Wayne Rooney is much wiser than Tony Blair. Here's the Times:
[Mike] Parry has enlisted the help of Marcus du Sautoy, Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University, to concoct three equations for the mental arithmetic Rooney performs when he runs into the box to volley a cross from Beckham. They are:
y = (v/u) x - (g/2u2)x2,
FD = CDpAv2 / 2 and
yn + akxy1 + by1 + cy = g.
Well, it’s quite obvious when you think about it. The first is to do with the height of the ball and its velocity, the second is the drag factor of the ball and the third the spin that Beckham will have put on the ball.
But the point is that Rooney doesn’t think about it.
Exactly. Rooney uses two things in these cases. First, he obeys some simple rules of thumb: "keep your eye on the ball" , "keep your head over the ball", "work the goalkeeper". Second, he's got the ability - gained through practice - to implement these rules.
Wayne Rooney knows - only instinctively of course - that some things are better than brains. Practice, along with simple heuristics, can do things that raw brain-power cannot; this point has been well made by Gerd Gigerenzer (for example in this pdf).
Indeed, Alfred North Whitehead thought the replacement of brain-power by heuristics was the key to progress:
Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.
He was right. In posting this, I'm using an enormous about of brain-power, but only indirectly. The discovery and harnessing of electricity and the development of computing took immense brains. But today, all that consists in just flicking switches. And even the content of this post consists in me remembering and pasting ideas together, rather than much original thought.
But here's the rub. For practice, memory and heuristics to work well, we need a stable environment. Rooney's endless practice would lose much of its value if the size and shape of footballs, or the rules of the game, kept changing radically. And good rules of thumb emerge through evolution; we learn which ones work and which don't over time. But this requires that the environment doesn't change much, so that rules that worked earlier still work.
And this is where Blair's managerialism enters. A cornerstone of his managerialist ideology is that "it's all different now", that the world is changing rapidly, viz:
Mr Blair argued a fundamental shift was needed from the principles of the criminal justice system drawn up in the 19th and 20th centuries to deal with the threats of the 21st century.
And if the world is different, traditional practices and rules are irrelevant. In which case we have to use our brains. And these, as Rooney, Whitehead and Gigerenzer all see but managerialists don't, are puny things.
Isn't it a damning indictment that a footballer widely regarded as an uber-chav can be so much wiser than our Prime Minister?
I agree with much of this- it demonstrates how vital it is to use technology and administration wisely so we have more time to use our brains in activities that are potentially creative and stimulating.
Unfortunately the consequence of poor thinking and bad management isn't that work is stimulating but that it is either stressful or boring. (And working hours are going up and not down,contrary to the logic of technological progress)
Posted by: Igor Belanov | June 09, 2006 at 01:51 PM
Gigerenzer's book "Reckoning with Risk" is a tremendous read. Layman-friendly. Recommends using brain, but wisely. Princess Toni-unfriendly.
Posted by: dearieme | June 09, 2006 at 02:23 PM
Wow. That's one of the smartest posts I've seen. Very well said.
Posted by: Charlie Whitaker | June 09, 2006 at 04:56 PM
There are also societal issues: the business of negotiation and agreement. It takes a lot of time and effort - using up available brainpower - to broker a common view on just about anything. It can be very useful to have a ready made consensus to hand.
I don't imagine that change is never required but I'd have thought that smart political leadership consists, in part, of rationing the application of creative thinking: i.e. we'll take a look at issues 3, 7 and 14 but leave the rest for now.
Posted by: Charlie Whitaker | June 09, 2006 at 06:50 PM