First we shape our social graph; then it shapes us

Escaping Flatland

SubscribeSign in

First we shape our social graph; then it shapes us

Henrik Karlsson<br>Sep 07, 2022

719

34<br>126

Share

This essay is the first of a series. Here is part 2, part 3, and part 4.<br>Once you see the boundaries of your environment, they are no longer the boundaries of your environment.<br>Marshall McLuhan

The inside of a womb looks as it did 70,000 years ago, but the world outside has changed. In July 2021, when our daughter was born, the night sky didn’t light up with stars; it was lit up by the warm afterglow of sodium street lamps. Green-clad women carried the baby away, pumping oxygen into her mouth. It was like something out of a sci-fi: she had woken up, without a memory, in an alien world. Smeared in white-yellow fat, she didn’t know who she was nor what she was doing here. The only thing she knew, genetically, was that she needed to figure this out fast or die.<br>How do we ever do this?<br>Chimpanzees, who are born into the habitat their genes expect, get by largely on instinct. We cannot. We have to rely on what anthropologists call cultural learning. We have to observe the people that surround us; we have to figure out who among them navigates our local culture best and then extract the mental models that allow them to do so. This is a wicked problem. But we solve it instinctively. It is the main thing that sets us apart from chimpanzees.<br>As I wrote in Apprenticeship Online:<br>If you measure two-and-a-half-year-old children against chimpanzees and orangutans, they are about even in their capacity to handle tools and solve problems on their own. Only when it comes to observing others and repeating their actions is there a noticeable difference.

Two-and-a-half-year-olds can extract knowledge from people just by watching them move about a room. They start to desire what those around them desire. They pick up tacit knowledge. They change their dialect to match their peer group. And after a handful of years of hanging about with people more skilled than themselves, our babies—these tiny, soft-skulled creatures—can out-compete chimpanzees in all but close combat.<br>This ability is not something you can turn on and off. You are always internalizing the culture around you. Even when you wish you didn’t. So you better surround yourself with something you want inside—curate a culture.<br>Your culture shapes who you become

How do you summon an interesting set of friends to bounce your ideas off? Where do you look to find good influences? Which types of output should you produce if you want people to route useful ideas your way?<br>This essay is the first in a series about culture curation. In later parts (which I will send out to subscribers during the fall), I will go into detail about how to do this. But here I want to give a high-level view of why it makes sense to think about the world in this manner—as a graph you can restructure to change yourself. Why should you put effort into shaping your culture, rather than something else?<br>Upgrade to paid<br>Here is a reason. Over the last few months, I’ve been reading about 30 biographies on the upbringings of historical geniuses (for an upcoming post). What has struck me, more than anything else, is the quality of the cultures they internalized. The pedagogies their guardians employed differed radically; they had differing temperaments; they mastered different disciplines, but they all had this in common: they spent their days around highly competent people.<br>Most who grew up to become geniuses, pre-1900, were kept apart from same age peers and raised at home, by tutors or parents. Michel Montaigne’s father employed only servants who were fluent in Latin, curating a classical culture, so Montaigne would read the classics in his mother tongue. J.S. Mill spent his childhood at his father’s desk, helping his father write a treatise on economics, running over to Jeremy Bentham’s house to borrow books and discuss ideas.<br>Blaise Pascal, too, was homeschooled by his father. His father choose not to teach him math. (The father, Etienne, had a passion for mathematics that he felt was slightly unhealthy. He feared mathematics would distract Pascal from less intrinsically rewarding pursuits, such as literature, much like modern parents fear TikTok.) Pascal had to teach himself. When it was discovered that Pascal, then a young teenager, had rederived several of Euclid’s proofs, the family relocated to Paris so father and son could participate in the mathematical salons of Mersenne. The instinct was to curate a culture, not to teach, not primarily.<br>By replacing a peer group that is low-skilled (such as a peer group in a school) with one that is exceptional (such as Mersenne’s mathematical salon), we can leverage our human capacity to internalize our culture to foster exceptional talent.<br>No, it is your milieu that shapes you

I’ve been using the word culture so far, but that is not the exact word for what I am...