I Like Trees

We got into the discussion while sitting on a bench, my friend R. and I. She’s brilliant, a shining, happy, cheerful up-and-coming psych grad student with a heart of gold.We have good discussions.

She brought up the question of branding health foods with cartoon characters so that kids will prefer them, and whether it was right, and whether it should be regulated.

“Sure,” i said, surprising myself. “I mean, it’s programming. Of course it is. But we’re going to do it anyway, we’re already doing it, we’re built to do it. If we didn’t do it nothing would work. The least we can do is admit that we’re doing it, and be up front about it.”

Then I wondered to myself, how true is that? We started talking about how automatic our choices are. We DO program ourselves that way, with everything from education to marketing. As adults, we throw all kinds of compulsions at each other, all kinds of persuasions and coaxings and promises of perfect something, all the time. We can’t walk down the street without seeing an advertisement, a political message, or some other communication. This is what we do.

We agreed that this isn’t the real problem; the real problem is that we don’t know when it works on us, because most of the time, we have no idea what we’re doing anyway.

We don’t. I don’t know if you’ve ever read or watched The Tick. If you haven’t, that’s all right (but you’re missing out)… but if you have, you’ll know the quote, “Rational thought is a one trick pony. You only get one trick- rational thought!”

The problem isn’t that rational thought is a one-trick pony, it’s that we have just so much darned faith in its continuation of the trick, that we let the horse amble anyplace it pleases. We convince ourselves that we get through our days as rational beings, while the pony of our rational thought sidles its way around the hurdles we really needed it to help on.We buy, sell, act, react, meet and intermingle, trusting ourselves all the while to be mature, rational, thinking creatures.

We need to face the fact that humans are idiots. Seriously. Not in that sarcastic, bitter way that we all say it, and not in the “everyone but us,” sense, either. I am an idiot. I am prejudiced, biased, stubborn, emotionally charged, and make decisions based on criteria which i then point-blank deny. And i do it all the time. Not just a little, but every single day. The dangerous part, the really dangerous part, is that I have no idea that I’m doing it most of the time, and neither do you.

There’s no reason why we would. Why would we? Hundreds of millions of years of ancestors got by without tennis shoes and pre-cut carrot sticks. There’s no real advantage to being ahead of the curve, is there? All you have to be is bright enough to have babies, as far as evolution is concerned. There is no substantial evolutionary advantage to being honest and real and right and true. Genetics happen when you make it far enough to breed; everything you do after the age of sixteen helps substantiate the species, sure, but you aren’t really the necessary part. So all this keeping a job, understanding orbital paths, remembering to get the laundry out of the dryer? That’s fabulous, but not what we have the advantage for. And your one-trick pony, rational thought, is nibbling clover next to the lavender label on a body wash no cave man needs.

Even the best and brightest of us can come up clueless sometimes, and most of the time miss all kinds of forests in favour of counting the spots on a leaf. Doctors are subject to bias in favour of the hurdles they see every day; physicists look from the perspective of their own disciplines. Psychology is the same- we spend years of study, learning everything that we can, and then we take that learning into the field and miss most of the field.

We do it because we have to. None of us is qualified or capable of understanding everything at once. These fallacies are biological short cuts, tricks that our minds and bodies use to keep track of a big, chaotic word. We prefer the berries we’ve had before, because we know they won’t make us sick. Having met tigers, we always check behind the trees before settling down for the night. Our mother used this soap, and it reminds me of her. I had a friend in college who always used that perfume, i never liked it. I like my brother; you have similar characteristics, why don’t we talk?

We’re built for it. It’s designed to get us through the daily jungle with as little effort as possible. The more we add on top of that jungle, though, the more we’re going to have to pay attention to. Whether we want it to or not, the brain is still indexing, keeping track. Creating shortcuts. And we’ll never know what we’re missing.

There’s a fabulous, if rambling, multipart article about this in the New York Times, called, “The Agnosognosic’s Dilemma.” It begins with the true description of a bank robber who had used lemon juice on his face, thinking it made him invisible to cameras. A spectacular delusion, really, and he’d arrived at it by what he thought was a genuine scientific test: spraying his face and trying to take a picture with a polaroid camera.

Needless to day, it didn’t work, and stands as a reminder to us all that we have no idea how blindingly incompetent we are, because we don’t even have the tools to measure it.

So what do we do about it? (You knew I was going to ask that question.) The answer is an awkward one to admit. The answer is: get habits. Good habits. Get the habit of watching that pony, and forcing it over the hurdles. Get in the habit of looking at the whole picture regularly, and asking yourself what part of it you’re superimposing. Will it help? Not really. But the things you miss are less likely to be critical.

The answer is to practice, and to practice hard. Steven Pinker (I warned you his name would come up often, and so here we are) wrote a terrific op-ed for the same paper, called, “Mind over Mass Media.” In it, he says,

“Yes, the constant arrival of information packets can be distracting or addictive, especially to people with attention deficit disorder. But distraction is not a new phenomenon. The solution is not to bemoan technology but to develop strategies of self-control, as we do with every other temptation in life. Turn off e-mail or Twitter when you work, put away your Blackberry at dinner time, ask your spouse to call you to bed at a designated hour.

“And to encourage intellectual depth, don’t rail at PowerPoint or Google. It’s not as if habits of deep reflection, thorough research and rigorous reasoning ever came naturally to people. They must be acquired in special institutions, which we call universities, and maintained with constant upkeep, which we call analysis, criticism and debate. They are not granted by propping a heavy encyclopedia on your lap, nor are they taken away by efficient access to information on the Internet.”

The trick is to keep your eye on the horse. It’s hard, but it’s how to miss fewer jumps, get more of what’s going on, and figure out a little more about what we don’t know we don’t know. Socrates said it himself, “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.” Is it awkward to still be discovering that, today? No. Our best hope is that everyone, at some point in their life, discovers it again.