Imitation of Life: On A Devotion to Subjective Science

My name is Freducate, and I crave subjectivity. I went to graduate school in Psychology, a field which arguably may or may not exist in twenty-five years (what with neuroscience and all). I work in market research, a field which is flawed by the very nature of the data it collects - there's this thing called "response bias", and have you ever listened to the kind of people who will pick up the phone and complete a 15-minute survey on their recent auto insurance claim -- without monetary reward? Yeah, these people are not normal per se, and by extension the data we collect as market researchers is not normal, either.

Don't get me wrong. Sometimes I crave objectivity. During most of the time I was an undergraduate in college, I dealt almost entirely in objectivity. I studied Biology and took courses in Chemistry, Physics, and Calculus. I did really well in almost all of these subjects, grade-wise. Now typically, people who do really well at these subjects in college subsequently focus every ounce of their ambition toward a highly-objective, fact-based, financially lucrative career. Think medicine or engineering.

For some set of reasons I still don't completely understand, I decided at some point that I didn't want to deal in objectivity anymore. (*ASIDE: Objective-science people look down at subjective-science people, for reasons I delve into later in this blog post. For now, just realize that they're right to look down at subjective-science people, but they're using the wrong metric. Anyway, whenever I tell people my "objective-science statistics" -- the grades, the courses, and the test scores I accumulated in college -- and about how I'm no longer an objective-science person, I'm always asked Why. This is the Why, or my best approximation of the Why.)

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What is a good person? What is a bad person? What is the difference?

Like almost everyone, I like to think that I am a good person. We all do this because it helps us sleep at night. To be fair, I have certainly done some bad things in my life, and -- like some of you -- I've done one or two things in my life that (a) I'm lucky I never got caught doing and (b) will require a long time to pay off my karmic debt to society. But in general, I am a good person. I pay my taxes and my bills, I don't speed obsessively, I'm good to my friends and I try to be as generous as possible.

But clearly there are people out there who are bad people. Charles Manson, who was referenced in a recent Damaged, Inc., blog post, was unquestionably a bad person. Michael Jackson, in a very ambiguous way, was also (probably) a very bad person. We agree on these things based on a social consensus, and we can argue about who to lump into which category, and - in general - the person who does the best job of arguing their point of view "wins" in the sense that other sensible individuals are convinced to agree with them.

The third question I posed - What's the difference? - used to fascinate me, and questions like these are what draw people to subjective-science disciplines. I'm going to digress here for a paragraph or four and talk about what (I think) is the difference between objective-science people and subjective-science people, and why O-S people think S-S people are stupid.

Objective-science people like to solve problems. Given a set of tools, equations, or facts, the goal is always to go from Point A to Point B. The world needs this kind of person, and I'm glad that they exist. But goal-directed, deductive reasoning is not the way to solve a subjective-science type problem. An independent point that I'd like to bring in at this point is that it's very easy to assume that very smart people are good deductive reasoners and vice versa by tautology. I do it all the time -- you can't do math? Fucking moron. See? It's easy. Because of these two facts, it's easy to assume that subjective-science people are stupid.

Subjective-science people are not stupid. (*ASIDE: Except for sociologists, who are stupid.)

Strangely enough, subjective-science people have developed a series of tests designed to deduce a person's ability. You know a few of them because you've taken them: the IQ test, the SAT, the GRE, LSAT, MCAT, and GMAT. In taking these tests, a nervous person walks into a room, is asked hundreds of abstract questions with little external validity, a score is computed and is later used to assess that person's general/applied intellectual prowess compared to a group of peers.

By many of these metrics, objective-science people are smarter than subjective-science people. (Math Ph.D. students score 300 pts. higher on the GRE, for instance, than Psychology Ph.D. students.) But what if the metric is measuring something completely unrelated to the type of problem-solving involved in determining who's a good person and who's a bad person?

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Questions like the above are what drew me into subjective science. I was very good at memorizing nucleophilic substitution reactions (both SN1 and SN2), and I could work my way through a partial derivative reasonably well. But I needed something more -- I needed to make sense out of difficult things. Things that required context to understand.

I was 21 then, and at the risk of sounding like one of those 25-year-olds who think that Four Years Makes a Huge Fucking Difference ... well, Four Years Makes a Huge Fucking Difference. I don't care about the difference between a good person and a bad person any more. I miss objectivity.

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When Michael Jackson died, I was surprised at the overwhelmingly positive nature of the coverage. It was clear to me that he engaged in relationships with young boys that were, at the very least, strongly discouraged by 20th-century American society. (*ASIDE: Whether or not they were sexual is anybody's guess. They were certainly weird relationships, but then again, the man seemed incapable of having sex with anything - even his wives.)

Regardless, most people forgot about the bad things that Jackson almost certainly did and instead focused on the incredible impact he made on popular music. Was this a good thing? Was this a bad thing?

I don't care. It was what it was, and it was certainly consistent with human nature. We want to believe that we are good; we want to believe that others are good. In reality, good and bad do not exist. They are subjective constructions, created by society. You know, the kind of thing moron sociologists like to study.

Stay classy out there.