Alex Ratcliffe-Lee

Feb. 25, 2010 at 6:32pm with 64 notes

Reblogged from mills

mills:

Clouds and clocks. (Image from a beautiful photoset by April Cakes).
My friend Tragos, in response to another of countless essays on this or that “generation,” noted why he feels that these periodic commentaries on Xers, Yers, and Millennials fascinate us despite their utter meaninglessness. Whatever their wittiness, their sardonic and seemingly-knowing nods to cultural phenomena we love to be reminded of, they are statistically indefensible: sweeping, Thomas-Friedman-esque generalizations about tens or hundreds of millions of individuals whose ages alone are no more essential to their nature than their ethnicity, class, religiosity, aptitudes, experiences, place of origin, sex, or genetics.
As I asked Tragos: when we cannot even cleanly define the span of generations, especially when we complicate them by comparing, say, a 1980 baby in NYC to one in Anchorage, one rich, one poor, etc., how can we possibly consider it meaningful when some indolent author-journalist sallies forth with a few pointed remarks about media, technology, and other comparably superficial signifiers? Such remarks are as useful as comments at your neighborhood bar concerning “women” or “whites.”
And yet! There does seem to be something more than the egoistic pleasure of comparing and contrasting ourselves superficially with others -do I watch more or less TV, or do I only watch shows on the Internet?- to generational investigations, if not concretely then in literature. Nothing is more novelistic than the embodiment of a time; it is a critical cliche -true and dull- that the best novels seem to “capture the zeitgeist.”
To me, this seems a classic illustration of the utility of impressionism: art behaves unscientifically, performs operations on data sets that cannot be methodologically justified, and achieves a fidelity to reality that is as useful to comprehending a time, a place, a people, as any sociological survey. One cannot scientifically defend un-researched assertions about millions, but one reads a single novel and is acquainted, so far as one can be, with an era long past.
(If such articles on generations -“Are Millennials More Likely to Have Successful Marriages?”- were considered as impressionistic sketches and not journalism, I’d not consider them nearly so ridiculous).
What has this to do with clouds and clocks? It reminds me -as does much- of the problems of aggregation, of individuation, of how one accurately renders on a social scale a reality composed of individual actors. It is always a reduction to do so, always a kind of falsehood, yet it is necessary, too, and has its own sort of truth. That truths change with scale is unsettling, and reminds me of Karl Popper’s distinction between clouds and clocks, and of how physical indeterminacy can nevertheless yield predictable systems.
These remarks by Erwin Schrödinger are illustrative as well; you’re no doubt familiar with the process of diffusion, but it is notable that for individual molecules, there’s really no such thing:
Imagine a vessel filled with a fluid, say water, with a small amount of some coloured substance dissolved in it… If you leave this system alone a very slow process of ‘diffusion’ sets in, the [substance] spreading from…place of higher concentration towards the places of lower concentration, until it is equally distributed through the water.
The remarkable thing about this rather simple and apparently not particularly interesting process is that it is in no way due, as one might think, to any tendency or force driving the… molecules away from the crowded region to the less crowded one… Nothing of the sort happens… Every one of them behaves quite independently of all the others, which it very seldom meets. Every one of them, whether in a crowded region or in an empty one, suffers the same fate of being continually knocked about by the impacts of the water molecules and thereby gradually moving on in an unpredictable direction –sometimes towards the higher, sometimes towards the lower concentrations, sometimes obliquely.
That this random walk of the molecules, the same for all of them, should yet produce a regular flow towards the smaller concentration and ultimately make for uniformity of distribution, is at first sight perplexing –but only at first sight.
Diffusion -a process essential biology in particular- works because of the aggregated behavior of individual elements that themselves do not obey the pattern-rules of the aggregate. Like an individual who, freely and of his own agency makes unpredictable choices and reacts intellectually and emotionally to his world, a single molecule cannot be relied upon to exemplify the “mass” behavior of diffusion. Yet, in total, the system of molecules does, just as many millions of individuals do seem somehow to sum into a society describable, in principle and to a degree in fact, by an observer.
I will continue to insist that society is better described by a novelist than a scientist, for the time being, simply because I am an individual, a molecule, and it remains more interesting to me what Tragos does -even as he typifies and violates the rules of his “generation”- than whether we millions move this way or that in our random shuffling.

Thank you for this. Comparing what I’ve read to what I experience and see in my life I realize that there is nothing important or useful or accurate about any of those general statistics, yet for a split second I found myself sorting through them looking for something that I might be able to fit into. It’s a slippery slope and I have to keep reminding myself about how much useless shit is out there.
Yes, those pictures of clouds are baller, but also, how does one capture them?

