The Case for Mental Models
Sherlock Holmes asked Watson in A Study in Scarlet: “What the deuce is
[the solar system] to me? You say that we go round the sun. If we went round
the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”
Continuing in that vein, Holmes even announces his intent to unlearn this bit
of information, “I shall do my best to forget it”.
Are Holmes’ remarks
the reason why even very knowledgeable teachers struggle to teach their students?
Because the student is thinking, “So? What do I do with that new bit of
information you hurled at me?” After all, most people think of teaching the way
Nobel-Prize winning physicist and professor Carl Wieman started:
“When I first taught physics as a young
assistant professor, I used the approach that is all too common when someone is
called upon to teach something. First I thought very hard about the topic and
got it clear in my own mind. Then I explained it to my students so that they
would understand it with the same clarity I had.”
But of course, that approach never works,
does it? And why doesn’t it work? Because teachers assume that “expert-like
ways of thinking about the subject come along for free or are already present”.
So, it would seem necessary to also teach students how to process that
information.
Charlie Munger brings
out the same point when he talked about the importance of mental models:
“If the facts don’t hang together on a
latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form.”
Conversely, isolated
facts don’t have much retention power.
Holmes even went
to the extreme of advocating only taking in information that “fits” when he
tells Watson:
“A fool takes in all the lumber of every
sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him
gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that
he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is
very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic.”
Of course, that’s
a dangerous extreme. Munger knew that which is why he suggested:
“you’ve got to have multiple models”.
Otherwise, with
just a single model, you risk becoming like the man whose only tool is a
hammer. To him, every problem looks like a nail!
Epilogue: Of course, Holmes never truly practiced
what he preached. He did know about astronomy, like the time he applied it in The Musgrave Ritual. Perhaps he was just
playing devil’s advocate?
Whatever Sherlock Holmes might say or whatever views experts in many fields may hold, the following simple truth will always stand out.
ReplyDeleteThere are levels of grasp. These could be broadly classified into these gradations - (1) observed detail, (2) data, (3) information, (4) knowledge, (5) wisdom.
This is a kind of selective variation in the approach that one should apply to situations. How one orients in a mixture of these levels decides one's analytically ability and resolving potential. That is what makes Newton stand out - because everyone also saw what he saw, but not everyone could operate at the level of universality in the grasp - staying above "just data" or "just registering what one sees".
I know about a patient who had gone to quite a few doctors and specialists. She got done many many tests, costing a fortune. But no doctor could zero in on the diagnosis and everyone seemed to be groping in the dark. Time was passing and it was a very stressful experience. Finally she went to an elderly doctor, who was known for his good work. The doctor took a mere glance at all the reports, asked a few questions on the nature of her ailment. He then advised one single test- that was all. That test was focused on the nature of the ailment and not any trial and error way of tracking and elimination through innumerable tests. Surprise - the test showed positive for bone TB, a form of relatively less known among tuberculosis types. Just one consultation was enough for this doctor to zero in on the diagnosis, a feat not matched by big name doctors at hospitals of reputation. And, she got cured!
How could he do it? He would not get engrossed in data. He was operating in some domain bordering on good knowledge and having his roots in wisdom. This does not come by shunning data accumulation alone.
By the way, in most of our arguments with one another, we often get trapped at data level. We go on and on arguing irrelevant details. Whereas wisdom is always sharp and pretty brief.