LIFE
The Tyranny Of The Normal
A case for the deviants
A week after I had moved to Berlin, I received a message from my primary physician in Seattle. I had been to the clinic for annual physicals and blood work. I wasn’t expecting anything. But my doctor had found my WBC, or the White Blood Cells, subnormal. Low. She wanted me to come in for additional tests.
For years, I had considered the physicians to be the necessary evil, like the tax man. They didn’t add much value to my life, just gave me the specialist recommendation when I fell from my bike and wondered with my dizzied brain if I were having a concussion.
In all these years of blood tests, it was the first I heard someone look at my WBC. White blood cells are part of the immune system. They help the body fight off infections and other diseases. When we get sick, the body makes more WBCs to fight the bacteria, viruses, or other foreign substances causing the illness. So, if I have low WBC, that means I don’t have any illness to fight off, right?
Since I was a medical illiterate who occasionally dabbled in Google research to self-diagnose and worry that my constipation might be ovarian cancer, I decided to entrust the question with the right authorities, aka my General Practitioner or GP in Berlin.
My GP had a barrage of questions after which she confessed her cluelessness. She didn’t know why my WBC was low. As per my health history, I didn’t fall sick often, I exercised regularly, and I had enough stamina to hike Mt.Fitz Roy. So, she entrusted me to another authority; a blood specialist in a cancer ward.
During this tail-chasing game with my WBC, I kept wondering about the norms. What’s normal anyway? In simple terms, it’s just a range of averages from a large dataset discarding the influences of deviants. The normal is only as good as the dataset.
Whether it’s in the blood test results or our behavioral patterns or relationships, we develop a box of normal; a median of the general population. Every qualification we have for someone depends on that median; someone is smart, kind, funny, grumpy, in comparison to that median.
We use the same median to prescribe the amount of exercise one should do in a week or the total calories one is advised to have in a day or the permitted time-lapse before someone returns a call. We set thresholds of normal based on what applies to the majority. It’s a great trail marker. It helps us to stay on the trail and not get lost in the wilderness.
However, becoming a slave to those markers makes life a guided tour.
The problem with such normalization is that it has no room for deviants. We expect people to behave in a certain normal way, without consideration for their personhood, their upbringing, their history, their physical condition, and such.
There’s a scene in Dune where Stilgar, played by Javier Bardem, spits on the table when he pays a visit to Oscar Isaac’s character, the Duke. The Duke and his coterie immediately take offense. His bodyguard promptly draws the sword to avenge the insult. Five seconds later they, and we, realize how Stilgar was showing his utmost form of respect. Being a citizen of Fremen which has an extreme scarcity of water, he was giving up some of his moisture, his most precious gift.
Duke’s normal hadn’t thus far included people from Fremen.
We decide what’s normal based on what most people do, and what we’re familiar and comfortable with. They are like the Machine Learning (ML) models; the computer programs that are used to identify patterns in data or make predictions. In the face of an unfamiliar pattern, the model can’t make predictions, or it will be an incorrect one if forced to do so.
In Thinking Fast & Slow, Daniel Kahneman introduces us to two ways in which the brain forms thoughts: System 1 & System 2. System 1 is the ML model — fast, automatic, frequent, emotional, stereotypic, and unconscious. System 2 is how we are when we hike up the Angel’s Landing — slow, effortful, infrequent, logical, calculating, and conscious. We can’t solely depend on either of the systems. The two systems assist each other like a circus duo and help us navigate the world efficiently.
So setting a box of normalcy allows us to navigate society easily. It lets us live on autopilot. The pieces of training in a globalized workplace, and its rules of conduct, facilitate such an autopilot. It attempts to reduce the friction between people from different cultures and people of different genders.
These made sure that the boss could no longer spank his secretary. It also made introversion more widely accepted.
When I started working 15 years ago, workplaces expected a level of networking from employees, which was torturous to people like me. My first team event comes to mind. The team had decided to go to a blockbuster but mindless comedy movie. They were my colleagues, not friends. And this movie wasn’t a sufficient enough enticement for me to spend my after-work hours with them.
I skipped it, and no one else did. I let my manager know that I prefer no-nonsense movies. From my perspective, I was just being honest. But my manager’s perspective was clearly outlined in my performance review — ‘She needs to be more of a team player and join team events.’ He couldn’t find any fault with my actual performance, my work that is. But to him, I was the weird one who shunned a team bonding exercise.
