From Whom Do We Learn?

17 min readMay 2, 2019

Looking beyond and behind the texts

I have recently created an account on the Medium.com platform and started to save articles I was interested in from various fields like culture, tech, self, books, writing, leadership etc. (1). While reading them, I remembered something a professor of mine once said, that we have been disconnecting ourselves from ancient knowledge. He argued that we don’t really know what is out there — ideas, dilemmas, indicative answers to big questions — that have already been pondered upon by the ancient Greek philosophers to Middle Age, Renaissance, and Enlightenment thinkers. This sort of approach is prevalent, he said, not only at the level of the general population, but also among intellectuals of any sort, and other economic or political elites.

Sure, we know some main ideas and concepts circulated, like Plato’s allegory of the cave, Epicurus’ gospel of freedom from fear, Leonardo’s Last Supper, Descartes’ ‘I think, therefore I am’, Kant’s categorical imperative and the famous quote ‘act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law’, or the Letter from Birmingham City Jail of Martin Luther King.

I am oversimplifying, but how many things one can really tell on the thoughts and legacy of Newton, Marx or even Einstein? And not what we can right away find out through an online search engine, but what do we already integrate into our own cognitive space from these people? While having such internal debates, I’ve revisited the 4–5 already read articles and from that point on, I have started to document the names of those quoted or named in these texts. I wanted to learn more than from the texts taken individually, but also from a meta-analysis of all the articles I had in queue to be read.

I’ve started out of curiosity and then it became a goal in itself, apart from reading the actual content and learning from the perspectives and ideas of the authors. Namely, how far back and how profound do we access ancient heritage? How do we put our assumptions in perspective? Who do we quote? Who is inspiring us and who are those we use to back-up our statements? In this wired era, how much do we actually wire back to thousands of years of knowledge, from so many places? What have we lost as a civilization and as individuals after as much as 90% of the collection at Brazil’s National Museum was destroyed in 2018? And how much from the disappearance of the Great Library of Alexandria? What do we lose from not having the ideas already thought and circulated readily accessible — if not embedded — into our own thoughts? I mean, the plant and animal world is automatically integrating the learnings of the predecessors in their DNA through epigenetics, but what about the learnings circulated among humans in the public space, through books etc.? If we forget them, if we don’t know them, what’s happening? Do we still use them through collective knowledge? Do we still have them even if we don’t know them as individuals? Do they get into our DNA?

A bridge between a critique and critical thinking

Very important to mention, this article is not a critique of those writing and publishing via open platforms such as Medium, nor is it a critique of the content of the texts I have read, and included in this article. These are all texts I have enjoyed reading and taking notes from, while having also questions and comments on the main ideas proposed. Also, this is not intended to be an exhaustive approach, but rather a snapshot analysis of 47 random articles which I was saving to read, based on my interests at a certain moment. Nevertheless, the statistics are showing a clear pattern, which is interesting as a starting point for a larger discussion on how we build the next period of knowledge sharing and preservation into our civilization. Of course, further discussions on the state of humanities and the failure of the still very influential 19th century inertial approach to the education system, would put the findings in this text in a more comprehensive context.

For the fluency of the reading, I shall mention all the articles and all the authors considered at the end of the text, I will also add some other details, like the hyperlinks, that will make it easy to revisit the sources. These texts are written by 41 authors from 8 countries, as shown below:

Figure 1. No. of authors, per country

Out of the total, 82.9% of authors are white/Caucasian, 12.2% Asians, and 4.9% Afro-American, 68.3% being males (2). I have chosen the term ‘Caucasian’ as it is the most recognizable when considering the ‘white’ people. There are of course critics to using this term - see, for instance, a recent article by Yolanda Moses, ‘Why Do We Keep Using the Word “Caucasian”?’ (3), but I will continue to use it in this text, for the sake of the fluency of reading, inviting the readers to consider it as a conventional term (not through its historic implications and origin of usage).

