Unlearning 101

Unlearning Bubbles

The Internet, the real estate market, fuel cell technology, nanotechnology and, now, "clean tech" have all experienced an investing "bubble." In retrospect, it is easy to point to signs that the market was inflating to dangerous levels. It is even easier to suggest that such bubbles are a bad thing -- precisely because so many investors got burned and lost a great a deal of money.

Bob Metcalfe, an early and successful Internet entrepreneur, see bubbles differently. He sees bubbles as a good thing. Here's his quote: "From Internet history, we know that bubbles are normal. Bubbles are an accelerator of technology progress. Bubbles go against the status quo. We should encourage bubbles."

I suspect that such statements are much easier to make when you're already a billionaire; as opposed, say, to someone to just lost a large amount of money in the stock market. Nevertheless, there is a certain logic to his argument and we may want not to dismiss all bubbles as cases of irrational investors getting sucked up by the winds of "irrational exuberance." Instead we want to view them as "technology accelerators." (This might not ease the financial pain of those who lost money in the bubble, but it might at least make them feel a little bit better about themselves.)

Unlearning Death

In 1899, just a few years before the Wright brothers achieved their historic accomplishment, Lord Kelvin -- then one of the world's brightest men and most accomplished scientists -- declared heavier than air machines to be "impossible."

He was wrong. To add insult to injury, Lord Kelvin was proved wrong by a pair of bicycle repairmen from Dayton, Ohio.

A few years ago, a relatively unknown computer scientist, Aubrey de Grey, declared that aging should not be viewed as something which will necessarily ultimately result in death. Rather, he theorized that aging is a  disease and should be treated as such.

The outcry from the scientific community was similar to Lord Kelvin's reaction to human flight. One group of scientists even declared that de Grey's idea was "so far from plausible that it commands no respect at all within the informed scientific community."

Well, according to this article in Wired, the idea is now beginning to gain some acceptance within scientific circles.

To be sure, society is still a long way from de Grey's goal of ending again but, as I have written before, I'd encourage people to not dismiss the idea entirely. For if he is right, it will require society to unlearn a great many ideas which it now holds as dear.

In fact, the scale of unlearning our current paradigm of "death as an inevitability" could make other past historic paradigm shifts -- such as the idea that the earth is not at the center of the universe (an idea for which Aristarchus was run out of Alexandria and Galileo was forced to recant under edict of the Catholic Church) or Darwin's theory of evolution -- look like child's play.

It's Never Too Late to Unlearn

In the spring of 2007 the Vatican announced that babies who died before they were baptized were no longer relegated to a life in limbo -- a rather mysterious land believed to reside just outside of heaven where unbaptized babies lived in perpetual happiness but were not in direct communion with God.

Regardless of one's religious views, I find the decision highly instructive for any institution that is attempting to unlearn a long-held belief because it demonstrates just how long it sometimes take to change. In this case, the Catholic Church held this particularly view for the last four centuries.

Interestingly, it seems that Church leaders ultimately reversed their policy because there were "reasons for prayerful hope, rather than grounds for sure knowledge" that unbaptized babies did not go to heaven.

I especially like that last idea about there not being "grounds for sure knowledge." Often, the first step in unlearning is the simple acknowledgment that you "don't know everything."

My point is this: If the conservative Catholic Church can unlearn a centuries old policy, might there be some long held policies that you or your organization can unlearn?