On September 30, The New York Times published an opinion by Joe Cruz, chair of the philosophy department and the cognitive science program at Williams College, entitled “I’m a College Professor. Writing Isn’t as Important as We Think.” He deploys Socrates, which is always a good rhetorical tactic.
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Socrates worried that by writing, we were outsourcing our thinking. There may be something to that. I had a revelatory read — or listen, as it was an audio book — a year or so ago. The book I didn’t read was The World Beyond Your Head, by Matthew B. Crawford (narrated by Robert Fass).
I’ll paraphrase: Socrates thought of writing as outsourcing and, as such, deleterious to maintaining sharp mental faculties. As Crawford notes, we outsource all the time, more often than not to our advantage. We do elementary math in our heads, but there comes a point where even the most gifted reaches for a pencil. There are only so many numbers in sequence the human head can hold. This is a small example of outsourcing. We’re not relying on the pencil and pad to do our work for us. We’re acknowledging our limits and devising a workaround to expand capabilities.
Did we, as notes or rock scratches allowed for longer and more involved calculations, get worse at holding figures in our heads? Did external storage take up the burden and allow mental muscles to atrophy? Probably. I suspect, adjusted for nutrition, that we lifted better before levers, ran farther before cars, and ran faster when we couldn’t shoot wolves. Are we further weakening ourselves now? The debate is still raging in updated forms. Nicholas Carr had a bestseller in 2010 with The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. There are many similar books.
One of the more interesting concepts Crawford discusses is the jig. Carpentry calls for replicable cuts. You may need a curve on a chair leg that takes a considerable amount of time to achieve. Rather than freehanding separately each of the four legs, or twenty-four for a dining room set, a carpenter saves time by making a guide piece called a jig. He measures once, sets the guide, and goes on without repeated mental processing. In this sense, Gutenberg’s printer is a jig. Set once, and a process is as close to infinitely repeatable as the life of the materials involved allows.
Is a calculator a jig? Two plus two is not at all different from five times six. Both are under the umbrella of mathematical functions, and mathematical functions are preset, jig-like, into the electronics of the thing.
Crawford wonders if we can’t have internal jigs. He mentions shoe-tying. I haven’t tied my shoes since I was four or five. Not really. I put on shoes that need tying and engage whatever process I developed decades ago to ensure they get tied. I don’t think about it. Loops and knots happen as a result rather than an effort. Chalk it to muscle memory or whatever quasi-autonomic takeovers are properly called. I can say the same about reading. When I come upon an unfamiliar or foreign word, there’s a slowing, a lapse into pre-school phonics, but otherwise I’m not working through the stages of sounding out words. From a conscious perspective, reading is automatic.
There are acceptable trade-offs. Jigs of all sorts are useful as well as needful in holding our place on the food chain. Being less innately agile in juggling problems of division is a small price to pay for calculus. I imagine a graph similar to the familiar “supply and demand” chart, where a point of diminishing returns announces itself. At what point does using a jig stop serving as an enhancement and become abdication?
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Prof. Cruz cleaves to a Socratic argument we’re familiar with because Plato and Xenophon wrote stuff down. Cruz writes, “Writing can be useful cognitive scaffolding for memory and self-regulated learning, but the notion that it is the best process for developing thinking skills is a fairly recent idea, traceable to the 1970s writing-across-the-curriculum movement.”
The question is whether the habit of writing is unimportant enough to abandon to a predictive engine, not if it is the “best process.” Never mind the further sleight-of-hand involved in bringing in a 1970s academic movement. Ideas are not validated by the success or failure of campus fads. Montaigne was not elevated from obscurity by bell-bottomed researchers. Thoreau retreated to Walden. Dickinson hid upstairs. All three found worthy contemplation in solitary writing. Throw in Seneca to be mean; I could keep piling on notables.
The question isn’t where writing ranks as a learning experience. Is writing worth doing?
Cruz does seem to have regard for what is written, if not how. No matter the worth to a student of composing an argument on his own, the professor requires a written product from him. I’ll admit to being confused on reading his A.I. use policy. The students must prepare an original outline without consulting A.I. That’s sensible. The students must not copy and paste. That’s so sensible that it’s usually assumed, but in an argument claiming that writing is of negligible benefit, the prohibition stands out.
Most student papers are a synthesis of essays, encyclopedia articles, and books on the assigned subject. Straight paraphrase is verboten without attribution, but it’s silly to expect broken ground in an undergrad “intro to Kant” course paper. What confuses me is that Cruz, who dismisses the value of writing, doesn’t allow students to let A.I. write for them. For unclear reasons, writing an original paper is of little value, but going through the motions of paraphrasing a predictive engine’s reduction is required. If A.I. is a beneficial jig, what is the benefit, and why make students disguise its product via translation?
The whole is a mess. I can’t help but wonder if Cruz is being outrageous in the bailey for a planned fall to an advantageously designed motte. He comes out swinging: Writing isn’t the great mind-honing exercise we believe it to be, so why not let students turn in A.I. product? That makes no sense. If writing isn’t useful, certainly asking a third party to write for you isn’t, either. If he wants cover for academic paraphrasing, he can fall back on , which, when compared to what’s argued in the opinion, seem a compromise.
Recently reported charges of plagiarism in academia made “everybody plagiarizes” a familiar defense. What a boon for academic skaters should a generation of graduates be complicit in dishonesty. I doubt Cruz intended it, but the opinion smells of jury-priming.
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