The Problem of Short-Cut Learning: Why Extensive Travel and Life-Long Reading Should be Cultivated More in Society

The problem of alternative media is a false promise that dense subjects and information about our world can be swiftly downloaded into our brains. Travel and life-long reading provide antidotes.

"If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them."

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”

-George Orwell

I recently learned two new phrases on the same day: “concepts of a plan” and “short-cut learning” and I think they are related. While I do my best not to bring explicit politics into the forefront of my posts here, politics is inextricably linked to anything we write. George Orwell famously appealed to the notion that “all writing is political.” Even a simple statement like “everyone should travel” has significant political implications. Anyone making such a statement has come to that conclusion because of a “desire to push the world in a certain direction” as Orwell wrote. That is the essence of politics; therefore, all writing is infused with politics to some degree whether explicitly or subtly.

During the Donald Trump and Kamala Harris debate in early September, the former president said he had “concepts of a plan” in response to a question about his healthcare agenda—arguably his most meme-worthy moment from the debate. As with so much modern political discourse of late, I responded with a laugh, a shake of my head, and another sigh. On the same day, an article in The Atlantic was titled ‘The Dangerous Rise of the Podcast Historians.’ Within it, the term “short-cut learning” appears as our fast-paced society’s latest craze for highly condensed media which gives the false promise of having highly complex subjects like history, religion, and science filtered into easily digestible video and audio recordings. 

There is no shortage of podcasts and gurus out there to fill our heads with any subject we can dream up. Sounds great! More people speaking and thinking about the world on deeper matters sounds like a renaissance. What could go wrong? However, this has the unfortunate side effect of delivering us a lot of “short-form, snappy content leaving little room for nuance, and of course, sensationalism will triumph every time” as the article warns. Often, these recordings are unintentionally misleading and presented or listened to out of context. Sometimes they are deliberately manipulated, thus serving as effective propaganda that we all consume like candy. Many of us intuit that these are problems and none of us are immune from the compulsion of short-cut learning and short-cut thinking.

While much of the Atlantic article is devoted to laying out the controversy over statements the podcaster and Substack writer Darryl Cooper made on Tucker Carlson’s podcast with regards to World War II, the Holocaust, and Winston Churchill, I’m more interested in the larger issue pointed out here:

[T]he “use of online media is inevitable” and “historians either engage to shape the narrative, or they lose automatically.” I tend to agree. After all, millions more people scroll online platforms than read any book written by even the most popular of historians. But pseudo-history has an unfortunate home-field advantage on social media, given its penchant for clickbait sensationalism and feeding on the worst impulses of audiences.

I am, like many of us, currently torn between two general worlds or sources of information: traditional academia/legacy media and the trending alternative media.

On the one hand, I value academia and legacy media institutions like The Atlantic and the New York Times. Many of our scholars and journalists who are investigating all the fascinating problems of our world, its past, and the endless quandaries of our cosmos deserve much more of our attention, trust, and respect. Much of the drivel found too conveniently on the internet isn’t yet up to the challenge of replacing them. However, many of these academics are their own worst enemy and know little of the vast changes taking place around them. They are sometimes wildly out of touch with our world when it comes to sharing new information with the public (this was my soap box issue while attending university where few that I spoke with seemed to think the disconnect between academia and the public was a problem). Furthermore, far too many academics, I have found, are not great popular writers or speakers for the lay public, and so, when speaking on current events or important historical moments, they can come across as pedantic, unintelligible, and condescending to a lay audience because they, not unreasonably, fear overstepping their expertise. 

Some scholars even have an adversarial relationship with the public and think a bit too highly of themselves, peering down from their ivory towers at the rest of us. Others simply refuse to engage, despite the demand to combat all the misinformation circling their coveted subject matter. As the Atlantic piece highlighted, “Few scholars at your average academic conference seem interested in meeting this challenge” and warned that “If professional scholars don’t engage the public, charlatans, and Holocaust deniers certainly will.” True, but there’s always more to the story…

When it comes to simply standing up on important matters of free speech and inquiry on campuses, these institutions and scholars have been floundering spectacularly in recent years–just consider a recent survey report that shows 71% of students agree that professors should be reported for making comments that students find offensive, which could be anything from a word to a topic that makes students uncomfortable—something that is ultimately subjective and susceptible to frenzy and moral panics. Knowledge acquisition is sometimes dependent on entertaining or communicating offensive language, ideas, and topics.