Of course, these two sets of data (race/ethnicity and gender) are not to be directly linked to the way these authors were mentioning and quoting other authors and public figures in their articles. While not knowing the overall figures on the Medium platform, i.e. who published and is publishing there, what race/ethnicities are represented and in what percentages (which would be very interesting), also what is the gender representation, the above data can only give a flavor of what one can find when reading a certain number of articles, and doing the further work of identifying each individual author. But putting things in perspectives will give greater justice to the larger picture, knowing, for instance, that in 2016 there were around 7.5 million articles published on Medium.com - 1.9 million in 2015 (4), but also knowing that there were 220 million visits on the platform in March 2019, with the top countries being the US, India, Brazil, UK and Turkey (making almost half of all the total visits), as shown below in figure 1 (5):

Figure 2. Traffic on Medium.com by country, taken from similarweb.com

I could not find yet data on how many unique individual contributors there are on the platform, but rather just a roughly estimation can be made considering the number of posts. I have added the map above since it will be interesting to see it in connection with the countries/nationalities of those quoted or mentioned in the articles.

One more detail is in regard to the way in which I gathered the data, namely listing the names of people quoted or just mentioned in each article, then looking for each of the persons to find the country, the race/ethnicity, gender, and the year of birth, then grouping them by century when they were born, and placing them in chronological order, using the Gregorian calendar, starting from X century BC to XXI AD. Of course, there are more ways of measuring time (let’s face it, it is 2076 already in Nepal), but again, I used it as a convention, recognized worldwide.

How many questions are there to ask?

So here we are, looking at 47 articles, written by 41 people, a total of 349 minutes in reading time (around 6 hours), with an average of a little bit more than 7 minutes in reading time per article. There were 233 persons mentioned (in most of the cases just mentioned, not quoted), that means almost 5 persons mentioned and/or quoted per article.

Now let’s look where these mentioned authors and persons come from:

Figure 3, Number of authors and public persons mentioned, per country

As seen above, the majority of authors and public figures used as references in these articles are from the US and UK (79% of the total mentions), with most of the remaining countries not having more than two persons mentioned, exceptions being Germany with 7 mentions, ancient Greece with 3 mentions, Italy 4 mentions, and France 4 mentions. Also, one can see that there is no mentioning of any African or Southern American authors and/or public figures (there is only one mentioning of a person from Central America). Below, one can see more in detailed figures:

Figure 4. The numbers and country of origin of the authors and public figures quoted or mentioned in the 47 articles considered.

If the race/ethnicity is to be considered, we have the following picture:

Figure 5. Race/Ethnicity of the authors and public figures mentioned in the 47 articles considered.

Well, this is the correct picture if one considers Riley Andersen from Disney/Pixar’s Inside Out animation film also White/Caucasian (she was once mentioned in one of the articles, the only fictional character in all 47 texts). While mentioning Riley, let’s also look at gender representation:

Figure 6. Gender of the authors and public figures mentioned in the 47 articles considered.

The last picture I got out of the data I’ve extracted from these articles concerns the century when the persons mentioned were born, and the figures look like this:

Figure 7. The number of authors and public figures mentioned in the 47 articles, and the centuries when they were born

To be more exact, 85.4% of the total 233 authors and public persons mentioned in building the content of the 47 articles considered for this analysis, were born in the 20th century, while 7.7% were born in the 19th century. This leaves 18 centuries of knowledge (from X BC to XVIII AD) to be represented by 16 people, or 6.9% of the total. No person born in the 21st century was mentioned, unless we consider again Riley Andersen, who was 11 by the time the movie she was living in, got released, in 2015. Nevertheless, one should still take into consideration that the works for Inside Out started in 2010 (6), so this will probably remain an open discussion until further findings (knowing the animation world has different scales and the capacity to either freeze or melt time, distances and other physical laws).

One other detail worth mentioning from placing the names during a timeline of 21 centuries is that only one woman born before the 20th century was mentioned, i.e. Virginia Woolf, born in 1882.

Also, there were 17 centuries with no one mentioned. The last detail I will add on this is that in most cases, there are one-time mentions of persons in the articles. There are only 6 instances where one person is mentioned twice (usually in the same article), and one instance in which a person is mentioned three times.

This is the data, and the aim is not to conclude but to continue the discussion. Looking at the topics covered by the articles, such as culture, tech, self, books, writing, leadership, etc. one can easily suggest that it is, for instance, normal for those from the tech industry who write about tech industry to mention mainly people from their field, and in the books, self or writing categories to get more humanities related people mentioned. Which is actually true until a certain point, see, for instance, the article ‘What If Mark Zuckerberg Had Stayed in School?’ by Douglas Rushkoff (7), or ‘Why the world fell out of love with Silicon Valley’ by Aytekin Tank (8), to name just two texts in which the approach is mainly inter-disciplinary. It’s not the space, nor the aim of the present text to get into more details on each article; nevertheless, various questions are surfacing while looking at the texts, especially that the overall tendency is to contextualize and build arguments in the articles, but not necessarily to address the chosen subjects from various angles. Why don’t we do it? We know that critical thinking is useful and essential, but we do not use it. What one can easily get from reading the 47 texts is that we have ideas, some of them great ideas, and we mention or quote those that will prove us right. And these people that we quote or just mention are mainly white/Caucasian, mainly from US, mainly males, and mainly born in the 20th century.

