Generational Knowledge Inversion

TLDR

If you are over the age of 50 and attempting to impress your viewpoint on someone between the age of 17 and 35 you should first stop talking and listen to their viewpoint. You’ll probably learn something. If you don’t know what TLDR means, this article is definitely for you.

Disclaimer

This blog is usually about a topic on which I have some expertise. The content is thoroughly researched. You can generally rely on it. Today’s post is based primarily upon observation and my own understanding of the human condition. There is no science here. Even my terms are at best loosely defined. I’d love to have this theory vetted or refuted by someone with actual expertise and a willingness to do the research required. I anticipate and welcome criticism.

Background

On July 1, 2022 my “Wisdom of the Week” was about Generational Knowledge Inversion (GKI). (You can watch the video if you prefer.) GKI is my hypothesis that, for the first time in the existence of humans, parents should anticipate that their children will, at some point in the parents’ lifetime, have more “relevant knowledge” than the parent. I do not have a concrete definition of relevant knowledge. Notionally, though, it is knowledge that, at the current point in time, has some usefulness. For example, I was once very proficient at using a slide rule and I know how to drive a manual transmission car. Knowing the foundational mathematics that govern how a slide rule works (logarithms, exponents, etc.) is certainly relevant knowledge. Perhaps knowing how and why a slide rule works is valuable knowledge. Being good at using one, though, is no longer relevant. Right now, for most Americans, knowing how to drive a manual car is not relevant and in just a few years it will go the way of the slide rule. A little thought reveals a plethora of examples from the last century: using a phone book, the Dewey Decimal System, shorthand, rewinding a cassette tape that has had the magnetic strip get pulled out of it. You get the idea.

I came upon the theory of GKI through my interactions with my own children. Most parents experience a moment when their children exclaim, “You’re not listening to me!” I am no exception. From the outside, though, I witnessed my mother engaged in a disagreement with my daughter (probably 20 years old at the time), and this exclamation come ringing back into my ears. I later suggested to my mother that her grandchildren are, in fact, experts in many of the topics that they discuss…and that she should consider listening to their viewpoint (or expertise) before trying to impress her viewpoint upon them. She might learn something. A couple months later, my mother unexpectedly announced to me, “You know, after spending more time with [my granddaughter] I’ve realized that when we disagree I should just stop talking and listen. I always learn something new.” It was in that moment that I realized that if my 78 year old mother was learning from her grandchildren, I too should stop talking and listen to them.

Generational Knowledge Inversion

Why is it so hard for us to come to that conclusion? Why don’t we all just instinctively stop talking and listen when our adult children speak? For about 300,000 years humans have roamed the earth. In nearly all of that time, parents, in general, could assume that they possessed more relevant knowledge of the world than their offspring. If we look at a completely unscientific graph of a person’s relevant knowledge it might look something like this:

At birth everything we see is new and relevant. We rapidly gain relevant knowledge. As we age, though, most of what we see is something we have already learned. Throughout most of human existence the graph was ever increasing, but the rate of increase was continually lessoning.

A person’s offspring would have almost the identical graph. Perhaps over centuries the total accumulation of knowledge might increase ever so slightly. A parent’s knowledge, however, could reliably be considered to be greater than that the offspring throughout the lifetime of the parent.

There were exceptions, of course. Perhaps Isaac Newton had more relevant knowledge than his parents. In general, though, all 300,000 years of human evolution have prepared parents to assume they have more relevant knowledge than their children…and their children’s generation.

Three elements of the past contributed to this. The world changed very slowly. Once gained, relevant knowledge rarely became irrelevant during a lifetime. That contributed to a graph that was ever increasing. Secondly, communities were small and local. What was relevant was typically relevant throughout the community and learned from the community. Limited travel and intrinsic commonality within a community dictated that a parent’s experiences would be directly relevant to the life of their children. Thirdly, the information available to a child generation was essentially the same that was available to the parental generation. This began to change with the printing press, but the change was small. And, typically, the older generation had access to, and the facility to utilize, the additional information before, or at least, at the same time as the younger generation.

For those born after 1960 (myself included), all of these elements have radically changed. Relevant knowledge gained in our youth rapidly dissipates into anachronistic trivia. New knowledge is abundant. The boundaries of space are overcome by instant communications with virtually anyone on the planet. Our children grew up in the information age, giving them an immense edge in accessing and assimilating relevant knowledge. My children learned elements of physics, chemistry, and biology in high school that were unknown while I was in college. The graph has shifted:

Interestingly, I postulate that members of my specific generation, born between 1960 and 1980, are in the unique position that we may never surpass our parents, but our children will surpass both their parents and their grandparents.

Pseudoscience

Here we have all the makings of a full-on pseudoscientific article: multiple graphs without any data to support them, corresponding text to support the pretty graphs but still lacking any data. Since proposing this theory nearly 3 years ago, I have had many people ask me, or more accurately, say to me, “But, you don’t really think your children know more than you, right?” My children are now ages 23, 26, and 30. On any topic that is not my area of expertise, I state emphatically: Yes, my children likely have more relevant knowledge than I do. That doesn’t mean they always have more relevant knowledge than I do. I go into most conversations, however, knowing that they may, or likely do have more relevant knowledge than I. Interestingly, I have found that even in areas where I have significant expertise, my children often contribute novel ideas and insights to the topic. I have been primarily discussing a parent-child relationship, but the same holds true simply across generations. I work with many people a generation or two younger than me. I consistently find that I should listen to their ideas and viewpoint before espousing my own. It occasionally saves me some embarrassment and I invariably learn something.

Whether this pseudoscience is accurate or not is somewhat irrelevant. My own experience is that I can shift my blue line (in the graph above) by listening more (and first). I’m not suggesting that I can keep my blue line above the red line, but I hope I can at least keep it rising instead of falling.

Finally, I admit that I am wildly imperfect at this. 300,000 years of evolution tug at me to think that I will always have more relevant knowledge than those in subsequent generations. Recognizing the fallacy, though, is a start.

TLDR = Too Long, Didn’t Read