Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist

As mentioned in my previous post, I’ve been reading a book called Mediated, by Thomas de Zengotita, which examines the ways in which a pervasive media has altered the way in which we perceive the world. He has lots of interesting examples, but today’s topic will be his discussion of the demise of heroes in a mediated culture.

Most of us know Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, that he gave the Gettysburg address, that he learned his lessons on the back of a coal shovel, and that he was assassinated. And that he was a great man. Notice how there are lots of blanks in that knowledge. de Zengotita’s premise is that it is precisely because of those blanks that most people consider Lincoln a hero. When there are blanks in what we know about somebody, we can idealize them by filling those blanks in ways which are wholly positive.

Such blanks would no longer exist in today’s paparazzi culture. For any given celebrity, one can learn _everything_ about them, from what they like for breakfast, to how they spend their free time. They are no longer heroes, standing at a distance, with us able to place them on a pedestal and idealize them. Celebrities today are “real” people, with all of the faults and problems that “real” people have.

An example that de Zengotita uses to illustrate how quickly things have changed - FDR was in a wheelchair during his entire presidency sixty years ago. And his constituents had no idea. Can you imagine anything like that happening today? Bill Clinton couldn’t keep his hands off an intern behind closed doors, and it was worldwide news. There are no access barriers any more, no mystique. We can’t have heroes, because heroes need to be removed from everyday life; once it’s revealed that they’re just regular people, the mystique is gone.

I think this is an interesting phenomenon because it illustrates something rather fundamental about the human psyche. I kind of touch on this in my localized generalities post, but one of the amazing things about the human mind is how it effortlessly and automatically fills in gaps in its knowledge; so effortlessly, in fact, that we barely even notice that we’re doing it. It is relatively rare to find people who know what they do not know; most people make assumptions and then are dismayed and shocked when others do not share those assumptions (e.g. my reaction to discovering Orson Scott Card’s reactionary political views). Such assumptions lead to the kinds of confusion I talk about in my thinking different post.

This phenomenon of filling in the blanks is why I think horoscopes and Tarot cards are fascinating. They make general pronouncements, and our brains figures out how to adapt those pronouncements to our own life. “You will take a journey” can be interpreted as a physical journey (business trip or vacation) or emotional journey or spiritual journey. But our brains flip through the possibilities and decides on an appropriate interpretation, and all we can remember later is how well the predictions matched our life, when it’s our brain that did the matching (see the sci-fi book Code of the Lifemaker for some scams that psychics use along these lines). I enjoy looking at horoscopes and Tarot cards precisely because they’re fuzzy - by observing the interpretations I make, I can find out what my brain is concerned with.

I think it’s also interesting that when we don’t know something, we tend to assume whatever works to best preserve our worldview. We think the best of our heroes, and the worst of our villains. We almost would prefer not to learn the “facts” rather than disrupt our images. I have definitely noticed myself being afraid to go talk to speakers I respect after talks, for fear that my idealized picture of their brilliance will have to be replaced by the mundane realization that they’re just people. And I’d be loath to watch a documentary on what a good person Karl Rove is (not that one exists, but you get the idea).

There’s something here, something about the connection between how our brains fill in the blanks, and how that reinforces our worldviews, but I can’t quite get a handle on it today. There’s the connection between horoscopes and de Zengotita’s discussion of the demise of heroes, but I can’t figure out how to generalize it. I started writing this post hoping that it would emerge in the writing, but it didn’t. Alas. I’ll poke on it more later, but I’ll put up what I have, and maybe somebody else will have an idea.

Amazon link

I’ve been meaning to read this for a while, and I added it to my last Amazon order, but didn’t get around to reading it until a few weeks ago. Jeff Hawkins was one of the driving forces behind Palm and Handspring, and now that he’s set for life, he’s indulging his childhood dreams of trying to understand the brain by starting the Redwood Neuroscience Institute, which is apparently now the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience. In this book, he pulls together a layman’s overview of neuroscience literature that he finds interesting, and then espouses his own theory of how the brain (or at least the neocortex) works.

Here’s the basic idea of his theory. The neocortex is composed of pattern-recognition elements that are wired to remember events that occur together. It’s a hierarchy of pattern-recognition elements that breaks people’s perception of their environment into manageable chunks. In other words, when I look around the room, I don’t see ten million pixels; I see my desk, the computer, the wall, etc. Even if I look at my desk at different angles, my brain perceives it as a single object.

Another aspect of this is that these elements are learning new patterns all the time. When we learn to drive and first get out into traffic, it’s terrifying because our brains are overloaded trying to filter all of the myriad visual information around us. As we grow more used to the speed of traffic and learn what’s relevant, the visual load is automated and pushed down to a subconscious level of the hierarchy. The same holds true for recognizing positions on a gameboard. None of this is particularly novel (I espoused a similar idea in my cognitive subroutines proposal).

The novel bit is that Hawkins noticed that our brains do more than perceive - they are actually continually making predictions. Here’s an obvious example: when you’re scanning your home, you can notice when something is NOT there. How is that possible? It’s not there, so you can’t see it. But your brain has developed a model of what IS there, and is making a prediction for what it should see, and when something doesn’t match its prediction, it alerts the conscious mind that something is wrong. This makes a ton of sense. Our brain adapts to the familiar, but if something changes, it needs to turn all of its attention to understanding why there’s a discrepancy. I thought this insight alone made the whole book.

As an aside, this also explains why most people suck at estimating probabilities. Our brains are wired to remember the abnormal and outlandish because they break the routine patterns that we have learned. We don’t remember the 99% of the time when things go as we expect them to, because it’s all handled subconsciously. So we significantly overestimate outlandish risks because they break the pattern and come to our conscious attention.