Some might argue that it’s not the educators’ fault students are policing their professor's thoughts and words, but what kind of learning environment creates a generation of would-be intellectuals and future leaders like this in the first place? Effectively, this is wrongthink professors are being accused and punished for, an Orwellian term which, I would argue, is a grave symptom of a culture that has privileged short-cut learning and short-cut thinking above all else. If you’re still skeptical this is overhyped, consider browsing the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) website and database tracking censorship on U.S. campuses since 1999.

On the other hand, I also value a lot of alternative media. There are so many fantastic podcasts and brilliant minds creating irresistible content that is far more captivating than most stuffy academic lectures can muster. Many of these podcasters are academics, scientists, and journalists who have just as much, if not more, integrity than their counterparts in traditional media and academic institutions. Substack and other online social media platforms have exploded with near-infinite perspectives and wisdom on just about any topic we can imagine. In some sense, we are in a golden age of information…and yet it’s also a golden age for propaganda and mass confusion.

This alternative media space, for all its benefits of democratizing media, has created a free-for-all environment for both respectable intellectuals and charlatans with far fewer editorial guardrails, and strong incentives to cut corners and play fast and loose with facts–things that were once held to high standards in legacy media and academic institutions. This is a big problem.

It’s a strange world we’re creating, one that is heavily siloing us into completely different versions of reality where credentials mean little and sophistry reigns supreme. Consider how odd it would be to encounter someone who says they “love studying United States history” yet had never heard of or read any work by a well-respected historian like Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jon Meacham, Shelby Foote, David McCullough, or Gordon Wood. With confidence in their eyes, they say they only listen to podcasts and watch YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram for the bulk of their knowledge of U.S. history. Now, we’re being told by Tucker Carlson that Darryl Cooper is “the most important historian in the United States.” We are creating an upside-down world.

I’m not here to pick sides or deconstruct any of these people or institutions right now. The larger issue that concerns many of us is that we are effectively creating disparate cultures, histories, and scientific facts that share little to no overlap—confirmation bias and group polarization run amok. There is a wedge being driven between alternative media and traditional media and academic institutions, with enormous consequences underway.

Does it matter if large swaths of our population do not share the same conceptions of history and current events?

This seems like an important question we need to answer. What might be the long-term implications of my neighbor and I living in completely different knowledge universes where we share nothing in common? If it does matter, then how do we begin closing the gaps and bringing more of us into better alignment with the facts of human history? We need both traditional educational and media institutions and podcasters that are more in sync rather than adversarial. The podcaster and Substacker are currently perceived as a kind of edgy rogue scholar, at odds with traditional media and academic institutions, a kind of brave contrarian “telling it like it is.” That’s fun for a while until you look around and see everyone in your cohort of nonconformists growing louder and chanting the same things. Down with the “elites!” In the long run, we’re going to need to repair some bridges and gaps in our thinking, not continue down the road of siloing ourselves into alternate realities.

Now, I do not buy the false consciousness argument that people are sheep following whatever their podcast masters, self-help gurus, or charismatic politicians and religious leaders tell them to think and do. Some of us are assuredly like that but the belief that many of us are is a bit too cynical for me. Most people are capable of figuring out what is true and false when it comes to issues that truly affect them. We ought to lend people more grace than most of us do, not just hearing someone’s position, but carefully and actively listening to one another.

