The World Beyond Your Head by Matthew Crawford

I tried to capture the main ideas of each chapter as Crawford stated them, without my own evaluation or critique. I occasionally inserted my thoughts – usually statements about not getting it – and have marked them in italics. Direct quotes from the book are either in quotation marks or indented as block quotes. Some summaries are much longer than others.

Preface: Our modern struggle with distraction and how gross it makes us feel provides an opportunity to examine what it is that makes us human. It’s tempting to blame technology, but the issues are really rooted in Enlightenment-era ideas about viewing the world through representations. A better approach is to consider our relationship with real objects and people, and by so doing we can ground ourselves and figure out what it is to be an individual human.

Introduction (Attention as a cultural problem): We are bombarded by demands on our attention (ads, TV, etc). We lament this seeming loss of control of our minds, and yet we also crave constant stimulation. The situation is exacerbated by the numerous possibilities for stimulation afforded us by modern life (e.g., the Internet) and the decline in cultural institutions/ideas (e.g., religion) that tell us what to focus on and value.

Attention is a common, necessary resource, that is increasingly being gobbled up by corporations. To think meaningful thoughts, we need “the condition of not being addressed” in the same way that we need clean air to live. This condition is now a luxury good.

Attention is a personal thing but also a shared thing. We want to make our own decisions about what to pay attention to, but we also owe it to others to pay attention to certain things. (E.g., we should pay attention to the road while driving.)

Attention is sort of like a muscle: we are better able to direct our attention as we put effort into doing it more often. Education is in many ways an exercise in learning to direct our attention / self-regulate, and the ability to do so is correlated with future life success. If we are not able to direct our own attention, others will gladly do it for us.

Diverse, independent thought is dependent on “our ability to concentrate on things that aren’t immediately engaging”. We tend to think that this diversity will naturally result from having the freedom to choose what to do, but we do not examine the value of different preferences. (Doing so would be “paternalistic”.) However, corporations do a great job of manipulating our preferences, so paying attention to them seems important rather than simply ensuring that we have the freedom to choose according to our preferences. We must collectively examine preferences and cultivate the right ones.

Controlling our thoughts requires the ability to ignore what is going on around us, but that is becoming increasingly difficult. By one view, this difficulty puts at risk our ability to “[achieve] a coherent self” because it threatens our inherently human behavior of understanding why we do things. By another view, why we do things is not particularly important, and we may simply be fooling ourselves into thinking we are being rational at all. Perhaps a better, third view is that we achieve a coherent life in response to culture and the environment in which we are situated.

Our modern lives have less structure than they used to. We can regain some of this structure through skilled activities, which naturally impose constraints, limit our choices, and force us to direct our attention to what is at hand. The constraints imposed by real things and by other people can seem limiting, but in fact they are anchors which allow us to be more independent. By engaging with our environment, we “[take] on a definite shape”, “in a relation of fit to a world [we have] grasped”. Being “situated in a world that is not of our making” is “fundamental to what a human being is”. We can find more satisfaction in life by treating the world as concrete and real, not as mere representations that we can interpret relative to ourselves.

The jig, the nudge, and local ecology: A jig imposes constraints to reduce physical or mental demands on us and can aid in physical (e.g., cutting straight boards) or informational (e.g., keeping track of what to do next in a busy restaurant kitchen) tasks. These jigs effectively extend our attentional capacity and are a common indicator of / contributor to skill.

A “nudge” is subtle structure imposed by a third party to guide individual behavior (e.g., making retirement savings opt-out versus opt-in). Nudges are often used to compensate for the loss of certain cultural jigs (e.g., religious and political ideals that encouraged thrift). Nudges can feel gross in that they are externally imposed, perhaps by a third party we don’t like, and are not really conscious actions that build good habits/character (unlike actions guided by cultural jigs). Yet the world must have some amount of structure, and someone must choose it in many cases, so really we can only decide who we want to choose it. (“Do you want to be nudged by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs or by Kellogg’s?”)

Those with the means to do so often pay for jigs of sorts (e.g., paying an accountant to keep you on top of your taxes or a tutor to force you to study). It seems clear that we don’t truly want full autonomy – we need some amount of structure to get by, let alone to thrive or accomplish high-skill activities.