Another discussion that I liked was Hawkins’s description of “invariant representations” (which I allude to in my post on localized generalities). Basically, because the neocortex is hierarchical and each level is always making predictions, each level can notify the level below it what it should be looking for. In other words, if one level keeps track of things in my office, it can notify the level below it that it should be looking for a desk, and that it should figure out how to interpret the raw sensory input in such a way that it looks like a desk.

As another aside, this also explains why we often see what we expect to see. Our entire sensory system is designed around the principle that it should adapt its interpretation of raw sensory data to match what the levels above it think it should be seeing. This applies not only to physical things like desks, but also when we see patterns in random data, or “interpret” data in such a way as to support our point of view. Our brains are wired that way.

I thought the book was decent. The predictive aspect of the brain and the discussion of localized generalities were “Oh, wow” moments, as I immediately saw how they filled in gaps in some of my theories. Most of the rest of the book was an explanation where he handwaves how the current understanding of the neocortex can support his theory. There’s some minorly interesting stuff in there about how the various neocortical layers are connected in a way that might be hierarchical in the way he suggests, but that’s mostly of relevance to the neuroscience geeks.

I’m mostly kicking myself after reading it, though. I was moving along the same lines with my cognitive subroutines theory, but I was a couple years too late (as well as lacking any sort of intellectual rigor). And I’ve already discussed how my localized generalities post was the same idea as the “invariant representations”, without the neuroscientific backing. So I’ve got some good ideas; I just need to develop them, and do the legwork to support them more fully. In my copious free time.

P.S. Speaking of which, wow, that was quite a lull in posting for me. It’s been crazy. My company is trying to finish up projects for two different clients before Thanksgiving, so I’m spending a lot of energy there. I had the conference in LA a few weekends ago. Last weekend was a company outing to Monterey. There’s all sorts of other social stuff going on. So on the few nights that I’ve had at home alone, I’ve been so exhausted that I have just collapsed comatose onto the couch to watch TV rather than blogging. But I wanted to get up the CellKey prototype pictures tonight, and then figured I should clear out the backlog of book reviews that has built up. I actually finished all of these books a few weeks ago (and then spent last week catching up on my backlog of The Economist), but they’ve just been sitting on my desk since then.

One thing that I noticed in the comments on my “designing for the collective” post was that I have been using Latour’s term “collective” in an extremely fuzzy way, where I change what I mean by it depending on the point I’m trying to make. This got me thinking as to whether this was an appropriate thing to do or not. Problems in communication are often due to imprecision of language, and I was wondering whether my lack of clarity was allowing me to avoid or ignore problems with my line of thought.

After tossing this around for a while, I realized that one of the issues is that “collective” is an extremely general term. Even as Latour used it, it can refer to a wide array of organizations. And yet there was meaning to be extracted from this general term, as he found ways to adapt it to specific situations that he constructed and discussed.

My theory of the moment is that generalizations are useful in part because they are somewhat vague on specifics. They can be adapted to the needs of the local situation. Admittedly, I’m biased since I tend to be a deductive thinker. But let’s consider the extreme opposite case, somebody who observes all of the details around them, but can’t separate the underlying commonalities from those details. They would not recognize that a traffic light is a traffic light whether it’s aligned vertically or horizontally. They would think that different fonts represented different languages. I’m being silly for the sake of argument, but you get the idea. Looking for the underlying general principles in specific situations means throwing away some of the specific details. In the case of traffic lights, it’s the colors and order of the lights that matter, not the orientation. In fonts, it’s the general shape of letters, not the specific details of serifs.

The really brilliant people, the deep thinkers, are the ones who are able to identify useful separations between the general and the specific. They can extract generalizations that apply to a variety of situations that had been heretofore thought completely separate. I’ve discussed the power of theories that apply across different areas before. It’s important to remember that such generalizations are only mental tools. They are not necessarily “right” or “wrong”, because they are both - they are “right” in the sense that they unify observations across several disparate situations, but “wrong” in the sense that they might not apply exactly in any of those particular situations. So they should be judged on whether they are useful or not.

Too many people adopt an all-or-nothing approach to generalizations of this type. In the “all” case, they take the results of the generalization and apply them indiscriminately without regard to specific examples. Prejudices are a good example, where the person will ignore the evidence in front of them in favor of their prejudice.

In the “nothing” case, they think the theory is completely useless because it does not explain all of the details; a lot of critiques of evolution fall along these lines, trying to disprove just one element of evolution (from carbon dating to the fossil record), then standing back and saying “If that one thing is wrong, then the whole thing must be bogus”. Of course, their disproof is often faulty, but that’s another rant.

The true use is somewhere in between, because generalizations are tools. They may not apply in all situations. The user has to take responsibility and decide whether they are appropriate or not, and if they use them, to adapt them to the local situation. This adaptation is like the premise of “Web 2.0″, taking the general tool and building a local adaptation. All of the details might not be right, but the general principle may provide insight that is not apparent from the observations of the specific situation. And it can work the other way - the specifics can help inform revisions of the generalization. One analogy I came up with is that it’s like being under a good manager, one who outlines the overall goals of the project, but leaves it to the employees to figure out how to accomplish those goals using their skills. The relationship works both ways - general goals flowing down, specific plans flowing up - to achieve success.

So this is my theory of why I think some of my posts and theories are sloppy in their language. I am trying to get to general principles and sometimes let the details slip. One of the things I need to work on is to try to figure out how to apply some of my theories to specific situations, going from a descriptive mode to a prescriptive mode. But this idea of the general being adapted to the local is a powerful one that I want to continue exploring.

