Ideas propagate faster than knowledge

An idea I have been playing with over the weekend without coming to any particular hard view.

Ideas propagate faster than knowledge.

It is appealing and makes sense and there are several proxy measures which might suggest it to be true. But weekend cogitation is no rigorous test.

Give me a pattern and I, and most people, can likely spin a dozen hypotheses in so many minutes as to why the pattern exists. Say it is accepted as a fact that children from homes in poverty do worse than children from homes in the upper quintile of income. Alternate explanatory hypotheses that can be found in reporting and op-eds almost any day of the week:

Rich children get more tutoring.

Rich children go to better schools.

Rich children live in cognitively enriching environments which carry over into school.

Rich children receive more parental support navigating the learning environment.

Poor children are more subject to emotional or physical trauma which spills over into school.

Poor children live more fragile lives and are not as robust.

Poor children have lower IQs.

Poor children misbehave more.

Poor children are more concentrated in dysfunctional cities.

Poor children are from single parent families and receive less educational support.

Poor children are from single parent families and are not taught how to behave.

Poverty is self-replicating.

Poor children are more exposed to environmental hazards which affect their school performance.

Teachers have lower expectations of poor children.

It takes only a few minutes to spin out the ideas as to what might be causing the performance differential. It can take years to actually refine and test all the possible hypotheses. Ideas which possibly true are easy to generate. Knowledge which is reliably and robustly true is far more rare.

I am, subject to actual research and testing, willing to accept the probability that it is true that "Ideas propagate faster than knowledge."

I think there is a second level consideration. Not only is it easier to generate ideas than to test them but it is more cognitively expensive to transmit knowledge than it is to transmit ideas. You have to build schools and cultural institutions to transmit knowledge over time and from place-to-place from one generation to the next. For families and societies it entails an expenditure of scarce capital and for those learning, it is an intensive investment in cognitive effort to learn the multiplication tables or equations in calculus or the periodic table or how to translate a language.

Whereas knowledge transmits only through concentrated effort and expenditure of money and attention, ideas can transmit through emotion. An explanation of a phenomenon which appeals to one's pre-existing emotional understanding of the world and to one's preexisting biases can travel further and faster than any fact. Indeed, emotional conviction tends to make people oblivious of facts which undermine an emotional position.

So ideas are easier to generate and transmit than is knowledge. In an era of low effectiveness transmission vectors for ideas and knowledge, this imbalance might not perhaps have been as consequential. But with everyone connected all the time, perhaps the imbalance between emotionally transmitted ideas (and ideologies) versus factual knowledge is more consequential.

I wonder if this structural imbalance has something to do with some of the key points made in Social media threat: People learned to survive disease, we can handle Twitter by Glenn Harlan Reynolds.

I’ve been reading James C. Scott’s Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, and one of the interesting aspects to the earliest civilizations is how fragile they were. A bunch of people and their animals would crowd together in a city, and diseases that weren’t much of a threat when everybody was spread out hunting and gathering would suddenly spread like wildfire and depopulate the town almost overnight.

As Scott writes, an early city was more like a refugee resettlement camp than a modern urban area. He observes that “the pioneers who created this historically novel ecology could not possibly have known the disease vectors they were inadvertently unleashing.”

[snip]

It took three things to help control the spread of disease in cities: sanitation, acclimation and better nutrition. In early cities, after all, people had no idea how diseases spread, something we didn’t fully understand until the late 19th century. But rule-of-thumb sanitation made things a lot better over time. Also, populations eventually adapted: Diseases became endemic, not epidemic, and usually less severe as people developed immunity. And finally, as Scott notes, surviving disease was always a function of nutrition, with better-nourished populations doing much better than malnourished ones.

[snip]

Where we can do something right away is with the equivalent of nutrition. Traditional training in critical thinking — the sort of thing the humanities used to revolve around, before they became focused on “social justice” — seems like it would be a useful protective. A skepticism regarding groupthink, ad hominem arguments and virtue signaling would likely offer considerable protection against the sort of mass hysteria we seem increasingly vulnerable to. Likewise, a social consensus on important ideas — the kinds of things we used to teach in civics classes — would help.