Smart, Measurable, and Missing the Point

This reflection is based on the monthly Tech Leaders Salon discussion, where we discuss books on topics including philosophy, strategy, management, and leadership. The salon is co-hosted with Laksh Raghavan as part of his Cyb3rsyn Community. If you’re interested in joining the conversation, you can learn more about the discussion group here. In July, we discussed Scott Hartley’s The Fuzzy and the Techie. You can find some notes about the book here.

The da Vinci Cliché

Scott Hartley’s The Fuzzy and the Techie asserts that the best way to solve problems, innovate, communicate better, and establish a good company culture is to broaden our horizons and cultivate both our technical and soft skills. To a certain extent, it states the obvious, especially if you find the liberal arts valuable.

The premise of the book, which is more relevant and timely than ever, is that with the democratization of tools like AI, it becomes easier to build new tech. It also becomes incredibly more difficult to figure out what problems to solve, how to innovate with humans in mind, and how to build a future where humans can flourish and have a good life.

The issues arise when we don’t necessarily agree on what that future actually looks like, or how we are going to pursue such a goal. Renaissance man is an appealing concept. Being polymaths capable of connecting the dots across domains, navigating interdisciplinary fields with ease, and innovating more creatively and artistically, just like Leonardo da Vinci, is a north star well worth aiming for. What type of formative environment and ecosystem need to be in place to help us become well-rounded individuals?

The question itself hints at a crucial role that both one’s upbringing and the educational system play. They lay out the conditions that contribute to the flourishing of individuals into synthetic and multi-disciplinary thinkers. Hartley’s book is a cautionary tale against only valuing STEM degrees and developing a prejudice against the liberal arts, discarding them as useless. Liberal arts graduates (sociology, political science, anthropology, history, philosophy) bring something to the table that STEM majors may not be interested in exploring.

Physics Envy and the Tyranny of Metrics

Hartley makes a good point, but I’m not quite sure the issue is one of degrees as much as of an increasing lack of appreciation of the liberal arts to begin with. If we dig deeper, I think our outlook on the humanities vs sciences debate stems from a set of beliefs, assumptions, and worldviews about these fields. That outlook is governed by how we think knowledge is acquired and transmitted (epistemology). Laksh brought this point up in the discussion, underscoring the importance of identifying what our epistemology is before we even begin to describe what reality actually is.

I don’t want to dwell too much on this here, but it made me think about the reason why the liberal arts have been viewed with more contempt over time. Possibly, physics envy and excessive scientism are to blame. This trend has its roots in Descartes and Bacon’s attempts to develop a method to attain objective and certain knowledge.

Fast forward through the scientific revolution, Enlightenment, Darwin, and the Industrial Revolution, all the way to the 20th century. That’s when ‘science’ in general and physics in particular started giving us definitive answers on many of the unresolved issues and triggered a wave of technological advancements. The scientific method became the holy grail.

As a result, if something could not be seen, tested, experienced, or measured, then it was not worth our time. Knowledge came to be associated with that which could be subjected to the scientific method, the only source of truth, certainty, and objectivity.

Everything turned into just numbers, statistics, probabilities, and graphs. We leaned more into the quantitative side of reality, slowly leaving behind any of its qualitative dimensions. Against the tyranny of method, Paul Feyerabend spent his academic career pushing back against this acute case of scientism and against the scientific method as the only source of truth.

However, witnessing the success of the STEM fields, the liberal arts, including philosophy, developed physics envy and set out to apply the rigorous scientific method to their respective fields. But this move made things worse, I think, because anthropology and political science deal with human behavior rather than planetary motions. And unlike the latter, which can be tested and verified, with exact measures that are replicated time and again, the liberal arts were plagued with many issues. These included the replication crisis of many experiments with mounting doubts about the usefulness of their findings, and the fields in general.

The more I thought about this, the more confusing things got for me. As Hartley explains, the general tendency in Silicon Valley and elsewhere was such that you were better off majoring in a STEM field rather than a liberal arts one. Despite the quantitative shift within the majority of the liberal arts fields, including economics, anthropology, psychology, and political science, they were still viewed as useless for solving the ‘hard problems’ and contributing meaningfully to big tech companies.

Rethinking Knowledge, Objectively Speaking

These liberal arts fields were not completely shunned despite being viewed as impractical, and that’s what I think is worth exploring. Bear with me because I’m thinking out loud here, and some of the ideas are not fully crystallized yet. Physics envy made us all too focused on quantifying everything, whether it made sense to do so or not. Decision-making in businesses and educational institutions was based on a scientistic view, namely that the scientific method is the only method worth implementing.

Every decision has to be made ‘objectively,’ including hiring, firing, promotions, strategy, innovation, educational curricula, deciding which new products to launch, etc. Objectives have to be SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound). Employees’ performance is tracked by KPIs; a professor’s promotion depends on the number of publications (weighted based on the ranking of the journal), and other metrics. The irony is that the very same fields studying the human condition ended up removing the human element from their methods due to physics envy, the quantification craze, and scientism.

I understand that at scale, and to avoid bias and discrimination, such practices may be deemed necessary. How else can a hiring committee decide on one out of five hundred applicants, most of whom have quite similar resumes and skills? Without rigorous, quantifiable, and objective criteria, it would be all chaotic; anything would go.

