Unlearning 101

Beware of Growing Icebergs

“It’s not what you don’t know that hurts you; it’s what you know that just ain’t so.”

 

--Satchel Paige

 

What is the world’s tallest mountain? Did you say Mount Everest? You’re wrong. The answer is Mauna Kea and, as measured from its base to its summit, it is 33,465 feet high—or 4,436 feet taller than Mount Everest.

 

Mauna Kea’s distinguishing characteristic is that three-fourths of the mountain lies under water.  Mount Everest remains the highest mountain as measured from sea level to summit, but Mauna Kea is the tallest as measured from the bottom its base to its top.

 

Now, you may cry foul and argue that the question was nothing more than a linguistic trick. I’d counter that both the question and the answer serve as a useful metaphor for the concept of unlearning, which I define as follows:

 

            unlearn; v. [the act of unlearning; verbal n, to unlearn]

1.      the act of releasing old knowledge.

2.      to see the world not as one would like to see it, but as it really is.

3.      to be un-uninformed.

4.      to acquire wisdom either by replacing old information that has been supplanted by new knowledge or by relinquishing known falsehoods.

 

Unlearning is a critical skill, especially in today’s world of rapid and accelerating change. To understand why, consider this: scientific and technical knowledge is now doubling every 7 years.

 

This may sound a tad astounding until one considers that there are now 6 billion-plus people populating the planet and 90 percent of the scientists ever to roam the planet are still alive; and these scientists and their growing legions of students are adding, at a prodigious rate, new knowledge in fields as varied as biotechnology, chemistry, genomics, material science, nanotechnology, neuroscience, robotics and quantum physics.

 

Aided in their quest, the world’s researchers and entrepreneurs are now armed with a bevy of sophisticated new tools which are doing everything from probing and plumbing sub-atomic particles inside the human body to visualizing the outer expanses of the universe. Further accelerating matters, these discoveries are now being enhanced with the aid of wickedly powerful supercomputers and then shared over wireless and fiber optic connections in a proverbial blink of an eye with fellow researchers on the other side of the globe—and all points in-between.

 

One often overlooked implication of this growing tsunami of scientific knowledge is that as impressive as our knowledge base is today it will represent just half of what we will know in just seven short years. (Remember knowledge is doubling every 7 years). In less than a decade-and-a-half’s time, it’ll represent a mere 25 percent.

 

To get a glimpse of the near future, it helps to go back in time two doublings (or 14 years) and consider how advances in just two fields—semiconductors and fiber optic bandwidth—enabled the creation of the cellphone and Internet and how those devices, in turn, have transformed society. Consider next that society will experience an amount of change comparable to the past 14 years in just the next 7 years.

 

If you think of future knowledge as an iceberg that portion of the iceberg which lies above the water can be thought of as representing existing knowledge. That which resides below the water is the equivalent of future knowledge. And, just as the hidden part of Mauna Kea causes many people to overlook the fact that it is the tallest mountain in the world, future knowledge will also surprise a great many people. Unless, that is, they are open to unlearning.

 

Unlearning, unfortunately, is neither a natural skill nor is it an easy one to acquire, and it is here that the metaphor to an iceberg is particularly apt. Imagine you are the captain of a ship entering waters conducive to the creation of icebergs; to survive it is important to beware not only of the presence of the growing number of icebergs, you must also understand that—by an order of magnitude of two— the far greater threats are the submerged portions of those iceberg which can’t yet be seen.

 

Just as a modest-sized iceberg sank the “unsinkable” Titanic, the growing number of future knowledge “icebergs” (e.g. biotechnology, nanotechnology, robotics, the semantic web, RFID, quantum physics, etc.) may similarly take down the most “unsinkable” of industries.

 

To avoid this fate, it’ll be necessary to change course quickly and often, and unlearning is an essential skill every leader and organization must possess in order to safely navigate the future. In fact, as this unlearning lesson suggests, you must either unlearn or die.

Unlearning Expensive Technology

Late last week, it was announced that NASA had, pardon the pun, pissed away $154 million by creating a urinal/water fountain system that didn’t work. To witness how a more simple technology can have huge implications down here on this planet, watch this amazing video (Note: it is a little graphic, but it helps to remember that these are the real life conditions under which billions of people must actually get their water):

In many ways, the example of this technology as compared to the $154 million failure reminds of that old story about how NASA spent millions of dollars to create a pen that would allow its astronauts to write upside-down in the low-gravity environment of space. They were successful, but so too were the Russians--they simply used a pencil.

Unlearning TV Advertising

Technology Review has an insightful posting on "Google's Plans to Take Over Television." It is hard to refute that television is becoming more fractured and that even the most popular shows are claiming an ever smaller share of the overall market. It, therefore, makes little sense for advertisers to continue to operate in the same fashion they always have. It is time they unlearn their current advertising model.

Unlearn or Die

In 1601, James Lancaster, an English sea captain, set sail from England to India. Overseeing a crew of 278 sailors on four separate ships, Lancaster conducted an experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of a treatment to prevent scurvy. He administered three tablespoons of lemon juice to the members of his ship and left the crews of the other three ships untreated—effectively creating a control group. Half-way through his journey, Lancaster’s experiment yielded startling evidence: none of the sailors on his ship had died of the disease, but 110 of the sailors—or 40 percent—on the other ships had succumbed to the dreaded malady.

