I’ve been thinking for a while about writing a post on the value of intellectual humility and curiosity in this post-truth, algorithmically-driven, AI-everywhere world. When I got started on the draft I ended up going down lots of rabbit holes, which left me with too much to write about in one post. So I’m going to partition this into a couple of parts, with the first one looking at the paradox of information abundance.
When I first seriously got into music in my early teens I had a few albums that I coveted and played endlessly on repeat. I knew them intimately. Now of course, we have access to over 6,000 genres and 12 million unique artists and uploader profiles on Spotify, endless scrolling and a never-ending supply of distractions. We’ve gone from one generation where scarcity determined a narrow and deep focus to the next generation where an almost infinite abundance results in a wide but potentially shallow focus.
This is not a new story but its one that has been given new impetus over the last few years by a glut of AI-generated content and the unstoppable growth of algorithmic content selection within feeds. This is what the excellent Gurwinder recently called an intellectual obesity crisis (he also shared a quite remarkable chart showing that the percentage of Americans under 40 reporting serious memory & concentration problems has doubled since 2015).
And it’s having some interesting impacts. Taking music as an example again, Ian Leslie recently shared a link to a fascinating report on evolving music consumption based on a survey of consumers which found that not only is music discovery highly fragmented but that the funnel to stream more music from the same artist is pretty broken. Users on Instagram and TikTok are less likely to actively search for music (instead passively consuming what the algorithm throws up), and people who discover music on TikTok are significantly more likely to follow an artist than they are to listen to more of that artist’s music.
In the age of the algorithm and increasingly AI-driven discovery the act of being intentional about where we place our attention has almost become an act of rebellion. Claude Shannon (the Father of the information age) theorised that more information doesn’t necessarily mean more knowledge. He distinguished between channel capacity (how much a system can transmit) and meaningful signal. Wisdom isn’t about maximising information intake but optimising our signal-to-noise ratio. And sometimes the most intellectually curious thing we can do is to close the browser and sit with a single difficult idea until it reveals its meaning.
Virginia Woolf was a largely self-educated woman who, excluded from university education, created her own curriculum by reading voraciously from her father’s library and following her intellectual interests wherever they led. Her concept of the ‘common reader’ is someone that, rather than reading as a symbol of intellectual prowess, reads to experience life more fully, is receptive and open to the unfamiliar, and draws from wide-ranging sources to create a personal framework of understanding.
This relies on intrinsic motivation. Yes, we need to read widely and be willing to explore but there are some deliberate daily practices that we can also use. Like purposefully choosing texts which are one degree removed from what we’re usually interested in or comfortable with. Reading the sources that the sources cite to understand the origins of ideas. Avoiding the temptation to outsource our thinking to AI. Scheduling unstructured time to allow our minds to wander. Keeping a casual log of interesting or nascent ideas and other odds and ends (this used to be what blogging was good for). Asking ourselves ‘what if I’m not right about this?’.
All this is to say that intellectual curiosity is going to be the differentiator of the future. Staff that want to find the right answer rather than just an answer that is given to them by an AI. Who are willing to change their view when new evidence emerges rather than have an AI rationalise how their existing view is the right one. Who question assumptions rather than rely on manufactured certainty.
In many ways we need more institutionalised doubt in business. The systematic questioning of claims and received wisdom. The evidence and logical argument to challenge assumptions but also the judgement to feel when something is off or to follow lines of exploration that can open up new possibilities. Intellectual humility becomes politically subversive when everyone is expected to have instant opinions on complex issues. Intellectual curiosity is personally enriching but also essential for navigating complexity, maintaining agency, and preserving what’s distinctly human in an age of AI.
So here’s to the common reader. To strong opinions loosely held rather than loose opinions strongly held. Hannah Arendt once said that ‘There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous’. This Substack (and my company) are named after a Malcolm Muggeridge quote: ‘Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream’. When I started blogging twenty years ago I was still in corporate world and this was something that felt particularly apt at the time.
Now, perhaps, being willing to swim against the stream is more needed than ever.
A version of this post appeared on my weekly Substack of AI and digital trends, and transformation insights. To join our community of over ten thousand subscribers you can sign up to that here.
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Image: By George Charles Beresford / Adam Cuerden – Filippo Venturi Photography Blog, Public Domain
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