Epistemic s-curve mismatch

A good point in this thread that needs emphasis - the problem of the epistemic s-curve mismatch.  The thread is:

I love when someone emails me wanting to argue in a way which will overturn my entire ideology.

I mean, maybe, if you have also spent your entire adult life studying this shit, it may happen, but usually, you look like an infant to me.

— Ian Welsh (@iwelsh) December 4, 2020

Click for the thread. 

It is not a problem of motives or bad intent or anything else.  It is also a problem easily ameliorated with accorded trust and accorded respect.   

What is the epistemic s-curve mismatch?  This is an S-curve, a concept with broad applicability from business to careers to epistemic achievement.

Click to enlarge.

At the beginning of the effort, educating oneself, launching a new business, establishing a career, there are common attributes.  At the bottom far left, it reflects in the initial time period that there may be no real return on one's efforts.  Indeed, there may be a negative return.

Spend more time, and if you have the other necessary attributes to succeed (and not everyone does), you begin to see some incremental improvement.  At some point, if there is an inflection point,  you begin to get a lot of return for little extra effort.  If you are a start-up, these are the gravy years - profits are flowing in.  But success always attracts competitors.  They begin offering something similar or almost as valuable but at a lesser price.  Whatever you are doing is becoming commoditized.

Even with knowledge.  Once you have deep knowledge and experiences with the precepts, the facts, the players, the arguments, the evidence and have innumerable debates and can see many sides of a debate, your certainty begins to erode.  At the bottom of the s-curve when you are learning, you are typically learning with passion and brimming with conviction, especially during that long central rise.  But almost nothing is as it seems and the more you know, the more you become aware of the inexplicable exceptions, the constrained circumstances, the untested assumptions, etc.  You become, usually, at least moderately more humble.

Here are some of the inflection points in an S-curve:

Click to enlarge.

And epistemic s-curve mismatch?  That is what Ian Walsh is highlighting.

Click to enlarge.

Consider someone at the top of their game, way up there at the top right, the blue circle.  They have an encyclopedic knowledge of their field.  

Other than social obligation or affinity, what is the epistemic return to them investing time in someone represented as the bottom left blue circle?  What could they possibly learn?

It is not a rhetorical question.  The top right expert in the field may have an encyclopedic knowledge but . . . tools have changed, techniques have changed, developments in adjacent fields may have shed additional insight on this field.  All these things and more.  And youth tend to complicate and go after novelty, sometimes well rewarded and sometimes a complete waste of time.  They are early adopters of new technologies, of new ways of looking at things with fresh eyes, reexamining old assumptions.  Bottom left can, under the right circumstances, work with top right.  But there has to be trust and respect and openness.  And often, for many reasons, this is missing.

As an aside, this is also an example of the old adage in academia - science progresses one funeral at a time.  The old give way to the modified new.

The epistemic s-curve mismatch is not just a function in academia.  It is everywhere.  

Think about having to call a technology helpline.  You get someone who wants to tell you to reboot, to check your cables, etc.  Because that is 80% of what they deal with.  They are down there at the bottom left.  You are at the top right.  You are deeply familiar with the technology, you may even have helped develop parts of it, you are an experienced trouble shooter.  You have already addressed all the plausible causes of the problem.

You don't need first level help, you need third level or higher assistance.  People who can speak as peers.  But all you are getting is blather because they are first level support and they have a script to adhere to.  Frustration can be deep.

That is epistemic s-curve mismatch.  

Solutions to the mismatch are hypothetically clear but oftentimes hard to achieve:  1) a shared culture of respect, tolerance, trust and openness.  2) Common shared goals.  

Those two things can bridge the epistemic s-curve mismatch, but those two things are like hen's teeth.

Think about Twitter - It is among the champions of epistemic s-curve mismatch.  It bring lots of people together with highly different levels of epistemic accomplishment (but frequently having passionate convictions) exacerbated by having no shared goals or actually having competing goals which might be enflamed by low tolerance, low trust, low respect or little openness.  Of course twitter is a platform of barbarian flame wars.  By its very nature it cultivates epistemic s-curve mismatch.