I feel strongly that we MUST value some core principles for society to function that I fear are in short supply these days: healthy skepticism, rigorous research and expertise, an ability to entertain multiple viewpoints, an ability to say, “I don’t know”, or “I was wrong”, and to be self-aware of one’s biases. We must find a better way to eternally teach such critical lessons with each passing generation. These values have been taken for granted and used to be the sine qua non of a liberal arts education. It remains questionable whether enough of us are even learning these critical skills from either traditional academia or this brave new world of alternative media. How many of us are actively advocating for and teaching these bedrock principles? Are these lessons even being taught or have we just been assuming these are common sense? It remains to be seen.

The problem of short-cut learning is pervasive. We find it in all of these social and political spaces of information-making and we are unfortunately all susceptible to it. The smartest among us are duped by misleading stories with increasing regularity and I wish we had a much more clear-headed way of declaring a war on ignorance than we do at the moment. Part of this problem makes sense when we consider the limitations and biases of our brains. We are forced to make some leaps in thinking in this short-lived world of ours. We inhabit a world with evermore information to process. Our brains are not computers with perfect recall and limitless memory but are more like small leaky pails slowly dripping out their contents over time and gradually rusting and corroding away as we age. 

Collectively we are choosing to invest too much of our time and attention in these mediums of short-cut learning and short-cut experiences. A large chunk of our culture—movies, television shows, virtual reality, YouTube, blogs, podcasts, etc.–can all be great mediums to supplement our experiences in life, but they cannot be surrogates for our experiences in this world. We are uncannily edging closer to living in a sci-fi dystopia.

We ought to be out in the world more than we are, with all senses present and engaging with it, forming important social bonds with one another, and reading deeply and widely with actual books. And I know, it’s easy to point out problems. The challenge lies in what to do about it.

A commitment and value for lifelong travel, relationship building, and reading may provide us with antidotes to much of the noise we feel bearing down upon us in the modern world. We need these various ways of coming together and sharing some common stories of who we are and how we got here–that is what my anthropology spidey senses are telling me anyway. 

As I argued in a former post On Wayfarers and Bibliophiles, 

Extensive reading and traveling go hand in hand because they have a similar effect on our minds: they often challenge and expand our worldview. Those things I’ve mentioned—frauds, tribalism, dogma—are antithetical to what one obtains by reading and traveling extensively because they outright restrict or limit one’s worldview by disposing of nuance and making things simplistic—black and white. We are all highly susceptible to thinking narrowly because it’s easy and comforting to think simply about the world. The world is a complex and confusing place after all and it is convenient if there is something that can make complex issues more palatable. But caveat emptor! What ideologies (and many podcasts and alternative media forms) conveniently do for us is pre-package everything we need to know about a topic into easily remembered and repeatable blurbs. Likewise, most politicians have learned the art of using ideologies to get your vote but at the expense of pitting people against one another in crude ways.

My solution to fighting misinformation, propaganda, or plain lousy thinking is to encourage more of us to see the world for ourselves and read as extensively as we can. Maybe that’s old-fashioned, but it’s the best I’ve got. Be brave and go find out what it’s actually like in these places and not take what others say about it on social media, television, or on podcasts at face value. The more we all do that, the harder it’s going to be for people to lie, mislead, or propagandize to us. And you don’t need to be in all places or read every single great book in the canon of great literature to get at some semblance of the truth. After we’ve traveled for a while or read a diverse amount of books, we begin to gain a general sense of what most of humanity is like and thus gain the healthy skepticism for detecting all the bullshit claims we may run into. The sooner we encourage others to travel and read deeply and widely, the better.

Another phrase I hear a lot lately is that we are “too online.” I tend to agree with that in principle but recognize we’re at a moment in history where we’re not going to convince many of us to become Luddites, smash our technology, and get back to basics in the woods in communes singing Kumbaya. Technology is intricately embedded in society and culture and far too important to dispense with. Given all this, what are some more balanced approaches to dealing with these problems of being “too online” and having our egos inflated to the point where we think we know way more about the world than we actually do?

