Last week I stumbled upon a fascinating interview between Ezra Klein and Atul Gawande, a prolific surgeon and healthcare writer. The two discussed the decline of ignorance and the rise of ineptitude as the primary cause of human failure. Their conversation made me reconsider the origins of failure in my own life and in the institutions around me. In the 21st century, there is no dearth of knowledge limiting human progress. For the first time, we are failing to accomplish our goals because we fail to apply the knowledge we already possess.
Consider the most ancient, primitive humans, and the state of ignorance in which they lived. They assumed their environments, the changing seasons, the unpredictable onset of disease and a host of other phenomena were all inexplicable. Ignorance was the enemy that confronted us at every turn. Our earliest discoveries—fire and flint blades for example—were random products of trial and error. Gradually, however, we built a base of knowledge that informed our future experiments, and slowly but surely we refined our methods of examining the world. Because of innovations like mathematics, logical reasoning, and the scientific method, human ignorance has decreased dramatically since those early years.
We now understand the phenomena that once astounded us, from the movements of stars to the inner-workings of our cells. Moreover, each bit of knowledge we acquire begets more exploration and discovery, accelerating the pace of learning itself. Add the last thirty years’ advancements in computing into the mix, and we now gather information at a dizzying rate. According to IBM, human knowledge doubles approximately every 13 months. We are learning so quickly, in fact, that the mass of knowledge we’ve accumulated now presents itself as a new challenge. How can we put it all to use?
Ineptitude in the sense Dr. Gawande uses it is the inability to apply knowledge to a task, and it manifests itself at every level of human activity from the personal to the political. For instance, we know that we need 7-9 hours of sleep each night to lead healthy lives. We know we that regular exercise adds years our lifespans. We certainly know that procrastinating on that problem set will be more stressful in the long-run than starting it today. We all know we should vote, but how many of us will let election day pass by without casting a ballot? At some point in our lives, we all will fail to translate knowledge into action, and usually we fail quite often.
Ineptitude even manifests in the failures of the international community. Take starvation, for example. Today one in nine people worldwide are malnourished and 3.1 million children die from poor nutrition every year. The problem clearly isn’t that we don’t know how to produce enough food. Each year the world produces enough food to feed 1.5 times the global population. The same reality is evident in domestic American politics, where political ineptitude is rampant. Politicians routinely defend positions that cannot be justified by facts.
At the personal level, ineptitude is usually the result of information overload. We’re bombarded with information cautioning us about what to do and what not to do to maximize our health, our prosperity and success; far more than we could ever recall all at once. The solution to this kind of ineptitude is organization.
One radically simple solution to personal ineptitude, courtesy of Dr. Gawande, is to make checklists. Establish steps and procedures for your most important tasks to prevent unnecessary mistakes and force yourself to take full advantage of the relevant knowledge available to you. If you procrastinate, make a schedule. If you want to become a better writer, record that feedback on your essay, and make sure you apply it to the next one. As a student, the knowledge and resources are available to you to succeed. Your responsibility is to take advantage of them.
Unfortunately, political ineptitude is a much more difficult problem to solve, and no checklist exists to remedy it. Democracies, as they exist now, are not equipped to take advantage of the amount of knowledge available to policy makers or the pace at which new knowledge is being produced. In technical terms, the problem is called retroactive accountability. This is the process by which politicians are evaluated each election cycle based on their performance during their terms. If the voters determine that they’ve underperformed, then they hold them “accountable” and vote them out of office. The consequence of this system is that it discourages elected officials from challenging the status quo.
Our democratic systems don’t give politicians the flexibility to apply knowledge, or to experiment. An elected official takes on considerable risk by instituting new policies or changing old, even ineffective ones. Perhaps that new policy will require several years to show results. Perhaps it will need to be adapted or refined, or more dangerous still, it will fail outright and need to be replaced completely. We associate these outcomes, as natural as they are, with bad leadership. We think good politicians are those that do no harm, rather than those who do the most good. The end result is that politicians spend too much time worrying about reelection, and too little time taking knowledge and applying it.
In an era when information is abundant, our greatest successes will not be the discoveries we make or the new knowledge we acquire, but the systems we develop to take what we already know and put it to use—for everyone.
Ian Burgess is a Trinity sophomore. His column, “from the mountaintop,” runs on alternate Fridays.
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