P.S. In an amusing coincidence, I had sketched out the ideas in this post the morning before I read the “invariant representations” section of On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins, which are much the same idea. He’s coming at it from a neuroscience perspective, I’m coming at it from the realm of ideas, but it’s the same idea (finding general representations and applying them to specific situations). So, as usual, that was both satisfying (because my ideas aren’t totally crackpot) and disheartening (he’s already published). I should have read the book long ago - my cognitive subroutines posts are pretty congruent to his theory of intelligence. More coming when I finish it and write a review.

As previously noted, I’m reading Paul Dourish’s book, Where the Action Is, in which he explores the branch of philosophy called phenomenology as a possible theoretical basis for embodied interaction. In particular, he mentions the work of Heidegger, about which I know nothing but a couple brief summaries I have read. But the concept which I want to address today is Heidegger’s exploration of equipment use, in which he divided equipment into “ready-to-hand” and “present-at-hand”. As Dourish explains:

These are ways, Heidegger explains, that we encounter the world and act through it. As an example, consider the mouse connected to my computer. Much of the time, I act through the mouse; the mouse is an extension of my hand as I select objects, operate menus, and so forth. The mouse is, in Heidegger’s terms, ready-to-hand. Sometimes, however, such as when I reach the edge of the mousepad and cannot move the mouse further, my orientation toward the mouse changes. Now, I become conscious of the mouse mediating my action, precisely because of the fact that it has been interrupted. The mouse becomes the object of my attention as I pick it up and move it back to the center of the mousepad. When I act on the mouse in this way, being mindful of it as an object of my activity, the mouse is present-at-hand. (p.109)

We’re all familiar with this concept. When we pick up a hammer and hit a nail, we’re not thinking about the hammer, we’re thinking about the task of hitting the nail. The hammer is invisible to our conscious thought; it has been absorbed into our extended self (Me++ explores similar ideas).

Dourish uses these philosophical concepts as a way to build a theoretical basis for designing embodied interaction. He talks about a bunch of different things, which I’ll explore more when I do a formal review, but for now I’m going to restrict the discussion to understanding how and why different forms of interaction can morph from “present-at-hand” to “ready-to-hand”, from visible to invisible, from outside my personal collective to inside.

While reading later in the book, it occurred to me that one of the keys, if not the key, to this transition is feedback. I am a tremendous believer in the power of feedback to effect changes in the world. It’s something I see everywhere, from the importance of aligning company processes with goals in Built to Last, to advocating using the feedback of others to change oneself.

How is it relevant in this particular situation? I believe that consistent and reliable feedback is necessary before an object can transition to the “ready-to-hand” state. If something is acting as an extension of oneself, it can not have an identity in its own right. It must behave exactly as one expects in response to one’s actions. If it doesn’t, if it starts behaving in an unexpected fashion, then the tenuous connection that has “coupled” it to one’s consciousness is broken, and the “ready-to-hand” status is lost. Dourish’s example of the mouse that reaches the edge of the mousepad is a good example of this transition. When the mouse is “ready-to-hand”, I move it up and the cursor goes up, so after a few moments, the mouse has disappeared from my consciousness, because when I think up, the cursor goes up. It is only when the feedback is unexpected, when I think up, and the cursor does not go up because the mouse has hit the edge, that the connection is broken.

Dourish mentions feedback in passing a few times, but I think it is central to this particular issue. Of course, I haven’t finished the book yet, so it may yet make a more prominent appearance. But that’s why I’m writing this now, so I can feel all clever if it does.

This connection of feedback with making things “ready-to-hand”, making things disappear from one’s consciousness as they are absorbed into an extension of oneself has some interesting consequences. For instance, it ties in readily with this post on cognitive trust, where I say “as we learn to trust and respect [a coworker], we can learn to call upon them with little more overhead than we do a subroutine in our own head” - our coworker has become reliable enough in our eyes that they essentially become “ready-to-hand”.

I noticed this recently in my own life, actually. In my previous jobs, I was always in direct contact with my “customers”, because I was writing prototype software for my coworkers’ use. I didn’t worry too much about specification requirements or software process, because if I started coding and I ran into an ambiguity about what they wanted, I’d turn around in my chair and go “Hey, how do you want this to work?”. At my current job, however, I am at least two steps removed from the customer. The customer talks to the president of the company, and the president talks to us. The feedback loop is much longer because if there are any questions, it has to be relayed to the president, who then has to take it to the customer when she gets a chance, etc. So I’m starting to learn that I need to be much more proactive about clarifying requirements and specifications as early as possible in the software design process. At my old job, I hadn’t even been aware of how much I relied on the instantly accessible nature of my coworkers; they had been “ready-to-hand”, used without thinking. Now that the feedback has become much more distant, my link to the customer has been broken and I am aware of the customer’s existence as being “present-at-hand”, an entity in their own right.

I think this mutual dependency between tight feedback loops and the “ready-to-hand” status of something (or someone) is something to be aware of in design. Certainly one of the things that makes software so hated is that feedback is often inconsistent and reliable. One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. And yet with our computers, we often repeat the same action over and over… and get different results. We don’t know what makes the software work. We develop elaborate incantations to invoke the blessings of the software gods (”Oh, I know that if I press this button, then call this from this menu, and then press F3, the report works, but if you do it the other way, it crashes”).

