Pink glasses

Humans know a lot. Our collective knowledge is so vast that one person can only know a tiny fraction of it. Professional academics specialise in subjects that sound absurd and yet meaningless; even the language they use is so distant from normal English that it’s almost unintelligible. Some of them do that deliberately.

              Now that we can store information accessibly, on the internet and in well-indexed libraries, someone can go looking for specialised information. We can dig up what interests us without spending years keeping up-to-date by subscribing to research magazines and keeping track of good work as it emerges. But we will still never know everything that relates to our subject of the day.

              Knowledge is built from these tiny pieces: a few people know the most about these little pieces. They see the detail there clearly; they are focussed on it. And stuff nearby isn’t as in focus, but they’re aware of it. With everyone working to align their little piece of the jigsaw with its neighbours together we can build a giant web of knowledge.

              There’s a danger here: some things are best built with an architect. Sometimes it’s best to step back, look at an overall structure and spot gaps or links. In the puzzle analogy, there might be a bundle of pieces that fit with each other, but we need to spot that they fit pieces elsewhere. So we step back and look.

              And some people get in the habit of scouring for information that links to specific subjects. They see things in the right colour. Someone working on blood pressure might always perk up at the sound of something that affects the kidneys. A feminist will look for effects on women.

              It’s right and proper to synthesize information in this way: that’s how we understand the complex interactions of larger systems; how we build an understanding of the whole. We don’t do it enough. Researchers get their grants from doing more research on what they know; they teach what their subject, ask and are asked questions about their subject. Trying to reach to distant subjects is a route to failure: others inevitably know more, and you can get bogged down in arguments with myriad others, all of whom know more about that specific part of your work than you do. In a world built on reputation and track record, it’s better to be right.

              And, of course, senior researchers – the principal investigators – grew up in that distant time when knowledge was hard-won. You knew your area and never hoped to collect information from hundreds or thousands of places in less than a second. Many of them haven’t yet perceived the incredible power of databases and search functions to change not only analysis in their own research, but how research is done as a whole.

              We don’t have much of a system for people to do meta-analyses on other work. A few places, such as the Cochrane Collaboration, make a habit of it in a relatively narrow definition. But we don’t have job posts for people just to assess the work of people ‘at the coalface’ and collate it into higher-level systemic understanding. That’s just an incidental task that researchers take on if they have the time and the funding. But with hundreds of thousands of papers published every year, we might benefit from some higher-level insights, rather than relying on every individual to synthesize all this information in their own way.

              Nowadays, anyone can become the expert on a narrow field: you just search the literature on that subject and spend a few weeks reading the papers. By contrast, there is no easy way to know you’ve got the synthesis of different fields correct. Textbooks are decades behind the research. And as there’s no established way, people do it wrong. (Yes, I’m aware of meta-analyses and data cataloguing. I think that creative insights from putting seemingly unrelated results together are different from assessing the state of a field by summarising the research.)

              We already know all about echo chambers in social media. The core idea is that we all have information overload; we can’t process all the information, and the choice of information that we do process can itself introduce biases into our thinking. If we consider a relatable example, imagine that I am rude to you the first few times we meet. You might suspect that I don’t like you. All the information you have supports this conclusion. Then you notice me being rude to someone else – someone of the same race as you. You suppose I’m racist. Then you notice me being rude to someone else – someone of a different race, but the same sex as you. Maybe I’m sexist. Suppose I’m rude to everyone except my brother. I’m just a despicable human being. You could still say that I’m sexist, because I am more rude to women than to men, on average. If you were being careful, you might say that my rudeness is systemically sexist: the average effect is more negative for women than for men.

              That would be true, and yet incomplete.

              Many analyses of society seem to fall into this category. Sociologists and campaigners pick a subject, often one that matters to them, and see the world through that lens. It helps them fully understand the lives of whatever group of people they are examining. If people didn’t filter out irrelevant information, they’d not be able to understand the subject in detail, so it’s a necessary part of advancing human knowledge.

              But the flip side is that this detailed understanding is not a complete puzzle: it is part of the wider puzzle. I saw a brilliant article (extract from a book which is probably worth reading too) in the Guardian typifying this tendency. The author had found an enormous array of things that affected women, on average, more than men. From smartphones which are usually too big for a woman’s hands to use easily, through to crash test dummies based on an average man, it’s important to catalogue the ways in which women are disadvantaged.

              The headline, and the article itself, however, implied that society was built for men and not for women. On the face of it, true… but hugely incomplete. Campaigns by and for obese people regularly point out how things such as fashion and public transport do not cater for them. Charities for the elderly often complain about how poorly their needs are catered for. Men can have small hands, be short, be tall…

              Women’s disadvantage, although discovered by synthesizing disparate pieces of information, is itself one piece of an even bigger puzzle. Why should we stop with women unless we are ourselves blinkered and selfish, caring about only one issue instead of truth itself? In large-scale society we must standardise: to have enforceable regulations, or bulk manufacturing and so on. And every time we standardize, we pick a normal. As humans, we’re great at isolating and mistreating people who are different. We do it in our personal interactions with great happiness. And here it’s a necessity for our impersonal interactions. The normal is chosen by people in power, and here that has predominantly been rich, older, white men.

              Nonetheless, the issue is one of inappropriate standardisation. In order to realize this we need to take our filters off: if we wear pink glasses, everything will look like it’s about women. To the obese, their struggles are salient. To LGBT campaigners, everything is rainbow-related. If we deal with just one of these, however, we’ve not got to the bottom of things. We’ve just shoved a thumb in a crack in the dyke.

              We might get the biggest cracks first. But there will always be more: our inherent tendency to dislike difference and standardise on normality is always looking for an outlet for expression. Stopping up the big cracks will only make the smaller ones widen as the pressure goes elsewhere. There are thousands of ways in which people are different. Sex might be the second-biggest in this country (after wealth). Wouldn’t things be easier if we tried to deal with standardisation and dislike of difference, the root causes of all the problems?

              That needs us to step back and find the common threads in our common threads – to realize that the puzzle we’ve just completed is itself a piece of a larger puzzle in a great interlocking impossible staircase of knowledge.

People of hugely different types tell us that we cannot know their struggles because we haven't lived them, ignoring the existence of imagination and empathy. And they tell us this because they feel that they haven't synthesized all these little things into one readable report: that the subject is unknowable, even though we study and understand lives in a vast array of other ways. Everyone wants someone in power who represents them: who sees the world through their lens. And someone in power who will make them the normal; who will shape standardization around people like them.

I don’t think this is the solution. That’s not because I can’t understand how all those small things add up into a different experience of life, or because I doubt that they happen. I agree that there’s a problem. I disagree with the solution. We need to acknowledge and address the underlying causes: build systems that celebrate any and all difference, that allow people to diverge from expectations in any way, that are flexible enough to deal with difference… We need to fight conformity and imitation. We need to rethink vast swathes of how we live our lives.

We don’t need a new normal: we need no normal.