Embodied perception: We perceive the world by experiencing it physically, via our own motions/actions, not merely as a series of pictures or other representations that our brain processes. As we gain experience, our brain comes to rely on certain features of the world around us and use them to accomplish its purposes (e.g., how we use gravity and the attributes of our body to walk with incredible energy efficiency).

When learning new skills, we often learn to similarly incorporate tools into this flow. (E.g., a motorcycle rider develops a feel for how their bike responds and over time is able to use the bike practically as an extension of their body.) Sometimes the way tools work is counter-intuitive, and it takes time and experience to adjust and ingrain those behaviors.

We perceive “affordances” – what different things offer us – rather than mere objects. Which affordances we perceive depends on our experience (e.g., a skilled martial artist notices someone’s stance that a novice would not).

Objective knowledge (e.g., knowing our speed in miles per hour) can interfere with our experiential knowledge (e.g., having a feel for how our current speed impacts our ability to take a turn) in a way that hampers the integration of perception with our body.

Concepts communicated through language allow us to take note of certain elements of situations such that we can incorporate them into our body’s experiential knowledge. (E.g., if you have been warned that having your shadow in front of you while riding a motorcycle means that oncoming traffic likely cannot see you, and then you have a close call while your shadow is in front of you, the position of your shadow will be part of the situation that your body automatically associates with danger and reacts to.) The need to understand these concepts theoretically before developing bodily associations means that social knowledge sharing is important in developing skills, even though skilled practitioners no longer consciously rely on theoretical concepts.

Even for experts, the conscious mind does need to remain involved in a watchful state. It can imagine things that might happen but are not yet observable (e.g., a patch of gravel on the road around a blind corner) in a way that “primes the appropriate action plans”.

This embodied perception / experiential knowledge is how skilled practice brings us “into a relation of fit to the world”.

Virtual reality as moral ideal: The realities of the world inform what we want to do and do. Kant’s arguments about free will, which form the basis of much of our culture’s view of the nature of autonomy, claim that we can only be autonomous when our choices are independent of any constraints imposed by things external to us. We see these sorts of views reflected in places like modern kids shows (e.g., Mickey Mouse Clubhouse) that never allow the environment to present any insurmountable obstacles. Such a view makes us less capable of dealing with frustrations/obstacles and more easily manipulated by corporations or others who present us with “choices”.

Attention and design: Modern design (e.g., modern cars) often insulates us from the realities of the world in a way that makes us feel more autonomous but also less involved in or affected by our environment and the others in it. We are forced to experience the environment through representations, but these representations don’t do a good job of communicating the realities of the environment. Good design should exploit our innate ability to sense and react to the environment rather than encumbering it.

Viewing the world through representations also inhibits our ability to get a sense of where we are and what is nearby, such that we end up feeling disoriented and disengaged from the world.

Autism as a design principle: gambling: Gambling provides a case study for how capitalism exploits the gap between our desire for control and the lack of control that we feel in our highly mediated world. Slot machines provide a sense of control as pushing the buttons always elicits a response from the machine. Whether you will win or lose is not entirely predictable, but there is nonetheless a predictable contract in that putting in more money and pushing the button allows you to continue playing. Gamblers report feeling at one with the machine in the same way that a hockey player may feel at one with their stick, but gambling machines are different in that they lack the continuous variability of physical experiences and therefore lead to an intoxicating feeling of efficacy. Slot machines “produce experiences of highly channeled pseudo-action that gratify the need to exercise the will”. They offer a haven from the frustration of living in a world that praises autonomy yet is confusing to navigate/predict.

Slot machines are explicitly designed to be highly addictive. They exploit normal human psychology and are as frictionless and immersive as possible to increase the likelihood that people will play until they have no money left. They also emulate real skill development by making it seem that you are getting closer to “figuring it out” such that you can win regularly, but that’s not actually possible; the odds are stacked against you.

Long-time gamblers often experience a “death instinct” that makes them continue gambling simply to be done with it. As long as they have money left, they must face the choice of whether to continue. Once the money is gone, no choice remains. We may experience something similar when we collapse, fatigued from all the choices we must make, into endless scrolling or binging shows.

