In my previous blog I wrote about a debate hosted by Engineering Collective. This semester they launched a lunch series and I went to one session titled Higher Education: Pathway to Success or Path of Debt? which led to the following thoughts.

1. Head Fake

There is a term called in sports called a “head fake”. For example, in basketball, when you move in one direction while intending to pass the ball in another, you are doing a “head fake” to fool your opponents.

I first encountered this term, and its metaphorical usage in education, in the Randy Pausch book The Last Lecture. For example, many parents send the kids to sports teams. They don't necessarily expect their kids to win Olympic medals. Their true intention is for the kids to learn sportsmanship, so to speak. The same applies to acting classes, Model United Nations, math clubs, and countless extracurriculars, where the true goal is to acquire some spirit that can be widely reused across one's life.

This begins to look like a means-end argument. In many occasions, what looks like an end is simply a means to some “truer” end. Here, the surface end is a head fake.

Let me play with this means-end inversion and push it a little bit further. The mental exercise consists of two steps:

(i) Take a commonly assumed “end” of higher education
(ii) Then ask: Can it actually be a means?

Let's do a warm up exercise.

Suppose one answer to (i) is “diploma”. It indicates your competence on the job market. It marks you as academically accomplished ......

Can the diploma actually be a means? Absolutely.

Perhaps the actual end is a wider range of options to secure your finance, to realize your dream, to enrich your life .....

Perhaps the actual end is more knowledge about a chosen field, deeper understanding of “what's out there”, better information to make informed decisions ......

Perhaps the actual end is entry into networks that will bring about a higher social status, an educated friends group, a connected professional community ......

Perhaps the actual end is simply experience itself, where you practice soft skills about problem-solving, critical thinking, team working, resource and time management ......

Now comes the advanced exercise: I would like to question those supposed “true ends”.

Could [experience, knowledge, information, networking, life possibilities …] also be means? If so, what would instead be the end in this case?

I don't want to dismantle everything at once. So I pick knowledge and information, and will argue why they are not the ultimate end of higher education. They, too, may be head fakes.

Ha, sorry, the writing above is a head fake as well. Next comes what I actually wanted to write.

2. Knowledge is the Head Fake. Organized Ignorance is the Real Goal.

I will write from the position I currently occupy: I'm under training to be a scientist.

Supposedly, a scientist has to be knowledgeable. So a central goal of the training process is to build a substantial knowledge base. But that's not the ultimate goal, because scientists always look into the unknown. Every piece of known knowledge is already published. As such, building a knowledge base cannot be justified merely for its own sake.

PhD doesn't aim to convert a person into wikipedia. Though the person may become something like a wikipedia when they make it to other side. Supposedly, higher education would improve \(\frac{\text{what you know}}{\text{the universe}}\). But there is more nuance to it.

There is a typical frustrating period at the beginning of a PhD: the more you know, the more you know you don't know. So if you measure \(\frac{\text{what you know}}{\text{the universe}}\) during that period, you would feel like the ratio is rapidly shrinking, because the universe is rapidly expanding, both subjectively (you discover entire literatures you didn't know existed) and objectively (the Universe is indeed expanding).

I used to be haunted by the thought that the growing speed of the numerator would never catch up with the growing speed of the denominator. Under this view, the contraction of my ignorance would always be outpaced by the expansion of my awareness of ignorance. And the outcome of my higher education would be bleak. I might prefer to remain happily ignorant rather than become anxiously knowledgeable.

How to step out of this spiral? I cannot control the objective expansion of the universe 🤷‍♀️.

Could I control its subjective expansion? Could I restrict myself to studying what's known to be unknown, without discovering what was previously unknown to be unknown? I tried! It is empirically very hard — you cannot see the figure without the ground.

Then I would consider the possibility of improving some “adjusted gain” — if you go through an experience and the result is that the numerator expands while the denominator expands by a smaller amount, that would be a pleasant outcome.

This leads to a pair of goals: growing the known, and managing the “known unknown”. I believe the former is a means to the latter: you gain a lot of knowledge for the sake of better organizing your ignorance.

