You will have heard the Zeno’s Dichotomy Paradox thing about how trying to travel any distance requires you travelling an infinite list of sub-distances, so saying a motion ‘starts’ or ‘finishes’ is illogical. Except it is logical, because it turns out you can do an infinite amount of things within a finite amount of time.
The remaining issue, and the feeling the paradox still gives you, is one of what to do about vagueness. Mathematically: 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + … = 1, and not equal to infinity. But the dots are still annoying, psychologically.
Appropriately, this also represents one of the basic issues of fitting psychology itself into science.
I’ve been reading Theodore Roszak’s The Making of a Counter Culture about the 60s. In his preface, he says this:
As a subject of study, the counter culture with which this book deals possesses all the liabilities which a decent sense of intellectual caution would persuade one to avoid like the plague.
I have colleagues in the academy who have come within an ace of convincing me that no such things as “The Romantic Movement” or “The Renaissance” ever existed- not if one gets down to scrutinizing the microscopic phenomena of history.
At that level, one tends only to see many different people doing many different things and thinking many different thoughts.
I empathise both with his exasperation over trying to talk about this stuff, but also with his colleagues’ hesitation over any given person’s attempt to talk about this stuff. You enter a weird zone of accepting things are hard to measure, and lose the safety of any kind of epistemic harness. You can’t really tell if what you are doing is correct beyond whether it resonates with you and/or other people, and even that could mean nothing.
So Option A is scrap it and stick to stuff you can be more confident in speaking about. There is more than enough of that.
But the issue is you don’t know how much useful insight you’re leaving untouched. Even if you may not know when you discover it, versus some random coincidence that means nothing.
I’ve also been reading A Time to Dance, A Time to Die by John Waller about the Strasbourg Dancing Plague of 1518, hoping to reach some actual belief about whether it actually occurred and what it means.
This paragraph was interesting:
But if Frau Troffea’s crazed dance reflected her own profound sadness, it was not a singular event. It is significant that lone individuals had felt an irresistible need to dance before. Municipal records tell us that around the middle of June in 1442 a monk danced himself to death in the cloisters of his monastery in the Swiss town of Schaffhausen. Ten years later, in nearby Zurich, a man entered the Water Church where he danced uncontrollably, calling in his misery to another man, an armourer who stood praying nearby, to ‘help him in his need and come to his assistance’. Similar cases occurred in the decades following the 1518 epidemic. In his classic medical text Observations on Human Disease, the Swiss physician Felix Plater told of an incident from his boyhood, in the 1530s, when a woman danced for a whole month in Basel. When the skin on her feet had been worn away, exposing bloody tendon, sinew and bone, she was conducted to a hospital where she slowly recovered. In another case recorded by Plater, a priest suffered from cramps and mental disturbances followed by convulsions. He then leapt to his feet and danced for days. Other episodes of solitary dancing from the region may well have been lost to the vagaries of time.
Interesting because it sets off all the possible alarm bells.
He is making the classic play of saying that this is a meaningful trend without making the explicit statement. Because he can’t be sure either, he can only make the case it could be. I respect it, although he slightly loses me with hilarious final line suggestion that other perfect evidence could theoretically exist.
And of course, it could be a meaningful trend overall. But how would we know?
(Let’s even say it’s reasonably likely these cases are exaggerated or made-up. Is that not also interesting? Why would several similar lies happen? Or let’s say this is all one big lie, is it not interesting that people are so captivated by it? What does it say about people that they want there to have been dancing plagues?)
Simulate a few centuries of global human life and I am confident the amount of people dancing for days on end bringing them close to their own demise is greater than zero. I am confident the number of people doing that for no observable meaningful reason is greater than zero.
So what to make of … 7 incidents, in a close-ish area geographically, in a short-ish timespan? My point isn’t that we need to come up with a threshold, it’s that it would never be possible. We have tests for randomness, but they only work vs control. There is no control group to human history (as far as we know). So it’s not that science can conclude that such a thing is random, it’s that talking about this stuff cannot happen within the domain of science.
Similar to Zeno’s paradox is The Sorites paradox: clear categorical differences can exist between groups without there being an identifiable boundary between them. You can ask at what point a pile of sand becomes a heap, and find that at no point will adding one more grain force it to cross the categorical boundary. But everyone can still tell a pile from a heap.
Again, the answer is that one must accept the vagueness as part of life. But that’s no help for someone who cares about what is happening within that difference.
And the issue with accepting that second part as another fact of life is that we don’t just care about differences for the sake of knowledge, we care about them for the sake of people. That’s what psychology is for.
Say you want to study the potential differences of qualitative experiences of jocks and nerds in school, under some global goal of improving adolescent experiences for future generations. To do your analysis, you need to decide which qual data is coming from a jock’s mouth, or a nerd’s.
You know a nerd when you see one, and accept there exists some spectrum of nerd to jock, yet no answer to how many footballs thrown/caught or books read is the key amount to split them. It quickly gets really difficult to come up with a measurement scale to sort participants up into one of the two groups. Your best bet is your own eyeballs, or a school kid that you trust’s eyeballs. And even if you do find a scale that works, it’s probably come from forcing your qualitative eyeballs into the right words so that the output matches your eyeballs again. Which is the same thing as just deciding who’s a nerd and who’s a jock. Which, again, crumbles under any kind of Socratic scrutiny.
