If you are applying to Oxbridge, I recommend watching the videos of Dr Matt Williams, the Access Fellow at the University of Oxford and a tutor in Politics at Jesus College.
His videos divest the University of some of the unhelpful and baseless myths that sometimes deter applicants. More importantly, he offers jargon-free tutorials designed to encourage the creative, incisive thinking that makes university study exciting. I urge all prospective applicants to watch his videos as their first port-of-call.
In a video published last year, Dr Williams explains how a creative thinker might answer the following question: 'Does Google know us better than we know ourselves?' His answer raises many fascinating subsidiary questions: are 'data' and 'knowledge' interchangeable concepts?; to whom does the word 'us' refer in this statement?; what is self-knowledge?
In the course of this video, he makes the following remark: 'What I'd be tempted to do is to argue against received wisdom, argue against the grain … in an almost contrarian fashion' before articulating an argument that posits that Google does indeed know us better than we know ourselves.
This made me contemplate an equally fascinating question unrelated to the discussion of Google's powers: what is 'received wisdom'?
An uncontentious – and inelegant – paraphrase might be to describe it as 'the ideas that people believe because others have told them to do so'. However, believing in 'received wisdom' is not always a simple matter of having being told what to think. Sometimes we believe in particular ideas because we accept them as part of the fabric of our everyday reality and because no one has encouraged us to challenge their usefulness or truth-value.
This train of thought led me to another interesting question: 'is there such a thing as a conventional opinion in the age of the internet?'
If I were to put Dr Williams's question about Google to some of my former students, I suspect that many of them – possibly most – would wholeheartedly concur that Google and other tech-giants know us better than we know ourselves. Several of my former Film Studies students were intensely interested in cinematic representations of AI and the process whereby machines can grow so well-acquainted with human behaviour that androids may not only live among us undetected but enjoy emotionally intimate relations with their human analogues. They saw films such as Blade Runner and Her either as prophecies of a likely near-future or logical extensions of much of humanity's current relationship with technology. Were I to present a class of my former sixth-form students with Dr Williams's question, the conventional view would likely be one of agreement. Those who argued that humans were in full possession of a self-knowledge which Google could never emulate would probably be in the minority, their views cutting against the grain of the received wisdom within that particular classroom.
Our world has splintered so much into so many communities defined by their shared opinions and common sociolects that it's hard to determine what constitutes 'conventional opinion'. The Man on the Clapham Omnibus might be agreeing enthusiastically with an article in The Spectator or liking a Tweet from Novara Media; he may well have heard of neither publication. At some point, he may find himself in company in which all three of these positions elicit disapproval.
My basic point is that self-proclaimed contrarians start from the needlessly difficult position of having to establish what constitutes 'received wisdom' before deciding to argue against it. I don't want to overstate the fragmented nature of discourse in 2023 as there are still plenty of topics which generate a broad consensus. For example, all but the most committed contrarians would refrain from advocating the legalisation of burglary or proposing that tobacco consumption benefits one's health. Questioning 'common-sense' positions can be valuable. Opposing all common-sense for the sake of doing so is the sort of knee-jerk perversity we probably ought to abandon when we enter secondary school. Doing so recalls the sketches that Lee and Herring used to perform about The Ironic Review, a magazine so obsessed with trumpeting its oppositional status, that its editors are forced to perform exhausting cognitive pivots as they attempt to establish the most against-the-grain 'take' on any given subject, such as proposing that 'Cotton Eye Joe' is the greatest piece of music ever recorded. (I am showing my age here.)
To illustrate the same point, Dr Williams also addresses the question: 'is violence always political?' The response which he outlines seems to rest on the assumption that most people would argue against this idea. However, once again, this depends on whom one asks. A large number of A-Level Sociology students I've known would likely be amenable to the idea that there is no such thing as apolitical violence since 'politics', in the word's broadest definition, refers to the exercise of power. To argue that there is a worthwhile distinction to be drawn between political and non-political violence might well put one in a minority within that particular context.
Where does this leave the prospective Oxbridge applicant? For me, it makes it all the more imperative that, when formulating arguments, rather than first working out how our view might slot into an established discursive framework, we prioritise other tasks. These include ensuring that our arguments have coherent rationale and supporting evidence, showing awareness of their various implications, testing them against potential counter-arguments and refining them accordingly. None of these tasks involves the exhausting, sometimes confusing and often impossible starting-point of determining 'what most people think' about a particular subject.
As Dr Williams notes, the notion of 'thinking for oneself' is a problematic concept and the subject of a lengthy essay in itself. However, recognising that one's own opinion needn't be rooted in the views of others is an important and liberating aspect of intellectual independence.
Thank you for reading.
If you would like a mock-interview, please get in touch at swlondontutor@yahoo.com.
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