An Autodidact's Bible, #18

Reclaiming Your Mind, Part 2, Chapter 5

This is the eighteenth installment of the serial of my forthcoming book Reclaiming Your Mind: An Autodidact’s Bible. As with other installments, part of it is behind the paywall. Become one of my supporters to get the whole thing.

Catch up on earlier installments here:
#1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10, #11, #12, #13, #14, #15, #16, #17

If your email client chokes on this post, find the whole thing at http://jdanielsawyer.substack.com

Chapter 5:
Experts, Mentors, and Type-2 Learning

You started your life playing. Within a few days of your birth, you reached out to grasp at the mobile dangling over your crib. You put anything you could reach into your mouth, and used your tongue to learn its shape. You tapped on things to see what they would do, and would squeal with delight as they moved (which is the earliest form of my favorite game, which I call “What’s this button do?”). And, as you got a little older, you played peek-a-boo.

Playing these games gave you endless delight. They also wired up your neural circuitry, teaching your brain how it needed to structure itself in order to interact properly with the world. In these games, you learned the rules of proportion, cause and effect, object permanence, and, maybe more important than all of those things put together, you learned how to seek surprise.

Play is a reflex. Joy, on the other hand, is cultivated. As children, we cultivate that joy with abandon, turning everything we can into games which are pleasurable for reasons we can’t even begin to imagine. “Hide-and-Seek” trains you to spot predators and prey. “Two Truths and a Lie” teaches you deception and deception detection. “Truth or Dare” teaches courage and bluffing and submission. “Tag” teaches hunting skills. Football (both kinds) teaches how to work in teams. American Football teaches how to go to war. Baseball teaches how to pursue individual achievement with a context of team solidarity.

But one of the most fundamentally joyful activities any mammal can engage in is a form of play called “Follow the Leader.” From the time we’re a few days old, we mimic facial expressions. A few days after that, we mimic gestures. We are partly motivated to learn to walk so that we can be like everyone else, and follow them around, and see what they’re up to. We mimic our same-sex parents (and sometimes our opposite-sex parents) at cooking or crafting or home repair. We dress up like people we’re curious about.

Type-1 learning is, at root, play. All that arduous trial-and-error? It’s playing. It only feels arduous because, as we grow, we become self-conscious and self-critical (partly through development and partly through training).

Type-2 learning, on the other hand, is a game of “Follow the Leader.” One of the great injustices of school is that it takes this most primal drive and denatures it. It becomes tedious, devoid of discovery. We sit in rows and follow the leader at the front of the class, as gradually, over years, “Follow the Leader” morphs quietly toward “Obey the Boss.”

But “Follow the Leader” is the game we’re born playing. It’s our instinct for mimicry—instincts are our Type-0 learning system—transformed into something altogether grander (though every bit as silly-looking), and it gives us our early training in criticism, besides. It is our game. So let’s take it back.

In fact, let’s stack four childhood games on top of each other, and use them to build a rubric for finding, sorting, and learning from mentors.

On Mentorship

Dan, you may ask, If this book is about self-teaching, why would you include a section on mentors? Don’t mentors teach you? Doesn’t that sort-of undercut the whole self-teaching thing?

You would have a point, and it’s an even better point than that question implies. For the duration of this book, after all, I am a teacher and/or mentor.¹ There is a certain amount of irony in writing (or reading) a book (a Type-2 activity) that spends so much time cautioning against prizing Type-2 learning over Type-1.

Here’s why I think I can get away with it without being a total hypocrite:²

Just as Type-0 learning is foundational to Type-1, so too Type-1 learning is foundational to Type-2. Type-2 learning is not dispensable. Even if it were, to cut it out of your life would be akin to cutting off one arm and one leg (in an era before advanced prosthetics).

I mean, just look around you! Life is a banquet and most poor bastards are starving to death.³ Between the Internet and your local library, you have free access to the bulk of the accumulated knowledge and wisdom ever produced by the human race. You run into domain-specific experts every day—they could be in line behind you at the grocery store, or sitting next to you in a theater—and probably never even realize it. Some of the greatest teachers in the world are only a mouse-click or a podcast subscription away, and many of them answer email. To sit in an autodidact’s paradise filled to bursting with all the technological, scientific, aesthetic, cultural, and natural wonders of the modern world and to not dive into them would be...well, silly. Maybe even unseemly. But...

Your trial-and-error system must be engaged in order for you to learn from mentors, or books, or classes, or watching other people work (or play). I touched on this earlier in Stealing the Low-Hanging Fruit⁴ and Working Within a Tradition,⁵ now it’s time to dive in with a full-throated yawp.⁶

You will (hopefully) find many mentors as you move through life. Some of them will be proximate (living people that you have personal contact with), and some will be distant (dead people, living people whose work you read, facilitators you engage with over the Internet, etc.).

Some will be personal mentors—friends, teachers, and family members who you admire who take you under their wing, answer your questions, and show you things about life, the universe, and everything.

Some will be professional mentors—people ahead of you in your chosen profession, or hobbies, who show you the ropes, give you a leg up, help train you in your craft, and champion you along the way.

Some will be intellectual mentors—people who know and/or understand things you’re desperate to know, who put up with your questions even when you’re sure you’re bothering them, and who give you room to explore.

Some will be moral mentors—people who embody qualities of character you wish you had.

Some mentors you find will be transitory, lasting for an afternoon, or the space of an essay. Some will stay with you for life, your relationship with them (or their work) transforming as you grow. Most will fall somewhere in the middle.

Now, let’s get on with the business of reclaiming those childhood games.