Marvin Minsky and Robert Bork
I’d bet those two names have rarely, if ever, been linked.
I had the good fortune to accompany my wife Mary, an artist, teacher and technology integration guru, to the Constructing Modern Knowledge seminar in Manchester, NH, last week. I spent the week working on my laptop and talking to clients from the hotel lobby and coffee shop while the educators kibbitzed, but I did go along on the field trip to MIT’s Media Lab and the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. The highlight was a two hour discussion between Marvin Minsky and a small group of CMK attendees. I knew only a little about Minsky, including that he was one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence and neural networks (and a consultant on perhaps my favorite movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey). The topics ranged from education policy to religion (he’s not a big fan) to AI to sports and far beyond. Each of Minsky’s answers was provocative, usually challenging the questioner’s premises and turning the discussion in an unexpected direction. It was a riff on knowledge, not unlike a virtuoso performance by a master jazzman. Although Minsky would deny it, he clearly took pleasure in being an agent provocateur. But it worked. I walked away thinking about some issues in a different way.
Twenty minutes into Minsky’s riff, I realized where I’d seen it before. My antitrust class, second year of law school. The professor was Robert Bork, ten years ahead of his failed Supreme Court nomination. I didn’t agree with his view of antitrust or constitutional law (still don’t, for that matter), but I learned more there than in any other class I ever took. Bork, like Minsky, is a brilliant polymath with an absolute certainty that he’s right and a penchant for challenging the conventional wisdom (although both have become the conventional wisdom among many in their fields). What I learned from Bork’s class was that when you’re debating with people smarter than you, if you let them state the premises you’ll lose the argument every time. So you’d better focus on challenging their premises and assumptions, particularly the hidden or unstated ones.
It’s a lesson that’s served me well in practicing law (and arguing politics with friends). The value of questioners like Minsky and Bork is widely recognized in academia. The “real” world, including the telecom industry, could benefit from a few more people like them challenging the conventional wisdom.
August 3rd, 2008 at 10:52 pm
Thanks Mark, for those comments. Fascinating, because I had the very same experience. When I was a mathematics grad student at Princeton in the 1950s, a person named William F. Buckley gave a talk about why parents (rather than governments) should control what schools should teach—because of being the rightful owners of schools. I had some strong objections to this, but not being bold enough to refute his premises, I lost every one of my arguments. I felt that this had never had happened to me before—and concluded that it had happened because I had not challenged deeply enough.
However, while I may appear to believe that I’m right, my inner position is far more modest: I merely assume that others are almost surely wrong, when they support a popular belief. That’s because I tend to regard any widely popular idea to probably be an especially infectious meme—or in other words, a symptom of some contagious mental disease.
Also, on the other side, I started to teach myself to appreciate the value of being shown to be wrong—because that’s just about the only way that a person can learn! (Positive reinforcement can only promote behavior that one already possesses!) So I deliberately try to feel displeased whenever someone agrees with me.
And people are always right when they disagree! That’s because either the speaker was actually wrong, or failed to present a convincing argument.
August 24th, 2008 at 4:06 pm
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