This actually ties into Lucy Suchman’s book as well, where she talks about patterns of conversation. One thing she mentions is that when we are talking to somebody, we assume that they are offering appropriate feedback to us. She cites a particularly thought-provoking study where they had students talking to a “psychiatrist” through a computer screen, but were only allowed to ask the “psychiatrist” yes or no questions. Of course, the “psychiatrist” was a program that randomly answered yes or no without any understanding of the questions. And yet the students were able to extract useful information from the conversation, hypothesizing mental models for the “psychiatrist” that resolved even seemingly contradictory answers. Suchman uses this understanding to illustrate how important it is for software to present appropriate feedback in response to a user’s actions; if the software doesn’t, the user will construct an incorrect mental model which will be detrimental to future interactions with the software.

An ideal tool is one that is “ready-to-hand”, that disappears from consciousness. We should aspire to create and design such tools, whether we work in software or any other form of design. And that means being ever aware of the importance of consistent and useful feedback.

Beemer commented on my last post:

But it makes me think that it would be really, really useful if we had a big long list of all the different kinds of thinking the human brain can do, and if people knew what they were good and what they weren’t good at on that list.

This reminded me of one of my pet peeves, the inability of many people to even recognize the existence of different kinds of thinking, let alone actually be able to classify those different kinds and rate their ability on them. I have brought up this point several times before, including one of the Latour posts, where I state:

I think that it is so important that people are aware of the provisional nature of reality established by a collective. That they understand that there is not a “One True Reality” that only they are privy to. I also think that it reminds us to go humbly when we enter the realm of a different collective.

I think this is partially related to my last post in that to be able to recognize different kinds of thinking, one has to start thinking about thinking, which is the same sort of meta-thinking that I think leads to irony and other interesting things. Plus, y’know, most of philosophy. Meta meta meta.

While I was mulling this around just now, I came up with a funny analogy that I wanted to share (which is most of the reason I’m writing this post). We all know of the stereotype of the clueless American tourist, who, when confronted with somebody who doesn’t speak English, raises their voice and repeats their question louder and louder, as if that would make a difference. It’s almost as if they don’t recognize that the person they’re talking to (aside: I just spent 30 seconds trying to think of a noun that means “person one is talking to” - conversational target? conversant? Language geeks, I call upon you!) may use a different language.

Now think back to a meeting that you’ve had at work. Two people start the meeting with very different mental models in place of the topic of discussion. They go back and forth, each one raising their voice, because it’s almost as if they don’t recognize the other person may have a different mental model. Same mistake, different context. It’s a reminder that when we disagree with somebody, we should not automatically assume they’re wrong (except when they disagree with me, of course ), but need to take the time to figure out if they’re speaking a different (mental) language, using a different way of thinking from our own.

I believe that one of my strengths is that I’ve spent a great deal of time examining different ways of thinking and how well I use them. I recognize that I can use different ways of thinking like tools from a toolbox. Because I am open to at least considering other ways of thinking, it often makes me uniquely qualified to “translate” between them. At my last job, it was my responsibility to take the inchoate desires of the biologists and translate them into specifications that the programmers could code to. I was essentially the only person who could talk to each side in their own language.

I feel like this is an important skill, and one that will become ever more important in a world of increasing specialization. I just haven’t figured out what kind of career it sets me up for, if any. One of the ideas I floated recently when asked what I wanted to be when I grew up was being an “Innovation Catalyst”. I’m not the person who’s going to do the innovative work myself - that’s just not something I’m very good at. But I am the person who can pretty quickly grasp the implications of innovative work, be able to see the big picture, and connect it with other innovative work that I know about. I can ask the appropriate questions to push innovators in the right direction. Hence the term “Innovation Catalyst” - I’m not necessary for innovation, but I could be an element that can speed it along. It’s nothing more than an idea as of yet - I have yet to figure out if there are any practical implications. I suppose it means I should be scoping out careers like research management and possibly venture capital. Hrm. And I should note that this isn’t a new idea for me - check out this note from a year and a half ago, where I reiterate this career desire. I just need to figure out what it means.

Anyway. Just to let people know, there’s going to be a whole slew of random posts coming up - I have something like 12 post ideas recorded as drafts from the last few months, and I’ll start to knock them off in my free time. Plus whatever new ideas I have, of course. Oh, the excitement. I bet you’re just quivering with anticipation.

In my last post, I mentioned that I wanted to think about how to connect the ideas in this post, where I describe how we have different groups of people in different contexts and often find them difficult to identify them outside of the context in which we know them, and this post, where I build off of the idea of cognitive subroutines and claim that “we are different people in different situations in a very real sense”. So while I was sitting last night in the chorus through the first three movements of Beethoven’s Ninth, I thought about it.

And the answer is pretty obvious. If we are actually different people in different contexts, then of course it’s difficult for us to identify people from a given context when we’re in a different one. We’re not the same person.

Let me take a step back here and reconstruct my meaning for those who may not have been following along for months. I have this notion of cognitive subroutines (which I also came up with during a concert oddly enough), which is that our brain identifies patterns that we perform often and creates a “subroutine” that will let us quickly call that pattern. These patterns encompass both physical activities like learning to spike a volleyball and mental activities like stereotypes and mental models. A followup post suggested that these subroutines were like computers in another way, establishing the importance of context:

They have a certain set of inputs which defines their behavior, much like a function prototype defines the inputs for a computer function. When our brain is presented with a situation with certain stimuli, it grabs among its set of cognitive subroutines, finds the one with the closest matching set of inputs, and uses it, even if it’s not a perfect fit. In other words, these cognitive subroutines are called in an event-driven fashion based on incoming stimuli.