The tyranny of metrics is a double-edged sword, though, because many a time a candidate is chosen either for their references and network, or simply because they’re a better fit within the company culture. Only afterwards is the decision backed up and justified by tweaking the numbers to make their file look optimal on paper.

Similarly for strategy, KPIs, investment models, and other quantitative methods that are only meant to make the undertaking sound objective, hedging against the responsibility of the decision-maker when things don’t go as planned, or when making tough decisions like laying off employees.

Bridging the Gap, Dwelling Under that Bridge

Where am I going with all this, and how does this relate to The Fuzzy and the Techie? I am not quite sure. I think that beneath the obvious assertion that we should be aiming at bridging the gap between STEM and the liberal arts, and before we even discuss how we can adapt our educational curricula, or which values we should foster, we ought to reexamine our assumptions and worldview regarding knowledge acquisition, objectivity, and what it means to be human.

Emphasizing the importance of the liberal arts in developing our soft skills, including communication, problem-solving, and critical thinking, especially in the age of AI, could only go so far. No matter how much we praise their importance, if the assumption remains rooted in scientism, namely that the only meaningful way through which we gain knowledge and make decisions should be based solely and entirely on the scientific method, nothing much will change. This is where the gap needs to be bridged first and foremost.

To reintroduce a humanistic element, along with the values that we think would lead to a better and more human-centered future in the age of AI, we need to reflect on what it means to pursue a liberal arts education. We also need to recognize that there is a different kind of knowledge, insight, and skill to be attained from studying, reading, and engaging with philosophy, history, psychology, anthropology, and the liberal arts in general, without the specter of physics envy haunting us.

Plato’s Educational Project

I’d want to invoke Plato here, but as I think about his theory of knowledge, I notice that discussing it might derail the reflection even further. But I’ll just briefly lay out a sketch of what he imagined a good educational curriculum would look like.

For Plato, education is a lifelong, continuous journey that advances over time but which focuses on nourishing both the body and the spirit. Kids would be introduced to physical play and artistic sensibility via poetry and the like; the youth would undergo a rigorous discipline via physical and military training. Then mathematics, after which they would engage in a more intellectual activity examining abstract concepts, learning how to think more critically, examining and questioning their assumptions.

The intellectual training would be followed by an extensive practical experience before engaging in philosophy after the age of 50, a stage marked by the love of wisdom. Other factors come into play for Plato, including one’s disposition, societal status, and aptitude, but that’s beside the point here.

The reason why I’m mentioning this is that the educational system proposed by Plato is holistic and takes into account the technical and artistic dimensions of the content, as well as the material and mental aspects of the students.

Developing a sense of curiosity and desire for knowledge, understanding the big picture, connecting the dots, and asking questions about reality and the life we want to live requires more than just developing technical skills and building software or new tech. The other side of the coin calls for an exploration of the human condition, learning about history, human psychology, and cultivating a philosophical mindset. This is where a liberal arts education would be different from pursuing a liberal arts degree.

To bridge the gap between the fuzzies and the techies, maybe the solution is not only going to be bringing more philosophers or anthropologists on board, as good as this may be. It can also mean figuring out a way to redesign a liberal arts or general educational system that seeks to expose the students to a wide variety of interdisciplinary subjects. Such a system would give them the tools to build a decent technical and fuzzy foundation. At the same time, they would still be at liberty to pursue whichever degree or career path they see fit.

Toward a Human-Centered, AI-Augmented Future

The Pope’s latest encyclical Magnifica Humanitas touches on some of these issues, too, echoing some of Plato’s ideas, and the solutions Hartley proposes in his book.

In the face of accelerating technological developments, when AI is giving us definitive answers, and making it possible for everyone to build and create things, Pope Leo XIV mentions several challenges that we are faced with, and underscores the importance of dialogue in the spirit of Plato.

The third major challenge is intellectual and concerns knowledge. Without careful attention, an educational system lacking in a love for truth may emerge, in which an incessant flow of information replaces the essential exercise of research, reflection and discernment. As knowledge becomes increasingly fragmented, it becomes difficult to grasp reality as a whole, to ask profound questions about meaning, or to develop authentic, critical and creative thought. Many educators already report signs of dehumanization, where people may “know many things” but struggle to find direction in their lives, partly due to an inability to connect information with deeper knowledge or maintain a sense of purpose. A genuinely healthy attitude is needed, requiring rhythms that incorporate silence, in-depth study, reading and judicious analysis, for without these elements inner freedom may be compromised.

Education, by contrast, is a long journey requiring patience, and therefore needs time for development and for engagement with reality beyond appearances. This is a fundamental issue because every technology shapes those who use it. Educating people about the use of AI, then, involves teaching them to decide when and for what purpose it ought not to be used. The speed and ease with which answers or summaries can be obtained risk extinguishing the desire to ask questions, which is a process that bears fruit only over time. As Plato wrote, the deepest and most important things are learned only after much time and effort, by engaging in discussion with others, “striking upon” ideas and experiences together like flint until the spark of understanding is kindled within us.

The road to a human-centered, AI-augmented future requires a liberal arts education that can complement the STEMs. To get there, we’ll need to take a step back and reexamine our covertly scientistic worldview, values, and implicit assumptions about what we consider practical or impractical. Reading philosophy may or may not help.

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