And maybe this is a clue, maybe, for instance, these ancient people, their knowledge and interrogations aren’t relevant nowadays. Maybe, life is so different now that we actually need to use different paradigms and approaches. But then, how can one assume he/she has a systemic approach if not considering a bigger scale picture? What if we risk reinventing the wheel of knowledge if we do not go back to what was already said?

Sure, one can, and probably should ask, who were those influencing the persons mentioned in the articles we are analyzing, the 233 authors and public figures? Who were the historical authors and figures that influenced Mary Helen Immordino-Yang in her development? Or who has marked the life and the formation period of Robert Cialdini, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Oliver Burkeman, Anders Ericcson, Niklas Göke, Steve Jobs, Daniel Pink, Idzie Desmarais, or Benjamin G. Veness? These are just few of the names that can be found in the articles.

We might indirectly benefit from the spirit and some of the knowledge of Edgar Allan Poe via one of these people that read Poe; maybe they have also read Eugène Ionesco, Karl Popper or Paul Valéry, and so we don’t need to; we take a reinterpreted Mircea Cărtărescu, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe or Michel Foucault. It’s like being introduced to Antonio Vivaldi by Max Richter’s Vivaldi Recomposed work (an incredible, sublime piece itself). But shouldn’t one know where Richter started in the first place? Shouldn’t one listen to Antonio Vivaldi’s ‘Le quattro stagioni’ first? I am not sure, I mean the idea of progress is rather a recent one, some placing it in the early 19th century’s concepts introduced by Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer. So, one can ask, how is world’s knowledge ‘progressing’ within us, as individuals, and also, as groups?

We might just need the basics to be known by only a few people and we are all set to continuing the journey of our civilization. But, in this case, there are more questions one could ask. Let’s take one scenario presented by Horia-Roman Patapievici, a Romanian philosopher and physicist. Let’s consider, he says, that all people who know how to operationalize Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity would go to a big event, and all of them will travel by plane, all on one plane. Now, let’s imagine that the plane crashes, and all scientists die. We remain, Patapievici says, with hundreds of books explaining the theory of relativity and its practical applications, but no one knowing how to actually operationalize it. The same is true in our case: is it enough to have the books and knowledge available (in libraries and on computer servers), if we do not read them, if we do not integrate their learnings in our own experiences, if we do not learn from them in order to build on what others were already interrogating, thinking, and answering? Like a big scale, worldwide Socratic seminar approach, not as another option of organizing a discussion, but as a goal of the civilization and its social, and educational dynamic.

Or maybe one might want to consider re-connecting directly to the knowledge reservoirs of humanity because we want to protect our freedom as human beings, as Yuval Noah Harari said: ‘to succeed at such a daunting task, you will need to work very hard at getting to know your operating system better — to know what you are and what you want from life. This is, of course, the oldest advice in the book: know thyself. For thousands of years, philosophers and prophets have urged people to know themselves. But this advice was never more urgent than in the 21st century, because unlike in the days of Laozi or Socrates, now you have serious competition. Coca-Cola, Amazon, Baidu, and the government are all racing to hack you. Not your smartphone, not your computer, and not your bank account; they are in a race to hack you and your organic operating system. You might have heard that we are living in the era of hacking computers, but that’s not even half the truth. In fact, we are living in the era of hacking humans.’ (9)

There was not intended to be a conclusion, and will not be a conclusion. I will end with more interrogations. While reading these texts, I have started to imagine who would Immanuel Kant quote or mention from those 233 people? What about Fannie Lou Hamer or Johannes Kepler? And, not only that, but what does it take for Kant to quote you? And, of course, I am not implying that the more one quotes, and the more famous figures names, the richer the writing will be, it can be quite the opposite. I am looking more at how we choose, and the way we are thought through the formal education systems, to contextualize and understand the world we need to understand before we want to transform it for the better, and not for the worse.

