Unlearning 101

Unlearning Pork

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article in today's paper on "political pork." It is easy to believe that "bringing home the bacon" is a sure path to electoral success for politicians, but in light of a $9 trillion national debt, politicans might want to "unlearn" this belief.

Unlearn Certainty

"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd."  -- Voltaire

Unlearn Your Putting Game

I'm not a golfer, but I thought I knew enough about the game to know that you're suppose to keep your head still when putting.

Well, according to this fascinating article, the trick may not be in keeping your head from moving; rather, it be in training your head to move in an egocentric manner.

Apparently, good golfers and duffers both move their heads. The difference is that duffers move their noggin' in the direction of the putt -- in an allocentric manner. Good golfers move their heads in an opposite direction of their putter. It is theorized that this egocentric act helps them better maintain a stable, central body position by counter-acting the destabilization caused by the putter moving in the opposite direction.

Unlearn Short Attention Spans

It is easy to fall prey to the belief that Americans -- especially younger kids -- have short attention spans. Yet if this is true why did millions of kids flock to the Harry Potter books? (For the record, the last three books were 870,652 and 759 pages, respectfully.)

In other areas, the same is also true. The biggest grossing movie of all-time was Titanic -- which ran over 3 hours. And, in the TV genre, the hit show requires viewers to follow the series for the entire season.

If you want to unlearn, a good place to start is by questioning conventional wisdom. Often, you'll find it is dead wrong.

Unlearning Detroit

Although the news is now almost three years old, I just learned that San Jose replaced Detroit as the 10th largest city in America. The change is symbolically important because it suggests that "Silicon Valley" has literally outpaced "Motor City."

Unfortunately, our current political system still tends to provide too much attention to reviving Detroit's automotive industry. Perhaps, our political leaders should instead focus on growing the "green technologies" of the 21st century-- such as San Jose is doing by trying to become a leader in the emerging field of solar energy -- instead of trying to prop up a stagnating and declining 20th century industry.

Before such a change can occur, however, our political leaders will need to unlearn the idea that the car is king.

A Watched Kettle Never Boils -- or Does It?

EcoGeek has an interesting article explaining how advances in nanotechnology can lead to the creation of a kettle that boils faster. The advance is significant not just because it could help consumers and businesses save money and time by bringing water to a boil faster, but because it suggests that a variety of other products—such as solar cells and catalysts—might also become radically more effective.

Of course, before many of these advances can be adopted people will need to unlearn the idea that a “watched pot never boils.”

Pharmaceutical Industry Needs to Unlearn

In 2003, I wrote the book, ”The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business.” In it, I outlined the many ways in which nanotechnology will impact the pharmaceutical industry in the near future. Recently, researchers at Children’s Hospital in Boston have uncovered a method of reviving a once-promising cancer drug, TNP-470—which was cancelled in the mid-1990’s due to concerns over toxicity.

The problem of toxicity is not a new one to the pharmaceutical industry. In fact, it is a big reason why so many early stage drugs fail to make it to market.

This vexing problem may soon be partially alleviated due to advances in nanotechnology. One advantage of reformulating drugs at the nanoscale is that they are water soluble and, as such, don’t require the solvents which so often cause nasty side-effects in patients.

Another application being employed from the nanotechnology bag of tricks is to use nanoscale platforms such as micelles and dendrimers to prevent drugs from crossing the blood-brain barrier. In this fashion, older drugs may be reformulated so as to prevent certain drugs from wreaking havoc on the human brain. (This was one of the problems with TNP-470).

The pharmaceutical industry has invested billions of dollars developing promising drugs. Unfortunately, most developmental drugs end being shelved when it is found they cause some unintended consequence. Nanotechnology holds the promise that a handful of older drugs may now be revisited. Some may even find their way to the commercial marketplace.

With a single drug’s ability to add billions of dollars to a pharmaceutical company’s bottom-line, it is time many of them begin turning their attention to nanotechnology. It’s a small technology, but it could pay big dividends. All the industry needs to do is unlearn the idea that just because something didn't work in the past, that doesn't mean that it is necessarily doomed to fail forever.

Related Post by Jack Uldrich

Does the Pharmaceutical Industry Also Need to Unlearn

If You Want to Win: Practice Your Unlearning Game

On December 30, 1936, over 17,000 fans packed into the old Madison Square Garden to watch Long Island University, the country’s top-ranked basketball team, take on Stanford. It was slated to be a great game. Long Island was putting up its 43-game winning streak up against the reigning Pacific Coast Conference champions.

More than that, though, people were there to watch Hank Luisetti, Stanford’s 6 foot 2 inch star sophomore. He was the only player known for shooting the ball with one hand while jumping up in the air. At the time, every other player shot with two-hands or took hook shots.

Luisetti’s “jump-shot” was so radical that it caused Nat Holman, the legendary coach of City College of New York—and a man known as “Mr. Basketball” – to remark, “That’s not basketball! If my boys ever shot one-handed, I’d quit coaching.”

Stanford went on to crush Long Island University and, two years, later, Luisetti became the first college player ever to score 50 points in a game. Today, it is impossible to find a single player at either the collegiate or professional level who shoots two-handed.

