"Our minds must be too highly trained."

That most-peculiar book, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, describes in Fit the Fourth how representatives of the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries, and other professional thinking persons confronted Deep Thought, the second greatest computer in the universe, when it threatened to find the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.

You really should read that entire web page. I mean, really, there is little or nothing on this planet more worth-reading than that particular passage, unless your religion tells you that there is a book written by God which you haven't finished reading. (And even then you're still probably better off reading this passage from HHGTTG, because the fact that you somehow haven't yet gotten around to finishing the book God gave you proves that you don't actually believe in your religion and will likely fail to obey even those few simple commands your God gave you, such as to stone adulterers and gays, or kill your children or invade the country next door if they don't follow your religion.)

But since most of you won't, I'll quote the relevant bit here:

DEEP THOUGHT:
But, but the program will take me seven-and-a-half million years to run.

LUNKWILL:
Seven-and-a-half million years?

DEEP THOUGHT:
Yes. I said I’d have to think about it didn’t I? And it occurs to me, that running a program like this is bound to cause sensational public interest.

MAJIKTHISE:
Oh you can say that again.

DEEP THOUGHT:
And so any philosophers who are put off the mark, are going to clean up in the prediction business.

MAJIKTHISE:
”Prediction business”?

DEEP THOUGHT:
Obviously. You just get on the pundit circuit. You all go on the chat shows and the colour supplements and violently disagree with each other about what answer I’m eventually going to produce. And if you get yourselves clever agents, you’ll be on the gravy train for life.

MAJIKTHISE:
Bloody ‘ell! That’s what I call thinking! Here Vroomfondel, why do we never think of things like that?

VROOMFONDEL:
Dunno. Think our minds must be too highly trained.

I always thought that last line was a poke at philosophers academics so full of themselves that they perceive their own stupidity as proof of their superior intelligence. But today, listening to lecture 2 of Robert Andre' LaFleur's lecture series Books That Matter: The Analects of Confucius, I heard a quote from C. Wright Mills (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, audiobook) which argues that this over-training actually happens:

The sociological imagination can also be cultivated; certainly it seldom occurs without a great deal of often routine work. Yet there is an unexpected quality about it, perhaps because its essence is the combination of ideas that no one expected were combinable--say, a mess of ideas from German philosophy and British economics [1]. There is a playfulness of mind back of such combining as well as a truly fierce drive to make sense of the world, which the technician as such usually lacks. Perhaps he is too well-trained, too precisely trained, since one can be trained only in what is already known. Training incapacitates one from learning new ways. It makes one rebel against what is bound to be at first loose and even sloppy.

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[1] WARNING: This has been tried twice. The results were Marxism and Nazism.

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This shows that The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, like any great work of philosophy, can reveal more wisdom every time you read and meditate on it.

Comments

[Silent Whisper]

So true. That's excellent insight on what I always assumed to be one of many little throwaway jokes in one of my favorite books, thank you!

[Honey Mead]

I always took the line to be how academics spend their time thinking about problems and solutions instead of thinking about how to exploit them for gain. Hence why you get people like JB Peterson making bank while actual philosophers struggle to get grant money.

[Calipony]

Nothing new.
Aristophanes, The Clouds. 423 BC :p

[Mitch H]

I mean, Aristophanes preferred to poke at his philosophers, and mock Socrates as being a con-man whose main purpose and livelihood was training his pupils to be better lawyers, and cheat their neighbors via barratry.

You will become a thorough rattle-pate, a hardened old stager, the fine flour of the talkers....

Hrm. Actually, The Clouds makes for a decent pegasus-play:

Eternal Clouds, let us appear; let us arise from the roaring depths of Ocean, our father; let us fly towards the lofty mountains, spread our damp wings over their forest-laden summits, whence we will dominate the distant valleys, the harvest fed by the sacred earth, the murmur of the divine streams and the resounding waves of the sea, which the unwearying orb lights up with its glittering beams. But let us shake off the rainy fogs, which hide our immortal beauty and sweep the earth from afar with our gaze.

Thus, Socrates, great high-priest of subtle nonsense.

in fact, you must believe as every man of intellect should, that the greatest of all blessings is to live and think more clearly than the vulgar herd, to shine in the contests of words