Gambling apologists often use the libertarian argument that people should be free to make their own choices. They also tend to pathologize addicts because if the addicts have something wrong with them then the industry itself avoids blame. The libertarian argument is hard to refute without some consensus about what actually constitutes a good life. (We don’t want to impose on anyone else’s preferences.) But it also ignores that we are being manipulated by corporate entities who often seem to “govern” our behavior much more than actual government regulation does.

The success of the gambling industry is evidence that we are heavily influenced by and intertwined with our environment, not rational, autonomous actors.

A brief history of freedom: Our modern notion of freedom is based on the ideas of enlightenment thinkers like Locke and Descartes. To forward their political ideology, they argued that we are all inherently equal and therefore legitimate authority is derived only from the consent of the governed. But their argument supposes some hypothetical people who are forming a government from nothing, whereas all of us are born into some pre-existing society and don’t really ever have an opportunity to give or withhold consent to our being governed.

Further, they argued that we must be free from authority imposed by others who claim knowledge. Not only can we not trust what others tell us, but we must also be skeptical of what we observe with our own senses because they can be deceived. Thus real, independent knowledge comes only from its construction via representations in our head.

Together, these ideas essentially claim that “reality is not self-revealing”, that our own subjectivity and ability to be deceived prevents us from understanding the world based on our experience in it. The arguments abstract us from the world we actually live in and force us to understand the world by forming representations of it rather than by simply paying attention to it.

There’s a great summary of part 1 of the book on page 117.

On being led out: Becoming educated requires being “led out” from yourself and accepting the unyielding reality of things external to yourself. (E.g., when learning a language you must submit to and pay attention to the rules of the language.)

Human agency “arises only within concrete limits”. Those limits can be physical (e.g., the physics of a musical instrument) or not (e.g., the structure of a language). As we learn more about and accept these realities that are external to us, we become more capable. (E.g., an improv musician benefits from a deep knowledge of culturally formed melodies, scales, genres, etc.) Creativity arises not out of nowhere but from an understanding of things external to us (from “membership in a community”).

Enlightenment-era (and later) thinkers argued that we must acquire knowledge independently, without leaning on prior custom or what others say. They had a certain level of distrust in anything external to the self which makes it hard to become educated.

Glass-blowing is an interesting example of attention. The results of different temperatures and pressures on the glass are of course governed by physics, but to do it successfully one must pay close attention to the glass – and one’s teammates – and have a feel, gained through experiences, for what the glass will do. The process cannot be fully planned ahead of time and is always somewhat improvisational.

Some kinds of knowledge cannot be described exactly and must instead be transmitted by example. Scientific inquiry may be considered like this – one cannot learn the process of scientific inquiry by example, but rather must learn by observing and working with someone more experienced, like an apprenticeship. In a good grad school experience, you learn not only scientific facts but also more slippery concepts like what problems are worth studying and how to best do so. Such knowledge is personal and acquired only through example and experience.

This type of learning by example requires trust in the experienced teacher, even when the teacher’s methods are not provably or objectively correct. This trust is at odds with Enlightenment thinkers’ skepticism towards authority expressed via “claims to knowledge”.

Modern attempts to broaden education via impersonal means like massive online courses fail to account for knowledge learned by example from someone more experienced. In adopting these sorts of educational methods, we risk losing significant parts of our knowledge that can only be transmitted by example and therefore disappear when those with experience are gone. Modern capitalism’s tendency to “disrupt” industry and displace skilled workers has this same effect of bringing an end to the teaching of skilled practices by example.

Our inclination to do away with the authority of others around us makes it dangerously easy for a large central authority (company or government) to exercise increasing control over us.

I didn’t totally get this chapter and how it fits in with the overall argument. Much of it feels obvious, and the parts that don’t (e.g., that the methods of scientific discovery require learning by example) are a bit hard for me to wrap my head around or feel confident about. Perhaps as I keep reading it will make more sense.

Encountering things with other people: The way we perceive the world around us is influenced by our experience and social knowledge. For example, when we look at a wall, we see it as uniformly one color, despite actual variations due to lighting and shadow, because we know that walls are typically painted a single color. Similarly, when we hear a sound, we can identify its source (e.g., the HVAC system) because of our experience.