From there, we got to the idea of identity as context, where if the way we react changes based on our environment, then we are different people in different environments. The set of brain patterns/cognitive subroutines that get activated change. So the people I recognize in my chorus context are tied in with the environment of being in rehearsal, sitting in Davies Hall. When I see them out and about (or on BART), they are not processed by the same set of routines, so I fail to identify them immediately. My internal processor thrashes, and eventually loads the right context, but it takes time. (Wow, and if I wanted to get ubergnurdly, I’d start speculating about caching here, but I won’t).

So, having resolved that particular connection, and still being in only the second movement of the Ninth (we don’t sing until the fourth and final movement), I continued doing some exploration work. In particular, I started thinking about the second question I brought up in yesterday’s post - what’s the connection of all of this stuff to the Latour-ian madness I’ve been going on about? In particular, I wanted to connect the idea of cognitive subroutines with the idea of a personal, internal collective. I came up with a rough idea, so I’m throwing it out there for further refinement.

Cognitive subroutines are reactions that have been embedded and institutionalized into the collective. In the Latour process, collectives are exposed to new unknown stimuli, and either reject them or figure out a way to incorporate them into the collective. My theory of the moment is that one way such stimuli can be incorporated is by prescribing a standard way of responding to them; in other words, developing a cognitive subroutine. From then on, the collective will respond consistently when exposed to that now-known stimuli.

I think it’s a good start, because it brings the cognitive subroutines back out of the subconscious and puts them up for the discussion inherent in Latour’s model. We may have an ingrained reaction, but when we are exposed to new stimuli or when we discover unexpected consequences of our already constructed responses (in the same way that asbestos was handled by the collective in Latour’s book), we can examine the reaction and decide to change it. It gives us the responsibility for the consequences of our actions, even when they’ve been built into our subconscious. And it forces us to strive towards self-awareness as the best defense against complacency, as discussed in the comments on this post.

I think that captures the idea as I worked it out last night. Let me know if I make any sense. Tomorrow I’ll try to finish up another post that’s been half-written for a while, which ties into the ideas of mental models and classification systems.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering why I’m not posting much, as usual, it’s been busy. New job still keeping me hopping, this week and next week are concerts weeks with the Ninth (concert reviews forthcoming in a sec), plus ultimate frisbee on Mondays, and occasionally I like to relax, unforgivable as that may be. The car has still been behaving - could it actually be fixed?

After the disjointedness of my last post, it’s probably worth going to check out the comments, because I think I clarified some of what I was thinking with the help of my commenters. What I want to talk about today is how we use classification systems, and more broadly, mental models.

Let’s start with the fundamental assumptions I’m making: that there are a myriad of classification systems available to us, and that none of them is the One True Way, and that each of them has advantages and disadvantages. Given those assumptions, how do we decide which one to use at any given time? It’s a matter of finding the right fit between the task we are trying to accomplish and a classification system that will streamline that task. To use a non-classification-system analogy, neither Cartesian nor polar coordinates is “right”, but each system has its uses; when you are dealing with a linear problem, Cartesian coordinates work better, but for trigonometric problems, polar coordinates are far easier.

I made this point in the last post, but it’s worth restating: Classification systems are a cognitive tool. Like any tool, there are appropriate and inappropriate uses. Being aware of the limitations of our tools is an important aspect of mastering them. In particular, the main limitation is that any classification system is going to leave us with blind spots (as a side note, while re-reading this, I just realized this also ties in with the filtered world views post). When a form asks us to classify our ethnicity, we are reduced to one of a handful of options, and any sort of complexity is going to be glossed over and lost to the system. And, of course, any information about ourselves that is not related to ethnicity will also be lost. Looking at a population based on the results of that form will give us a very distorted view.

And the same is true of any other classification system. Each one introduces simplifications for the sake of making the data more manageable. So what are the advantages of these simplifications? By making the data more manageable, they can make trends more evident, allowing us to develop generalizable theories about the data. As most of my readers are scientists of one form or another, they are familiar with the feeling of finally hitting upon the right data representation, and everything just falling into place in our model. It happens in programming as well; with the right data structure, programming becomes much easier, whereas with the wrong one, every task becomes a kludge.

Given the ways in which data models and classification systems can streamline our solutions, the importance of choosing the right one when beginning a task becomes evident. I’d like to imagine that we can train ourselves to be like a master craftsperson in his/her workshop, surveying the tools available to them, and choosing just the right tool for the job. And I think most of us do this at a subconscious level, as described in Sources of Power, where Klein describes a “Recognition-Primed Decision Model”, wherein people develop subconscious models of situations, and react accordingly. In time-critical situations, we may have to depend on our subconscious to do the right thing. But that can also lead to critical errors, as our subconscious models blind us to other inputs that would lead us to choose different actions; Klein describes several such breakdowns in the book, including the case of the USS Vincennes shooting down an Iran Air commercial passenger plane.

Such breakdowns indicate to me that being able to consciously examine our mental models and assumptions should lead to better decisions (it can also lead to paralysis-by-analysis, but I’m going to ignore that for now). It’s important to be able to step back for a second, and ask whether there are alternative ways of looking at the task before us. This requires a certain flexibility of thinking, of being willing to admit that there might be other options available, and that one might have chosen less-than-optimally before. But far too many decisions are made once, possibly based on an incorrect data model, and never re-examined.

I wonder how we can train ourselves to become better at this skill of looking at problems with fresh eyes. I think it all comes back to my continued campaign for people to be self-aware, aware of the choices they make, the blinders they put on, the ways in which their mental models may torque their perceptions, etc. Since I continually struggle with my own self-awareness, I’m not sure why I think I have any authority on advocating it to others, but that’s another story.

