A large part of my professional career has been spent developing software, and this experience (combined with a dabbler’s interest in other sciences) has given me some perspective that I think might reveal a slightly different way of thinking about some aspects of the challenging political and cultural landscape that we currently find ourselves in.
Computer programming is to a large extent about building models. If you want to simulate or interact with any real-world phenomenon in software, you need to come up with a way to represent that potentially abstract or messy thing as concrete rules and data that a computer can process: a model. The modeling process frequently reveals how complicated and ambiguous even seemingly simple things can be. I learned this particular lesson early in my career from an assignment to estimate package weights and calculate shipping costs in a shopping cart application, which turned out to have more variables (and unexpected plot twists) than one might reasonably anticipate. Any given software model could likely be made more accurate or more detailed if given unlimited time and resources, but ultimately, some degree of compromise is necessary to move forward and finish the job. At the same time, rushing and choosing a bad model has consequences, because making poor modeling decisions early in development can impede the ability to improve or modify a product in the future.
When you build enough models for one purpose, you start to notice that models are everywhere. In fact, it could be argued that everything in the human experience is a model. Language is a tool for creating models that represent physical things as well as more abstract concepts. Philosophies and religions are attempts at creating an orderly, rule-based model to make sense of the complex physical and social worlds we occupy. Every sight, sound and sensation we experience is a model created by our brains from the light, vibrations and other inputs that reach our sensory organs. We literally could not function in any way without these models, and we are also intrinsically unable to more directly perceive and understand the deeper realities that exist behind them.
None of this should be news – I’m really just stating the obvious – but we are generally so immersed in our lived experiences that it’s easy to forget that we have these limitations and that much of our “reality” is actually a self-imposed illusion. Don’t get me wrong; our models are quite good, and they serve their intended purposes most of the time. They’re not perfect, though: for example, there are plenty of optical illusions that demonstrate the ways our brain’s optical modeling can get misled and confused. In my life, this most commonly manifests when I perceive small, dark objects out of the corner of my eye and immediately interpret them as my cat; this is my model getting ahead of the available data. Things like this happen to all of us from time to time.
It’s also important to note that models are subjective. Obviously, many of us have different languages and beliefs (and pets) that impact the way we interpret the information we perceive. There are also even lower-level differences; consider, for example, people who lose (or are born without) certain senses. People can navigate the world successfully with different combinations of senses, but they presumably do so with the aid of substantially different internal models. Even relatively small differences like color-blindness demonstrate that two individuals can look at the same object and experience meaningfully different things.
And this brings me to the important part: the role of models in our present societal moment. What are most of our current “culture war” issues but people arguing about which models are right? My frustration with this situation is that, by definition, there are no “right” models. The correctness of a model depends entirely on its purpose, and we’re not all using them for the same reasons. And let me be clear: I’m not saying all this to argue that there is no such thing as an objective reality, or that our choices of model don’t matter. I’m actually arguing just the opposite: there is truth behind what we experience, but it’s too big for us to fully comprehend all at once. We should embrace models, because they enable our very existence, but we also shouldn’t take them more seriously than they deserve, and we should be prepared to adjust them when we find that they don’t fit the available facts, rather than denying the reality of those facts.
One example: most people have a pretty fixed idea of what a species is, biologically speaking, and they’re mostly right: it’s a set of organisms that are similar enough that they can breed and produce fertile offspring. This is a useful model, because it helps us to describe and better understand the incredible diversity of life on earth. But things are a lot fuzzier around the edges than one might expect. Take, for example, the concept of a “ring species” – a distributed population where nearby neighboring individuals are similar enough to be able to breed with one another, but more distant ones have too many genetic differences. This situation is documented for a wide variety of plants and animals, and it reveals that a spectrum can exist in a place where people automatically tend to expect tidy, discrete categories. Humans talk so much about species that it’s easy to believe that species identity is one of the most fundamental parts of being alive, but in actuality, “species” is not an intrinsic characteristic of any plant or animal – it’s just a label we apply to reduce a large number of factors down to a single thing we can easily comprehend. That’s useful most of the time, but it’s occasionally inadequate to fully describe what is truly going on.
I could, at this point, belabor my point by further applying similar analysis to any hot-button issue of my choice, but I don’t think that’s necessary. The general theme of tidy boxes vs. complex and messy phenomena tends to be the unifying theme. The advice that I think we all need to follow, regardless of what we believe, is this: do your best not to get overly hung up on your models, and try to have some empathy (and, when necessary, healthy wariness) for those who cannot see past their own. If we take this approach, we have a greater chance of living together in peace, and also perhaps getting closer to an accurate understanding of the reality we live in. If we instead stick to defending dogma, we may experience some short-term victories, but the shortcomings of our models will bite us (or our descendents) in the end. I hope to see a day where more people can constructively discuss and explore their differences in order to find solutions to some of the pressing problems of our world, instead of wasting most of their energy fighting over inherently meaningless or counterproductive distinctions.
– Demian Katz, July, 2024
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