Weblog
It is now the year 2007. The year in which some three thousand other Cornellians and I are expected to graduate. The year some of us have been eagerly anticipating; and others, dreading. If anything, I think I belong to the former contingent, but not because I have grown tired of Cornell. Four years is a long time. There’s a lot of stuff you’re supposed to have seen and done during your college years, and I think I’ve mostly exhausted that checklist enough to admit that my tenure as an undergraduate has expired. The pursuit of a career and the surrender of my parents’ financial support — kudos to the self-sufficient — are matters too immediate to allow for frivolous talk about feeling old and wanting to preserve one’s youth.
And laugh, all ye who knoweth the irony therein.
Checkpoint
Nonetheless, graduating from college this spring will be the leading milestone in my life thus far (even though I know it’s not going to feel like it), and that means I have to think of the single most important thing that I have learned during this intellectual pilgrimage. (Not really, but milestones in general are good excuses for making boldly declarative statements. So sue me.)
I should be clear about one thing first though, and it is that my proposed wisdom will not be born out of any instruction I have received in my major field of study. I love what I study, but computer science does not teach you anything about life. It teaches you how to think intelligently about quantitative problems, which is an invaluable skill, but it would be sort of meaningless for me to walk away from college and say that I learned how to do that. I mean, my academic learnings ought to be implicit anyway when I graduate or when I get hired or when considerable time passes and I don’t get hired.
It’s either that, or this is me demonstrating how little I know about computer science.
Whatever the case, my newfound wisdom comes to me from my studies in psychology, and it is simply this:
People do a lot of things without knowing why.
I didn’t have to say it. You knew that already, didn’t you? You think about it for a second and realize it’s one of those aphorisms you always observed in yourself or the actions of others but never really took the time to hammer out in words. But as obvious as it may be, I don’t think it’s really on peoples’ minds all the time or at least as much as it should be.
To Err is Human
Understanding that the human mind is unable to objectively judge itself and make complete sense out of its complex processes and manifold ways of making decisions doesn’t come easily. It’s a tricky thing to ponder for the reason that we spend so much time absorbed in our own consciousness that we easily convince ourselves of being fully aware of the motives behind our actions. We like to think that we know what’s going on inside our own heads, but I don’t really think that’s at all possible.
It’s easy to see that the human brain does a lot unconsciously in order to make life easier (we involuntarily recoil from pain, for example), but I’m less interested in the processes that contribute to our basic functions than I am in, say, the way we handle our interpersonal affairs. As an example, the way we feel about another person is something we try to rationalize as best we can given the amount of information available to us, and there are times when that information is clear enough to warrant a really nice, unwavering impression about the person. In general though, the world is not so lucid, and we end up having to make choices in ambiguous and conflicting circumstances.
And whether it be on the side of prudence to abstain from drawing conclusions in such cases, our brain is so conditioned to reasoning in the absence of a complete set of information that we sometimes draw conclusions anyway. We guess wrongly, which itself seems like a minor offense, but we often do it without understanding our chances of being wrong. It’s even entirely plausible that we imagine ourselves to be in fully specified, fully parameterized situations when in fact the opposite is true. Whatever the case, we mess up, and when we try to figure out why, we either come up empty, or we formulate something completely off the mark.
The subconscious just plays too much of a role in our behavior for us to be sure of what factors contribute to the decisions we make. Our emotions get the best of us, our moods inspire temperamental frames of mind, and our responses to the stimuli around us depend heavily on past conditioning and cognitive priming, which often remain discreet and beneath our awareness.
Self-Help
To interpret this knowledge as a way of saying that the human mind is not to be trusted is valid, but I think that’s just another thing we all already knew to begin with. Furthermore, it wouldn’t really make sense to live strictly by that premise, because then we just wouldn’t trust anything that anyone does. I prefer to use it as a way of keeping my own emotions and feelings in my conscious awareness, so that I can anticipate making choices that might be influenced by them. It also helps me remember that I may never have a complete understanding of the situation at hand, which can motivate a heightened sense of scrutiny or make me more likely to concede to my own propensity for error. In short, this knowledge has made me more vigilant and less assuming of other people. I realize that doesn’t sound like much of a benefit, but I have chosen to err on the side of caution.
Ultimately though, this is not as much a cautionary tale as it is an expository one. People cry and get angry for totally unexpected reasons. They find themselves annoyed by the company of someone who may exhibit completely amiable behavior. They fall in love with those who seem to be the wrong people entirely. And in all such cases, they obey an innately human drive to make sense of it all by reasoning for the sake of reasoning. I can’t pretend to be above my own instincts, but as much as I can, I try to remind myself that my best inferences are still born out of an indiscernible foundation of knowledge.
Most of them worth trusting, but still many of them the product of my own volatile, human self.