Teaching people to value slow travel and slow learning helps here and is vitally important to value in conjunction with the onset of all this god-like technology, such as large language models and artificial intelligence which promise to both alleviate many problems and exacerbate others. One of the reasons for this I covered in a previous post The Case for Slow Travel and Slow Reading in a Fast-Paced Society where I argued,

What all this means is that hefty and dense books still need to be read and patiently pondered over if we truly want to understand a subject, no matter how archaic it feels. Listening to podcasts is enjoyable and entertaining, but it is debatable how much information we truly retain from passively listening to a podcast on say, the French Revolution especially if we’re being distracted by other tasks like driving or cooking. We have to legitimately engage with a subject. Long conversations and training still must be had with experts in their field to acquire the subtle art of learning. Watching how-to videos on YouTube can potentially help you fix a broken sink in real time, but it won’t help you master much else in this world. Learning a trade like carpentry or a martial arts or becoming a scientist, economist, or doctor takes most people a lifetime to master.

Out of all this comes the realization that there is a need for a type of hierarchy in society based on knowledge and expertise, whether we want to acknowledge it or not. We live in populist times when many believe we can easily dispense with “elites” and somehow become magically smarter and more capable of doing everything ourselves. But we cannot all be expected to always be “doing our own research” and thinking we can somehow will ourselves into knowing more than those who dedicate their lives to learning a set of skills and subjects. No, this doesn’t mean someone automatically becomes the authority. No one should be assumed to ever have a monopoly of knowledge or wisdom. But some people can be an authority or expert in their field. And we need those knowledge experts to help us all navigate the complexities of life on this planet.

Thus, we’re still going to need a world with experts in institutions that have standards and care about cooperating with others who don’t always see eye-to-eye if we want to maintain the level of complexity in our society.

I’ve always wished we had some easy way to detect how extensively someone has read or researched a topic that is brought up in conversation. Maybe a tally of sources that magically hovers above a person’s head when they start talking confidently about the economics of the early 21st century or an app that catalogs a bibliography of sources someone has consulted. “Oh, it shows here this person has only skimmed hours of Reddit and the Wikipedia page on 9/11 conspiracy theories and works as a telemarketer. Perhaps I’ll be a little skeptical when they start pontificating about their claims on structural engineering and aviation fuels.”  

I’m not arguing people shouldn’t listen to podcasts, read Substacks (heavens no), or even watch short clip videos on Instagram or TikTok (maybe not too many, may I interest you in the documentaries of Ken Burns instead?). What I am arguing is that they’re not some alternative oracle to our traditional knowledge institutions and they deserve just as much, if not more skepticism applied to them–nor should we exclusively derive our worldview from such short-cut learning and experiences.

I maintain the position that if we can reorient society in a way that encourages us to travel more and read deeply and widely–taking those lessons to heart while not cutting corners–those experiences will help inoculate us from a lot of the nonsense we may encounter in this world.

When I think about what have been my MOST important sources for understanding our world, they are the many places I've traveled to and been inspired by; the many people I’ve met along the way who've taught me real wisdom; and everything I’ve gathered so far from books in a never-ending quest for knowledge. These are the paths to independent inquiry by my estimation. As the late Christopher Hitchens once said,

Take the risk of thinking for yourself, much more happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you that way.

Our society can and should better cultivate a yearning for travel and life-long reading in our citizens. More of us can be better about setting aside plenty of time for reading the lengthy books and traveling to other corners of the world to see if what people have said about “over there”  measures up to what we’ve only been told by overly confident voices in the ether of alternative media. A common response someone makes when returning from another country or adventure is, “It’s nothing like I imagined!” That’s what will lead us on the path of wisdom, not another TikTok video. With enough time and curiosity, we might all eventually be able to do a little better than having “concepts of a plan” when it comes to understanding and constructing a better world.

For consideration:

• How important is it for us to share a common understanding of history and current events?

• Is it too optimistic to think life-long travel and reading can become more valued and structured in our society?

• Can travel and reading even be considered “antidotes” to the problem of short-cut learning?

Thanks for being a fellow traveler with me through this read. Please consider subscribing, sharing, and supporting this project—much more to follow!

Cheers!

-JSB