Think Complexly About Complex Things
Or, the dangers of not thinking about complex thing with nuance and subtlety
👋 Hey there! My name is Abhishek. Welcome to a new edition of The Sunday Wisdom! This is the best way to learn new things with the least amount of effort.
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Q: What is the best way to think about complex subjects?
The shoebill is a prehistoric looking bird. It has a characteristically large beak. In the BBC Earth show Africa, David Attenborough narrates the story of a shoebill with two chicks — who is struggling to catch fish to feed its chicks.
The weight of the large beak makes the chicks unable to fly when they are young. They are completely dependent on their mother for food and water for 3–4 weeks after birth.
When the mother returns, the older chick constantly pesters her to get water for it. The younger chick on the other hand isn’t doing so well. It’s weak and wobbly. It’s looking frail.
After the mother leaves, the older chick shows its darker side. It attacks the younger chick with its beak, peeling of skin, and drawing blood. It knows what has to be done to get all the food and water for itself.
As the mother returns with water, she sees what has happened. She realises what the older chick has done. While the weakling walks to her mother to seek comfort, it appears that the mother has made her choice. She ignores it. Only her first born will get water. Only the stronger would survive.
Today, let’s talk about complex subjects. More precisely, how to think about complex subjects. Let’s also try to understand that anything that can be explained or understood simplistically may not always give the full picture.
Let’s take human beings for example. We are complex subjects. Unlike us, it’s easy to study birds and animals. If you were interested in the biology of how migrating birds navigate, or in the mating reflex that occurs in female hamsters when they are ovulating, or the evil side of shoebill chicks, it would be a fairly easy task.
But unlike the “obviousness” of animal behaviour, human behaviour is a mess. It’s a subject that involves brain chemistry, hormones, sensory cues, prenatal environment, early experience, genes, both biological and cultural evolution, and ecological pressures, among other things. Even though some of these factors are present in animals, they are quite simplistic and almost always predictive.
It’s a capital mistake to treat human behaviour simplistically. It’s a complex subject. Simplistic thinking and explanation can create serious problems.
But, before getting into that, let’s try to understand how we generally handle complex subjects.
We tend to use a certain cognitive strategy when dealing with complex and multifaceted phenomena. We break down separate facets into categories — into buckets of explanation.
In his book, Behave, Robert Sapolsky explains this with a great example. Suppose there’s a rooster standing next to you, and there’s a chicken across the street. The rooster gives a sexual gesture that is hot by chicken standards, and she promptly runs over to mate with him. And thus we have a key behavioural question — why did the chicken cross the road?
If you’re a psychoneuroendocrinologist, your answer would be, “Because circulating oestrogen levels in that chicken worked in a certain part of her brain to make her responsive to this male signalling.”
If you’re a bioengineer, the answer would be, “Because the long bone in the leg of the chicken forms a fulcrum for her pelvis, allowing her to move forward rapidly.”
If you’re an evolutionary biologist, you’d say, “Because over the course of millions of years, chickens that responded to such gestures at a time that they were fertile left more copies of their genes, and thus this is now an innate behaviour in chickens,” and so on, thinking in categories, in differing scientific disciplines of explanation.
You should avoid categorical thinking. Putting facts into nice cleanly demarcated buckets of explanation has its advantages. It can help you remember facts better. But at the same time, it can also wreak havoc on your ability to think about those facts. This is because the boundaries between different categories are often arbitrary. They are created by us, for our convenience. They aren’t real.
Once some arbitrary boundary exists, you forget that it is arbitrary and get way too impressed with its importance instead. As a result, you have trouble seeing how similar or different two things are — and this is a problem.
If you pay lots of attention to where boundaries are, you pay less attention to the complete picture. You start looking at it from only one perspective. This is reductive thinking. This is detrimental for a nuanced decision maker.
So, how do you see the complete picture?
Let’s do a thought experiment. Suppose, a behaviour has just occurred. The first question should be, why did it happen? Your first category of explanation might be a neurobiological one. What went on in that person’s brain a second before the behaviour happened?
Now pull out to a slightly larger field of vision, your next category of explanation, what happened a little earlier in time? What sight, sound, or smell in the previous seconds to minutes triggered the nervous system to produce that behaviour?
On to the next explanatory category. What hormones acted hours to days earlier to change how responsive that individual was to the sensory stimuli that trigger the nervous system to produce the behaviour?
By now you’ve increased your field of vision to be thinking about neurobiology and the sensory world of the environment and short-term endocrinology in trying to explain why a behaviour has occurred.
You don’t stop there. You just keep expanding. Your next question might be, what features of the environment in the prior weeks to years changed the structure and function of that person’s brain and thus changed how it responded to those hormones and environmental stimuli?
Then you go further back to the childhood of the individual — their foetal environment, then their genetic makeup. And then you increase the view to encompass factors larger than that one individual — how has culture shaped the behaviour of people living in that individual’s group? What ecological factors helped shape that culture? — You go on expanding, considering events umpteen millennia ago and the evolution of that behaviour.