Thinking on why I think I have made strides in self-awareness, here are some pointers. I have surrounded myself with good friends who are intelligent and observant. I have learned to trust their opinions and to listen to their advice, for the most part. I am still working on learning to open up and ask for help, and to be secure enough to admit when I am wrong, but that’s part of it as well. I need to do a better job of cultivating a diverse set of friends to be exposed to a wider variety of viewpoints. Hrm. There’s a lot more thinking to be done on this topic. I’ll pick it up another time. I’d love to hear any thoughts any readers have.

I was having an email discussion earlier today with a friend where the topic of stereotypes came up. As is common, my friend said that stereotypes are bad, and we should judge people based on their own individual characteristics. This gave me an excuse to launch into a longstanding rant of mine, wherein I defend the existence of stereotypes and note common problems with them. While writing it up in email, I realized that I don’t think I’ve ever written this rant up for the blog, so I figured I should do that. We’ll see if it’s any more coherent this time than it was in the email I sent today.

Here’s the basic outline of the rant. Our brains have evolved over eons to be extremely good at recognizing patterns and classifying things, because those actions reduce cognitive effort exponentially, allowing us to use our big brains to work on innovations rather than memorization, thereby giving us a survival advantage. Therefore, fighting against the existence of stereotypes is pointless, because our brains will do it, and do it well, regardless. The real battle that needs to be fought is understanding how our brains develop stereotypes, and what the drawbacks to stereotypes are.

Let’s start with a non-politically charged example: doorknobs. A doorknob is a common object. Whenever we come across one, we turn it, the door opens, we go on our way. But how do we know that the doorknob in front of us works the way we expect? Our brain has encountered hundreds of doorknobs before, and come up with a universal theory of doorknobs - we see a doorknob, and we expect it to work like the other doorknobs we’ve used. In fact, the only reason a doorknob ever stands out from the canonical doorknob stereotype is when it fails to work as expected, when it needs to be pushed or pulled rather than rotated.

What’s the point of this example? It demonstrates the power of stereotyping - rather than have to remember how each individual doorknob of the hundreds of doorknobs we encounter work, we create a stereotype of a doorknob, remember how it works, and then all of the hundreds of individuals collapse into one category, possibly with a few outliers that work differently. It’s an incredible saving of cognitive effort.

Rather than delve into the dangers of stereotyping people, due to their comparatively more varied natures, I’m going to take this rant in a different direction, which is exploring the topic of classification systems. Stereotypes are just an example of the more general case of classification systems. What is a classification system? It is, in essence, a simplification of the world, throwing out “unnecessary” details to make the new description of the world more manageable. It is this throwing away of details that makes classification systems paradoxically both more and less powerful. Such systems are more powerful because they condense a lot of information about the world into a few bits of data. They are less powerful because in the process of condensing that information, they often ignore crucial details.

So what is one to do? The answer is to remember that classification systems are a cognitive tool. And just like a hand tool, they can be used both appropriately and inappropriately. As the saying goes, “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” We might stretch that to say “When all you have is a single classification system, everything gets squeezed to fit.” So it is important to be aware of the limitations of any classification systems that we use, and to be aware of the information that gets thrown away when we classify objects using that system. As a side note, this line of thinking is heavily influenced (if not stolen outright) from the book Sorting Things Out by Bowker and Star).

We can often see what the limitations of our classification systems are by noticing what doesn’t fit. For instance, the taxonomic classification system is relatively straightforward; if something has fur, it’s a mammal, if it lays eggs, it’s a bird or a reptile, etc. Then they found the platypus, a furry creature that laid eggs. Scientists dubbed the platypus a freak of nature, as if it was the platypus’s fault for breaking their classification system (as another aside, this placing of fault with the object under consideration is a direct consequence of the “object-oriented” viewpoint that I rail against in this post). All the platypus did was point out that there were things not handled by the classification system. And that’s okay. In fact, a classification system that tried to handle every exception would be useless because it would be so unwieldy. It would be like the map of a territory that is as large as the territory itself. The power of the classification system is in its condensation of information, even at the cost of not fitting the data exactly.

Circling back to the original topic of stereotypes, what practical advice can we extract from this theoretical discussion? First of all, stereotypes can be useful. If we see a guy at the bar, wearing a sports jersey and drinking Budweiser, we will probably guess that he’s a jock fratboy. If we see them wearing all black with stylish glasses, we’re thinking hipster. Given that first impression, we can often ascertain the accuracy of that impression with only a few questions, whereas if we had to start from scratch with each new person, it would take much longer to get a read on the type of person they are.

However, we must always be aware that all of our stereotypes are necessarily incomplete descriptions of people, extrapolating from a couple bits of information. When new information comes in that contradicts the stereotype, we need to recognize that the individual does not fit in our classification system, and to recognize that the fault lies with the system, not with the individual. The stereotype is just a tool. It should not control our perceptions to the point where we can not distinguish the individual from the stereotype. If we start talking to the jock fratboy, and it turns out that he’s an avid reader of Foucault and Derrida, we should not reject him for not living up to our expectations based on our stereotype.

In fact, I can use this as an opportunity to tie this topic into the Latour series of posts. One thought I had while thinking about this was that classification systems are a subset of Latour-ian collectives. In his conception of the collective as a political entity, Latour talks about external entities demanding entrance to the collective, which, if admitted after due consideration, are placed within a hierarchy. In the case of a classification system, when an exception is found to our system (e.g. the platypus, or the Foucault-reading jock fratboy), it is up to us to determine whether we will ignore the exception or whether we will modify the system to try to accommodate the exception. There are tradeoffs either way - if we ignore the exception, the classification system may be overly simplistic and unrealistic - if we accommodate it, the system may be too complex and therefore useless. So there should be an internal debate that takes place as to how to modify our classification systems in the presence of an exception. It’s a matter of being aware of our biases and being able to explicitly take them into account rather than letting them unconsciously rule us.