It took a long time for basketball players to unlearn the two-handed shot, but the story serves as a good reminder that unlearning is not easy and that—like most sports—it is something which must be practiced continuously.

In fact, the sporting world is an excellent place to study the practice of unlearning. On May 6, 1954, Roger Bannister unlearned the “four-minute mile” barrier when he circled the track at Oxford in a then record of 3:59.6. Dick Fosbury similarly unlearned the traditional straddle method of high-jumping when he invented the now famous “Fosbury Flop.”

Alas, unlearning is not so easy. In the insightful book, The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki, recounted a study conducted by David Romer, an economist at Berkeley. In the study, Romer reviewed 1,100 first-quarter fourth-down plays where the teams would have been better off going for it. Instead, they kicked the ball 992 times. In blunter terms this means that in 90% of the cases, the team’s coaches were actively working against their team’s prospects of winning.

Is such insanity limited to the gridiron? No. In the book, Moneyball, Michael Lewis demonstrated how the Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane unlearned his reliance on crusty old baseball scouts and instead turned to young, Ivy League educated “number crunchers” to help him spot the top prospects to draft. The book was published in 1999. To date, and in spite of the A’s consistently fielding one of the best teams with the lowest payroll, only one other team has adopted the strategy in a widespread manner—the Boston Red Sox.

Perhaps it is a coincidence—and a healthy payroll—but in case you haven’t been paying attention the Red Sox have won two of the past four World Series. It is also, however, possible that Boston has been practicing its unlearning skills. In 1947, Jackie Robinson became the first African-American to play in the Major Leagues. The Boston Red Sox were the last team to integrate—doing so only in 1957. During that time it won no American League pennants and, of course, no World Series.

Bottom-line: If you to want to win, practice unlearning.

Study Carneades

”I have what I call an iron prescription that helps me keep sane when I naturally drift toward preferring one ideology over another and that is: I say that I’m not entitled to have an opinion on this subject unless I can state the argument against my position better than the people who support it. I think only when I’ve reached that state am I qualified to speak.”

The above quote is from Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s right-hand man for more than 40 years, and it offers wonderful advice for anyone wishing to stay open to the importance of—as well as the need for—unlearning.

Munger’s practice of arguing opposite sides of an issue is a practice that dates back thousands of years. As Nassim Taleb recounts in his wonderful book, Fooled by Randomness, in 155 B.C. the Greek philosopher, Carneades, traveled to Rome to argue against a fine which had been levied upon the Athenians.

With unmatched eloquence, Carneades sang the praises of Roman justice and convincingly swayed his audience to the merits of his position. Alas, that was not the point he was trying to make. The very next day Carneades dissected his previous arguments and proceeded to persuasively convince the same audience that the opposite was true.

So where did Carneades really stand on the issue? We don’t know. But that doesn’t matter because what he wanted to advocate was a doctrine of ‘uncertainty of knowledge.” Carneades, you see, was a “radical skeptic” and believed that all knowledge is impossible to know, except for the knowledge that all knowledge is impossible. Or, as Taleb writes, “[h]e stood all his life against arrogant dogma and belief in one sole truth.”

Carneades, though, recognized he lived in the real world and realized such a philosophy would not be readily accepted—or easily tolerated—by a society in need of rules and structure. He, therefore, advocated the idea that “probabilities of truth” could be established, and that these probabilities of truth might reasonably guide society.

The philosophy calls to mind a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald who once said: “The test of a first rate mind is the ability to hold two diametrically opposed ideas at the same time and still function.”

The ability to deal with ambiguity is not, however, a luxury reserved only for ancient philosophers and poets. In 1988, a study by the American Management Association found that the leadership characteristic most essential for steering organizations through troubled and complex times was “the ability to deal with ambiguity.”

One strategy for preparing for such ambiguity is, like Carneades, to know the opposing side of an argument was well as the supporting arguments. In this way, whenever new—and perhaps contradictory information—becomes available, the holder of the opinion (or position) can assimilate that information into their decision-making process. This, in turn, might make it easier to reverse a position in spite of having voiced support for it in the past. Why might this be so? Because the previous work in understanding the opposite view will have tilled and loosened the soil in which unlearning may take place.

Unlearning the Brain

The other day I had a light-hearted post entitled "Empty Your Brain." The brain, however, is no light-hearted matter (or light-hearted gray matter for that matter). Hardly, a day goes by without some new finding emerging from the rapidly accelerating field of neuroscience that challenges our understanding of what we think we know about everything from our emotions and economics to psychology and politics.

As exciting as many of these developments are, it is important to understand that we are still in the early stages of our understanding of how the human brain operates and functions. To this end, I'd encourage you to read this recent article from Technology Review entitled "First Detailed Map of the Human Cortex."

If you don't have the time or desire, here's the operative section:

"The brain we've been looking at with conventional MRI or CT scans all these years is not the real brain," says Van Wedeen, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston, who was also involved in the study. "We're just seeing a shadow of its surfaces."

As we learn ever more about the "real" human brain you can be guaranteed that we will also need to unlearn just as much -- if not more -- about a great many other aspects of our lives that the brain controls.