Hence we arrive at an intermediate conclusion that organized ignorance is a “truer” end.

Indeed, it is very covert because it cannot be directly taught, practiced, or optimized. The only way to achieve it is to engage in the process of achieving “the means” (i.e. gaining more knowledge) while pretending it was the end, if you will.

3. Information is the Head Fake. Channelled Information Flow is the Real Goal

A twin sibling of knowledge is information.

But I see information as something more scattered and less technical. Information ranges from the global — a started up merges, a new technology hits headlines, a company shifts its investment plan; to the local — a pop-up event, a newly-announced opportunity, someone recommends a book, someone's plan doesn't end up well ……

It is not the case that the more information the better. Because you will soon notice conflict, either between two pieces of information, or between new information and old beliefs.

You might attend a class and end up hearing something that challenges what was taught in an earlier class. When it comes to decision making, you might find yourself juggling information and soon overwhelmed by the complexity of reality — the complexity has far exceeded what you can wrap your head around.

Higher education seems to be responsible for equipping us with information so that we can make informed decisions. But are we absorbing information or distraction? Where to draw the line between signal and noise?

Gaining appreciation to these questions, and developing effective strategies, requires us to abandon the idea that accumulating information is the end goal. The dazzling array of information surrounding us functions as a selective pressure. It forces us to sharpen the ability to sort and filter, and strengthen the ability to hold complexity and conflict.

Everyone is a moving particle on an information landscape. You seek information today for the sake of better seeking information tomorrow. What is getting shaped is the channel through which information reaches you. A natural result is a polished information landscape.

Hence, we arrive at a second conclusion that channelled information flow is a “truer” end.

Again, the end is covert. Only information is transportable, while the outcome of channelling and polishing is not. The only way to achieve it is to engage in the process of achieving “the means” (i.e. exposure to complex information) while pretending it was the end, if you will.

4. University as Buffet

The lunch event also touched on greedy optimization for “high-utility courses”, which look good on your resume and signal your competitiveness on the job market. In the same spirit, double-majors or double-degrees have become increasingly common.

However, there is a difference between taking a course and “actually taking” a course.

When an “optimized” curriculum is tightly packed, the student can hardly be present in every class. Students inevitably apply “shortcuts” just to survive the workload.

I experienced this firsthand in my undergrad. I did double-major in CS and Math, so I contributed to the very dynamic I'm analyzing.

In my undergrad, almost everyone had at least a minor. Someone had two minors. Many pursued double-majors. A handful pursued double-degrees. I even had a classmate who managed a triple-major via “customized curriculum”. If you were someone doing a single-major, then you would feel like dressing non-decorative clothes at a Halloween party — you are out of place.

Each semester I had 6 required courses and 1-2 electives or non-technical. I wanted to make sure that I took at least 3 courses seriously. This meant I had to make conscious decisions about which ones to “give up” — doing the bare minimum, hacking the exams by working through past papers.

Given my struggle and compromise, I kinda admired the triple-major classmate's time management and energy commitment.

Later, when I learned that the measurable benefit of double-majoring is statistically insignificant, I began to reflect more critically. There is an upper bound on how many courses a realistic human being can “actually take”, assuming finite but reasonable capacity and commitment.

Many double-major curricula or even more ambitious ones obviously exceed that bound. In the end, you might acquire roughly the same amount of knowledge and information as someone with a single-major, but your transcript would tell a story as if you got more.

It tempting to blame such greedy optimization on students' narrow objectives. But in a conversation with Alexa (a real student, not the chatbot), she made a great point: rising tuition gives rise to a buyer's mindset — students are “buyers” who want to make sure they receive maximimal value for what they pay.

By analogy, imagine you enter a fancy buffet. You already paid a high price. You would gravitate toward the steaks and lobsters, and dismiss the fries and salads — not because you dislike them, but because your natural interests are filtered by the buyer's mindset. What is worse, the worry about return on investment could make you stop tasting the food.

We think we are collecting things.

In fact, we are rearranging our ignorance and our information landscape.

Or alternatively, we let ourselves be rearranged by the buffet, the buyer's mindset, and the flood of information.

To rearrange or to be rearranged?