Make abstraction great again

Back from a hiatus - spurred into action by the US election no less

It’s been a while

My bad. I know my absence has been keenly felt. There are reasons aplenty, but I’ll leave those for another post (mainly wrestling with the ever present demons of productivity). But if anything was to wake me up from my extended slumber, of course it would be the American drama that has gripped eyeballs of the globe in rapt attention. My lukewarm take as follows.

The US election and abstraction

Dominic Sandbrook said something very clever during The Rest Is Politics live coverage of the US election (not usually my bag, but I would crawl over cut glass to hear the pronouncements of the eminent historian). On the election of Donald Trump he said:

2016 was not an aberration. All those people who said at the time: “This is not America”... This is America. 

Whenever the rug is pulled out from under our collective understanding, a period of disruption ensues. In politics, there are recriminations and diagnoses, hopefully leading to some newly enlightened way of appeasing the electorate. In the realms of technology and science, more often than not, great leaps in scientific understanding abound, leading to ever extraordinary enhancements to the human experience. 

Our understanding, to use a Kamala-ism is quite suddenly ‘unburdened by what has been’.

Having the right abstraction to hand helps us cross these canyons of (mis)understanding. As a software engineer and former lawyer, I expect that I am more sensitive to the utility of a good abstraction than most. An abstraction being the human made map we throw over inherently chaotic reality, boiling down its complexity to something digestible and salient.

For the politicos and media class in America (and across the Western world), the inexorable edges of reality have torn through their maps of understanding (see Borges below). 

I mention abstraction because, unlike plain understanding, that sort of personal and comforting intuition that one builds up about chaotic reality, abstraction is the construction and the architecture, that gets us there. Wrong abstractions can lead us to all sorts of bother. 

Galen’s medical theories, expounded in On Hippocrates' The Nature of Man in 400 BC or so, proved particularly sticky. The idea that the body’s health depends on the balance of four bodily fluids (blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile) hung around for well into the seventeenth century, and buttressed all sorts of, to put it lightly, deeply suboptimal medical interventions. Drilling holes into skulls. Copious blood letting. Ingesting toxic potions.  

It seems to me, that once an abstraction takes hold, it can persist for a very long time. Theories build upon theories; authorities sprout up which confirm such theories; opposing phenomena are explained away and supporting evidence is heaped up. Yet all the while, the entire edifice is labouring under misapprehension.   

There needs a Damascene moment of realisation, as happened with St. Paul: immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales: and he received sight forthwith. 

I love that quote. 

Back to the US election coverage and another observation made by Sandbrook, but then taken up by the rest of the panel: 

I think the tendency that the Democrats have, is to divide people up into specific groups … to parcel people up into specific groups, and assume that they have a lock on groups. 

Talk about groups always gets my antennae up. In the US election such talk is ubiquitous from one end of the political spectrum: Black. White. Urban. Rural. Hispanic. Asian. Men Women. On and on it goes. 

Being of an ethnic persuasion myself (second generation Sikh, whose family arrived in the UK from Uganda in the 1970s), I hate this group speak. There is nothing more annoying than being talked about by proxy: BAME. Person of Colour. Ethnic Minority.  

This identitarian discourse is itself a good example of poor abstraction, a type of conception that reduces complexity to such an extent so as to be essentially meaningless. These dissections have been found wanting yet again, flattening out all other salient markers which could genuinely inscribe intention, and give us signal.  

The reason I harken back to choices of abstraction is because I think this is where constructive discourse lies. Another Sandbrook statement:

I think Democrats talk a lot about MAGA voters, but they don’t talk to them. 

Across various social media feeds post election I have seen plenty of living and breathing examples of this, diatribes calling Trump voters everything under the sun. But this is nothing more than a scream into the abyss. An action which is more about alleviating psychological pain, rather than enquiry. 

I hope that we can move beyond this, because the interesting and productive conversation happens at an abstraction level. It poses the questions: How am I thinking about this? What conceptions am I using to understand this? It views disagreement, even violent disagreement, as the expression of misaligned mental models, and takes us away from the realm of the personal.  At the abstraction level, you can ponder. You can define. You can update assumptions. You can trace back to the root source of disagreement, and maybe, just maybe, further the collective understanding.  

The Rest Is Politics - US Election Livestream

On Exactitude in Science

Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley.

…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography. —Suarez Miranda,Viajes devarones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658