Jun 02, 2008

Morality and the Geek

When I was young enough to go out trick-or-treating, the best part of the evening for me was coming home and plunking myself down on the living room floor with my sister, overturning our orange, pumpkin-shaped buckets filled with the night’s haul, and making little piles of every kind of catch. It wasn’t so much about taking data and statistics – it was really the fun of categorizing and grouping, thinking about how long I could stay sweet on Three Musketeers or Twix or whatever favorite (Three Musketeers is my favorite, even if it’s not so different from other candy bars).

People might be quick to point out that I am an MIT graduate student engaged in scientific research, and it stands to reason that I should be more concerned with counting the candy than eating it. This kind of a statement, of course, is really the same thing as putting a Three Musketeers bar in its proper pile. All those number crunchers, right? All the same.

It is the greatest strength, and occasionally a powerful weakness, of the human mind that it is incorrigibly obsessed with finding patterns, even where they don’t exist. The aspects of science that we find most amazing (and useful) are those which show similarities of behavior between widely disparate things, like amoebas and galaxies or a traffic jam and a river or hits at an internet site and radiation events out of thorium. And so practical, this pattern identification: throw the ball up, it comes down; fall on your face, it hurts; eat a burrito, feel sated. Life without patterns is – well – inhuman.

But can we have too much of a good thing? Well, there are certainly times we see patterns where there aren’t any. Sports fans (including many here at MIT) will swear by the “streak” – “this batter’s been hot lately”, “this guy/girl has been hitting all the free throws”, and so forth. I once read an article in a philosophy class at RPI on the topic of made basketball shots and the hot hand. I’m pretty sure it was this one by Thomas Gilovich:

Gilovich Article

It turns out that the “streaks” of consecutively-made field goals, free throws, and controlled shots were completely consistent with normal fluctuations in a binomial distribution – that is, the thrower wasn’t any more likely to make the twenty-third free throw in a row than to come off a “slump” of thirty straight misses.

A more basic example: lots of people feel like, after flipping a coin and getting twenty heads in a row, the next flip is more likely to be tails. It’s not – the coin has no memory of whether it landed heads last or tails. It is rare to get twenty heads in a row (one try in about a million, on average), but the probability of getting twenty-one heads in a row is the same as getting twenty heads followed by one tails.

And why have I brought this up? Well, it’s really because I heard a radio broadcast on NPR (a station and idea which I love deeply) which said something to the effect of “Dr. X is a scientist and [therefore] sees the world through equations.” And tonight, I heard a radio broadcast of a (very entertaining) play called “Camping with Harry and Tom” by Mark St. Germain, a fictionalization of a real camping trip between Harold Ford, Thomas Edison, and President Warren G. Harding. Edison’s character in the story is great, and also follows the usual stereotypes for the scientifically-inclined (accurately or not, I have no idea). And from these and many other experiences, I get the sense that people, or at least listeners of my favorite radio station, tend to lump those engaged in my profession or related ones into a common group.

My (paranoid?) theory is that people believe in a kind of “geek” class of humanity, revered for its insight, braininess, and (restricted) creativity. Also thought to have – mmm – less-functional interpersonal skills. And somehow less compassion for fellow human beings. Indeed, in an interview with the author, St. Germain, of the afore-mentioned play, the interviewer led the author to describe how the play juxtaposes the “head” (Edison), “heart” (Harding), and “guts” (Ford). Is this a kind of “geek racism”?

Well, I wouldn’t resent being thought of as a geek – first of all, if it means I get to be here in grad school and doing the things I’m doing, then I know I’m on the right track. Plus there are those movies about nerds getting their revenge which I needn’t discuss further. But still, I guess I don’t like people thinking of me as having less “heart” than the average person because I’m a student of science. Interpersonal skills on the fritz from time to time, okay, maybe. But I think that the average grad student in technology or math or science is fundamentally just as much a bleeding-heart idealist as his or her counterpart in the humanities – maybe even more so. I’d say the overwhelming majority of my peers and colleagues really are motivated by the belief that their work may benefit the whole of humanity in real and immediate and far-reaching ways. I know I am motivated by this belief.

And as for this whole idea of grouping people into categories, I’ll close with rumination on the words of a good friend of mine named Peter (a fellow grad of ECSE at RPI). He said to me once, “You have to judge the individual.” I know he wasn’t the first to say it, but he’s such a nice kid that I like to associate the concept with him – it helps me to live by it. Maybe there’s some statistical validity behind the geek stereotype (where none seems to exist for the “hot hand” in basketball). But bottom line is it’s a real injustice to make assumptions about the character of an individual because he or she is of a certain race or ethnicity, or even, yes, profession. So words to live by from Peter to the world. You read it here on T Blog!

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