Thought Bananas 9 | "a huge spectrum of multi-sensory, thematic modes of expression"

The Value of Pure Research and Having an Aesthetic

This is Thought Bananas, a weekly newsletter for big ideas, short stories, and appropriately-sized memoirs from Charlie Becker. If someone forwarded this to you, subscribe here to get the new issue emailed to you every week.

🍌Quote of the Week

“You don’t get better on the days when you feel like going. You get better on the days when you don’t want to go, but you go anyway. If you can overcome the negative energy coming from your tired body or unmotivated mind, you will grow and become better. It won’t be the best workout you have, you won’t accomplish as much as what you usually do when you actually feel good, but that doesn’t matter. Growth is a long term game, and the crappy days are more important.” -George St. Pierre (Former UFC Champion)

🍌In the Newsletter This Week

No new essays or stories this week.

• Lessons from Teaching: Three quick lessons from my last three weeks of teaching.

• Crowd Work: What’s your aesthetic?

Lessons from Teaching

🍌Teaching Research

The last two weeks kept me so busy I wasn’t able to write and send the newsletter. I was teaching a two-week intensive research course to undergraduates at University of Houston.

This specific course kicks my butt every year. The students are already within the very prestigious undergraduate honors program, and they must apply to get into the course. Even though the class is only 10 days long, the number of hours I'm meeting directly with students, the depth of small-group conversations, and the intense engagement of such an exceptional group, makes it feel like a full semester workload. 

As difficult as it is, teaching this course is one of the highlights of my year, simply because I learn so much. Part of that is because I am teaching something I do all the time (research) at a different level than I’m normally doing it. Breaking something you do all the time down to the basic parts then explaining it to someone who is smart but new to it will expose the gaps in your knowledge. (We embed this philosophy into what we do at the SURE Program by saying to treat everyone who takes the course as a “topically ignorant genius.”)

In addition to learning by teaching my students, they also teach me a bunch. In the remainder of the newsletter, I will share the biggest things I’ve learned from teaching my students.

🍌Aesthetics and Cross-Generational Communication

I opened this course the way I always do: assigning the students a presentation where they describe themselves and tell me about, “one thing that they’re obsessed with lately.” I love doing this because I learn so much from the things they’re obsessed with. This year I learned something especially interesting from the way one student described herself. 

That student’s presentation started with her name, academic distinction, goals, and all the other usual stuff, then she said something really interesting.

“My aesthetics are Hippie and Granola.” 

All the other students nodded. I stopped at the end of the presentation and asked:

“What are aesthetics? I know what that word means, but is ‘an aesthetic’ a set thing? Did everyone else know what she meant by that?”

The other students said yes, they did know. After class, one student emailed me a link to the Aesthetics Wiki List of Aesthetics which explained that an aesthetic is, “a collection of visual schema that creates a mood.” However, there’s a full multi-page definition that talks about how expansive the idea of an aesthetic is, and how there are still ongoing debates about this definition. 

I found this interesting for two reasons. First, it is an new language that people are using to communicate with each other. You might ask, “doesn’t every generation do this?” In a sense, yes. However, this is more than just a few new slang words. It is a crowdsourced organization and codification of a huge spectrum of multi-sensory, thematic modes of expression. Second, it seems to be entirely contained within Gen-Z. I’ve told a lot of people, but have yet to meet another millennial or older who knows about what aesthetics are, in the specific sense in which my students were using them. It is an emergent symbolic language developed by and for a generation who was raised entirely on the internet. 

I hope to explore this new idea more in future newsletters, and perhaps even find my own “aesthetic.” I’ve not had much time to go into it, but so far I’m a mix of Vacation Dadcore and Light Academia. 

The wiki suggests that Tom Sellleck as Magnum PI is one figure you might use as inspiration for a Vacation Dadcore aesthetic.

🍌The Importance of Audience and the Merits of “Pure Research”

One of my favorite parts of teaching this course is when we talk about the difference between pure and applied research. Most people don’t understand what the difference is and why pure research is something that should be valued and celebrated. Even in my research course, there are often students who think of much of pure research as esoteric bean-counting, written in unnecessarily complex language to hide its uselessness. 

Before I explain why, I want to make some caveats. There are some legitimate criticisms that can be leveled at academia, many that have to do with it being an “ivory tower,” siloed away from the rest of us with their own weird rules. Most of these have to do with the tenure system, the proclivity of academics toward politics, and the inability to mobilize what is learned in academia into the broader community. 

There is also an economic problem with higher education. The government limits supply of degrees through accreditation and funding. Then, they subsidize demand through loans. These combined have led to skyrocketing education costs. However, many people who see these problems want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and just blow it all up. I think that–when people believe this in good faith–it is largely because they don’t understand the value of pure research. 

The classic text that I use to teach the research course is The Craft of Research. Early in the book, it makes the distinction of pure vs. applied research:

“We call research pure when it addresses a conceptual problem that does not bear directly on any practical situation in the world, when it only improves the understanding of a community of researchers. We call research applied when it addresses a conceptual problem that does have practical consequences.” 

The criticisms against pure research are obvious: it is conceptual. It doesn’t have any practical use. However, I think there are two strong arguments for pure research. The first is that pure research makes our lives more psychologically rich. I touched on psychological richness in the last issue of Thought Bananas, and plan to write on it at length soon, but this excerpt from the book does a great job of explaining my point of view: 

“[A]s the term pure suggests, many researchers value such research more than they do applied research. They believe that the pursuit of knowledge ‘for its own sake’ reflects humanity’s highest calling: to know more, not for the sake of money or power, but for the transcendental good of greater understanding and a richer life of the mind.”  

I think there is a second, even bigger reason that pure research is inspiring. To get at the heart of why it inspires me, I would add one word to the definition: 

“We call research pure when it addresses a conceptual problem that does not bear directly on any practical situation in the world yet.”

Pure research is a bet on progress. Many people think of pure research as navel-gazing, whereas I think it is intensely exploratory: the simultaneous mapping of the universe and the human mind. Pure research breaks new ground in Art, Technology, Science, and the Humanities. Pure research is the mortar which binds the bricks of civilization. 

Many people denigrate pure research. There are two major reasons they do so. First, they don’t see pure research as a bet on progress. They are not taking the long view. The resource cost of pure research is too much for them. Second, they find pure research to be esoteric because it’s written in the language of professional researchers. Critics accuse researchers of using this kind of language to obfuscate what they’re doing–and sometimes they’re right. However, usually it is simply a waste of time to redefine all the basic terms when writing for an educated audience.

Luckily, the students gave me an excellent example for them to see this in action. I explained why the language was needed, and the students mostly understood and agreed, but then I said: 

“Think about it like this, writing in that style is an aesthetic for the professional researchers.” 

All of them nodded. A few let out a long, “oh.” A couple of them even groan-laughed the way you do when an old person tries to relate to young people. At the end of the day though, all of the students leave my course equipped with better research skills and an understanding of why pure research is valuable. 

Crowd Work

In standup comedy, crowd work is when the comic speaks directly with the audience. This section is a place for us to directly engage one another. 

What’s your aesthetic? (Had you heard of “having an aesthetic” before?”)

That’s all for now—see you next week!

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