Okay, one last point because this has already gone on way too long. One idea that came up while I was talking about this with my friend was the idea of using people’s classification systems to classify them. We were talking about the different criteria that people use to classify people. Some people will judge people by the kind of car they drive, others by the college they went to, others by the books they read, others by their appearance. Each of these classification systems is a reflection of the individual doing the classifying, a reflection of their internal Latour-ian collective, a record of their history of interactions with other people. So it seems like we should be able to use their classification systems to extract information about them, and thereby be able to classify them. As an example, we might dismiss somebody who judged others by their car or by their attractiveness as being shallow, whereas somebody who judged people by the quality of their mind and by their inquisitiveness might be judged as being more thoughtful. I’m not quite sure where the idea goes from here, but I like it a lot, partially because of the reflexive and recursive nature of it, so I’m hoping somebody else can help me flesh it out.

Okay, I’m done for now. Sorry for the long post, but this is a topic I’ve had saved up inside of me for a long time. Plus I’m not sure when I’ll get the chance to blog again - things have been busy. Speaking of which, a little journal-type update for those of you strong-willed enough to struggle to the end of this post: things have calmed down at work from that first week, but are still busy. Spending Memorial Day weekend in Boston visiting friends and going to Crusher’s wedding was awesome. The car has been okay for three days in a row - is it a trend? I’m tired, but glad I wrote this - I need to just make the time for blogging, because I like doing it. That’s it. More another time.

This is the next post in the Latour series so feel free to skip it if you found the other posts boring.

I’d actually started writing this post several weeks ago, when I noticed that while I was reading Latour, certain points resonated very strongly with me, and others I was just kind of skimming over, waiting to get to the “good stuff”. And I noticed that what I meant by “good stuff” was stuff that supported the theories that I already believed. I was essentially only absorbing information that matched what I already thought. Using Latour’s terms, I was essentially skipping his “Constitution” of due process, and only accepting external inputs that matched my pre-existing mental hierarchy. No outside voices were making it past my filters.

In the case of Latour, I eventually slowed myself down and was able to absorb some of his other ideas, which helped to restructure my mental hierarchy. And I absolutely love it when that happens. My original cognitive subroutines post describes that moment when I connect a bunch of different ideas, and a whole set of synapses light up, as things shift into a recognizably better configuration. In Latour’s terms, my personal collective finds a new hierarchy that is able to absorb the new ideas that had been floating around my head. I try to keep my mind and eyes open for inputs that will help me to gain new perspective and let me find different ways of putting ideas together. I’m always looking for ways to add to the internal collective.

This is a good opportunity for a digression back to Latour’s book. He points out that modernism, as he describes it with its coldly rationalist viewpoint, is destructive with time. The final goal of modernist Science is a perfectly rational set of equations which is purely objective - everything else, all multicultural viewpoints and perspectives, have been weeded out of reality. He contrasts that with his idea of collectives that are continually encountering new external influences and finding ways to absorb them, such that the collectives are always growing. I like this picture, especially as applied to my individual collective - I am always reading and looking for new ideas, ones that will help me re-form and re-structure my mental hierarchy, as mentioned towards the end of this post. It seems like a much more life and growth-oriented viewpoint.

Getting back to my original point about filtered world views, the danger of not accepting Latour’s description of the temporal nature of reality, and instead believing in a One True Reality, is that you end up with the situation I originally found myself in, where I only accepted inputs that already matched my internal collective. I was not open to new inputs that might change my mind. And I would guess that most people operate like this.

I’ve addressed this point glancingly in posts like the one on conservative postmodernism but this sort of observation drives home for me the pointlessness of the “object-oriented” Western philosophy (which I describe in this post as our inclination to “try to stuff all of the properties of an object into the object itself rather than the network of relationships surrounding the object”. Huh. Now that I think about it, that “object-oriented” viewpoint is actually another restatement of what Latour calls Modernism, where the true object has an “essence” that exists outside of time, and that our poor human brains are too limited to fully perceive).

Anyway. My point is that because of the filters inherent in our internal collectives, our mental hierarchies, two people can look at the exact same thing and see completely different objects. One person sees the Confederate flag and sees a proud symbol of the Southern states, the other sees a flag symbolizing hatred and racism. Same object, different viewpoints.

And it becomes even more relevant in the case of information. Because of our filters, we only absorb information that matches our internal hierarchy. This comes up most often in the case of politics, when one person sees Bush as being presidential for ordering military action, and another sees him as being imperialistic. Those people live in fundamentally different worlds (or Latour-ian collectives), even though they are experiencing the same events. And that’s even before we get into the separate media that they consume.

This is also why Lakoff’s work on framing is so vital. By controlling the language, we can put information into a form that will get past people’s filters. If it matches up to their mental hierarchies, it sneaks right on in and start subverting some of those hierarchies from the inside. Which sounds horrible and Machiavellian, but the problem is that it works. People change their minds because of this stuff. And the conservatives are using it. So, given that we live in what is rapidly becoming a direct democracy, we can either take the high road and expect people to research issues and develop coherent platforms, or we can accept that they don’t, and fight back.

Man. Do you start to get the sense of what it’s like to live in my brain? In this post alone, I’ve linked Latour’s work with everything from electoral politics to my ideas about art to cognitive subroutines. Everything is linked in my head. It all fits together in some ungainly way. I didn’t even mention the part where the awareness of the temporal nature of reality is another aspect of being a good information carnivore or how I’d noticed the congruence between liberal arts and science myself, but didn’t follow it up, and of course wouldn’t have come up with a process as elegant as Latour’s.

