I can’t talk baseball, read about politics, or consume coronavirus news without being reminded of the supremacy of data. I can’t crack open a book on US economic history, ask my partner about her job, or imagine my future career without acknowledging that to measure things and analyze them with computers is modern society’s most prestigious ritual. I can’t even find a new shrink.
Last week I sat down in a new psychiatrist’s office. Surrounded by soothing music and abstract art with innocuously warm colors and rounded shapes, seated across from a bespectacled face full of kind, studied interest, my instincts from regular psychotherapy kicked in. I breathed deeply; I noted feelings in my body; I paid attention to the sensations of thoughts; I let the “interpreter” part of my cerebral cortex monologue non-linearly about my day, my job, and my amygdalae. I figured, this is the best way for a professional to understand my mind.
Back my direction came a blank stare, a polite nod, a question as to my suicidal-ness. I was unsurprised: in my experience, psychiatrists are computers. They exist to observe measurable behaviors that may hint at what is happening in my brain – how much am I sleeping, am I thinking about hurting myself or others, am I interested in things that normally interest me, etc – and match them with the average outputs of clinical drug trials. They are not interested in the immeasurable parts of mind, the unique workings of thought, feeling, and experience that might actually explain how I feel, and how to feel differently. I was disappointed; I wanted her to do better.
I’ve always wanted Nate Silver to do better, too. Back in 2011, 2012, and 2013, Nate Silver was becoming canon among political spectators. He would gather all available measurable information about an election and aggregate it into a very clean, simple scoreboard. This was the era in which devices in everyone’s pocket started throwing off rich streams of data, that Geoffrey Hinton’s team was reviving a long-dormant algorithmic technique called neural networks, and that Steph Curry started shooting almost eight threes per game: in other words, as a society we were slipping into a kind of giddiness about the power of measurement and analysis, like it was showing us the real truth of the universe, with which we could aspire to perfection. And so Nate Silver’s scoreboard was ascribed with awe-inspiring wisdom. But I was a hater.
I hated partly because, as a college senior, I was desperate to be seen as intelligent, no idea what anyone would ever pay me to do for work, and had a long history of turning blank when confronted with any math, whether it was precalc or basic stats questions or even longhand multiplication, as friends who happily watched me labor with pen and pad on my senior apartment porch in preparation for an undeserved case interview may recall.
But I hated also because, as a political obsessive, popular devotion to Nate’s scoreboard offended my personal devotion to my lovely Where’s Waldo swamp map of randomness that was politics and campaigns: full of haywire gauges of jealousy and enthusiasm and apathy, torn up by news thunderbolts and economic earthquakes. In which each candidate’s smile, laugh, and tone of confidence or violence or reflection will or will not gently interweave with voters’ desperate need to be participating in a compelling story. Unique features of individuals and unprecedented events can’t be transformed into numbers, and can’t be recombined by a computer into a scoreboard. They can only be observed by a patient and curious human brain, and interpreted by its unknowable and emergent blend of conscious and subconscious experience and intuition. Belief in Nate crossed against my belief in the beauty and power of examining the unmeasurable.
Likewise: while psychiatry is not useless (if you need help, please seek it!), so far its “let the computers figure it out” approach lacks the dimensions-adding, reality unspooling power of a patient psychologist who wants to figure out how your mind is different from all the others. The power to reach inside, twist the deeper muscle and sinews, unearth from many feet down forgotten seams of feeling, turn things over on their sides, and make stars align.
I just read about the history of readymade clothes and department stores and interchangeable parts: all major aspects of the de-blurring of the late 19th-century America into the familiar world of consumption we were born into. And all of it relied on the new use of data and statistics. Today’s tools are just continuing what could be modernity’s defining process.
But as we continue to revel in having solved baseball and dating; and as the moneyed knowledge class continues to use the word “intelligence” to describe statistical calculation machines, and remains collectively dogged about what can be figured out with data, and how much money can be made: All the more, I wonder, what other parts of earth can be improved, what more can be accomplished, by exploring the immeasurable, by sitting quietly in our own and each other’s teeming inner worlds.