Last weekend I was at an AMC Advisory Board meeting. The people on this board are a very impressive group of people. I've been on a handful of these types of boards in the last 5-10 years, and this group is probably the strongest and most smoothly-functioning. But when discussion turned to anything outside matters at hand (usually politics or the financial meltdown), I had the same strong feeling I always do when in a room full of academics (I think I might be the only person on the board who has spent more than a year or two since age 6 outside the classroom -- there might be one or two others, but not more than that). I couldn't help but think, "Wow, they really live in a bubble, and have a hard time seeing it." Of course, not all of them are like this, but a vast majority are. It's very easy to see this as someone outside the bubble. (To be fair, I have the same feeling when in a room full of traders. Or a room full of the very religious. Or a room full of city people. Or my family .)

Of course, this makes me wonder, what bubbles am I inside that I don't even realize? I often fear that I don't get outside of the bubble of AoPS enough to see what we could be doing differently, or to think about broader educational issues. I feel like I try to avoid getting stuck in bubbles, and I think the main advantage of trips like the one I took the AMC is that they force me out of my comfort zone (home and office) and force me to be confronted with new ideas that might conflict with mine. The trips also give me the time to really think about ideas that come from outside my own bubbles, which is very important. I read all sorts of news and political blogs, from all sorts of different viewpoints (although many are getting unreadable in the run-up to the election). These expose me to new ideas, or old ones I think I disagree with, but I don't think even this is enough to really get outside the bubble. A few words or a short conversation are not enough.

This is one reason I love books -- they give me 6-10 hours of argument, a full immersion in something outside my experience. For example, I'm now reading Terror and Consent, which I'll blog about in more detail later. But, in short, the book has given me a new appreciation for potential importance of international law, and a new prism through which to view history and evaluate proposals for the future.

I will note that trying hard to get outside my own bubbles weakens a great many of my own convictions. I find that most things are much more complicated than my first approximation, and that as I learn more about them, I feel less certain about proposals for handling, or even describing, them. And I think that's basically the right way to be, even though it's somewhat uncomfortable. It's nice to feel certain about things, but most things are very, very uncertain, and if an issue gets to 60% certainty, that's more clear than most. Moreover, as social and economic systems get more complex, these sorts of projections and policy decisions will get even harder and harder.

All this leaves me playing Devil's advocate in most conversations, as it's much easier to tear down the strongly held convictions of people in bubbles than it is to advance (or even have!) my own. Does it make me weak-minded to have the strength of my convictions dampened by information? Certainly, written in those terms, it would appear to. But maybe I'm wrong about that, too