Class(ification) Struggle
Over the past couple of months, the year 2020 has been labelled “the worst”. 2016 to many, including myself, seems like child’s play when compared to events of this year. We are only in August! There is a good chance that the wacky factor of 2020 is the highest it has ever been to anyone alive today.
How to describe it? I had just used the term “wacky”, which to some is a comical, but accurate, depiction of this year. Some may even be thinking of “wack”, a popular meme depicting Hannibal Buress. Regardless, “wacky” is an adjective that I used in order to describe a subject, in this case the events in the year 2020 (if you want to be more specific).
Even if you disagree and don’t think this year is wacky, odds are you were not really up in arms about it. For one, years are temporary and arbitrary. The wacky factor isn’t really tied to the year being 2020. It just so happens that during this revolution around the sun, things on the blue marble got pretty “wack”. We won’t just return to our position slightly after 365 days (thank you leap years) and things will somehow be better. Perhaps if you live somewhere with distinct seasons then the effects of said seasons can be used to judge how things are temporally. “I couldn’t go to the beach in 2020 like I could in 2019, 2020 is wack!” is an example of this thinking and why it happens. Humans are pattern seekers, but often times this is a detriment.
I just touched on a primitive quality of our human psyche. Pattern-seeking. A rather close cousin of this idea would be “classification”.
Classification
This seemingly innocuous word holds a lot of the reason why people can seem really diverse, despite being so similar regardless. Really all classification is is putting something in a group of like attributes or qualities. This process is designed to help our pink, squishy brain to survive (at least that is what it started out as). I would think twice about eating a brightly colored frog, so the next time I see a bright frog, I won’t eat it. There are some errors that happen, but today’s human beings are proof of having that level of thinking is advantageous in order to reproduce.
That’s where a lot of human brain tricks (or if you want to be technical, heuristics come from). A lot of them have to do being helpful to reproduce, or otherwise advantageous to us in some way. I would argue mostly for survival, but I think that our human society has become a lot more since the origin of the species.
Still, it is important to recognize the limitations that all of us have as human beings. Biology.
Natural selection is the process where, generally speaking, those best adapted to their environment will reproduce more and therefore the qualities that lets it adapt get spread through generations. So far I’ve been pretty reliant on the aspect of this towards human nature. Well, maybe not exclusively human, maybe just nature.
Nature vs. Nurture
Around the turn of the 20th century, a spectrum of psychological thought was introduced with a formalization of the subject of psychology itself (before then, the act of studying how people act and “tick” was a combination of science and philosophy, sounds familiar hmmmmm?). The ends of the spectrum would be almost pure biology (what chemicals, genes, etc. produce or are produced by behaviors) and behaviorism (all behaviors are established through the environment).
I think there are two major ideas are here.
Humans have a brain.
A brain is an organ. It has many networks of neurons that fire upon certain activities or upon certain stimuli. All homo sapiens have had a brain ever since the species began 125,000 years ago, and that doesn’t even include the other forms prior to this that used fire, crafted stone tools (if you were to include this then it’d be more like 2,000,000 years ago). The first recorded civilization of Mesopotamia was founded around 5,000 years ago. That is a lot of time where humans simply hunted in packs, living the nomadic good life (of dying in your twenties). Since then there has not been significant changes in the way humans work from a biological level that would require distinguishing the humans of today with those same humans.
Humans like to be enlightened.
The power humanity has had on the globe has been due to our brains being capable of higher-order thinking. Thinking about thinking, as many say. This is true! There are not many animals in the world that we think wonders why they are on this rock flying in space. Those animals also don’t know that the earth revolves around the sun. Why do humans? Well we didn’t for the longest time, or at least it wasn’t the social norm to think that. People are curious, and for a time that was probably a detriment. A lot of bright frog eating. High risk, high reward though.
Class(ification) is in session
These ideas don’t seem like they are incompatible, but they kind of are. Human brains are simply not built for higher thinking. Evolutionary theory doesn’t care about enlightenment. Evolution cares about gaining qualities that make it easier for you to reproduce. Yet I think there are a lot of examples of human behaviors that run counter to mere reproduction.
I blame society.
A quest for knowledge and understanding is also a time of not getting all the babes.
Consumption of media is also time not getting all the babes.
If you are reading this, you are likely not suffering from hunger. That’s good. Are you also getting all the babes? Isn’t that what’s next?
Well if you think about it, humans have kind of cheated from the standard way animals go about reproducing. Agriculture has made it so that food is plentiful. Modern day logistics have made food gather in specific locations, rather than having to waste time doing that yourself. You still must get the food, and food costs money.
Wait, money?
Money doesn’t naturally get produced. It is a socially agreed upon* way of assigning value or worth (among other things). People get money by trading away their labor and time. Society has some ways of determining how much labor means depending on the activity. Cashiers do not do an activity as worthwhile as what computer programmers do. This is because computer programmers have a rarer skill set that not as many people can do.
And by golly I just did it. I classified two different groups.
I’m sure when I mentioned a cashier, your brain created some kind of image of one. This is a stereotype. Just conjecture here, but it is probably how our brain would make a picture of a bear up so that it is easier to recognize a bear and we are able to react more quickly. That’s the nature side of your brain.
There are a lot of cashiers in the world though. In fact, if you go to a grocery store, the number of cashiers matching that image in your head will be quite low. Humans are diverse, and we see diverse communities more often today than thousands of years ago.
“But Michael” I hear you, “I am a cashier, I saw myself”
That is exactly the point. Oftentimes the issue with identities and labels is that medium in between the idea and your image, which is your brain. This is where things like cognitive bias comes into play, which is inherently behaviors that are brain does that we have identified as faults.
Cognitive Bias
I’m not going to go through cognitive bias or logical fallacies in number because they’re so many and by the time I’d be done explaining them all there would be three more added. Here’s a nice explanation of what they are, with access to find out more about a specific one if you fancy. The main idea is that these exist in order to help us in four problems:
There is too much information
There is not enough meaning in the world.
There is a need to act faster than we have time to think.
There’s too much information to remember.
