Jumping jack

This entry was originally posted on 15 October 2004 at 12:35 p.m.

Way back when we lived in Germany, my parents decided to take advantage of Being In Europe, and took us on a couple of vacations to various Interesting Places. For two of my three years there, we visited Holland. I vividly remember tulips and windmills and people driving like animals on the highway, and a statue of the little boy who put his finger in the dyke (yes, there is such a thing, though the legend--which is entirely fictional--was written by an American). The statue looks like this:



Anyway, that's not really important to the story at hand, beyond being one of the things i remember about our little vacations.

So, my story begins in Holland, probably in Amsterdam. My brother and sister and i have gone into a little shop. There are all sorts of little knick-knacky toys, and, to amuse myself while they browse, i start playing with one of them. It's a little wooden puppet toy--i think they're called "jumping jack" toys. It was a representation of a little boy wearing a costume whose cultural origins i'm not certain of anymore. The body and head were a single, flat wooden piece, and the arms and legs were separate, attached so that they would move easily when you pulled the string. It was constructed pretty much like this:



...except the legs weren't jointed at the knee--just straight.

I wasn't terribly interested in the decoration, but i was having quite a good time pulling the string and watching its limbs rise and fall, my little five or six or seven year-old brain mentally dissecting the toy, trying to grasp how the mechanism worked. And so it was that i didn't see my siblings (i'm the youngest; my brother is older than me by six years and my sister by nearly eleven) leave the store. I just kept on pulling the string, slowly, slowly.

Somehow or other--i don't remember how it happened--i learned that they'd left, and somehow or other--equally forgotten--managed to be reunited with them. Although i've forgotten these details, i recall being very upset. I hated being lost, and i had a history of it, going back to my mom losing me in the PX a few years before then (long story). So this was bad news.

But everything was fine, and we went on our way and i managed to forget about everything and concentrate on enjoying the vacation.

And thus it was a complete surprise that night when we got a knock at the door of our hotel room.

My parents answered and spoke to whoever was there, and came back into the room bearing something wrapped in tissue paper. I was curious, of course. I was always curious--but i was the youngest, and just a kid, and nothing important ever happened to me, really (...well, one thing did, but that's another story and it's much darker than this one).

So i was shocked when they presented the item to me. I unwrapped the tissue paper and saw, nestled within it, the toy from the shop, his little Pinocchio face and sombrero and orange pants looking up at me.

I'd never been so embarrassed in my short life until that day. I looked over at the door where an adult was standing--i can't be sure, but i think it was the shopkeeper. She was smiling, and so was i. Even though i hadn't even planned on asking my parents for it, i was grateful. It occurred to me, young as i was, that this was an Important Moment, and an Important Gift. I said thank you.

Several years and a number of moves later, we eventually got rid of the toy. I'm not sure whether my mom asked me first before taking it to the thrift store or wherever she took it, but i'm sure it was one of those things she figured i'd grown out of.

Thinking back on it, i'm not so sure that i ever did.

Qualitative research

This entry was originally posted on 1 July 2004 at 12:22 p.m.

Not too long ago, B's father and i were talking about quantitative versus qualitative research. I was telling him how i'm eager to get back into anthropology, where i can focus more on qualitative and narrative research. He wanted to know why i preferred it to quantitative research, and i started to explain, but the conversation kind of drifted away before i could. I've been thinking about this issue ever since.

Many social scientists like numbers. It gives us a sense of validity in the face of the clinical precision for which the hard sciences are known. Doing statistical research in the social sciences allows us to sidestep the inferiority complex we've developed as a result of years of head-scratching and scorn by both other scientists and the general populace. It's the same kind of inferiority complex that leads many of us to use obscure terminology and horrible grammar in technical journals.

All social scientists are aware of this to a greater or lesser degree, but you'll be hard-pressed to find many of us who will admit to it.

But the thing is, we don't need to feel this kind of pressure. This sense of inferiority, when you take a good look at it, is something we've brought upon ourselves in a search for validation as scientists: we're brought up to believe that science is the thing that provides us with hard, definitive answers--and human behavior, the core subject of all social sciences, is a phenomenon that defies the kind of binary pigeonholing that statistical research requires.

The hard sciences deal with some pretty abstract concepts, many of which are difficult to understand (theoretical physics is probably the most difficult discipline, by this reckoning). But when it comes down to it, all physical behavior is explicable at some level. There are extremely complex systems at work in astronomy, cosmology, geology, biology, and chemistry. But ultimately all of these things are quantifiable, and once we understand these systems and the factors that play into them, we can accurately predict their behavior.

Not so with human behavior. Despite our more predictable animal nature, we're amazingly flexible, whimsical, and varied creatures.* While our behavior does fall into clear patterns, there is enough variation that it's neither fair nor accurate to make hard and fast predictions about how a person will turn out. Think of it this way: we know how hydrogen bonds with oxygen to create water, and under which conditions this will happen, and we can predict this behavior with near 100-percent accuracy. But ask under which conditions a human child will turn out to be a bank robber, and the success of our predictions drops substantially. If we can predict human behavior even 30% of the time, it's a success from the perspective of social science.

