Competence without comprehension

From ‘A Perfect and Beautiful Machine’: What Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Reveal About Artificial Intelligence by Daniel C. Dennett.

What Darwin and Turing had both discovered, in their different ways, was the existence of competence without comprehension. This inverted the deeply plausible assumption that comprehension is in fact the source of all advanced competence. Why, after all, do we insist on sending our children to school, and why do we frown on the old-fashioned methods of rote learning? We expect our children's growing competence to flow from their growing comprehension. The motto of modern education might be: "Comprehend in order to be competent." For us members of H. sapiens, this is almost always the right way to look at, and strive for, competence. I suspect that this much-loved principle of education is one of the primary motivators of skepticism about both evolution and its cousin in Turing's world, artificial intelligence. The very idea that mindless mechanicity can generate human-level -- or divine level! -- competence strikes many as philistine, repugnant, an insult to our minds, and the mind of God.

and later;

It was, indeed, a strange inversion of reasoning. To this day many people cannot get their heads around the unsettling idea that a purposeless, mindless process can crank away through the eons, generating ever more subtle, efficient, and complex organisms without having the slightest whiff of understanding of what it is doing.

Is this not a mirror of much of the current political discourse between the centralizers who wish to achieve outcomes through directed action and the laissez-faire people who trust to an uncontrolled process as long as it bounded within some moral or ethical code (as Adam Smith presupposed). Both world views have a logical basis but only one is frequently demonstrated in reality. Enthusiastic seekers of justice believe that it can be attained through sufficient intellectual artifice. Every utopia predicated on the intelligence and rationality of man (or some small cadre of thought leaders of men), though, seems to come crashing down, not before having wreaked terrible injustice and inflicted suffering far and wide. But all of it logical. It calls to mind Thomas Wolfe’s “the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.” There would seem to be a groundedness or pragmatism in the culture of the Anglosphere (or perhaps it is the attributes of agency, individualism and skepticism) which tends to forestall the worst excesses of scientific behaviorism and logical zeal.

In contrast, there are those believers in freedom and liberty who rely on the mysterious forces of dispersed individual decision-making, the chaos of the marketplace and the wisdom of crowds. Time and again, when exercised within some constraining moral or philosophical framework, the individual agent, market and the crowds end up delivering superior outcomes to those achieved by credentialed, cognitive, or inherited elites.

The markets and crowds deliver competence without comprehension while reason-based utopias seeking to achieve desired outcomes time and again founder on the human fallibilities of those deemed the best and the brightest and deliver up only failure and human misery.

It seems that the challenge is not to choose one or the other but to recognize the circumstances under which one may be more likely to yield success than the other, or really, how to blend a balance of the two for the particular situation. My guess is that the bedrock recipe is maximum liberty with a rare dash of occassional centralism.

Highfalutin but fun speculation.