Reductio Ad Nauseum

Johnnie Moore's post today and the buzz surrounding Malcolm Gladwell's Blink focus on an old problem: logical positivism.

What's that?

Well, basically an approach to reality that says, "if I can't measure it, it's not real." And, of course, numbers are the tools we use to measure anything in modern Western thought. (Eastern folks are catching up, too!) So, all human experience must be reduced to numerical representation in order for it to be studied, understood and, most of all, trusted.

So, by implication of what Johnnie points out, human emotion is unreliable, but something called an "emotional attachment score" is reliable enough to bank on! 'Cause it's a number, and numbers are good. What's bad? Experiential reports, telling someone how you feel, what you believe, what's important. Unreliable. Specious. This is one of the reasons for the "innate suspicion" of "rapid cognition" that Gladwell cites. Human intuition cannot be replicated numerically, mechanically, so it's suspect.

But the fact of the matter is that all of the most important aspects of human existence transcend the domain of numbers. As children, we learned that the question, "How much do you love me?" (itself a logical positivist construction if I ever heard one!) cannot be answered answered numerically. Neither can, "I'm just not comfortable in that store," or, "I'm so over that brand." Not that these experiences can't be described empirically, just that they can't be reduced to numbers and still retain their human qualities, which is, after all, what all of us are interested in learning about. What are the subtle ways in which emotions develop, change and impact choices? Great question. Not well answered through numbers.

When you're thinking about expert methods for describing human experience, think "novels" not "Excel spreadsheets." But spreadsheets are a lot easier to take to the bank than Tolstoy, so we feel more comfortable saying that we're "positive" about their meaning.

Don't believe it, reducing human existence to numbers doesn't make it more "accurate," it's smoke and mirrors.

Comments

[Jon Husband]

Thomas Homer-Dixon recently reviewed Blink ! (hehe ... I typo'ed Bloink !) in the Toronto Globe & Mail Books Section, and said much the same thing. Homer-Dixon wrote the book The Ingenuity Gap, which was very serious and thought-provoking.

A thoughtful and interesting review, I found. I don't know if it's accessible online.

[Jon Husband]

THD also suggested. I think, that reducung the issues to our abilities to come to decisions quickly isn't the whole story .. and that ignoring facts and other key information in service of relying on our abilities to "blink !" can indeed be facile and might tend to fit all to easily into our environment of seeking quick answers and responses where more thoughful and deeply analytic approaches would better serve the issue.

[Tom Guarriello]

I'll try to find the review, Jon. I'm only 75 or so pages into Blink, and find it good storytelling. I'm a phenomenological psychologist by training, so I've spent many years thinking about explicating the structures of lived-experience, most of which is "lived" rather than "known." Part of the problem is the models we've constructed of cognition, and I'm not an advocate of the "complex computer" model that Gladwell seems to advocate (so far, in my reading of the book). Becoming infatuated with "rapid cognition" at the expense of analysis is as simplistic as the reverse.

[Jon Husband]

The link to THD's review is available on my most recent blog post.