 

With such clear and compelling evidence, one might have expected the British Navy to begin immediately administering lemon juice to sailors. It did not.

 

Nearly a century and a half later, in 1747, James Lind, a British Navy physician who was familiar with Lancaster’s work, carried out the first example of a truly controlled clinical nutrition study using human subjects. He prescribed oranges and lemons to scurvy patients and found they were cured in a matter of days. Six years later, in 1753, Lind published his seminal work, “A Treatise of the Scurvy.”

 

Armed with this new information, one might again have expected the British Navy to make haste in prescribing regular doses of citrus fruits to all of its sailors. Alas, it did not. It took an additional 48 years for the British Navy to wipe out scurvy.

 

Why did it take the British Navy almost two centuries to adopt a new, albeit simple, method for a treating a disease that could have spared the lives of untold numbers of its sailors?

 

A variety of factors were at work, but prominent officials and the sailors alike had different ideas for the best way to prevent scurvy and this erroneous knowledge prevented them from being receptive to new knowledge. In short, before they could fully assimilate the new information they had to unlearn their old knowledge.

 

It is easy to dismiss the scurvy case as an isolated example and chalked it up to poor scientific knowledge; the slow diffusion of new information; bureaucratic inertia or just plain stupidity. Unfortunately, the British Navy isn’t alone in its slowness to unlearn.

 

Consider the case of Australian physician Barry Marshall. In 1984, Marshall traveled to Brussels, Belgium to a prestigious conference of ulcer specialists to discuss his research which strongly suggested that ulcers were caused by bacteria. His presentation was greeted with laughter because the audience judged the idea so preposterous.

 

A year later, Marshall returned with even more compelling evidence and this time he was shouted down with a chorus of boos. It took the American Medical Association a decade but it finally recognized his research and announced that the vast majority ulcers were caused by bacteria -- and not by acid, stress or spicy foods as leading ulcer experts had so recently argued. In 2005, Marshall and his researcher partner, Dr. Robin Warren, were awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine.

 

The question is this: Why were ulcer patients treated with unnecessary, costly and often ineffective treatment for more than 20 years?

 

The answer is because many people, including highly educated medical specialists, have a difficult time unlearning old knowledge.

 

It would be reassuring to think that society has learned much since 1984 and it won’t repeat similar errors in the future, but we can’t be so sure. In 2007, a new study was released suggesting that the manner in which we now treat heart attacks is exactly the wrong thing. This is because, by administering oxygen, we are shocking the remaining healthy heart cells and exacerbating an already lethal situation.

 

How long will it take medical professionals, paramedics and otherwise well-intentioned CPR-trained citizens to unlearn our current methods for treating heart attack victims?

 

Unfortunately, our lives are at risk in a multitude of ways because of our inability, unwillingness or slowness to unlearn. What if I told you that six times as many people died in their cars from the terrorist attacks on that fateful day as did all of the victims in the planes that crashed into the World Trade Towers, the Pentagon and in the rural farm field in Pennsylvania—combined!

 

You probably wouldn’t believe it. However, if you changed your frame of reference and considered that, in the wake of 9-11, millions of Americans decided to forego flying and instead choose to drive to their destination, the numbers become more believable.

 

Why? Because driving is statistically more risky than flying. In fact, an estimated 1,535 (and counting) more Americans have died in automobile accidents than otherwise would have if only those travelers chosen the safer method of travel – flying. Alas, before people can accept that airplanes are more likely to get them safely to their destination, they first need to unlearn that driver is safer than flying.

 

Unlearning can not only save your life now, it may also save your life in other ways. Provided that is we have the wisdom to unlearn where the true threats to our safety lurk.

 

Quick, which is the greater threat to a child’s safety: the neighbor’s pool or the unlocked gun in his closet? By a factor of 50, it is the swimming pool. As a general rule, most of us are awful at assigning realistic levels of risk to everyday activities. To improve our odds of more safely navigating the future, unlearning is a critical skill.

 

Another case-in-point: Michael Osterholm, one of the world’s leading epidemiologists, travels all over the world arguing that countries and institutions are woefully under-prepared to deal with the possibility of a major pandemic. Interestingly, in his presentation, Osterholm makes the compelling point that as dangerous as the threat of a pandemic is, more people will likely die from non-influenza-related deaths during a pandemic than from the flu itself.

 

How so you ask? Well, because much of the pharmaceutical industry utilizes “just-in-time” inventory procedures, it is quite possible that in the event of a pandemic major shipping, trucking and distribution centers will be slowed or shut down entirely. As a result, hospitals—many of whom already possess dangerously low supplies of many critical life-saving drugs—will run out of these important drugs in a matter of days. The end result is that just as untold numbers of British sailors perished unnecessarily from scurvy, a similar fate awaits those who are unfortunate enough to be dependent on certain drugs during a global pandemic.

