Closer To The Ideal

I’ve been meaning to link to this post for several years, as it is one of my favorites. Surprise exists in the map, not in the territory:

Human intuitions were produced by evolution and evolution is a hack. The same optimization process that built your retina backward and then routed the optic cable through your field of vision, also designed your visual system to process persistent objects bouncing around in 3 spatial dimensions because that’s what it took to chase down tigers. But “tigers” are leaky surface generalizations – tigers came into existence gradually over evolutionary time, and they are not all absolutely similar to each other. When you go down to the fundamental level, the level on which the laws are stable, global, and exception-free, there aren’t any tigers. In fact there aren’t any persistent objects bouncing around in 3 spatial dimensions. Deal with it.

…The principle extends beyond physics. Have you ever caught yourself saying something like, “I just don’t understand how a PhD physicist can believe in astrology?” Well, if you literally don’t understand, this indicates a problem with your model of human psychology. Perhaps you are indignant – you wish to express strong moral disapproval. But if you literally don’t understand, then your indignation is stopping you from coming to terms with reality. It shouldn’t be hard to imagine how a PhD physicist ends up believing in astrology. People compartmentalize, enough said.

I now try to avoid using the English idiom “I just don’t understand how…” to express indignation. If I genuinely don’t understand how, then my model is being surprised by the facts, and I should discard it and find a better model.

Surprise exists in the map, not in the territory. There are no surprising facts, only models that are surprised by facts.

I wish I could get a copy of this blog post and then go back in time 20 years and start handing it out to all the people I’ve known who use the phrase “I just don’t understand how…” to express indignation. While it is sometimes appropriate to express indignation, this particular phrase is a uniquely ineffective way to do so. The aim of such a statement is to entirely dismiss the thing you are objecting to, to dismiss its right to existence.
This is a bad thing to do, no matter what your circumstances are. Either you have the power to truly eradicate the thing that you object to, in which case this rhetorical tactic amounts to a kind of bullying, or you do not have the power to eradicate the thing you object to, in which case this rhetorical tactic suggests a lack of creativity on your part. The better thing to do, in all cases, is plainly state the reasons for your indignation. For instance, if someone denies that natural selection has played an important role in shaping what species now exist on Earth, it is probably better to say “Natural selection does a better job of explaining observed phenomena than any other competing theory” than to say “I just don’t understand these people who don’t believe in evolution.”

I’ve known some smart people who have been made stupid by their mental models, or rather, by their refusal to keep their mental models up to date. I knew a smart chemist who maintained a nostalgic attachment to Newton’s clean mechanical universe and who was uncomfortable with the whole of modern physics. I knew a smart woman who studied urban policy in the 60s but who was later unwilling to acknowledge that there might be a limit to the expansion of the suburbs. I’ve seen many smart project managers destroy viable projects via inaccurate ideas about how to manage software development.

Raw intelligence is of little to use to us when we are crippled by incorrect models.

Bruce Eckel points to another kind of broken model – the mistakes that arise when you only look at one metric from a situation where several metrics are important. He calls this “Wrong Correctness” where you are correct by the metric you are measuring, but you are not measuring the right metric. He starts by noting how dangerous models can be:

Every model is an abstraction. This means that some information is removed and/or lost in creating the representation. We attempt to abstract away only the pieces that don’t affect the results we seek, and in doing so we assume that the system is made up of discrete, isolated components that can be added and subtracted with little or no impact on the rest of the system. Indeed, the concept of reductionism is itself a model, that says, in effect, that the pieces are more important than the interactions that form a whole (although I suspect it started as “let’s see how far we can take this idea” rather than an expectation that this is how the world works. Only subsequently did people adopt reductionism as an accurate world view).

Ironically, a model becomes a problem when it starts to work enough of the time that you begin to believe in it. You start to see the model as the world, and it becomes annoying and time consuming to constantly remind yourself that “all models are wrong, some are useful.” In fact, humans are too limited not to see the world through our abstractions. If, every time we had to make a decision, we went back to first principles and took everything into account, we’d never do anything.

…Models are so enticing. When you get one that works, it gives you a tremendous advantage: cheap predictability of results. It is very tempting to create a model even when it’s not possible, because you want one, and you want the outcome it promises.

An example he offers of “wrong correctness”:

Here’s another example of “wrong correctness,” also from Peopleware: the Furniture Police. This is the team in a company that decides what furniture you can have, and how much should fit on a floor, etc. From the standpoint of the Furniture Police, the more people you can squeeze onto a floor of a building, the better. And the only metric they have for measuring their success is how much money they save. So they do the thing that is correct for them under their constraints, and cram people closer together, and show positive results through lowered costs.

The actual effect is very, very wrong. It greatly reduces job satisfaction and thus productivity. It appears to save the company money but the amount it actually loses vastly outweighs the tiny savings. Of course, you’d have to look at the big picture to see the loss, rather than the quarterly report where the furniture police seem to produce a win.

He then points out some of the constraints faced by modern work environments:

Even if we do manage to create a human-centered company, it’s only a matter of time before the incessant demands of the quarterly-profit beast erode these values. The only (rare) exceptions occur when the creators make up-front decisions to prevent such erosion from taking place; staying private, maintaining controlling interest, or creating employee/customer-owned cooperatives. Of course, such organizations don’t have the potential of growing cancerously fast. To create and maintain a business like this requires strong and experienced leadership in the face of questions about optimizing growth and profits.

I have a number of friends who are MBAs and they are among the smartest people I know. All the same, as I said above, raw intelligence is of little to use to us when we are crippled by incorrect models. And my dear friends are taught a business logic in school that allows the irrational to seem rational:

Studies show again and again that repeat customers are your best source of business. And again and again, companies start looking at the cost of making customers happy in the same way they look at free sodas for employees: “hey, here’s some fat that can be trimmed.” It’s a perfect example of wrong correctness and short-term thinking to say that we can cut back on customer support because it doesn’t contribute to the bottom line, which is defined as sales for this quarter. Somehow everyone gets on board with these cost-cutting measures, because it seems so obvious. And often, at the same time, these same folks are saying that yes, repeat customers are very important. Except that it’s so easy to make this quarter’s numbers look better by doing some quick cutting. You end up cutting something that has taken years to develop, just for a quarterly bump. It’s a bit like saying “I could lose 30 pounds overnight just by cutting off my leg!” Oh, sure, when I put it like that it sounds deluded. But how different is it, really?