Reductionism inhibits human potentials in VUCA times

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Reductionism is the basis of current scientific thinking, and extend well into humanistic domain as well, with a lot of undesirable outcomes. I have written about the damage reductionism is doing to our national higher education here (Part 1) and here (Part 2). This article is another article illustrating how reductionism is still the basis of our mode of thinking, even matters relating to education.

 An example currently at work Id like to share here. A research group is trying to formulate new direction for  education of a specific field for the next 10 years. The project is currently drafting an extensive quantitative survey of the current situations. Some 60-70 questions asking multiple choice answer to various stakeholders. To me this is another example of reductionism at work, trying to understand phenomena by specific answers and quantify them. First and foremost, in the age of VUCA, (Volatility, Uncertainties, Complexity and Ambiguity - a phenomenon brought about by IR4.0, Pandemic, etc) stakeholders of any phenomena are not immediately clear. They might well be people who are outside of the field in question. Secondly the questions dwells on trying to understand the status quo, in a  quantitative manner. These are common characteristics of study in humanities these days, which borrow extensively from natural science counterpart.


The quantitative survey like these are looking at current problem, current issues. Even those speculative questions about where the future direction should be, are asking people based on their past experience where the dynamics shaping them are no longer relevant. I am afraid if we are to formulate future direction based on these questions, we are solving the current scenario, or at least the immediate future situation. which might not be relevant beyond that. In short knowing the past history and present situation of a dynamic no longer gives accurate prediction of its future state. These kind of surveys give a good grasps of what the situation was and is. To do a future trajectory based on these info though is risking obsoleteism.

This approach to understanding human phenomena actually ignores the full potential of human. In 1970s, if Steve Jobs were to ask Hewlett Packard of where the direction of Silicon valley technology would be, and based his innovations strictly on those answers, we would not have personal computer, cloud computing or even smartphone these days. Because back then Hewlett Packard vision of the future was Photocopy machines!

So my suggestion for any exploration to chart the future direction of human endeavour should be more wide based, intuitive, employing the full potential of a human. Moore's law in predicting the growth of computer processor has stand 45 years of accuracy. When he did it, there were no extensive research on what the current technology were, but based on a simple observation and on a hunch, from his wide experience of technology in Silicon Valley. If he were to base on the then existing state of the art tech, he might not have come up with such an accurate prediction.


Zaky Jaafar (15 Nov 2020)

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