Self Indoctrinated Dog

Many people know that all my best (average and positively bad) ideas start life as a scribble on a scrap of, often yellow, paper. One idea for a blog posting that I have been carrying around in the pocket of various different suits over the last two months, (scraps of paper are typically migrated at the end of each week from one pair of trousers to another), came from a conversation with my riding coach Michel who has been teaching people to ride horses for over 30 years.

Michel’s view was that after a certain point you can’t teach any dog any trick, new or old. What you really need to do is to get people to discover their own potential. This immediately reminded me of the initially painful experience of having to teach myself politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford as a 19 year old, leading me to concur with Michel’s view. I suppose the real challenge in today’s world is that whilst infinitely more effective, this herding and gentle nudging of cats to educate themselves typically takes a lot longer than telling people what to do.

The other thing I read recently which made me re-think about Michel’s point (and the reason why this particular scrap of yellow paper actually made it into a blog posting), was the following article in the Economist... http://www.economist.com/node/18894910. It talks about the invisible sieve on the internet. As Larry Page, the chief executive of Google, once put it, “the ultimate search engine would understand exactly what you mean, and give back exactly what you want.” Another example of internet personalization is Facebook which shows you updates from the friends you interact with the most, filtering out people with whom you have less in common. One person commented that “My sense of unease crystallised when I noticed that my conservative friends had disappeared from my Facebook page”. The result is a “filter bubble”, which is defined as “a unique universe of information for each of us”, meaning that we are less likely to encounter information online that challenges our existing views or sparks serendipitous connections. “A world constructed from the familiar is a world in which there’s nothing to learn”. This has been termed “invisible autopropaganda, indoctrinating us with our own ideas”.

So if teachers can’t teach us, if nobody ever has any time in this world of the immediate, and if the only tricks we teach ourselves are ones we already know, where is this going to lead us…………. Maybe I should now come down from the clouds and go back to this utterly dull conference call.