All Charms Fly at the Cold Touch of Data
Finding meaning in the information age
Meaning has a way of evaporating when we try to trap it in a perfect container.
Umwelt is a German word without a direct English translation. It describes the unique ‘bubble world’ of any creature’s subjective perception and meaning.
A bee’s umwelt is characterized by it’s ability to see ultraviolet light and to sense certain pheromones.
A person’s is characterized by culture, language, and personal experience.
Every individual’s brain leaves cognitive fingerprints on the information it takes in based on its umwelt.
Think for a moment: how could you reduce an umwelt to data? Is it even possible?
We’ll come back to this question.
On Looking
Even when we’re trying to take in as much information as possible, our perspectives are biased based on what we know.
I’m reading a wonderful book called On Looking: A Walker’s Guide to the Art of Observation. In it, the author—a cognitive scientist named Alexandra Horowitz—walks around her neighborhood eleven times with different characters, ranging in perspective from a physicist to a child.
Each walk and corresponding talk conjures different mental and emotional specters in the author, despite seeing the same sensory inputs each time.
While reading, it reminded me of something a colleague had recently said about how a category-defining leader he’s working with is different from the other mere mortals we’ve worked with.
“I can’t explain it. She is able to look at the same data as everyone else and know exactly what to do—often subverting the expectations of other experts along the way. She’s not just right, she’s more right and in more nuanced ways than those around her.”
Deep, hard-won experience generalizes in ways that seem to defy our best attempts at turning them into systems.
On Trying to Scale Perception
Gary Klein, an organizational behavior expert, points out an interesting paradox: businesses want to hire people who have struggled and succeeded, but it’s against their best interests to create an environment of struggle.
They become concerned with simulating growth. Not in real, gritty, ugly, inefficient actual growth.
Struggle is, after all, the antithesis to efficiency. It must be rooted out to maximize profit.
As a result, many organizations are filled with people living off the table scraps of great leaders who have struggled and succeeded themselves.
Klein argues that they share these learnings by passing along mental models. It could be as complicated as a process or as simple as a rule of thumb.
This is where we start to go off the rails.
On Looking Too Hard
As soon as we start trying to make concentrate from people’s struggles by turning them into systems and frameworks, we run into a universal truth:
Meaning seems to actively resist being quantified.
John Keats’ famous poem Lamia about the Greek figure of the same name captures this idea better than any other.
In the full poem, Lamia is a mysterious being who “melts into a shade” when Apollonius, a philosopher, applies cold rational scrutiny.
Here’s a relevant excerpt.
Lamia
By John Keats (1795-1821)
Do not all charms fly At the mere touch of cold philosophy? There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: We know her woof, her texture; she is given In the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings, Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine -- Unweave a rainbow, as it erstwhile made The tender-person'd Lamia melt into a shade. [229-238] The bald-headed philosopher Had fix'd his eye, without a twinkle or stir Full on the alarmed beauty of the bride, Brow-beating her fair form, and troubling her sweet pride. [245-248]
Keats describes the awe-inspiring sight of a rainbow and notes how it loses its luster “in the dull catalogue of common things.”
It’s a beautiful lament on how dissecting can stunt imagination and wonder.
We Live in a Retrospective, Dissected World
We live in an era that worships what can be quantified.
AI is a massive oracle to consult all of human retrospect.
We’ve lost sight of the profound value of the fundamentally unique perception of each person. We treat these idiosyncrasies as speed bumps. We assume every blind spot can be filled in with a corresponding manicured piece of information.
Horowitz points out that “You are missing at least eighty percent of what is happening […] You are missing what is happening in your body, in the distance, and right in front of you.”
We’ve replaced original thought with an insatiable desire to standardize perception in nearly all areas of our lives. We take the same classes. Watch the same shows. Read the same books. Cite all the same great thinkers.
Our near-constant diet of idealogical concentrate has divorced us from original experience.
If a right answer could possibly exist, we live in a time where there’s a near moral-imperative to find it. In parenting, in business, in life.
Original experience is, after all, a painfully inconvenient inefficiency in both education and business.
In Conclusion
The antidote to watching meaning “melt into a shade” under the microscope of reason isn’t to try to change the world.
It’s to try to change your world—your perception.
Nobody will prioritize your original experience if you don’t.
I’ll offer three suggestions that have helped me:
Limit consumption of concentrated, heavily distilled ideas in the same way you’d limit processed foods in your diet
Maximize time spent having inefficient, original experiences with ideas by thinking through ‘solved’ problems on your own
Prioritize non-propositional sources of meaning like art, poetry, narrative, beauty, story, and shared struggle
In doing so, accept the key tradeoff: exploring the world first-hand is less efficient.
Efficiency is a small price to pay for meaning.