Platonic vs. a-Platonic Thinking

How Not to Be a Nerd

Let us dig deeper into the problem of knowledge and continue the comparison of Fat Tony and Dr. John in Chapter 9. Do nerds tunnel, meaning, do they focus on crisp categories and miss sources of uncertainty? Remember the presentation of Platonification as a top-down focus on a world composed of these crisp categories.

Think of a bookworm picking up a new language. He will learn Serbo-Croatian or !Kung by reading a grammar book cover to cover, memorizing the rules. He will have the impression that some higher grammatical authority set the linguistic regulations so that nonlearned ordinary people could subsequently speak the language. In reality, languages grow organically; grammar is something people without anything more exciting to do in their lives codify into a book. While the scholastic-minded will memorize declensions, the a-Platonic nonnerd will acquire Serbo-Croatian by picking up potential girlfriends in bars on the outskirts of Sarajevo, or talking to cabdrivers, then fitting (if needed) grammatical rules to the knowledge he already possesses.

Consider again the central planner. As with language, there is no grammatical authority codifying social and economic events; but try to convince a bureaucrat or social scientist that the world might not want to follow his “scientific” equations. In fact, thinkers of the Austrian school, to which Hayek belonged, used the designations tacit or implicit precisely for that part of knowledge that cannot be written down, but that we should avoid repressing. They made the distinction we saw earlier between “know-how” and “know-what”—the latter being more elusive and more prone to nerdification.

To clarify, Platonic is top-down, formulaic, closed-minded, self-serving, and commoditized; a-Platonic is bottom-up, open-minded, skeptical, and empirical.

The reason for singling out the great Plato becomes apparent with the following example: Plato believed that we should use both hands with equal dexterity. It would not “make sense” otherwise. He considered favoring one limb over the other a deformation caused by the “folly of mothers and nurses.” Asymmetry bothered him, and he projected his ideas of elegance onto reality. We had to wait until Louis Pasteur to figure out that chemical molecules were either left- or right-handed and that this mattered considerably.

One can find similar ideas among several disconnected branches of thinking. The earliest were the empirics, whose bottom-up, theory-free, “evidence-based” medical approach was mostly associated with Philnus of Cos, Serapion of Alexandria, and Glaucias of Tarentum, later made skeptical by Menodotus of Nicomedia, and currently well-known by its vocal practitioner, the great skeptical philosopher Sextus Empiricus. Sextus who was perhaps the first to discuss the Black Swan. The empirics practiced the “medical art” without relying on reasoning; they wanted to benefit from chance observations by making guesses, and experimented and tinkered until they found something that worked. They did minimal theorizing.

Their methods are being revived today as evidence-based medicine, after two millennia of persuasion. Consider that before we knew of bacteria, and their role in diseases, doctors rejected the practice of hand washing because it made no sense to them, despite the evidence of a meaningful decrease in hospital deaths. Ignaz Semmelweis, the mid-nineteenth-century doctor who promoted the idea of hand washing, wasn’t vindicated until decades after his death. Similarly it may not “make sense” that acupuncture works, but if pushing a needle in someone’s toe systematically produces relief from pain (in properly conducted empirical tests), then it could be that there are functions too complicated for us to understand, so let’s go with it for now while keeping our minds open.