I am reading David McCullough‘s The Great Bridge, about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. (Yes, I like McCullough very much.) In a passage about the fundamental differences between Brooklyn and New York (i.e., Manhattan), McCullough writes:
People then were still inclined to form opinions more from experience than information and it was the experience of most Brooklyn people that between their city and the other one, there was no comparison.
The time he is writing about is the late 1860′s. The observation that fascinates me is that “people then were still inclined to form opinions more from experience than information.” This strikes me as both a) true and b) profound, though I am willing to be argued out of either one. It also makes me wonder further:
1. In the modern age, do we primarily treat information as a substitute for experience?
2. If so, do the benefits outweigh the losses?
3. If McCullough is right, doesn’t it make bad information that much more dangerous?
4. If McCullough is right, might we approach a point where information distrust and overload encourage people to return to experiential wisdom?
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not a chance in the world that your average person in the united states treats information as a substitute for experience. perhaps in europe, but it doesn’t happen here. call it the ‘blink’ phenomenon, or call it the reason a guy like gladwell catches fire at all, but this is not a country that knows how to consume information with anything resembling success.
I see it every day. Information overload is a very real problem, especially when folks get conflicting information from “trusted” sources. The easiest thing to do is to retreat to personal experience and “gut” reactions. W sold himself on just it
Sounds like one of those great unverifiable claims to me.
It seems that interesting pop-psychology books (I don’t read the real stuff to know any better) indicates that we merely claim to make decisions based on information, in reality we still make them on experience for the most part. We just adjust our view of the facts in hindsight to fit what we already decided.
Interesting. I think people sometimes weigh one againt the other, but that does not mean that either has an advantage over the other. The dangerous thing about information, is that people tend to collect data to support what they already believe to be true and they tint their experiences in the same manner.
If you are a firm believer that cats are better pets, based on your experience with domesticated animals, you would read Cat Fancy magazine and your trip to the dog show would end in disaster.
1. Yes. As education increases, people tend to become more and more specialized and ignorant about subjects outside their realm of expertise.
2, Up to a point, but once your ability to apply info begins to degrade, you shift into the loss column. Information is useless if you have no idea what to do with it, and worse than useless if that’s the case, but you mistakenly think you do. I’ve seen a couple of Six Sigma blackbelt solutions implode upon application because the team got lost in the metrics and failed to include anyone who would actually have to work under the proposal and would have been able – in an instant – to point out why it was ridiculously impractical. In one of the cases I’m thinking of, there was even a clamor from lower level employess for senior management to punish the team by forcing them to work under the parameters of their proposal.
3. Yes.
4. Yes.
I find the differentiation between information and experience itself an interesting topic. Is experience not just information that one has gathered him/herself? And is information not just the collection of experiences of other people? The substance is not different, just the method of collection.
I think the point to be made here is that people tend to trust themselves more than others and need to be convinced otherwise. In an extremely individualistic society such as ours, this seems perfectly natural. Though I wonder if this dynamic is present, or as strong, in more communal cultures, such as China.
the corollary to 4 may be more subversive- higher levels of info distrust may lead to cynicism, rather than encouraging enlightenment
I think information is always filtered through experience. Information is a great reference point, but experience is an anchor we trust.