Building Models is Great, As Long As Can Tear Them Down
Part One of Two
A model is merely the application of a theory, which itself is an organized explanation of an idea.
You don't need to wrap your head around all that any more than you need to wrap your head around the WNBA participation guidelines. Just memorize this formula: Ideas + Theories + Explanations + Models = Bullshit.
No, that's not an exaggeration. An exaggeration is your high school Freshman Seminar teacher telling you that a few cans of Schlitz so inexorably lead to Schnapps, vodka by anal infusion, cocaine, the gutter, and miserable poverty that you might as well go to the boys' restroom now and monetize a glory hole.
My formula, OTOH, is no exaggeration, as long as we take the joyless effort to define "bullshit."
"Bullshit" here means unreal reality.
Eric Scheske
Unicorns are bullshit. They're real because we know about them and could easily identify one if it came ambling in front of our car while we're driving 65 mph and are now freaking out because the Canadian shaman gave us too much. But it's unreal because, well, unicorns don't exist and never have.
Unicorns and models are bullshit, but we need models: they mold our day and shape our lives. So our left hemisphere cranks them out at a pace that would've kept Henry Ford pumped for way more than four hours.
When we grab a handful of platitudinous cliches and try to mold our lives around them, we make models. When we envision the perfect vacation or Christmas gathering, we make models.
Even that most pedestrian thing--planning our day--involves model-building. With the model in one hand and our hourly itinerary in the other, we lumber out the door to greet and beat the day.
Eric Scheske
The problem is, the models never work. The cliché "Just do it" has an entirely different connotation for the enthusiastic gay couple in the apartment next to you, the bastard airline bumps you from your flight, and the exigencies of daily life use our itinerary to wipe with.
And so we adapt: we flush the itinerary, we get a motel room at the airport to await the next plane, we get a sweet set of Bose noise-cancelling headphones. With effort, we gain a measure of resignation and contentment, just thinking about how much more unpleasant things could be if we had, say, a pit bull latched onto our privates or had to share the motel room with Lizzo.
We, in other words, detach our minds from the model and accept the reality, in full, including its blessings. Things are fine. Not model great, but good enough.
My young friend was so obsessed with creating an efficiency spreadsheet for his restaurant employer that he neglected the customers at his tables.
"Waiter, could I get some more water?"
"Just a sec. I need to figure out this cell formula and I'm in the middle of talking with the Excel chatbot."
The restaurant fired him.
That spreadsheet—a model—took precedence in his mind over the real customers right in front of him.
We all have that tendency. It's so ingrained in human nature, one of the leading spiritual lights of the twentieth century, Francis Fernandez, identified my young friends' restaurant customers as a "cross":
"[W]e will normally find the Cross each day in the sort of petty annoyances that may occur at work . . . It may be something unexpected . . . plans perhaps that have to be changed at the last minute . . .".
Accepting that your model isn't quite real, casting it aside and allowing reality to control. Those things--beating down the left hemisphere--are crosses in the Catholic worldview.
If you're into this whole hemisphere hypothesis thing, it's quite fascinating, but that's not my focus here. My focus here is to point that we all need to revise, rebuild, and reject our models relentlessly as we discover they don't fit reality.
If, in other words, we want to lead a sane life.
And Francis Fernandez is right: it's hard . . . it's a cross.
And it's made even harder by those around us who have zero clue that their models are ultimately bullshit and insist on cramming them down our throats, even as evidence mounts that they're more unicornish than the most fantastical equine novel.
I'll address the problem of those left-hemisphere captives later.