The Problem of Acceleration

I finished Book 5 of Jasper Fforde’s “Thursday Next Series” interestingly titled First Among Sequels. (There’s a good reason for it in the story!) I’ve enjoyed this series because there’s a strong blend of science and literature, not to mention large doses of wry humor, weaved throughout the narrative. (It also fittingly has an amusing sub-index.) The story also moves at a good pace, making it one of those hard-to-put-down books. For an overview of the first several books, here’s an earlier post after I finished the first three books.

Today I’d like to highlight a few of the science-y parts by quoting a few passages. Then I’m going to discuss one of the core issues brought up by the book, the problem of “Short-Termism”, something quite relevant to our ever accelerating pace of life today.

The first quote is on the nature of ghosts, spoken by a phantom ever-curious inventor-scientist, as the temperature of the room drops. “A phantom is essentially a heteromorphic wave pattern that gains solidity when the apparition converts thermal energy from the surroundings to visible light. It’s a fascinating process, and I’m amazed no one has thought of harnessing it – a holographic TV that could operate from the heat given off by an average-size guinea pig.”

The next quote is a discussion of the “Schrodinger Night Fever principle”. I’ve truncated some parts to keep it short but kept the original italics in the quotes. “Many things happen solely because of the curious human foible of a preconceived notion’s alternating the outcome… If you go to see Saturday Night Fever expecting it to be good, it’s a corker. However, if you go expecting it to be a crock of shit, it’s that, too. Thus Saturday Night Fever can exist in two mutually opposing states at the very same time, yet only by the weight of our expectations…” After being asked whether the principle works with any John Travolta movie, the explainer continues: “Only the artistically ambiguous ones such as Pulp Fiction and Face/Off. Battlefield Earth doesn’t work because it’s a stinker no matter how much you think you’re going to like it, and Get Shorty doesn’t work either, because you’d be hard-pressed not to enjoy it, irrespective of any preconceived notion.”

I might use the quote in my Quantum class this upcoming semester, although it would probably have worked much better ten years ago – not sure if the students are familiar with all these movies. There’s another part that links the Second Law of Thermodynamics to the invention of time travel via the discovery of the equations constituting the recipe for unscrambled eggs. That will have to wait until the spring semester when I teach thermodynamics again.

[Warning: Book spoilers in the next paragraph.]

Littered throughout the book are references to the government trying to come up with ways to spend down the “stupidity surplus”. It builds up, and you have to spend it down by coming up with hare-brained projects, otherwise a sudden release could become catastrophic. It’s more prominent here than in the previous books because one of the core issues that reveals itself towards the end of the book is how time travel is powered. The organization known as the ChronoGuard essentially are mining the present time (or the “Now”) for their time-jumping activities. This has caused a shortening of the Now that will “spell the gradual collapse of forward planning, and mankind will slowly strangulate itself in a downward spiral of uncaring self-interest and short-term instant gratification.” This increasing Short-Termism reveals itself partly in the alarming falling rates of readership. “The Short Now would hate books; too much thought required for not enough gratification.” The 2006 movie Idiocracy is a good example of what this dystopia might look like. (While I checked the internet to find out the year the movie was released, I came across a very recent article where the director muses how scary it is to see similar behavior just ten years later, referring to the present political circus.)

I certainly don’t think my students have gotten stupider in the last ten years. The average capability may have even gone up slightly, if you’re using SAT/ACT scores as a measure. What I do see, however, is a distribution moving from normal to bimodal. The high-achieving students are really impressive; the low-end students (by this I mean academic grade-wise) don’t have the desire and interest to put in the time and energy. I’ve seen more withdrawals in recent years compared to when I first started teaching. (I don’t think the students are unintelligent, but they do have different priorities.) But more alarmingly I see increased stress levels all across the board, more so at the high-achieving end. The fear of failure (sometimes defined by the student as not getting an “A”) is palpable. Their lives seem so busy, so compressed, as they run around in a frenzy of activity – not just on the academic end, but also in the extra-curricular. They don’t give themselves the opportunity to slow down and think in the deep and broad sense; but that’s because society-at-large does discourages it.

Witness the assault on the humanities and the liberal arts in favor of narrow job skills needed for the here and now, less you end up jobless and laden with student debt. But defenders of the liberal arts have not done any better with their brand of fear-mongering: The jobs of today will not be the jobs of tomorrow! Society is changing at a rapid pace! You need critical thinking, a broad skill set, adaptability, leadership! Not that these are bad things, but it is no wonder that the frenzy credential-chasing frenzy continues. And how do you blow off steam in our fast-paced society? Though the Binge, of course. You can binge Neflix, binge alcohol, binge eat; everything is done in a frenzy of excess. Witness the growth in student services in the last twenty years. Professors are doing no better as role models as the pressures pile on. I am alarmed by the stress I observe in new assistant professors, akin to what I see in top-notch students. Everything needs to be done here and now so you need to be Efficient! Short-termism has permeated the academy, just as it has the business world, political structures, and the entertainment industry.

But where does all this come from? I don’t think it comes because time travel has been invented (although First Among Sequels explores this in a very clever way). I suspect that the philosopher Jacques Ellul may be on to something when he discusses the tyranny of the all-consuming technological system. The system’s imperative is to continue improving efficiency, streamlining and accelerating communication, providing feedback loops, evolving (as it were) into a complex organism – maybe an ecosystem. But unlike the ‘natural’ ecosystem, it seems to be moving further from equilibrium – at least from the perspective of humans. We are increasingly dis-equilibrated in this new world.

Can we as a society free ourselves from this tyranny? What makes it particularly difficult is that the cost to an individual or a small group to opt out of the system is huge, unless it has sufficient resources to do so. I’d like to free my courses of grades and GPAs, in an effort to reduce student stress and change baseline motivations, but it is embedded in a much larger credentialing system far beyond my university or even simply the set of tertiary education institutes. There was an attempt in our most recent core curriculum revision to reduce the overall number of units a student needed to graduate, but that failed. There are Assessments, Accreditations, and other Accountabilities to worry about.

I’m not sure how to slow down this Acceleration, and to help students move away from Short-Termism. Perhaps I could start by being a good role model, and start by consciously giving more time to my students. I feel that, over time, as I took on more administrative duties, I might have given my students the impression that I have less time for them. It’s challenging to maintain a high level of teaching excellence, research activity, and be a good ‘servant’ to the institution. So one of my goals this semester is to make a conscious effort not to be rushed when I am with students. (I’m sure they pick up the subtle cues.) I’m not sure how I will achieve this as I’m also trying to get an NSF grant out the door, among other things that are already piling up as the beginning of the semester approaches. We haven’t even started the actual semester yet! I wonder what the Zen secret is that counters Acceleration.