saving ink

A friend sent me a good article in today’s New York Times: What Life Asks of Us.

And it got me thinking.

My only problem is that the approach Brooks describes only works for the majority of people, but not for all of us. It’s most usually outsiders that revolutionize an institution’s methods and theories, precisely because they are not indoctrinated in the institution’s ways. And without those revolutions, particularly in science but also in most crafts, we wouldn’t have progress.

There’s a good analogy that Lee Smolin made when discussing the way modern physicists are categorized, which works for all fields that depend on progress. He said that among physicists, there is the majority, which is those who do regular science: expand existing theories, do the hard math and apply new theories to various fields, etc.; and then there are the visionaries, who think up the new theories, often not doing much else in the process. Both are necessary for science to progress; without the visionaries, the rest would eventually come to a wall once everything that can be derived from the existing theories has been derived. Without the regular scientists, inventing new theories would be pointless as there would be no one around to apply them and expand them to apply to different fields that the original theorists never considered.

The same goes for baseball, or journalism, or banking, or just about anything. The problem that I think Brooks is getting at is that too many people are trying (and failing) to be visionaries, and without the “regular scientists” sticking to the institutions, the institutions are collapsing.

But his first debate about the value of a liberal education is a bit beside the point; most people tend to see this as a black and white issue: either liberal educations are a waste of time and people should just be trained in their craft (institution), or that everyone should have a liberal education so they can be free thinkers and the world will be a wonderful place if only that was made law. In reality, not all are cut out for a liberal education, and would be better off sticking to a craft and doing it well. But, eliminating the idea of a liberal education would be diasterous for all, as there are those who are naturally drawn to it, and eliminating that option for them would mean eliminating the very visionaries so necassary for progress.