Another question is, why are we still reading mainly white/Caucasian male authors? And why, when writing, we are still quoting and mentioning mainly white male authors, and public figures? In this landscape of facile access to such rich and vast knowledge produced all over the planet, how divided are we, actually? And how blind are we to those different than us, culturally, ethnically, religiously, sexually, and geographically? What are we missing if we focus only on the dominating knowledge? As we are fighting for the rights of the minorities, shouldn’t we fight as well for integrating within our cognitive universe the knowledge outside the dominating one?

As Aytekin Tank said in ‘Why learning more isn’t always better’ (10), ‘nearly every major scientific discovery has challenged an old paradigm.’ But how much do we do this nowadays? Do we still need this approach? And if we do not need it, how can we make bridges between the two worlds, the old and the new? How responsible should we be in pushing the humanity into the next hundreds of years of dynamic and knowledge sharing? And, what should be the basis for addressing this responsibility? Socrates should be mainly used in philosophical texts, by those from his tribe? How inter-disciplinary are we ought to think and relate to the reality around us, but also to the big questions of our lives?

And the question remains open: from whom do we learn? Whom are our sources of knowledge? What is available out there in the civilization as knowledge, and how much do we use it? What haven’t we discovered yet in how to pass the knowledge produced in our civilization more effective? Because it is quite obvious that we can do better. We need to invent new methods of circulating and integrating the knowledge from the humanities, and create the right context for educating and growing the next responsible adults of the planet, those that will positively contribute to the dynamic of their lives, and of their more inclusive communities.

Footnotes

(1) ‘Medium is an online publishing platform developed by Evan Williams, and launched in August 2012. It is owned by A Medium Corporation. The platform is an example of social journalism, having a hybrid collection of amateur and professional contributors and publications, or exclusive blogs or publishers on Medium, and is regularly regarded as a blog host’, taken from Wikipedia, accessed on March 13, 2019.

(2) A mention here, the way I’ve chosen the articles was by the interest in the title, and, with some exceptions, I did not have any indication of who were the writers, or what their race/ethnicity was.

(3) Published on Sapiens.com, on February 1, 2019

(4) Taken from https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/medium-facts-statistics/, accessed on April 11, 2019.

(5) Data taken from https://www.similarweb.com/website/medium.com, accessed on April 11, 2019.

(6) Source imdb.com, accessed April 9, 2019.

(7) Douglas Rushkoff, What If Mark Zuckerberg Had Stayed in School?, on Medium.com, https://medium.com/s/douglas-rushkoff/what-if-mark-zuckerberg-had-stayed-in-school-321aa3129af5, accessed on February 24, 2019.

(8) Aytekin Tank, Why the world fell out of love with Silicon Valley, on Medium.com, https://medium.com/swlh/why-the-world-fell-out-of-love-with-silicon-valley-3320a86981e4, accessed on March 4, 2019.

(9) Yuval Noah Harari, What Kids Need to Learn to Succeed in 2050, on Medium.com, https://medium.com/s/youthnow/yuval-noah-harari-21-lessons-21st-century-what-kids-need-to-learn-now-to-succeed-in-2050-1b72a3fb4bcf, accessed on March 28th, 2019.

(10) Aytekin Tank, Why learning more isn’t always better, on Medium.com, https://medium.com/swlh/why-learning-more-isnt-always-better-2154f75a71d6, accessed on March 14, 2019.

Articles and authors considered for the analysis

Below, are the 47 articles included in this article and their authors (and links to them), all taken from the Medium.com platform, and which I have read during February and March 2019:

Feliks Eyser, Do less

K. Albasi, Reclaim Your Focus by Letting Your Mind Wander

Douglas Rushkoff, What If Mark Zuckerberg Had Stayed in School?

Benjamin Hardy, If You’re Going To Do Something, See How Far You Can Go

Owen Williams, Notifications Are Broken and Technology Companies Should Fix Them

Brendan O’Connor, Whole Foods Worker: “Mid-level People… Don’t Trust Whole Foods Corporate Anymore.

M. L. Sukala, I Keep Falling in Love With Strangers on the Subway

MORGAN MEAKER, Can “Govtech” Save the Government — and Tech?

Renee Chen, A Guide to Choosing Which Books to Read

Gloria Liou, This Is Silicon Valley

Lawrence Yeo, Travel Is No Cure for the Mind

Jesse Weaver, The Value of Inconvenient Design