An unoriginal meditation on original thought
One of the most rewatchable scenes in Good Will Hunting, is the one where Matt Damon comes to Ben Affleck’s defense when a college bully is mocking him at a bar. Matt Damon has read the textbook that the bully is quoting, recites it back to him and taunts, “you paid a hundred and fifty thousand for a degree you could have gotten for a dollar fifty in late charges at a public library.” This is satisfying for many reasons. Blue collar everyman destroys entitled coastal elite. College fratboys are gross. Matt Damon gets the girl.
Just as important however, is the implication that real intelligence comes not from a wealth of knowledge, but from thinking; that reciting facts shows only eruditeness, not intelligence. This insinuation is satisfying to everyone because knowledge about certain topics can be easily compared, but the same cannot be said of creativity or cleverness. Everyone can rest content in the belief that they are smart, probably above average. They haven’t read that many books, but they’re street-smart. They aren’t mathematically inclined, but they went to the School of Hard Knocks. They don’t know as much about this topic, but given the same amount of base knowledge, they’d be able to draw the same, or even better conclusions. Everyone has told themselves this comforting life at some point or the other.
This belief is valid. Given the same amount of information, it is the person who better applies it that’s the intelligent one. It’s not about what you know, but about what you do with what you know. But what use is that cleverness without anything on which to base it? Can someone draw better conclusions or make superior decisions without any sort of knowledge to start? It’s telling that the word intelligence also means information. Ben Affleck’s character in Good Will Hunting would be better equipped to solve certain sorts of problems, particularly ones that aren’t normally associated with intelligence. But no one doubts that the cocky college fratboy would be better disposed at solving most other problems, including the ones associated with traditional intelligence.
Independent thinking without any sort of education leads to the laughable Western phenomenon of flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, and red-pill pushers. It is a forgone conclusion that knowledge is necessary for any sort of productivity. A quick-thinking physician might be better at identifying symptoms and reaching more accurate diagnoses, but I’d rather ask the dumbest physician than the smartest nuclear physicist about my cough. The other extreme encapsulated by that example is a bit more interesting; that knowledge, in most cases, is better. Even if the doctor doesn’t think, diagnosis is much more likely to be correct than anyone other than a medical professional can guess, since they don’t have the knowledge that the doctor has.
In other contexts this is a little less obvious. In a survival scenario, a thinker could guess what vegetation was safe for consumption through obvious warning signs on mushrooms, or observing which ones animals chose to eat. Someone with the knowledge of which plants were safe to eat and how to identify them would win every time. Similarly, someone sharp would be able to deduce the meaning of a word or a slang term, but someone who knows the word wouldn’t have to bother. Even chess, the paragon of cerebral contests, is realistically a competition of who has studied more openings and can recognize more situations, to the best of my understanding anyways. In virtually all cases where the information exists, knowledge trumps inference.
These two are obviously not mutually exclusive, and frequently come hand in hand. It is likely that an outdoorsman would both have some knowledge of edible plants and have the ability to watch for animal feeding habits. It is also likely that someone with an inclination towards language would both have numerous words in their vocabulary and be well-equipped to deduce meanings of words that weren’t. Pragmatically, it is the combination of these two skillsets that allow anyone to be successful at what they do, a composite of knowledge with logic and pattern recognition.
The aforementioned synthesis is most prominently visible when applied to problems whose solutions are hitherto unknown. This is why Tesla and Edison are household names: because they leveraged their scientific knowledge with their mental faculties to come up with something new. For almost all other situations, pure knowledge trumps any sort of original thinking.
Many creative answers to problems are only the application of old solutions to new situations. How many newfangled tech companies are simply old business models brought online, but are instead heralded as ingenious technological innovations? How many new stories are simply retellings of the tried and true? In a world where fewer and fewer people are reading, repeating wisdom from books that most have considered boring ancient tomes can pass for thinking. Unless of course, someone else in the room has read the same pre-Revolutionary War textbook.
The irony of the scene from Good Will Hunting is that Matt Damon couldn’t have recited the textbook if he didn’t read it. In fact, he doesn’t offer any wisdom of his own, though he is shown to be good at counting later on. Although he is a genius, that shouldn’t detract from the graduate student who not only studied the assigned readings, but was able to remember them sufficiently to bring up at a bar. He isn’t required to come up with original ideas until he has done a few more readings; if he finds himself working in policy or development, this pure knowledge might become applicable too.
So do your readings. Hoard knowledge, because it is power. Though innovation is undoubtedly more valuable than rote memorization, innovation requires a foundation from which to build. Luck is opportunity meeting preparation, and accumulated knowledge is that preparation.