It’s all connected. Everything informs everything else. This blog is my attempts to capture my internal collective on disk. And as it grows more coherent, and as I find the language to make the connections less fuzzy and easier to communicate, maybe I’ll be able to turn it into that book. But enough for now.

I start my new job tomorrow morning, so my time for blogging will probably decrease over the next few weeks while I get up to speed. But I think I’m mostly done with the Latour thread for now, so I’m okay with that. On to new and different topics.

I’ve talked about the importance of context to cognitive subroutines before, but I wanted to pick up on it again this morning. I’ve just spent most of the last three weeks in New York City, living a very different kind of life in a different place. I walked almost everywhere I went, I was going to shows almost every evening, etc. And I was curious if, when I got back, whether it would feel weird to be back after having spent that much time living a different life. And the answer is no.

This is fascinating to me. If we only had one set of responses, I think three weeks would be long enough to start shifting those responses to a new paradigm. But that didn’t happen. What I think happened was that the old routines didn’t really apply in New York (things like the impulse of hopping in a car to get anywhere, or the idea that I should buy things in bulk), so I developed a new set of New York responses. As soon as I got back to my old life in Oakland, with its set of environmental inputs, the old routines were re-activated. But the thing that’s really interesting to me is how seamless it felt. It didn’t even occur to me that one set of behavior patterns should feel out of place until I asked myself the question whether it felt weird to be back.

I think this demonstrates the real power of context, that our environment controls how we respond so smoothly that we don’t even notice when our behavior patterns are wildly different. We think of ourselves as having a central core of behavior (and to some extent we do), but it’s amazing how easy it is to alter that behavior by changing the environment. The obvious examples are things like the Milgram experiment, where just by having a white-coated person in authority tell them to, people were willing to shock an unseen patient into unconsciousness. But it shows up in all aspects of our lives. We behave differently at work than at home. We behave differently on vacation.

This is why I think Lakoff’s work on framing is so important. By changing the frame, we change the context, and people respond differently without even realizing it. Our behavior changes utterly seamlessly. Our consciousness papers over the gaps and makes it all seem consistent, even when it manifestly isn’t.

It starts to get pretty disturbing when you think about framing as a form of brainwashing. Framing’s goal is to change what people think, by changing their view on an issue. This is what I don’t like about Lakoff’s work, that he suggests that we must fight frames with frames. I think he might be right, that such a battle may be our only option, but I’d love it if we could teach people the self-awareness necessary to understand frames, understand context, and be dispassionate enough in their observation of themselves to see how their behavior changes in response to such frames. I know it’s a pipe dream, though. Most people have a strong sense of themselves, believing in their continuity from moment to moment. Our consciousness is wired to preserve that illusion (which is an interesting question in itself - why should our consciousness do that? What benefit do we get from not seeing ourselves as a set of context-activated cognitive subroutines? And how did our consciousness get so good at explaining away all the little inconsistencies of our unconscious? I’m thinking specifically of the way that people have been hypnotized will rationalize their behavior even when it is ludicrous. Wow, this is a long parenthetical. Um, anyway).

While I think this line of thought is a little depressing, that we are nothing more than automatons responding thoughtlessly to our environment, there is one upside - it answers the question of how we change ourselves - we change the environment. I mentioned this before in the setting of social identity, but it is perhaps more widely applicable. I’ve been trying to figure out ways to modify my behavior for a long time, so maybe this will help. Perhaps to write more, I need to join some sort of writer’s club. Certainly joining an ultimate frisbee league did wonders for my physical fitness. Would going back to grad school help put me in the frame of mind necessary to pursue work on social software?

On the other hand, I don’t want to take this line of reasoning too far. I do believe there is a central core of tendencies that shapes how our unconscious cognitive subroutines develop. No matter how often I get plopped into a loud bar or party environment, I don’t think I will ever suddenly morph into that cool dude who is utterly smooth with that situation. The cognitive subroutines are already in place to respond negatively to that set of inputs. To change that behavior would require a lot more than more exposure to that environment.

I suppose it’s possible to do a slow morph, though. I mentioned this in the case of physical activity, but perhaps it’s all about taking small steps, and changing one’s response a little bit at a time. I’ve already taken a bunch of steps along this path, I think. I’m far more comfortable in dinner party conversations and the like than I was a few years ago. I can even survive in a bar or club like environment for a couple hours now, when I would have fled instantly several years ago. Continued exposure is starting to change my reactions. This is a case where the strategy of tossing somebody in the deep end to teach them how to swim is ineffective, I think. There’s too much to process for that to work effectively. But by slowly changing the environment from one of comfort towards one of challenge, the cognitive subroutines will also be modified slowly, such that by the end, it will seamlessly handle the challenging environment and the person will be stunned at how easy it all seems. I think we’ve all had that feeling when we’ve learned something new, when we finally get it right - we say “Wow, that’s easy!” with a tone of pleasant surprise. We never would have imagined that we could learn it, but by building up the behavior step by step, when it all comes together, it does seem easy.

There’s some interesting stuff here. Who knew all this would come out of my initial question of “Does it feel weird to be home?” One thought is that I need to spend more time blogging. Just sitting down and starting writing, even with only a vague thought to start with. The exercise of developing an idea is one of those things that I need practice on, and the only way to get better at it is to practice and to continue to develop my comfort with it. Heck, one of these days, I may be able to turn myself into a real writer. Tomorrow maybe I’ll get into some of my initial thoughts on Latour’s book. Or maybe I’ll talk about something entirely different.