the nuance is needed and appropriate.

Ok, I didn't like this book all that much when I first read it, and I at first gave it a mediocre 3 star rating on Amazon. I felt it did a great job deconstructing the concept of hereditary talent, but I strongly criticized it for leaving a gap where we need a better theory of where talent comes from and what it is, since obviously we don't all become true geniuses. Even among the folks who appear to have the seeds of genius in them from early on, most don't become genius adults in the broader sense.

In my original review I said this was a one-sided review of the evidence for the interactionist model. I do think it's a very selective review, but one-sided implies that he deliberately ignores contradictory evidence. He doesn't do that. He just doesn't talk about the evidence that led to the model Shenk says is obsolete, that genes are akin to blueprints. That is, the evidence that different variations of allele sometimes have strikingly specific effects in a seemingly "normal" range of environments. The case for the model of heredity that Shenk is deconstructing is not entirely ignored, but it is glossed over in order to make his case for the interactionist model. I think that is why hereditarians like Galton, Spearman, and Charles Murray get so apparently shorted in this book, Shenk focuses entirely on what they get wrong and glosses over the things they may get right.

I suspect that we do inherit "predispositions" in some form under a very wide range of conditions, even if the underlying mechanism is more complex than we previously assumed. Even if changes in environments do alter the expression of genes, something like inheritance of traits clearly does happen in a wide range of "normal" environments, and we can't just ignore that completely because of additional complexity and things that change at the extremes. That's why I say this is a very selective review. But no, it isn't really one-sided, the selectiveness is appropriate for a deconstruction, although it does mark this as a deconstruction rather than a scholarly review.

The more important problem is that the model of talent that arises from this book is not particularly easy to understand. The author is strongly against thinking of genes as predispositions, and rather offers the perspective that genes are akin to "settings." So it would be easy to conclude that the author is saying that we have the ability to make anyone a genius just by tweaking a few settings. He isn't. Or, if you read it as I did upon my first reading, you might hear the author saying that "anyone can be a genius, but talent is complicated process, we don't know what is happening at each step, and so we don't know how to help people get there, but we know it's possible." That's perhaps a little closer to the truth, but it didn't seem very helpful to me.

The reason I updated this review and why I'm now expressing more appreciation for David Shenk's accomplishment here is that while the "settings" model of genes doesn't quite convey the message, I did find upon close reading and careful reflection that the author captured a lot with his examples and case studies of individuals. The thing that is missing is some way of tying together how people manage to select and shape environments for themselves to accomplish great things, in spite of all the cultural, social, and physical constraints that tend to make environmental factors very hard to change for most of us. Shenk assiduously avoids attributing "predispositions" to genes, but then speculates that epigenetic factors may predispose us to things like musical ability. If non-genes can do this, why not genes? He just seems a little *too* intent on crushing hereditary talent in some places.

Geniuses don't just see things differently (although that is sometimes also going on), they don't just have unique abilities (although sometimes they do) geniuses are most distinct in that they manage to carve their own niche, exploiting their own uniqueness in a process where they are driven to mastery and are amazingly persistent, even where the goal seems way out of reach. This runs contrary to our popular wisdom that it makes sense to work toward small easily attained goals in most things. What we think of as really deep talent actually requires really deep faith in the long term process and the motivation to keep going. Shenk captures the significance of motivation, but I had to look very closely to see the patterns for it. It requires willingness to do things that others may find bizarre and to learn freely from what is available. The author illustrates this but seems to have a hard time really tying it all together, at least he did on my first reading. I've come to think of it in terms of niche construction, which to me really captures what exceptional people do that brings out and shapes their unique gene x environment combination in a targeted way. My reversal in the rating reflects my feeling that capturing this idea is more important than giving it a catchy name, which is really what the author is missing.

We don't know exactly how to take advantage of the dynamic nature of heredity and development, although the study of achievement and expertise reviewed by Shenk gives us many tantalizing clues to go on. And if knowing that the potential is there inspires the faith to keep going, then more and more of us will eventually learn to become better and better at using our minds, constructing our own niches from our own individuality, and the promise of "The Genius in All of Us" will eventually begin to be realized. There is a lot in this book that will repay careful reading and re-reading, as I discovered by doing exactly that.

Related Reading:

See also this classic manifesto of genetic interactionism: The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment(Lewontin R (1998/2000) Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, Environment. Cambridge, MA, Harvard)

This superb earlier popular introduction to the emerging model Shenk offers: The Agile Gene: How Nature Turns on Nurture(Ridley, The Agile Gene)

This similar treatment of trait development in interactionist terms, but focused on personality: The Temperamental Thread: How Genes, Culture, Time and Luck make Us Who We Are(kagan, temperamental thread)

This alternative and original interactionist account of how personality develops: No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality (Judith rich harris no two alike)

This interesting challenge to some widely help assumptions about influence: Stranger in the Nest: Do Parents Really Shape Their Child's Personality, Intelligence, or Character?(Stranger in the Nest, D. Cohen)

This little known treasure by an old friend that offers its own unique challenges about human uniqueness and what it means: rebellion: physics to personal will (Brody, Rebellion)

This on the classic view from the perspective of behavior genetics: Genetics and Experience: The Interplay between Nature and Nurture (Individual Differences and Development)(Plomin, Genetics and Experience)

This on the fascinating broader biological implications of interactionism from a gene perspective, how the genes of organisms construct niches even beyond the organism itself: The Extended Organism: The Physiology of Animal-Built Structures(Turner, The Extended Organism)

And finally this wonderful broad account of biology and the role of heredity that appreciates the complexities of gene function in a demanding but uniquely engaging way: The Logic of Life(The logic of life, francois jacob)

Todd the Fervent Public Audodidact

My sub-species has finally been identified: fervent public autodidact

I was honestly very touched by this comment from Alexander Iwanow on my FaceBook page. I just had to save it here so I can look back on it on those days when I wonder whether anyone reads those reviews that I sometimes put so much into.

"Mr. Stark, I've been an admirer of your fervent public autodidactism for years now. You've turned me on to many great books (and off of many bad ones). You are among the most vibrant, reliable, and judicious voices to gift himself on a public website. (Jeff Bezos should give you a plaque for helping him to sell so many books!) I mean hell, man, you even got me to look into YOGA...!!! Thank you for responding warmly to my somewhat rude and impulsive kamikaze invite, and I look forward to whatever twists, turns, and elegant refinements your consciousness opts to undertake."