Ghost Tree

Sometimes dead trees can be quite beautiful....

Sometimes when one gets an insight into something not fully understood, it keeps coming up again like a word that has to be looked up in a dictionary keeps coming up. I've been thinking about numbers, and computers  and the reduction of human behavior to ones and zeros.

I think I've mentioned before that John once commented that he 'thinks in numbers'. Being more of a right-brained person, I was quite horrified, but came to see that there were some ways in which I could understand it. He's very good at mapping out complex problems in terms of numbers. Sometimes, especially when it comes to money, it clarifies things. He retired early from his job as a chemical engineer because he was frustrated by the fact that the new view of design was computer modeling. Nobody went out and crawled through reactors or climbed ladders to get a first hand look at what the computer models did. Eventually he went back to the same job as a consultant because there was a recognition that not every problem can be solved by computer. Sometimes old school knowledge and hands on familiarity with the equipment and the people who operate is both valuable and necessary.

I've been reading a book called Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez, a sort of philosopher naturalist. He spent a lot of time living in the Arctic, learning about the land, its people and animals and its history. He talks about how the history of survival in such seemingly hostile country is not about reducing subjective observations to statistics as scientists are wont to do, but in learning the stories of the Eskimo people and their relationship to the land, patiently observing the wildlife and surviving  with respect for the harsh conditions. Computer models designed by observers who fly in on a plane, stay a few days, and then fly away again to reduce everything to numbers don't ever really understand what it is like to live there. Here's what he says,  A belief in the authority of statistics and the dismissal of Eskimo narratives as only 'anecdotal' is a dichotomy one encounters frequently in arctic environmental assessment reports. 'Statistics, of course, can be manipulated....if you punish the data enough, it will tell you anything. The Eskimos' stories are politely dismissed because...their words are too hard to turn into numbers....

I was listening to Dave Eggers on the radio the other day. He is the author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and  Zeitoun among my favorites,  and he started talking about the effect of artificial intelligence and social media on real life. There it was again. The idea that complicated things can be be reduced to simplistic terms, compressing human emotions to emojis, reducing life to instagram pictures. He said, ' kids should not have to carry everything they know or need to know on an iPad. They should write on paper, read real books, talk to each other....'

Life is complex. It should be lived, not observed.