Rising Above the Over Quantification of Content: Part One: Parker vs. Piaget

This is the first in a four part series on the value of providing people the opportunity to exercise their own cognitive powers to make sense of content, see the connections between content, and decide what is valuable to them. Now I doubt that the famous American wine expert Robert Parker and the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget ever met, much less debated but one can imagine what might have occurred, especially if Piaget was like many of his fellow Europeans.

In the September 6, 2004 issue of the New Yorker, there was a nice piece by Adam Gopnik on the wine, “Through a Glass Darkly.”  (Apologies that I do not have the link available any more.)  In the piece there is a lot of discussion on Bordeaux, my favorite region. Adam critiques the naïve views of Robert Parker, who tried to quantify wine raking in the 1970s, much to the pleasure of American wine buyers and displeasure of French wine lovers.

As Adam writes, “(Parker) was uncannily successful because (he was an) apostle of a radical American empiricism – an insistence that facts and numbers could show you what was really going on, against everything tradition told you…The debate is not about whether the numbers are right but whether it is right to have numbers.”

Adam continues, “…the French connoisseur believes that, with his glass of a turpentinery Gascon wine, he is in a truer relation to history than the American searching for his jammy high scorers.”

This reminds me of similar issues that came up in cognitive psychology. Jean Piaget, the Swiss (French speaking) psychologist who many feel invented the developmental approach, chose certain tasks that were not being taught in the Genevan school system to test children’s problem solving ability. This was the same guy who was more interested in the mistakes (than correct answers) children made on IQ tests to better understand their thought processes.

Some American psychologists who followed Piaget devised ways to teach children so they could perform Piaget’s tasks at an earlier age. The goal was to determine how young can we induce success on this task, taking an almost Fred Taylor time and motion approach. We will come back to Fred later in the series. 

Piaget was dismayed and amused by how these psychologists missed his point, driven by empiricism. He referred to this as the “American” problem. I am confident that he would a lump Parker in with these psychologists. Piaget felt that children should spent time at each developmental stage to fully absorb it and not be hurried through stages prematurely. To be fair, he felt that not all Americans were wrong and his educational hero was John Dewey who also felt that education should focus on experience and be comprehensive.

Now is content getting the same treatment as wine? Nick Carr quotes Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, in his Atlantic article, Is Google Making Us Stupid?, that it is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does. Carr adds that what Fred. Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind. I would add: and what Robert Parker did for wine.  Nick goes on to write, “in Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.”

Now like most things, I feel it is matter of balance. There is a place for simplicity, numbers, and measurement, and a place for “tradition, chemistry, and complexity.” There is a place for Google and I used it in writing this article as Carr did in his. But I used it to find things I knew I was looking for, not to explore the complexity of a topic and discover unknowns. Google needs a complement. Having taught how to use numbers in research, I tend to err on the side of complexity and welcome some ambiguity. We will return to Nick Carr’s article in more depth at the end of this series but next we want to look at Robin William’s character in Dead Poet’s Society as he considers the measurement of poetry.