Let's face it: when social scientists attempt to be like hard scientists, we fail miserably. It's no wonder people turn their noses up at the social sciences when our success rate--based on our self-imposed need to quantify behavior--is so dismal.

Statistics in the social sciences have their place, there's no question. We wouldn't be able to assess things like the success of new policies or rehabilitation programs without quantifiable data. But when it comes to understanding the causes of, understanding the effects of, and successfully predicting human behavior, our strengths lie in methods other than statistical analysis.

Qualia abound in human behavior. We've built our existence around them, and even though they're not truly expressible, we've spent centuries creating great works of art, literature, and music to express them. We've built wonderful organic systems around the perception, communication, and understanding of abstract notions--systems that, when quantified, lose much of their meaning. And this is where the social sciences excel.

For example, one of the best things about psychology isn't its ability to predict mental illness; it's its ability to treat it--not through quantifiable methods (though these methods should be assessed via quantifiable data in order to measure their success), but through a sort of gnostic interaction built on understanding, knowledge, and the subtle interplays of a therapeutic relationship.

As humans, we instinctively understand things on a qualitative level. We see colors, hear sounds, feel emotions, think thoughts, experience sensations, and have ideas--all of which are based on qualia. We can quantify them, as we would a suicide statistic, but in doing so, we lose a crucial piece of information: in quantifying these things, we understand how they are, but we do not capture why they are.**

Finally, there are those who would argue that all we need to know about human behavior lies within the bell curve: social sciences are probabilistic, not deterministic, and it's good enough to know what the "average person" would do. To that stance, i can only reply thus: if we, as both social scientists and humans, do not believe that we have anything to learn from qualitative research--if, in fact, we believe that the only cases that matter are those that lie along the mean, then we are dooming ourselves to academic failure. Human behavior is based as much on individual experience as it is on genetics, and because of this we will never have the level of precision in prediction as the hard sciences. In eschewing qualitative research, we deny what it is that drives us as a species, and we deny the power of insight. And once we deny the power of insight, we've lost what it means to be scientists in the first place.

*I'm sure this applies also to other animals, in varying degrees as well; we're not so special. My guess is that self-awareness and self-will have something to do with this.

**Mathematics is its own abstract realm, and this piece is not intendted as an attack on the beauty or strangeness or qualia inherent to mathematics; the author appreciates mathematics and its qualities.

The imperfection of language

This entry was originally posted on 17 June 2004 at 12:28 p.m.

I've been thinking about language lately. I suppose this has something to do with reading a book that's been translated from Turkish into English where the translator did a fabulous job of maintaining the poetic feel of the original. Or, at least, the poetic feel that i surmise the original must have had, based on the translation.

Language is imperfect. Language creates conventions that refer to reality, then it creates conventions that refer to the conventions, and then you get metalanguage, and this opens the door for us all to question the meaning of words, the meaning of grammar, and the meaning of meaning. It's a wonder that any real communication takes place.

Granted that language is an evolved phenomenon--one that will never reach "completion" unless our species suddenly stops discovering things and creating new things and new ways of thinking about things--it's less surprising that it works. After all, we've had thousands of years to hash out things like nouns, verbs, and adjectives. And yet, despite all this, there's still a massive division between spoken language and written language; practical language and poetic language. It's the kind of division that makes the imperfections of words and grammar and syntax both beautiful and frustrating.

Example: Ever try explaining an abstract notion to someone else? I notice this especially with computer-related issues. We have terminology for the various types of programs and the actions that they perform, but using that terminology leaves most people scratching their heads and wondering whether you were actually speaking the same language. So, to get around this, you try to convert the technical terms into realistic descriptions that should be more accessible, only to be met by a blank stare that indicates that the person you're talking to heard and understood each word individually but still has no idea what you're talking about. Finally, we resort to metaphor, using other systems (both physical and non-physical) as imperfect reflections of what we're trying to explain.

The same situation in literature, however, is almost like a gold mine. An author can write a very simple paragraph explaining an object, only to find that the reader just doesn't see the object as the author described it. Or, better yet, an author can write about the motivations a certain character had to take a certain action--only to have the reader continue to question it, this time from a new perspective. Or, and this one's very important, an author can write a phrase that seems very simple and very clear only to find out that it's still ambiguous enough that most readers don't interpret it the way it was intended.

And this is the crux of the gold mine: for every phrase or sentence or paragraph that we don't understand, numerous interpretations are available. And each of those interpretations sheds a different color of light on the object in question. Because of this, nondimensional characters, who only exist in nonphysical space, suddenly become as real as any one of us.

And for each of these interpretations, a new series of philosophical questions arises. It's like opening one door only to find three more waiting for you on the other side.

In communication, this is frustrating. In literature, this can be wonderful (or frustrating, depending on whether it's complex prose or just unclear writing).

So all this leaves me wondering, when do we get to the meat? When can we walk away from the branching and sub-branching of interpretation and be satisfied that we understand the meaning of any sentence?