The Social Cue Factory
From the beginning of our civilized society, we are creating and destroying norms. It is almost like a factory that has been manufacturing social cues for everyone to follow. As societies mature, every person in society takes fewer and fewer life decisions as a result of the cues that are already laid down. Many small and seemingly minute decisions that a human has to make are automated away by markets and the internet. For example, Facebook decides (as a consequence of its feed) which friends you will talk to today. Ratings on many goods, like refrigerators and TVs automate your buying decisions. There are arguments to be made for this kind of decision automation is important for the betterment of human society.
(Note: Most of the time I will be talking about people at the extreme case rather than the average case. )
There are also important human decisions that have been affected by the internet, the markets and other important phenomena. The most important of them being how humans, in general, think about learning, education, and careers. Peter Thiel has always been a major influence on the way I think about education and careers. You can’t help but notice that the smartest people in the world still follow conventions and are addicted to following social cues. As Thiel states in many of his interviews, “ the word ape meant both primate and to imitate.” Imitation and a desire to follow social cues have been a prominent feature of our societies for centuries. There is almost an addiction like feature to trends. Trends exist in general because humans imitate, copy and repeat each other’s actions at all times. It is much easier and natural for a human being to follow a trend, a ritual, a custom then to not follow it. The meme culture on the internet today is almost a result of this imitating behavior where strange and almost obscure objects are shared every day.
Coming back to education, learning and careers. The society in my view does a very good job of creating individuals who are similar in many ways. There is a great utility for a society in having people who are similar to each other in at least some aspects. But as a side effect, individuality and creativity are somewhat thrown sideways in a society which values homogenous discipline rather than heterogenous creativity. Students and kids who are somewhat inclined to worry less about social cues are labeled as renegades and are called undisciplined. For discipline is to only do what all of your class(or peers) are doing. If your class is walking in a straight line to get to a place and you choose to find an optimal way to get there by breaking the line, you will be punished for the indiscipline rather than be rewarded for the creativity.
Sooner or later these undisciplined and rogue students are talked out of their free, creative and innovative ideas even before they have a chance to form them. There are many products of this “social cue factory”. There are products that give cues, traditions, norms, definitions for success and failure. In Mahabharata, Krishna confesses to Karna who is on his deathbed, “Warriors like you are a glowing and burning lamp for all mortals on this earth. You are born only to burn and in the light, you throw, we find our paths.” In the 21st century, as ideas are getting harder to find and scientific progress is harder to achieve, we need the smartest of us to show us new directions rather than follow old safe ones. We need more lamps.
In the modern world, success and intellect are easily attributed to getting into a prestigious college, getting a prestigious job or such other signifiers. I have seen many peers falling for this, knowingly or unknowingly. The real misfortune of our society is that the smartest among us are the most gullible. They are one of the biggest consumers and customers of the social cue factory. In my personal life, I have looked up to many smart people and my admiration has waned a bit when I see them using social cues to make most of their important decisions. As expected the environment around me (society in general) has only worked to reinforce social cues. As Thiel again rightly puts it, “courage is in shorter supply than genius.”
As one of the ordinary human beings, I have found myself in the beeline of people doing unoriginal things and following safe and easy paths. I took the safe and easy path of studying computer engineering. The courageous decision I took was to pursue my bachelors from Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Technological University, Lonere which is the state technical university of Maharashtra. It is a university in the middle of nowhere, based entirely on a rural campus far away from the chaos of the cities (Pune and Mumbai are at least 120 km away). The choice I made was to trade colleges with good placements with a university with which had mediocre placements at best. The education I received at DBATU was better than what I would have received at colleges of equal standing in the cities of Pune and Mumbai.
The hard choice I was surprisingly comfortable making was to choose substance, self-learning, struggle, solitude and silence over style, herd mentality, comfort and chaos that the city life offered. If not anything, it showed me how the lives and perspective of people are varied. But that is a topic for a different blog.
In India, students are obsessed about getting into IITs, IISc and other prestigious colleges either for bachelors or for postgraduate degrees. On my personal front, I never got into a master’s program, not for the lack of trying though. I was rejected by MIT and Cambridge University, mostly I suspect because of my average grades and because of a not so well know university. Only in the last two years have I known that the real people to look up to are the people who have gone off the beaten ordinary track. Admission to colleges should be a well thought out action rather than an automatic selection which will give one more option to choose from.
Getting degrees for degree’s sake is always a sign of two things:
- Being a premier consumer of the social cue factory
- Inability to take actual decisions and creating options for oneself.
(Applies less for STEM fields may be, but it still does)
When it comes to careers after college, there is also weird myopia among the smartest people. In my opinion, the smartest people should at least at some point in their lives do things that otherwise would not happen. That is to say, smart people need to be courageous. A simple and potent example is of Elon Musk. Without him, we would not be dreaming of Mars. There is so much progress enabled by human beings working at their full potential. We need individuals who are less sensitive to social cues. One of my favorite Thiel saying is, “If you’re less sensitive to social cues, you’re less likely to do the same things as everyone else around you.”
“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” Students getting out of college should take a moment to examine if it makes any sense to be a small cog in a big wheel. That job at Amazon and Google has taken away the best minds that could have worked one of our most pressing problems. Do you want to be in a place where anyone can replace you? Find a problem worth solving, find your calling and dedicate yourselves to it.
Anyone and everyone who thinks they are smart should focus all their energies on taking actions that nobody else would take, creating companies nobody else would dare to create, writing poems and stories that will not be written and asking questions that will not be asked.
[PS: Even I should take my own advice.]