on not being a baby
blooming buzzing confusion and its discontents
Trying to get back to a normal schedule after a couple of weeks on the road at two extremely fun conferences (as always, I apologise to readers when I do this, while reminding them that it’s basically an investment in the future as it very much reduces the chances of me running out of ideas!). While dropping off to sleep on the plane back home, a phrase popped into my mind which has proved extremely difficult to shift, and so I’m passing it on ...
“The only people who try to pay attention to every single bit of information that they have all the time, are babies”.
As a mid-morning DJ might say, please don’t write in. I adapted it from William James and don’t know if it is still regarded as true as a statement about child development. But I will defend the underlying point even if it isn’t. Although lots of people go on about the information that gets left out of measuring systems (including me! A lot of the time! Even in posts I regard as centrally important!), it’s important to remember that deciding what you’re going to ignore is a very important part of thinking like a grown up.
Of course, a mathematician might say that “deciding what you’re going to ignore” is the same thing as “deciding what to pay attention to”, which is one of those true-but-annoying things that mathematicians say. It is uncomfortable to admit that there are things in the world which are important, but which you’re not going to pay any attention to. It reminds us of our own limited capability, which in turn reminds us of our mortality, which in turn reminds us that one of the things we can choose to ignore is the person who’s making us uncomfortable by saying all these annoying things. Something like this, I think, is at the heart of what annoys and confuses people about the POSIWID Principle. A system chooses what it’s going to be when it chooses what information is going to have a causal role in its decision making; this is bad enough, but it’s intolerable to be reminded by some passing smartass that the information which doesn’t have any such causal role is also part of the creation of systemic identity.
And it has to be so. One way in which I might have (but didn’t) express the whole problem that I wrote a book about is that the connective tissue of society is the shared understanding that all the stuff we are ignoring is going to be taken care of by somebody else. When that starts to go, everything goes.
Useful to consider the difference between the things we pass off to other people so we can ignore them and the things we pretend to pass off to other people so we can collectively ignore. Or to put it another way, how distribution of responsibility can transform into an accountability sink.
Think the digital/data revolution has a weird distorting effect on this phenomenon. We now truly have the Borges library at our fingertips, in organisations (most of whom are data rich and insight poor) and in our personal lives. The issue being that the (effectively) infinite pool of information requires seemingly infinite navigation to discern the signal from the noise.
We end up feeling simultaneously like everything we need is accessible, while also constantly doubting if we picked the truthful edition or if it’s the one with the facts all reversed (to butcher the Borges story).