Benefits of Scalar Thinking

the mediation of extremes

Last Tuesday I was driving home from school, and I noticed an unfamiliar button on the steering wheel. It was a rainy day so I had my wipers on, and when I pressed the button it adjusted the wiper speed for the speed of my car. I actively realized for the first time that more rain hits the windshield when it goes faster.

Fast forward five minutes to when I arrived home, and I also realized that the rain meter on my sprinklers was broken. Spraying at full force despite the rainfall, they put up an intimidating liquid wall that I had to negotiate. However before trying, I thought, would I end up dryer if I ran, or walked through the spray?

On one hand I could go fast and spend less time in the water, but just like my windshield I would hit water at a faster rate. In order to avoid that, I could go more slowly, but then I would be spending more time in the splash zone. For the brave and impulsive, you can ignore the whole dilemma and take your chances, but what are the rest of us perpetual optimizers to do? This is one situation in which scalar thinking can lead you to the best, and dryest, path.

First, identify the value that must be decided upon. In this case, it’s speed. Then, look at the extremes of that value. Either you could slowly crawl through the water, going an inch at a time, or you could whiz through it at the speed of light. What happens at those extremes? The first gets you soaking wet, while the second leaves you relatively dry. So, I jumped through Unless the value you’re deciding upon and the desired result, in this case dryness, have some sort of uncommon relationship without a clear-cut and constant trend between the two points, it’s a reliable model for thinking that has helped me make conclusions without having to apply much effort.

Running fast through the sprinkler may seem like the obvious option in this conundrum, but the model works best for situations in which the options are more abstract and unfamiliar. For example, let’s say you were trying to analyze the effects of technology on the quality of our social lives. Classically, there have been two sides to this question. Some believe that technology faciliates social capital and increases useful relationships between people, while others claim that topical online interactions are replacing healthy, genuine connections. Tackling this question first without our scalar model, we try to compare the validity of the two arguments, but in reality they aren’t mutually exclusive and so we end up with an effort in futility. One side makes a few compelling points just like the other, and we don’t really know how to integrate those points into a final thesis. Comparing apples to oranges famously yields no conclusion.

Following the scalar thought process, let’s identify our changing value. This is the amount of technology present in our social lives. Twenty years ago technology’s presence was minimal, and we can probably all agree that in fifty years it will be much greater. To establish our extremes, what can we say about social quality twenty years ago? It was decent, much more face-to-face than it is now but as a whole, it was very limited. There wasn’t the constant and easy interaction that we have become used to, but social lives moreso involved letter carriers and phone operators. Well how about social quality in fifty years? I’m speculating here, but I’ll assume we’ll have holographic conversations instead of phone calls. Even if this isn’t the case, considering the progress technology has made in connecting people (we used to talk on the phone, now we FaceTime), it’s almost certain that some kind of instant, intimate face-to-face communication will be present. Technologies like these will provide an incredible boost to social capital. The same thing will happen with networking technologies, in which the progression LinkedIn has made on the old Rolodex will be seen again in comparison to LinkedIn, connecting incredible numbers of people together to boost their productivity and improve relationships. There are just so many ways it could play out, with the expanding mind-scanning industry and technologies like Google Glass offering great potential. If this is on our technological horizon, just imagine the electronic connectivity beyond it.

Looking at these extremes, we see a direct relationship between technology’s involvement in our social lives and the quality of those lives over this seventy year period. If you think about the context of our history, those complaining about its rising implementation are just bygones of a more primitive human existence. So, we can conclude that technology as a whole benefits our social and work lives.

Making decisions with this method is more conclusive than trying to weigh out specific causes because we aren’t arguing about the relative magnitude of each cause, but we look at the final product. Instead of fighting about the importance of various reasons when determining the minimum wage’s effect on health care costs, we look at the absolute relationship between the minimum wage level and those costs. A lot of the decisions that we make aren’t simply yes or no, but a question of how much? This style of thought has helped me with everything from physics through sociology, and I hope it can help you too.