As babies grow, they learn to focus on things in the world that those around them are focusing on and eventually use pointing to call others’ attention to the objects of their focus. We have a sort of joint attention to a shared world external to us.

In fact, our social knowledge/experience influences our perception so much that our memory does not accurately record what our senses have experienced but rather filters and stores them according to social norms. Perceived social norms can even go so far as to cause us to recall experiences that we sense that we should have them when in fact they never happened.

Achieving individuality:

One knows oneself by one’s deeds. And deeds are inherently social – their meaning depends very much on how others receive them…. There is no self to be known that exists prior to, or at a “deeper level” than, the self that is in the world. This implies that individuality, too, is something that we achieve only in and through our dealings with others.

Nuance is required. Not all actions reflect one’s true self. Sincerity, as indicated by one’s inner state, isn’t enough to differentiate, though; the way others interpret and react to our actions is key to how we understand ourselves.

Exchanging money can be one way that we communicate with others about the value of certain actions and thereby understand our own worth. In asking for a certain price, we take responsibility for our actions and make a claim about their value. In paying that price, a customer affirms that claim.

Price is not the only indicator of actions’ value, though. If it were, we would all be stuck conforming to society’s ideas about what is worth doing. Instead of looking to the public market, we can instead look to the opinions of experts within relevant communities.

Making/fixing things is a special kind of activity because the actions we take when doing so are recognized, even during times of cultural disagreement or change. In working with physical things, we get out of our heads to learn from experts and then seek to do the thing well, as judged by fellow practitioners and experts.

I’m still feeling confused by this second half of the book. We’ll see where it goes…

The culture of performance: The modern ideal of autonomy and the insistence that we are isolated from external circumstances creates intense pressure to succeed. This pressure may be part of the reason for the rise in depression. We tend to value flexibility, the ability to supposedly succeed at anything, over experience gained over time.

American culture continues to believe in social mobility, that one’s social standing is the result of one’s effort. This view blatantly ignores the influence of external circumstances. As culture has shifted away from things like religion that prescribe behavior, we have shifted from feeling guilty for not doing the right things to feeling weary from trying to “become one’s fullest self.” We use medication to combat this weariness.

According to Freud, we are inherently in conflict with the world, and that conflict is fundamental to our humanity. The modern ideal of autonomy instead seeks to eliminate the conflict. Blaming depression or other problems on the workings of the brain (e.g., the deficiency of some chemical) fits with this view by ignoring all the external circumstances that contribute to our well-being. We feel that we are free, but really we all feel stuck trying to be “high-performance” individuals. Perhaps we are not as free as we think.

The erotics of attention: We can easily become trapped in our own head, focused on our own feelings of boredom, annoyance, etc. The cure is to shift our attention and act accordingly (e.g. praying, saying “I love you” to a spouse, smiling at someone even though we don’t feel great about them).

We sometimes try to defend ourselves by dealing with the world through representations, e.g. communicating with technology rather than face-to-face. Other people are difficult, and sometimes we just want to ignore/avoid the hard parts. We are fragile and unwilling to face conflict.

I’m a bit confused by this chapter as well. There are certainly interesting little concepts in it but I’m not sure that I grasp the big picture.

The flattening: The modern world seems to think that “aesthetic judgment is purely subjective, and therefore not the sort of thing that is amenable to public contestation.” Surely you could not really think that your music is better than mine, because I like mine and that makes it good for me. “What makes something right is how I feel about it. But different people feel different ways, so I couldn’t speak on behalf of anyone else.”

This subjective view implies that our value judgements cannot be validated by the external world and therefore that our outlook “can’t deepen or mature, it can only change.” But this doesn’t match our experience. Our judgements do deepen over time. But when we treat them as purely inside ourselves, we are unable to effectively communicate them and “assert them as valid.”

What it takes to be an individual is to develop a considered evaluative take on the world, and stand behind it. Doing so exposes one to conflict, and in the conversations with others that follow you may revise your take on things. Such development can’t occur if you’re not attached to anything to begin with, or never put it forward to others as being choiceworthy.