(You may be told that doing something liking latent variable analysis solves this, measuring things about their school-life that cluster into revealing the real variable behind it all. But this again is essentially the same as just picking. Why have you decided those variables?)
But you know that kids experience school differently. For some it is torture. And you also know that these categories exist, at least to the extent that is possible for you to know anything, and they seem to matter a lot.
This is the issue Theodore Roszak was addressing. The Renaissance ‘happening’ is a feeling which one must bound arbitrarily, inviting debate on the boundaries. It started in a given century, but not in a given decade, definitely not in a given year. And let’s say there was one big event that really signified it starting that I could get you to accept, well that event must have causes, which if anything, are even more relevant to our studies.
At which point you say “well this isn’t a problem of psychology, this is a problem for historians”. Unfortunately, History is a subset of Psychology. In fact, I broadly agree with Jean Tirole’s view that Psychology, Economics, Law, Anthropology, History, Political Science, Sociology and parts of Philosophy are all basically the same thing. I would just go further and call that ‘thing’ Psychology. If you think there are clear differences, good luck specifying them enough to make them measurably distinct.
Here are the openings from the descriptions of the top three History books on Amazon right now, bolding mine:
Over its nearly 150 years, the United States Department of Justice became America’s most consequential institution, determining the rules and limits of what makes us who we are as a country: our political freedoms, our economy, and our nation’s most revolutionary core principle: equal protection under the law. As the Department made wildly consequential decisions about what types of Americans to target, and for what crimes, it has been steered at times by patriotism, bravery, and self-sacrifice, but just as often by lust for power, corruption, and vengeance.
For three decades following World War II, the Great Lakes overtook Europe as the epicenter of global economic strength. The region was the beating heart of the world economy, possessing all the power and prestige Silicon Valley does today. And no ship represented the apex of the American Century better than the 729-foot-long Edmund Fitzgerald―the biggest, best, and most profitable ship on the Lakes.
The United States has far more homicides than any of its peers around the world. Why? In this groundbreaking book, Malcolm Gladwell explores the American “peculiarity”—how the world’s wealthiest country came to suffer from a problem typically only seen in the world’s poorest-ok how the hell did this one get into the history section
ChatGPT can list out events and years. These are psychology projects.
Which is .. fine?
The argument above just leads to the conclusion that this is how it has to be. Individuals have to take their best stab at what they feel is right, where certain events aren’t coincidences, what factors were most important, and make that case fully. Maybe enough people follow the same reasoning, get the same conclusion, and we can agree it’s probably right. Much in the same way you and I may agree whether a random student is a nerd or a jock (and probably will agree).
The market should theoretically play a role too, and should help you identify which people are worth listening to. This doesn’t explain Malcolm Gladwell’s success but that’s beside the point.
Or maybe it’s not beside the point. Maybe it’s very relevant.
Because what the market is saying is that this type of analysis is the domain for people who care about serious intellectual work in as much as it can be used to tell a good story. Not that people only want this, but that readers aren’t offered other options. And that those that care about truth alone quickly realise they can’t do anything with their intuitions and pursue other stuff.
How would we then know how much we are missing by considering such analyses entertainment, and not something that gets in journals? How would we even be able to begin to know?
Think about this too much and you will want to bang your head against the wall. Because even the most inspiring, insightful-feeling account of any psychological difference across a category, be that a time period, or a culture, will always be vulnerable to an infinite amount of ‘um akshually’s from a rationalist perspective.
And the issue with arguing with rationalists is that it’s literally impossible to explain to them how they’re wrong using words they can hear, because it requires stepping onto their side of the fence. “You can’t actually say that” - yes, under your rules.
This is how the discipline of Psychology often works and it’s bad. Because it does not match who people are. Nerds and Jocks seem to exist. The Renaissance seems to have happened. Patterns are being expressed all of the time. And they may well have important lessons for us about the mind. There is just a certain amount of vagueness you have to accept along the way.
The obvious riposte is how do you then tell the good from the bad. Should only qualified psychologists or PhDs attempt to analyse people or moments in history? That falls on its ass immediately. Those credentials came from the system that I’m saying doesn’t really work. Are some people just going to be better at it than others? Probably, but who can objectively tell us who those people are?
The answer would seem to be that you can’t evaluate anything in isolation. What you can do is keep generating original experiences in your own life, observe your inner experience, see what other people say about their inner experiences, see what other people say about other people’s inner experiences, see how that differs or correlates across vague categories and time periods, and think the ones that resonate most are more likely to be true and useful. It is a process with no possible observable beginning or end, and fundamentally it remains about you. I think they used to call that ‘Psychology’.
As an aside, I genuinely have no idea if that dancing plague book I read was any good or not.
footnotes:
the header is two paintings (kokoschka and rembrandt) which i actually saw presented alongside each other like that at the Antwerp Museum of Fine Arts. very cool approach to being a gallery. 10/10 recommended.
the jean tirole opinion i reference is buried somewhere in his book ‘economics for the common good’. i don’t have a copy on me to tell you where.