Clouds and clocks. (Image from a beautiful photoset by April Cakes).

My friend Tragos, in response to another of countless essays on this or that “generation,” noted why he feels that these periodic commentaries on Xers, Yers, and Millennials fascinate us despite their utter meaninglessness. Whatever their wittiness, their sardonic and seemingly-knowing nods to cultural phenomena we love to be reminded of, they are statistically indefensible: sweeping, Thomas-Friedman-esque generalizations about tens or hundreds of millions of individuals whose ages alone are no more essential to their nature than their ethnicity, class, religiosity, aptitudes, experiences, place of origin, sex, or genetics.

As I asked Tragos: when we cannot even cleanly define the span of generations, especially when we complicate them by comparing, say, a 1980 baby in NYC to one in Anchorage, one rich, one poor, etc., how can we possibly consider it meaningful when some indolent author-journalist sallies forth with a few pointed remarks about media, technology, and other comparably superficial signifiers? Such remarks are as useful as comments at your neighborhood bar concerning “women” or “whites.”

And yet! There does seem to be something more than the egoistic pleasure of comparing and contrasting ourselves superficially with others -do I watch more or less TV, or do I only watch shows on the Internet?- to generational investigations, if not concretely then in literature. Nothing is more novelistic than the embodiment of a time; it is a critical cliche -true and dull- that the best novels seem to “capture the zeitgeist.”

To me, this seems a classic illustration of the utility of impressionism: art behaves unscientifically, performs operations on data sets that cannot be methodologically justified, and achieves a fidelity to reality that is as useful to comprehending a time, a place, a people, as any sociological survey. One cannot scientifically defend un-researched assertions about millions, but one reads a single novel and is acquainted, so far as one can be, with an era long past.

(If such articles on generations -“Are Millennials More Likely to Have Successful Marriages?”- were considered as impressionistic sketches and not journalism, I’d not consider them nearly so ridiculous).

What has this to do with clouds and clocks? It reminds me -as does much- of the problems of aggregation, of individuation, of how one accurately renders on a social scale a reality composed of individual actors. It is always a reduction to do so, always a kind of falsehood, yet it is necessary, too, and has its own sort of truth. That truths change with scale is unsettling, and reminds me of Karl Popper’s distinction between clouds and clocks, and of how physical indeterminacy can nevertheless yield predictable systems.

These remarks by Erwin Schrödinger are illustrative as well; you’re no doubt familiar with the process of diffusion, but it is notable that for individual molecules, there’s really no such thing:

Imagine a vessel filled with a fluid, say water, with a small amount of some coloured substance dissolved in it… If you leave this system alone a very slow process of ‘diffusion’ sets in, the [substance] spreading from…place of higher concentration towards the places of lower concentration, until it is equally distributed through the water.

The remarkable thing about this rather simple and apparently not particularly interesting process is that it is in no way due, as one might think, to any tendency or force driving the… molecules away from the crowded region to the less crowded one… Nothing of the sort happens… Every one of them behaves quite independently of all the others, which it very seldom meets. Every one of them, whether in a crowded region or in an empty one, suffers the same fate of being continually knocked about by the impacts of the water molecules and thereby gradually moving on in an unpredictable direction –sometimes towards the higher, sometimes towards the lower concentrations, sometimes obliquely.

That this random walk of the molecules, the same for all of them, should yet produce a regular flow towards the smaller concentration and ultimately make for uniformity of distribution, is at first sight perplexing –but only at first sight.

Diffusion -a process essential biology in particular- works because of the aggregated behavior of individual elements that themselves do not obey the pattern-rules of the aggregate. Like an individual who, freely and of his own agency makes unpredictable choices and reacts intellectually and emotionally to his world, a single molecule cannot be relied upon to exemplify the “mass” behavior of diffusion. Yet, in total, the system of molecules does, just as many millions of individuals do seem somehow to sum into a society describable, in principle and to a degree in fact, by an observer.

I will continue to insist that society is better described by a novelist than a scientist, for the time being, simply because I am an individual, a molecule, and it remains more interesting to me what Tragos does -even as he typifies and violates the rules of his “generation”- than whether we millions move this way or that in our random shuffling.

Thank you for this. Comparing what I’ve read to what I experience and see in my life I realize that there is nothing important or useful or accurate about any of those general statistics, yet for a split second I found myself sorting through them looking for something that I might be able to fit into. It’s a slippery slope and I have to keep reminding myself about how much useless shit is out there.

Yes, those pictures of clouds are baller, but also, how does one capture them?