Offhandedly, regarding something related to recommendations, I wrote, ‘there are always echo chambers’ in the context of social media and recommendations. It’s an unfortunate truth about we humans and our perspectives, and I thought to expand on it here.

We recursively play our roles in the Allegory of the Cave, where some of us ‘leave’ the cave and go explore outside of it. It was originally wrote about philosophers, but it also applies to any sort of world view.

You can think of this as when you’re a child and you leave the house and see wondrous things – so when you go back and report to your adult supervision, whoever that may be, you expect them to be as astounded as you were. They likely weren’t, thought they may have pretended to be, because you had just ventured out of a cave that they had already ventured out of.

Conversely, adult supervision people tend to have rules you may not have understood as a child, such as, “Don’t climb trees” because they are more aware than the child of what happens when one falls out of a tree. The child, in the cave, doesn’t understand this rule, and so goes out and climbs trees, much to the consternation of the adult supervision.

Some children, though, do not wish to explore outside of the ‘cave’, and we consider these children well behaved and then later as adults find fault with them because they seem close-minded. This isn’t always the case, obviously, but it’s an example.

A child who has climbed a tree and looked down is more likely to understand the gravity of the situation than a child who has not.

If we go visit the Marginalian’s post, “The Experience Machine: Cognitive Philosopher Andy Clark on the Power of Expectation and How the Mind Renders Reality“, we begin to understand how this concept of the ‘cave’ can shape our reality. I do recommend the book mentioned, “The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality“, as it drills down deeper into how we experience our world.

Our brains ‘fill in the blanks’ based on previous experience. If we don’t have previous experience on something, our thinking is more confined when observing. If we have experience with something, we’re more likely to fill in any blanks more appropriately. This is why a senior person is supposed to be more valuable than a junior person in any given field because the senior person would have more experience, and thus be more familiar with situations that arise.

Fundamentally, this same concept is related to Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘10,000 hours’, which he consistently mentioned in his book Outliers. Of course, the 10,000 seems an arbitrary number when it comes to experience, but the point remains that the more you practice something, and the better you practice something, the better you become at it.

This is because you have gained experience that you did not have before. You have grown. Your mind predicts better now, we hope. If you practice the wrong things or practice ‘wrong’, you’re more likely to be more wrong – which gives us practiced idiots. Check your local newspaper for details.

In essence, the more experience you gain, the larger your ‘cave’ becomes. You might specialize in one direction, as many people do through education, or maybe you’ll push on the barriers on any side that catches your interest – which is where I’ll introduce David Epstein’s book, “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World“.

…Approach your own personal voyage and projects like Michelangelo approached a block of marble, willing to learn and adjust as you go, and even to abandon a previous goal and change directions entirely should the need arise. Research on creators in domains from technological innovation to comic books shows that a diverse group of specialists cannot fully replace the contributions of broad individuals. Even when you move on from an area of work or an entire domain, that experience is not wasted.

“Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World“, David Epstein (2019), p290.

Because we do live in a world where specialization is what is taught – perhaps even forced – on students and employees, breadth of experience is more valuable than people think. I solved one problem for a startup with a memory leak by idly considering how mailing addresses are done in Costa Rica, which I had picked up in my travels. When it comes to software engineering, I applied all sorts of different experience I had gathered in my life to solve problems in ways that puzzled more than a few people in how I came up with them.

We are all prisoners here. Some go through school, get piece of paper and stop trying to expand the prison – the rare ones are the ones who keep learning, keep pushing their prison walls to give themselves more and more space, to give themselves more and more experience – because life, as it happens, is just a fleeting thing where our perceptions of our world grow only as much as we do.

The difference between education and learning is that education tends toward specialization these days. The world itself is not specialized and offers us the opportunity to grow beyond.

Grow. Push those walls back, expand your caves, your echo chambers, your prisons of perception.