"The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it." - Terry Pratchett

***

Someone claims that my use of such terms like "the 'never make generalisations' / 'what is truth?' school" is simplistic, yet surely I have to come up with a name to refer to people who broadly share certain precepts, or I'd have to write 10,000 personalised reports dealing with each individual's nuances and variations and even I am not that free, contrary to popular belief; individual variations can be addressed after the similarities are dealt with. For example, there's a wide spectrum of libertarians, but they all share a common skepticism in the power of Big Government to solve problems.

I suspect that people of the aforementioned school tend to lack statistical training and knowledge. Not least, this is because my impression is that those in fields which lack such training seem prone to such thinking (sociology and probably many of the other social sciences are more fond of another of the sneaky tools of the social sciences - when you're not happy with the results, question the methodology, blame the West/rich people or find some weird exception and crow that it negates a generalisation). The influence of ideology is doubtless also a major factor, but I shan't attempt to factor it out, nor am I sure how I even could.

I predict that such people would also be fond of false dichotomies, since they cannot conceive of a grey area in which intermediate solutions would lie (hypothesis testing). They would crow triumphantly at finding one or two outliers, claiming that this disproved generalisations, whereas generalisations are not intended to be universal and axiomatic (for otherwise they would have to be necessarily true).

Such people might also be outraged to discover, as some scene in a movie went, that car companies tweak their cars until the cost of incrementally improving safety equals the money saved from avoiding one less class-action lawsuit. This callous disregard for human life might seem galling, until one recalls that lawsuits in the US often result in insane awards and, more importantly, that it is impossible to design a car that is 100% safe, and that even if it were possible, it'd be so bulky, ugly and expensive that no one would buy it. I hope they also do not discover that if some defective products are found in a batch of manufactured goods, the QC people will let it through as long as it is not above a certain level (it is impossible to ensure 100% of the products work perfectly).

Some Greens might also fall into this category, if they supported recycling even if it were more harmful to the environment than just buying everything anew (transport, cleaning and refitting costs et al.)

If I made a simple statement, say 'Birds fly', I might be pounced on for being simplistic and close-minded, ignoring the many birds who are unable to fly and accused of denigrating these flightless birds and holding them to my arbitrary notion of bird-ness and of depriving them of the moral dignity due to them as living things, animals or even sentient beings. Of course, saying that 'Birds fly' does not mean that a necessary condition for a bird is for it to be able to fly, and that those birds that can't fly are somehow inferior or incomplete. As entry 111 of How Girls Waste Time goes, "Analysing and cross-analysing in excruciating detail the words and actions of others, often reading into them implicit meanings that don't actually exist, and seeing daggers where there are none (which explains why girls like to do Literature)" (of course this is not exclusively a female problem). Such wild-eyed criticisms reveal more about those making them than about those to whom they are targeted.

One must never lose sight of the trees for the forest, but losing sight of the forest for the trees cannot do either. Of course the problem with most people is that they are happy to see forests and not trees, but this does not justify swinging to the other extreme and denying that the forest even exists, for just as society is more than the sum of its parts (individuals), regardless of what Margaret Thatcher thinks, so are forests emergent systems that cannot be understood by considering each individual tree in isolation.


Peripherally related: I wonder how many people take certain of my utterances like "Never make generalizations", "... women" and "I support the death penalty for attempted suicide" at face value and then start hammering relentlessly at me. I have been attacked on separate occasions by separate people for the first two, at least, but so far people are smart enough to realise what the last is about.

Someone: application to social sciences and humanities in general
damn all this positivism, essentialism, structuralism, postmodernism, post-structuralism
for making the lives of poor students so complicated

yes, we get that in human geog
and damn them all for trying to make simple things so complicated
to them, a map is more than a map
it is a representation of power struggles and social tensions, and contributes to the shaping of space and identities

that's the theme of my latest reading. gah

Me: do you agree? ;)

Someone: i agree, inasmuch as i am able to see the points they illustrate

but when i'm on the streets of bangkok with the same map
i don't care about these power struggles
all i care about is, "am i lost?"

Me: well it is a curious confusion to go from the assertion that maps can be used for blah blah to the assertion that maps are always used for blah blah


Someone: which is the problem with the idea of literature, isn't it?
­a lot of people like seeing daggers where there're none because it is cool to be the devil's advocate, no matter how dumb you can be.

neh, i'm just talking about people's perception of lit