Contrasting that to today when I can easily abscond from a team event without sticking out, I do think training and awareness help.
However, training based on a categorization of people, even in broad buckets of gender, nationality, extroversion, and whatever else with an operating manual for interacting with them shouldn’t be at the expense of genuine effort to understand the individual.
A few years back, I knew an exceptionally smart software engineer. He designed and built practically perfect systems, the ones that were defect-less and scalable. He was already a senior back then. At his level, to get promoted, he was expected to do a fair bit of talking — networking, mentoring, speaking at conferences, and such.
But he was an extreme introvert. If one went by his desk and asked if he had a minute to spare, he would say no even if he were swatting flies. If the same person had pinged him on Slack and asked the same, he would gladly indulge all their questions for hours on end. He just hated talking.
In a stroke of genius, his manager changed the rules of the game. Promotion rules only stipulated influencing beyond their immediate ring of power. It didn’t matter if he spoke at the conference or if he published a White Paper. It didn’t matter if he mentored someone by talking or chatting. And just like that, the deviant broke the norm.
Our box of normal is like a neatly packed Amazon box. We don’t like the things that stick out. We might continue expanding the size of the box. But we still find the things that stick out, weird.
One of my former colleagues was someone who, in his words, was weird. He, in the words of other well-meaning people, was in the spectrum of neurodivergence. He was extremely smart at his work. But when it came to social interactions, the world was a landmine for him.
At first, he wasn’t aware that his interactions weren’t normal. He said what was in his mind, and lived life with confidence. However, his colleagues, who were expecting ‘normalcy’ from everyone, were offended at what and how he said things. When he was made aware of the impact he left on the rest of the team, he had to take a leave of absence for several months before he could collect himself.
He was never the same after that. He lost his confidence. After every sentence, he added disclaimers that he didn’t mean to be an asshole. He begged his team to let him know if he was offending them in any way.
I don’t mean to invalidate the offense his colleagues took at his words. But I also feel it shouldn’t be his burden alone to shoulder. We are all weird in our own ways.
In the last 100 years, we’ve expanded the box of the workplace to include women, introverts, new nationalities, and new genders. But we now don’t know how to fit those with different neural wirings. I’m sure we will eventually expand our box to fit them. But until then, shouldn’t we treat them intentionally, the way ML models would handle unseen patterns — don’t let it predict outcomes and just feed that new data to train future decision patterns?
To this day, the title, the blood specialist, sounds scary to me; like a wizard performing blood magic. I walked into the waiting room alone, through rows of patients, several of them bald from their cancer treatment. What did it mean that my WBC was low? Did that mean my bone marrow wasn’t producing enough blood cells?
To tame my dread, I told myself — I don’t fall sick, I’ve stamina enough to do HIIT thrice a week, and my weight has been stable for the past decade.
The ‘blood specialist’ asked the same questions as the previous ones and recommended me for further tests. And one value jumped out to him.
“Your B12 is low. Are you a vegetarian?”
So, B12, which was required for the generation of blood cells, was deemed the culprit. Thus started my routine visits to my GP, to get a B12 shot every month. 12 shots and 365 tablets later, my B12 was slightly up and so was my WBC. I was now within the box of normal.
But I didn’t feel any different. I was still the same person, with the same level of energy and immunity. So what had actually changed?
None of these doctors shared a correlation of my B12 or WBC deficiency with any physical symptoms. All these doctors chased the tail without any concerning symptoms in me. They were also unclear what such a deficiency could mean in the long run.
They might have been right in what they did. But, I was just a tad irritated with our number games, our obsession with the normal.
Normal is the average of all instances. That normal will not include Einstein or Marie Curie or Kafka or Van Gogh or Lincoln. But that doesn’t mean they should be trimmed to fit into the box.
To quote Kahneman, “The automatic operations of System 1 generate surprisingly complex patterns of ideas, but only the slower System 2 can construct thoughts in an orderly series of steps.”
I don’t discard the use of medians or System 1 thinking. It makes our lives easier. It makes us process complex sets of data and stimuli with relative ease. It allows us to coexist in large groups.
But often our mental ML models encounter new data sets that don’t fit existing patterns. That might be the moment to consider the non-normal person (or even the WBC count) in front of you in their entirety.
Even the best ML models abstain from predictions on unseen data. Let’s not try to fit that into the box. Let’s not act on that unseen pattern in the same way as we would otherwise. Instead of forcing a decision based on System 1, that might be a moment to let System 2 shine.
