The beauty of chaos - Part 2
THE
BEAUTY OF CHAOS – PART 2
Mario
D’Couto
For those of you who have read the life of Benjamin
Franklin, he was a man who lived his life to the ‘T’. He was disciplined
because of which he became successful. Although, he had one small weakness: he
could never keep his place in order. For a man who invented the bifocals, the
lightning conductor, the flexible urinary catheter, became the first US
postmaster general, served as America’s ambassador to France and who was also
the president of Pennsylvania, he struggled with this particular quality. He
wrote in his autobiography, “My scheme of order gave me the most
trouble, my faults vexed me so much and I made so little progress in amendment
and had such frequent relapses, that I was almost ready to give up the
attempt.”
This may sound a bit weird or out of place from one of
the most determined men who ever lived, yet, it was true as one scholar wrote, “Strangers
who came to see him were amazed to behold papers of the greatest importance
scattered in the most careless way over the table and floor.” This,
definitely, may seem surprising or even shocking at prima facie but on the
contrary, his weakness was his strength. Let me explain.
On a subconscious level, Franklin, may have thought that
disorderliness was no bar to success even though he did almost everything he
set out to do. Life is never a ‘straight line’ and so while we may have our
plans in place, given the situation and circumstances we may find ourselves in,
we may have to adjust ourselves or adapt to that situation. Daniel Levitin
explains in “The Organized mind”
that our spatial memory is powerful, and it is easier to remember things when
they are anchored to a particular location. It is no wonder that there could be
a tendency for keys and cork screws to go missing because of the number of
times it is used. Tim Hartford, in his book “Messy” uses the example of online dating sites where people are
‘matched’ based on like – minded interests, hobbies or beliefs but yet, there
is something more which cannot replace it, which is the human touch.
There is a story told of Chris McKinlay, a man touted by ‘Wired’ magazine, as the ‘the math genius who hacked OkCupid’.
McKinlay was a computer science researcher in his md – thirties and was looking
for romance. So, he created a software that slurped up information about 20,000
women on OkCupid. This was no easy task as OkCupid blocks attempts to scrape
data from its website because of which McKinlay had to develop his own software
to imitate human search behaviour. He left it running around the clock in a
quiet corner of the UCLA maths department and 3 weeks later, he had the answer
to 6 million questions.
McKinlay then identified clusters of ‘types’ of women he
found promising. Armed with a deep pool of data, he was able to optimise his
own profile, answering truthfully but choosing the perfect answers to
emphasise. Finally, he unleashed software bots to attract attention to his own
profile. The result was a perfect dating storm: Chris was swamped by messages
from interested women. The only trouble was that he then needed to date them.
And so, he began to date. He managed about 55 dates, of
which, 52 flopped. Eventually, he had a date with someone whom he really liked
and who liked him back. Her name is Christine Tien Wang and it wasn’t long
before Chris and Christine had announced their engagement. His marathon dating
season had come to an end and it ended happily. What’s striking about this
whole phenomenon is that his success was not so much because of his hacking.
Neither was Christine a particularly good match according to his algorithm. In fact,
she wasn’t in the top 10,000 matches in Los Angeles. We may just say that
instead of him finding her, she found him. She searched for someone who was
local, tall and had blue eyes and there was Chris McKinlay. Believe it or not,
she was his 88th first date.
When I think of life, I sometimes think of it as an ocean
where we are called to surf over the waves and the more we are able to do it,
the more we will be able to surf through (move ahead) through life. If we don’t
surf along the waves of life, we may just get ourselves drowned. The point is
daily plans are tidy, but life is messy.
Before online dating took off, most people didn’t manage
55 first dates in their entire lives and yet somehow people developed serious
relationships and enjoyed happy marriages with no less success than they do
today. Perhaps McKinlay was being picky, given that he was suddenly faced with
potential dates than anyone could manage. But it’s hard to avoid the conclusion
that if the algorithms were any good at finding the right kind of woman,
McKinlay wouldn’t have had so many disastrous dates. In other words, if
algorithms were meant to find the ‘ideal’ soulmate, why is it that McKinlay had
to go through so many disastrous dates? Is life so mechanised that we can
pigeon- hole it? Perhaps, this is one of the biggest criticisms of psychology.
There are so many theories to the working of the mind, the brain, personality
types and so on but in my humble opinion, all these are valid in as much as it
is a tool but not an end in itself, for both, the human person and life, are a
mystery, which we can only live with even though we may not understand it
completely as the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel explains it by comparing it
with a problem as seen in the following words, “A problem is something that can
be solved while a mystery is something we have to live with.” This, of
course, is a paraphrased version. The original words are, “A mystery is a problem that
encroaches upon itself because the questioner becomes the object of the question.
Getting to Mars is a problem. Falling in love is a mystery.”
The sociologist Sherry Turkle once conducted a survey
with young people about what they felt about old – fashioned face- to-face conversation
and the response she got was traditional discussion were difficult or may be,
even frightening. The reason? One high school senior says it, “I’ll
tell you what’s wrong with conversation. It takes place in real time and you
can’t control what you’re going to say.” Here was a youngster who was
so obsessed with control that he was intimidated by the prospect of simply talking
in ‘real time’.
The truth is life takes place in real time. Life cannot be
controlled. Life itself is messy. The problem isn’t with just high school
seniors who like to fool themselves about real time conversation. From Marco
Rubio to the managers who try to tie performance down to a reductive target, we
are always trying to reach for tidy answers, only to find that they are of
little use when the questions get messy. Real creativity, excitement and humanity
lie in the messy parts of life, not the tidy ones. An appreciation of the
virtues of mess in fulfilling our human potential is something we can encourage
our children from an early age; not forgetting to maintain the boundaries (just
as a precaution).
Speaking about inculcating the appreciation of messiness
in children, Peter Gray, a psychologist at Boston College points out that an
informal game would be the best source to understand about how to handle messiness.
How? The need to compromise, to empathise and to accommodate younger, weaker and
less skilful playmates is not something that one would find in formal games who
irrespective of what the situation may be, winning or losing, are obliged to
keep going until the final whistle blows. Now while there is truth in this it
is important to look at the other side of the equation. Being in a formal situation
teaches discipline. I guess if I were to sum it up in phrase, it would be that
formal settings teach us adherence to rules and norms while informal settings teach
us to adjust, accommodate, adapt and be creative.
Jared Diamond, author of “The World Until Yesterday”, says something similar when he writes
about the hunter gatherer societies in New Guinea, who consider young children
to be autonomous individuals whose desires should not be thwarted and who are
allowed to play with dangerous objects such as sharp knives, hot pots and
fires. Though plenty of these kids grow up with physical scars, argues Diamond,
they are the opposite of being emotionally scarred. Their ‘emotional security,
self – confidence, curiosity and autonomy’ sets them apart from children brought
up by cautious Westerners.
It seems as though when we overprotect children, denying them
the opportunity to practice their own skills, learn to make wise and foolish
choices, to experience pain and loss and generally make an almighty mess, we
believe we are treating them with love – but we may also be limiting their
scope to become fully human.
Yet, in as much as the above is important, there are
something things in life that cannot be substituted, for instance, respect for
authority, morality and the ability to distinguish right from wrong. If these,
combined with the above-mentioned qualities, are implemented, we would be
forming a brighter future for the next generation.
