CHAPTER 3: HUMANS and LEARNING
- didiermoretti
- Nov 30
- 2 min read
Why don't chimpanzees build cities or cathedrals?
It’s not for a lack of ambition, and they certainly have complex social hierarchies. The fundamental problem, as it so often is, is one of information management. Every chimpanzee generation is forced to start, more or less, from scratch.
Humans, by contrast, stumbled upon the ultimate hack: we learn from the dead.
This unique ability to accumulate, compound, and transmit information across time and space is the foundational engine of our progress. It required us to invent technologies to store our memory (Writing) and disciplines to correct our errors (Science). Before we could trade goods, we had to trade ideas. Before we could build vast institutions of cooperation, we had to build a shared, learned reality.
And here, we find a great paradox. This "learned reality" is not a stable foundation; it's a rickety scaffold. What we collectively "know" is periodically, and often painfully, overturned by new discoveries. Worse still, we are creatures of cognitive comfort. We cling to our established knowledge with a religious fervor, often in the face of ample evidence to the contrary.
This presents the central puzzle of our progress. If we're so good at clinging to established error, and so stubborn about admitting it, how did we ever manage to advance?
The answer, as we'll see, involves a delicate balance: just enough acid to dissolve bad ideas, but enough glue to hold the edifice together. Just enough humility to admit error, but not so much that we lose confidence in our ability to know anything.
And that balance, it turns out, is remarkably easy to lose. It appears we are losing it now. Experts are dismissed as corrupted elites. Peer review is reframed as conspiratorial gatekeeping. The scientific method itself—humanity's most successful error-correction system—is increasingly viewed as just another ideology in a marketplace of convenient opinions. We have, it seems, decided that thinking too hard was overrated after all.
Which makes understanding how learning actually works all the more urgent. If our superpower is on the fritz, we had better understand why, and how to reboot it.
Money and trade are powerful, as we've seen, but they are only amplifiers. The signal they amplify originates here. This chapter is about that vital yet fragile activity: the relentless, collective, and deeply contradictory process of Learning.
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Reference Article on the Growth Framework: The Growth Enigma: How Humans Cracked the Code to Prosperity
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