More blue dots
Oliver Burkeman explains how it can be true both that things are overall getting better and that we still run around with our hair on fire because of all the things that are getting worse. There’s this study…
In the experiment, participants were shown hundreds of dots in shades from deep purple to deep blue, and asked to say whether each was blue or not. Obviously, the bluer a dot, the more likely people were to classify it as blue. But what’s interesting is what happened when researchers began reducing the prevalence of the blue dots they displayed. The fewer dots that were objectively blue, the broader people’s definition of “blue” became: they started to classify purplish dots that way, too. Their concept of blue expanded, a phenomenon the study authors label “prevalence-induced concept change”. Which clearly has nothing to do with social problems such as poverty or racism – except that, actually, it might.
Of course it might…and that’s not even necessarily wrong (as he goes on to say). A social evil may be ameliorated but we still want to do more, and that’s a good thing. Yes, many Jim Crow laws were repealed, but there are still all those Confederate statues sending their messages about violent subordination of former slaves so let’s not quit yet ok?
But then again sometimes that finding The New Burning Injustice can get…warped.
It’s been argued that we live in an era of “concept creep”, in which concepts like “trauma” or “violence” have stretched to encompass things no previous generation would have worried about. Hence the idea that certain forms of speech are literally violence. Or that letting an eight-year-old walk to school alone is actual child neglect. Or – to pick an example from the current contentious debate over gender identity – that to question someone’s preferred explanation for their experience of gender is to deny their right to exist. Subsequent stages of the blue-dot study showed that prevalence-induced concept change affects this kind of issue, too. For instance, if you ask people to classify faces as threatening or non-threatening, then reduce the incidence of threatening ones, they’ll define more neutral faces as threatening. Ask them to classify research proposals as ethical or unethical, then reduce the unethical ones, and they’ll expand their definition of “unethical”. As co-author Dan Gilbert put it, “When problems become rare, we count more things as problems.”
Sometimes that’s a good thing, other times not so much. The expansion of human rights into the claim that one’s subjective ideas about oneself are both infallible and To Be Respected has a lot of absurd implications that bear no great resemblance to social justice.
The challenge when it comes to social problems – or your personal problems – is to ask whether the thing you’re worrying about is more like the former or the latter: a serious problem in its own right, or one you’ve essentially invented? If it feels like nothing’s improving, it might be because your brain keeps shifting the goalposts.
Exactly so.
“When problems become rare, we count more things as problems.”
I love that. It says clearly something I’ve often felt. It’s good to have the study to back it up.
But it’s not just that, is it? It isn’t just demanding respect for their own self identity, but repressing our own ideas about our identity and subsuming them into theirs.
Of course, I’ve seen another thing happening, which may be related, but I’m not sure. When we begin to solve the problems, getting rid of the most visible problems like, say “Coloreds Only” or “No Women Allowed”, people begin to think we’ve solved all the problems – at least, if they’re not in the same group. I wonder if there is a blue/purple dot experiment that could test that observation? You can’t see what doesn’t happen to you unless there is some sort of visible obviousness…
iknklast – I think maybe we don’t have and use enough categories. We’ve all got and use “bad” and “good”, but that’s going to oversimplify everything badly. The problem is that we’ve got people oversimplifying both ways:
conservative lunacy – this (e.g., a moderate gender pay gap) isn’t nearly as bad as that bad things we’ve kicked (women as chattel), so it’s got to be just fine, and
liberal lunacy – this (e.g., people being made uncomfortable by others on the basis of their gender self concept) is definitely less than ideal, so it’s as bad as that awful thing (lynching)
If people thought more along continua, or even with a few more categories (godawful, bad, meh, good, woohoo), we wouldn’t be caught conflating things with distant fellows on the same side of the point of indifferent value.
There’d still be plenty room for error and a need for substantive debate and consideration – we’d just be less subject to having it slip easily into the silly positions on the basis of false equivalences.
The weird thing is – what we’ve got at the moment is, after a period of fewer blue dots, a sudden explosion of them.
Basically, we’ve got real shit to deal with in the form of Donald Trump and the rise of various fascist movements on a global scale. If it is a simple matter of there not being enough problems, I think you’d see people stressing less over the petty shit as the major shit hits the fan.
I live in a country with real problems – over the past few days a lot of taxi drivers have gotten murdered, we’re currently debating land reform with one of the major proponents being a guy who says he’s not calling for genocide “yet” and our ruling party can’t seem to maintain enough order in its own ranks to keep its own Councillors from being murdered for their seats. Hell, following the Life Esidimeni scandal, in which a load of mental health patients died of starvation and exposure to the cold, the woman who had to resign as Gauteng health MEC was reelected to the ruling party’s provincial executive council.
And yes we still get the same petty bullshit. I suspect the problem isn’t the lack of blue dots, it is that petty bullshit serves as a pretty good distraction for the more major problems. If you’re busy getting offended at someone’s use of pronouns, you’re maybe not noticing that 8 guys own about as much as the bottom 50% of the world’s economy.
If 90% of the stuff that’s supposed to outrage you is stuff which really doesn’t matter to you if you stop and think about it for five seconds, it leaves you too exhausted to properly consider the 10% that really does make your life that little bit more miserable.
Then again there’s the issue of what really matters to us and why. Quite often when I reel at the latest Trump outrage – killing off the Endangered Species Act for instance – it occurs to me that I could just choose to ignore it, because it doesn’t affect me personally in the literal way being evicted or beaten up or imprisoned would. It’s not, in the literal sense, My Problem. But in reality it matters to me even though it doesn’t directly harm me.
Ophelia, I would have to argue that the example you cited does harm you, though not necessarily immediately or obviously. Our entire existence is predicated on the use of resources that are disappearing rapidly, so while I will willingly make an argument for protecting endangered species solely because it is the right thing to do, it is also not a trivial matter that doesn’t harm us. At this point, we don’t know with any degree of certainty all the species that are in some way or other tied to our own survival, so it is definitely a good idea for our own wellbeing to err on the side of caution.
And that’s one of the major blue dots – the failure of people to see the extreme impact damage to the life on this planet does cause, because we keep boiling the frog a little at a time. We don’t feel the heat – yet.
It’s not the existential benefit iknklast rightly brings up, but there’s also the more abstract one: a better, fuller human life is had when we can appreciate nature in greater diversity, when we can see and participate in larger, healthier ecosystems. There’s also profound satisfaction in being a part of a civilization that stewards its environment rather than grinds it away bit by bit for resources it will never renew.
It has to come behind the life-or-death concerns, but sheer human quality of life isn’t something to forget, and we need that kind of hope and aspiration in dark days.
Yes, of course, but I meant it very literally. As I said, it matters to me anyway, including for the reasons you both cite, but in the most selfish literal personal immediate sense, it doesn’t directly harm me. Of course our entire existence is predicated on the use of resources that are disappearing rapidly, but that’s going to harm the next generations a lot more than it does me. This is the problem; this is one big reason we keep destroying those resources. I often wonder why the “fuck the environment” types don’t worry more about their children and grandchildren and their children and grandchildren, but the reality is they don’t. That’s part of the picture, along with the blue dots.
[…] Benson, Ophelia. 2018. “More Blue Dots – Butterflies and Wheels.” July 24, 2018. http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2018/more-blue-dots/.< […]