High Cognitive Minds

"You're so good at xxxx. You should set your sights on yyyy career". Counselors and teachers tend to see a student's talents in terms of the boxes defined by society. Counselors are most comfortable when they can channel a student into a slot, based on career test scores.  But the talent in which a gifted student scores high may actually be the least of his abilities, and it may be one he's not interested in pursuing as a career.

A student with a talent for collecting, organizing, and analyzing facts is far more likely to be steered in the direction of law, than encouraged to pursue a career as an investigative reporter. And if he's interested in the law he'll be encouraged to become a corporate attorney or a criminal lawyer. The possibility of being a public defender or working for the environment is unlikely to even come up.

What are the chances he would even be queried about his real interests, his passions?  Pity the poor counselor faced with someone with interests in architecture, anthropology, and linguistic analysis. Is there a job category where all those would fit? Of course not. Well, son, you’ll just have to make a choice; it’s got to be one or the other.

What got me thinking about all this is an article by Clay Shirky about categories. He contrasted the Yahoo directory with Google searches as an example of the way that the internet is changing our ideas of how we classify things, and who does the classifying. The most striking thing he said is that classification has been based, either metaphorically or actually, on shelf space. But we now live in a world where there is no shelf.

“People have been freaking out about the virtuality of data for decades, and you'd think we'd have  internalized the obvious truth: there is no shelf. In the digital world, there is no physical constraint that's  forcing this kind of organization on us any longer.”

When there’s no practical limit on the number of categories you can have, rare and oddball items don’t have to be squeezed in as subcategories, or dropped altogether. There’s no need for hard and fast definitions that can’t allow for errors in search parameters. The Yahoo directory, like the Dewey Decimal system, or any other directory, says every item can be found in one place, and only one place. Google says there are infinite ways of finding something. Yahoo says that each item has a specific definition and a specific name that you have to know in order to do a search. Google says you can search for something in any number of ways.  

Top-down naming has shaped our world up till now. And it’s the naming that says you’re going to be steered into a job that’s clearly defined, and steered away from anything with loose boundaries that can’t be pinned down. In that world, you’re at a disadvantage if you want to jump the boundaries, or bring disparate subjects closer together so that their boundaries overlap. That’s beginning to change, and the future is looking much more open. That can be a good thing for the restless gifted with too many interests to fit in a box. The big question is how to take advantage of it.