By refusing to assert our own values we also leave the door open for other forces – e.g., corporations – to fill the gap with whatever they are offering. Typically the space, such as the music at a gym, is filled by some anonymous actor trying to please “everyone”. The anonymity makes it impossible for us to engage with any individual and contest their choices/preferences.

He goes on about representations, but I don’t totally get that. I’m running out of energy to keep summarizing this book. I think the point is that to be an individual, and to truly engage with others, we have to have real opinions and own them, be willing to assert them as valid.

The statistical self: Our ideal of autonomy is a cultural force that instills in us the desire to “be self-sufficient in forming [our] own judgements about everything.” This is hard, and of course we reject any authority imposing its views on us, so we instead look to public opinion for validation/inspiration.

Social surveys (polls) are interesting in that they inform our view of what is “normal”. We want to be normal. As we have rejected various forms of cultural authority like religion and family, we have become isolated, and so we increasingly want reassurance that we are normal, that we belong to some unknown group of people like us. Often fitting ourselves into categories of normal is confining, though.

The modern world prefers collectivism in various forms, e.g. online in wikis and aggregation sites. But collective practices often remove individuals from the picture entirely, conveniently eliminating the risk of responsibility. We are hiding from the individual responsibility that we claim to idolize. We are now subject to an “amorphous form of authority” – public opinion – that no one is responsible for and that we therefore cannot effectively change/resist.

The organ maker’s shop: Making pipe organs is an example of a craft that requires engaging with one’s inheritance (e.g., the established tradition of organ making and the excellence of past organs).

Baroque organs had a certain type of sound, and over time organs began to have a softer, smoother sound as newer technologies like electricity were embraced. In the last several decades, organ makers have begun to return to the more Baroque sound because they believe it to be musically superior. They rediscovered the Baroque sound by reproducing the old organs and their techniques. In studying the past, they enabled progress in the future. They did not merely mimic the past out of reverence for tradition. Instead, they were unhappy with the present sound of organs, and from their study and experience they formed judgements about what was a better sound that happened to align with the preferences of past organ makers.

Often we view technology with a sort of inevitability. “Yet the progression of an engineering art seems to require a freer sort of relationship to the past without the progressive prejudice, as well as a critical stance towards one’s own times.” Sometimes the newer is not in fact better.

Traditional techniques in organ making (e.g. using hide glue instead of modern wood glue) often reflect a concern for maintainability/repairability in the future.

Organ makers are on a trajectory – “a thread” – that began in the past and that they hope to continue into the future. Understanding and being rooted in the past of organ-making helps them orient themselves and make forward progress that continues the greatness of the tradition.

There is “an ongoing dynamic of reverence and rebellion”. A respect for the great work of the past, but also a desire to do better and to leave one’s own creative mark.

Doing the work of voicing organ pipes requires much repetitive work that “you could train a monkey” to do. But doing it well also requires a bit more, the last few percent that “rests on a large base of technical proficiency”.

The owner of the organ shop doesn’t have to motivate his workers to care about quality. The have a care and appreciation for the work that causes them to be offended at the mere mention of trying to speed things up or cheapen them.

The pipe organ is a species that comes to us through cultural traditions, and serves aesthetic purposes that would be unintelligible without reference to those traditions. To start with a “clean sheet of paper” would be to miss the whole point, because to a large extent the history of organs constitutes what it means to be an organ.

Making organs can’t be exclusively about the craft, though. Organ makers must still consider what their customers will want and pay for, e.g. adding electrical preset stop combinations that are not “essential” and not traditional but that are handy for church services.

The dialectic between tradition and innovation allows the organ maker to understand his own inventiveness as a going further in a trajectory he has inherited. This is very different from the modern concept of creativity, which seems to be a crypto-theological concept: creation ex nihilo.

“Some critics will say that these craftspeople have ‘retreated from the modern world.’ I think nearly the opposite. We have come to accept a condition of retreat from the world as normal.” The organ maker is very much in the world, engaging with real things and rich tradition.

Epilogue (Reclaiming the real)

The epilogue is brief (13 pages) and basically a summary of the whole book. I don’t see the point in trying to summarize it further.