Thus, instead of trying to explain all of “behaviour” with a single discipline or a simplistic explanation, you should think about a bunch of disciplinary buckets that are intertwined.
This way you are able to think and reason in a multifaceted way. Because when you think about complex things this way, you also integrate your knowledge of other disciplines into it.
For example, if you say, “The behaviour occurred because of the release of neurochemical Y in the brain,” you are also saying, “The behaviour occurred because the heavy secretion of hormone X this morning increased the levels of neurochemical Y.” And you’re also saying, “The behaviour occurred because the environment in which that person was raised made her brain more likely to release neurochemical Y in response to certain types of stimuli.” And you’re also saying, “. . . because of the gene that codes for the particular version of neurochemical Y.”
And if you’ve so much as whispered the word “gene,” you’re also saying, “. . . and because of the millennia of factors that shaped the evolution of that particular gene.” And so on.
There are no longer different disciplinary buckets. Instead, each one becomes the end product of all the biological influences that came before it and will influence all the factors that follow it. This paints a really big picture.
A “neurobiological” or “genetic” or “developmental” explanation for a behaviour is just shorthand, an expository convenience for temporarily approaching the whole multifactorial arc from a particular perspective.
It is impossible to conclude that a behaviour is caused by a gene, a hormone, a childhood trauma, because the second you invoke one type of explanation, you are de facto invoking them all. No buckets.
If you don’t do that, if you remain stuck with bucketed thinking — bad things happen. Take the following quote for example:
Give me a dozen healthy infants, well formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and yes, even beggar-man thief, regardless of his talents, pen“chants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.
This was John Watson, the founder of “behaviourism”, around 1925. Behaviourism believes that human behaviour is completely malleable — that it can be shaped into anything in the right environment. This isn’t true.
We are not all born the same and we don’t have the same potential — regardless of how we are trained.
But Watson was pathologically caught inside a bucket having to do with the environmental influences on development.
Another example:
Normal psychic life depends upon the good functioning of brain synapses, and mental disorders appear as a result of synaptic derangements. . . . It is necessary to alter these synaptic adjustments and change the paths chosen by the impulses in their constant passage so as to modify the corresponding ideas and force thought into different channels.
These were the words of the Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz, around the time he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1949 for his development of frontal leucotomies.
Here was an individual pathologically stuck in a bucket having to do with a crude version of the nervous system. Just tweak those microscopic synapses with a big ol’ ice pick to change behaviour.
If it doesn’t already sound familiar, leucotomy is the predecessor to “prefrontal lobotomy”.
We aren’t done yet. Here’s another one.
The immensely high reproduction rate in the moral imbecile has long been established. . . . Socially inferior human material is enabled . . . to penetrate and finally to annihilate the healthy nation. The selection for toughness, heroism, social utility . . . must be accomplished by some human institution if mankind, in default of selective factors, is not to be ruined by domestication-induced degeneracy. The racial idea as the basis of our state has already accomplished much in this respect. We must—and should—rely on the healthy feelings of our Best and charge them . . . with the extermination of elements of the population loaded with dregs.
This was Konrad Lorenz, animal behaviourist, Nobel laureate, cofounder of the field of ethology, regular on nature TV programs, and a rabid Nazi propagandist.
Lorenz joined the Nazi Party the instant Austrians were eligible, and joined the party’s Office of Race Policy, working to “psychologically screen” Poles of mixed Polish/German parentage, helping to determine which were sufficiently Germanised to be spared death.
Here was a man pathologically mired in an imaginary bucket related to gross misinterpretations of what genes do.
These were not random blokes. These were among the most influential scientists. Yet all of them were so flawed in their thinking.
In their reductive thinking, they destroyed the brains of people against their will. They shaped who we educate, how we educate, what social ills are fixable and when we shouldn’t bother.
They also helped implement final solutions for problems that didn’t exist.
Human behaviour is only one example. You should never think simplistically about complex subjects. Ever! Be it business, finance, society, culture, history, etc.
You need to take lots of angles into account. You may focus on a narrow subject at a time, but at the same time you should know that their particular categorical bucket isn’t the whole story.
You should think complexly about complex things.
Timeless Insight
Rather than thinking what makes a good life, think about what would ensure misery, and simply avoid them.
In every business deal and personal decisions, identify all the possible things that can go wrong or backfire, and then make sure they don’t happen.
Rather than trying to think why something would work, think of why it would fail instead.
When you look at a problem backward, all sorts of possibilities emerge.
What I’m Reading
The difference between predictions and outcomes is the key to understanding a strange property of learning: if you’re predicting perfectly, your brain doesn’t need to change further… Changes in the brain happen only when there’s a difference between what was expected and what actually happens.
— David Eagleman, Livewired
Tiny Thought
It’s easier to do outside the box than think outside the box.
Before You Go…
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I’ll see you next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