 

It needn’t be this way. From driving less and flying more, to treating heart attacks differently, to correctly sizing up the threats in your neighborhood, to rethinking our pharmaceutical supply chain, unlearning could, quite literally, be the difference between living and dying.

Google and P&G Unlearn From Each Other

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal ran a front page articleon how Google and Proctor & Gamble are swapping employees in an effort to spur innovation. It's a great idea, but much of what the two companies are doing is unlearning from the other. In P&G's case, its marketing people are unlearning that marketing dollars should primarily be used to fund television advertising -- whose customers are typicallypassive. And, instead, the company needs to spend more than 2% of its budget on Internet advertising targeting more "active" consumers and engaging bloggers (such as Moms) who use their products.

Unlearning Skinny Models

New research suggests that skinny models are actually a turn-off to consumers. If true, a variety of advertisers will need to unlearn their reliance on super-svelt models.  

Supercomputers Will Require Unlearning

I have written before the amazing and growing power of supercomputers (here and here), but this article makes a compelling case that supercomputer simulation will soon become the “third branch of science” and that the growing power of these beasts will rival the invention of the microscope in its impact on science.  It will be interesting to see if more established members of the scientific community can unlearn their old habits and embrace the technology.

New Voice Recognition Technology Mandates Unlearning

Late yesterday, Google released a very cool new mobile application which employs voice recognition technology. The question is not so much what the technology can do today, the question is what will the technology be able to do in the near future—and how might it require professionals in the education, health care, and a host of other businesses to unlearn?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on how this technology could unfold and how it might alter people’s behavior. Below are my initial thoughts from my other website: www.jumpthecurve.net:

Unlearning Our Bias Toward Action

“There are three types of people in this world: Those who don’t move; those who are moved; and those who move.” “Man is made for action!” And my personal favorite or, as my father used to say, “Don’t just sit there, do something!”

 

From childhood, we are instilled with a bias for action. In many cases, it is a useful trait. It is even possible that our bias for action is genetic hand-me-down from our pre-historic ancestors and it enabled us to avoid being devoured by predators.

 

Is this bias toward action something that we may need to unlearn?

 

The answer is a qualified, yes. Scientists studying the odds of goalies trying to stop penalty kicks concluded that a goalie’s best strategy was to stay put. If they had followed this course of action, they would have been successful 33 percent of the time. According to the data, however, they only employed this strategy 6 percent of the time.

 

There is a reason for this: we don’t like doing nothing. In fact, people who don’t act often feel a deep emotional pang of guilt for their inaction. In the case of a goalie during a shoot-out, for instance, the goalie would feel worse for just standing there than he would have if he dived left on, say, a kick to the right. This is true even though the outcome would have been the same – a goal. In common parlance, “At least he did something.”

 

The example of a goalie staying still might seem trivial, but the implications for staying put can have real-world implications. Consider the stock market.

 

It is not uncommon for people to rush in and buy a certain stock when others are doing the same. The result, as a spate of investing “bubbles” have recently demonstrated, is artificially high and, ultimately, unsustainable stock prices. Counter-intuitively, many people also follow the actions of others when selling a stock. That is they sell only because other people are selling, not because the underlying of the fundamentals of the stock have changed.

 

Warren Buffett is one of the world’s richest men, but his right hand man, Charlie Munger, says “Half of Warren’s time is sitting on his ass and reading; the other half is spent talking on the phone or in person to a highly gifted person that he trusts and trusts him.” In other words, Buffett stays put a lot.

 

A bias toward staying put can also reap other unexpected benefits. Have you ever been traveling down the freeway and then spotted the other cars moving over into a more crowded lane? What is occurring is that drivers in the trailing cars believe that the action of the drivers in front of them are based on a knowledge of something that they can’t yet see and they decide to mimic the action. Sometimes there really is something in the road, but sometimes it is the result of nothing more than two cars simultaneously shifting lanes for arbitrary and unrelated reasons.

 

The problem begins to manifest as this faulty logic gains momentum and subsequent drivers shift lanes and thus offer even more “evidence” for others to shift lanes.

 

Lesson: If you want to get ahead on the freeway and in life it behooves you to wait until you actually have access to compelling information that requires movement. Or, as your mother likely told you as some point during your youth, “Just because everybody else is doing something that doesn’t mean that you should do it too!”

Unlearning the Five Stages of Grief

I first studiedElisabeth Kubler-Ross' "five stages of grief" in high school. Since then, I have accepted her theory. As Michael Shermer suggests in this articlein Scientific American there is little evidentiary support for her thesis.

Part of the problem, I believe, is that people like to make life more tidy than it actually is. For example, Freud suggested that people move through five stages of pyschosexual development; Lawrence Kohlberg postulates our moral development has six stages; and, of course, Kubler-Ross was of the opinion that we experience five stages of grief. (Ironically, I once read that near the end of her own life Ross was bitter at the thought of her impending death -- apparently, she never reached the "acceptance stage.")

If we accept these theories as given, it makes unlearning that much more difficult. To really unlearn it helps to view life as far complex than many of our leading social scientists would like us to believe.