 I'm reading this murder mystery where they just discovered that the serial killer is a postmodern philosopher. He keeps leaving his victims as bodies without organs. In the very first Sherlock Holmes adventure, a study in Scarlet, Watson paints a picture of the legendary detective's quirky mannerisms. He's tall, skinny, prone to episodes of malaise, and weirdly, he's ignorant about everything that isn't immediately relevant to solving crimes. He can identify 50 kinds of tobacco by smell, and knows what mud stains come from which area of London, but he doesn't know the first thing about philosophy, literature. He doesn't even know that the earth goes around the sun. And when Watson informs him of the fact, he says he'll do his best to forget it. Sherlock explains his peculiar behavior by way of analogy, saying that the human mind is like an attic. There's limited room for information, and every additional thing you learn is added to that space, both making it harder to find what you need and, once you reach capacity, crowding out other facts. To keep his attic tidy, he consciously decides what knowledge will be useful for sleuthing and scrubs the rest from his memory. That's a pretty wild assertion, and if you think about it for more than a few seconds, it's demonstrably untrue. An expert mathematician doesn't forget their times tables or get slower at integration if they take piano lessons. Also, even in the fiction of Sherlock Holmes, the facts that become relevant to solving these eccentric cases are definitely not the sort of thing you'd learn in the forensics reference books he studies. What spices would you need in a dish to mask the taste of opium? What pattern of hoof prints does a typical cowgate leave behind? What sorts of exotic species of marine life can kill a man? It's not particularly hard to imagine a mystery, where the Copernican model of the solar system would be relevant, and Sherlock, with his tidy, well-organized attic, would just have to give up and go home. Thankfully, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle realized how silly this idea was in retrospect, and later books featured a more well-rounded Sherlock, with a passing knowledge of things other than forensics. Still, the notion of an otherwise smart dude being painfully dumb about certain subjects on purpose isn't a far-fetched notion. Plenty of people are ready and willing to dunk on whole fields of study that they see as being useless for their goals, saying things like, I haven't needed to use the quadratic equations since high school, or, man, I wish the college would bulldoze that department and build something useful. There's also a form of pride that many take in not knowing certain things, as a kind of signal about what their priorities are. I don't know the first thing about sports ball, and I'm not keen to learn. It's one thing to prioritize learning certain subjects because they seem likely to be relevant to certain goals. Sherlock wouldn't be quite as weird if he was just a forensics nerd who was really into fingerprints. It's quite another thing to cultivate deliberate ignorance, to be actively hostile towards facts and ideas that don't land close enough to some predetermined criterion of usefulness. It's also a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. Someone who refuses to learn something because they think it's useless won't experience any firsthand evidence that they're wrong. If you never learned the quadratic equation, you wouldn't be able to recognize the sorts of places where it might have been useful if you had it. And so long as you don't die in a tragic math accident, you'll always be able to confidently say, hell, I got this far without the quadratic equation. It's obviously not anything I need. A potential argument against this sort of systemic ignorance comes from, wait for it, post-modern philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, whose book A Thousand Plateaus is, let's say, it's hard to read, but by design. Often when we encounter new ideas, they're embedded in some organizing framework. Aristotelian physics, Newtonian physics, then general relativity. Children's books, young adult books, adult books. This can be helpful as it provides an organizing principle for understanding those ideas, but only one kind of understanding, often dictated by an authority with an agenda. In contrast, A Thousand Plateaus is a chaotic mash-up of musings about the state, schizophrenia, art, consciousness, anarchism, ontology, all sorts of subjects that appear and disappear in a loosely bundled maelstrom of thought without any imposed hierarchy or linearity. It's a model of what the authors refer to as a rhizome, a representation of how thoughts exist in the wild without any artificial structure. The reader is encouraged to jump around while they're reading the book, to interpret, connect, and use its ideas in whatever fashion they feel the most resonant or helpful for their purposes, creating and dissolving relationships and organizing principles, as needed in the moment to hopefully make some sense of it all. There's no real up or down in the rhizome. There are many forking paths you can follow, many ways of dissecting or grouping ideas, but none is intrinsically superior or logically prior to any other. They're only more or less useful for a given purpose. This style of engaging with the texts emulates the losing Guattari's model for how a prodigious thinker ought to interface with the landscape of ideas. Rather than getting trapped by just one way of breaking up the rhizome, they encourage fusing, splitting, tracing, chopping, and screwing, all with an eye towards discovering new, useful combinations and frameworks for understanding. Assembling sets of conceptual tools, then throwing them at problems to see what sticks. When Sherlock refuses to remember anything but the crime-solvy subjects, he's locked himself into that way of looking at the world and can no longer practice the mental flexibility that might actually be useful for solving crimes. Maybe the way the earth orbits around the sun could be used as a mental model of how a thief orbits around the object of their desire. Maybe it connects to thoughts about gravity, which makes you think of how a murder victim was too heavy to be dragged away by a small person. Maybe the Copernican principle allows you to predict the expected longevity of a criminal organization. There's a whole slew of potentially useful relationships Sherlock might build between a model of the solar system and other ideas, but he doesn't have access to any of them. Sure, maybe he's still capable of solving crimes without those mental tools. You can open a can of beans with a pickaxe if you need to, but it's not exactly the most efficacious way of going about it. This point can be leveled at anyone who refuses to engage with some field of study because it's useless, whether it's math or gender studies or sports or whatever. These categories are all just arbitrary divisions in the landscape of ideas, boxes that we draw out of convenience in certain contexts where it's necessary to distinguish them in certain ways. No more valid than ideas that start with a letter Q or ideas that involve BERTs. Deliberately excluding some random temporary subdivision in that landscape from our thinking is like deciding to throw out every fifth tool from your toolbox just for the hell of it. Maybe instead of burning mental energy as some sort of gatekeeping sorting hat trying to determine each idea's ultimate value according to some arbitrary hierarchy, it can be more productive to simply look for ways to use them. There's a practice that's fairly common in academia that has no firmly established name as far as I can tell after two weeks of research. There's certainly people who have gestured at it or given it a name in their sub-discipline, reparative reading, textual poaching, collaborative reading, pedagogical constructivism, generous reading. These all sort of point at the same behavior, actively engaging with media with an eye toward maximizing the amount of meaning and insight that can be discovered there. Whether or not that meaning is explicitly intended. Imagine someone reading a poem written by a fourth grader and noting interesting parallels with Beowulf, E.E. Cummings, and Truman Capote. Obviously those references aren't intended by the author unless they're extraordinarily precocious, but a reader who's trying to maximize what they can get out of it can still excavate that sort of interesting and worthwhile interpretation from the text. Someone who's stingier with their thinking might object to that sort of thing as a waste of time claiming that none of that stuff is really in there. But for Deluz and Guattari, nothing is really in anything. There's only the rhizome and the meaning that you can extract by playing with it. What about you? Do you think that the rhizome model of ideas and how they work is helpful for combating the closed-mindedness of Sherlock-style cultivated ignorance? How would you remix it into something that might help you solve your own problems? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Quick ending note here. Thunk is pretty clearly inspired by PBS Idea Channel and in the show's finale, host Mike Rugnetta cites a thousand plateaus and nomadic thought as key inspirations for the show's format and content. I actually got to pick Mike's brain about this episode, which was extraordinarily helpful. And I'd also like to thank these very kind people for holding my hand while I was reading the book. Siri's content morning on that one, especially if you don't do a lot of drugs, reading a thousand plateaus feels like what I imagine a schizophrenic break might feel like. So, you know, take it easy. Do it with other people if you can. Anyways, don't forget to subscribe, blah, share and don't stop thunking.