It’s not that simple
newsletter #32 | 16-Jan-2018
Saturday morning, 13-Jan-2017, an emergency alert went out to Hawaii’s alert-enabled mobile phones that a missile was inbound. Discussion ensued about how this mistake was made and what we could do about it. Cyd Harrell, who has experience with government software and processes, tweeted a thread about the complexity of both how and what can be done.
The news story made me think about our human tendency to want to explain things simply, state a theory, and set off in a certain direction based on that theory–as quickly as possible. I was listening the the Radiolab podcast episode about stereotype threats, and the replication crisis (in psychology). In particular, an experiment was formerly replicated to show that college women’s math test scores increased to equal men’s when they were told that the particular test they were given had never shown any unequal gender results. There were other variations on the experiment, but they were having trouble replicating it. They were wondering if it was because stereotypes change over time, this generation is more aware and able to block the power of stereotypes, or if the level of the preparation for difficult math tests was different, etc. I kept wondering: why not ask the participants what went through their minds during the test? Why is this component, hearing from the actual participants, not included in their research?
Probably because of academic methods. Possibly because the answers different participants would give would each be different. Those differences would be difficult to summarize into a simple explanation.
This reluctance to embrace complexity exists in the business world. In the tech space. We’re trying to support simple versions of people and scenarios that just don’t exist in any clean way. We want to reduce cognition to heuristics and pattern processing. People in tech see little difference between training a pilot to fly a plane and writing software to control a car on a road full of other cars driven by other people. I believe there is more complexity involved, specifically involving time, lived experience, continuous consideration of inputs, and emotion.
People change over time. It’s not simple rationality. They change their minds. They get influenced by others and shift perspectives. Within the industry of making algorithms, this is not viewed as a good thing. You can’t be pinned down. It’s harder to chase you and get your attention and appease you. Simplicity and minimalism, these are the watchwords. But humans are complex. The algorithms we interact with are no match for the speed of our thinking, the cultural references, jokes, and digs we make, the leaps of intuition we have, the motivations and guiding principles we follow, the empathy we feel, or the compassion and kindness we display. Continuing in the vein of “simple” has brought us to a wall.
Mathew Desmond, a sociologist, author, and professor, writes about the complexity of poverty and race systematized in American society. He summarizes the human tendency to simplify others this way: “There are two ways we de-humanize others: cleanse them of all virtue, or remove all sin from their lives. Neither is true.”
The best way I can think of to address our fear of complexity is to accept it and start investigating pieces of it, little by little. Pick a particular thing a person is trying to do, a set of contexts, and a couple of different thinking styles. Gather from people what goes through their minds as they seek to accomplish this purpose, translate, and look for patterns. The “translate” part is where you put into words the crazy-human-ness of our inner voices. When a person tells you of an event that happened when she was a teenage lifeguard at a pool, you listen. A group of boys had jumped in the deep end, and one of them was struggling to stay afloat. She had to decide whether he needed rescuing or if he was “fake drowning” to catch her attention. She wondered if he actually couldn’t swim and jumped into the deep end just to keep up appearances with his friends. “Of course I’d jump in the deep end if I didn’t know how to swim!” You have to recognize sarcasm and take into account context and mood. How do you do this unless you have a human brain equipped with life and social experience and capable of cognitive empathy?
So our job is to help those around us embrace the complexity and feel confident in exploring it, rather than racing past it with a hasty theory. We don’t want our own crisis, do we?
