The Perils of Abstraction

The good professor kind of ignores the demonstrable way that each of thinks: we are Bayesian machines: we form an initial hypothesis or model and then update it constantly with new information. By its very nature - it is imprecise sand subject to whole-cloth error. But if we are clever, the next piece of data improves its predictability. And I prefer to think of Weil as being encapsulated by the "The Iliad or Poem of Force". She understood perfectly what was happening in Europe and understood perfectly it was not a matter of words and that words would not solve it. Long before we Foucault - she captured the perfect essence of our imperfect world. The first three sentences: "The true hero, the true subject, the centre of the Iliad, is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man's flesh shrinks away. In this work at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relation to force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to." If you get a chance - read Weil's work and be moved and amazed. But not if you thinks the world's problems are simply semantic.

Some very good points, and the example about "success" is a particularly good one to start the argument. I've written a lot on how measurements of accomplishments can be blinding and have other unanticipated consequences, as I learned several fields have found. But, as some other commentators have noted, I don't know how you can get away from them. The truism you sometimes see: "We don't need any more new ideas" is so wrong and puts a cap on potential progress. Abstractions also serve vital functions in communication. While it can have its own problems, sometimes you really need that generalization a specific abstraction provides. At any given time, there just might not be the time for specifics or for nuance, and I'm usually a big fan of the latter. (I even wanted to name my next pet "Nuance," but my wife put the kibosh on that idea.) The trick is to be aware of some of these impacts, especially the deliberate misuse, and be more comfortable moving back and forth between abstraction, concreteness, and nuance. Maybe more nuance about nuance.

It's not so much the presence of abstraction as the inability, unwillingness, to take the abstractions and create specific definitions. It's abstraction left at the abstract stage. The abstract concept "success" is by far the best example of an abstraction that sits out there controlling so much of what we choose to do about so many things; but, provides no real guidance whatsoever and in fact usually guides us down the wrong path. Health care is a particularly good example. America's health care system is a roaring success! It is an utter failure! Without specific definitions of a successful health care system how are we possibly to debate the alternatives and choose good strategies? We are left with the abstractions and no decisive steps toward improvement.

I agree with everything you write here. But on the other hand, our very survival as a species depends on our understanding such abstractions as climate change, pollution, discrimination, oppression. Each person has a limited capacity to understand what humanity is doing to itself and to the planet, and we have to figure out a way to trust at least some of the experts some of the time.

Powerful stuff, abstraction. Its ability to instantly convey a simple message is unparalled. Decades ago, I and an old pal, an excellent, underappreciated writer of fiction, were having drinks. He'd been lamenting the sales figures for his new book, and said with no little bitterness and a great deal of truth: If you want to write a book, and make certain it's a best seller, regardless of the book's theme, put a swastika on the dust jacket. I've never forgotten that.

Language itself is obviously an abstraction. This goes without saying. And thoughts are the less-tamed, blood cousins of language. This also goes without saying. Every time a human soul thinks, then forms and utters words, s/he pierces reality with but a pinhole. What is life but to bump up against such pinholes, adding to their eddy, our own?

RE: “The number 2 thought of by one man cannot be added to the number 2 thought of by another man so as to make up the number 4.” Yes it can, and has been. That’s how we build things. Some abstractions are general, some are vague, and those are what Warren is trying to get away from with her question to the generals.

Hmmm.... "... consider how a move away from the abstract and toward the concrete..." What is "concrete" but another abstraction?

This was a great article. Well written, speaking to important considerations for today, and carefully both pointing the finger and no-one and everyone. Wishing I had read Simone Weil before this. The truth of "...too numerous and complicated to be known by all..." is such a critical component of our current dysfunction. In an uncertain world we tend to seek stability, and these capitalized abstractions are the tools most easily manipulated by the priests/scientists/politicians/corporations to steer our behavior and choices in ways useful to them rather than in ways useful to us. Thanks for a truly inspired piece of writing.

Just read Orwell on "Politics and the English Language."

Every thought is an abstraction. We experience the world abstractly, and observe only a slice of reality. We process that slice through our own filters. So the real question, I think, is how we abstract the world. The healthiest among us recognize the abstractions and are willing to adjust them to more closely adhere to reality, or at least to adhere to a more utilitarian construct of reality. Utilitarianism assumes values. The utility of an idea is the degree to which it drives us toward our values. If you value racism, you will abstract your experiences in a manner that drives your racism. If you value fairness, you will abstract the world differently (more rationally, from my perspective). Recognizing this, we should be open to applying reason to challenge the values we hold.

What an insightful, brilliant essay. It’s too bad so very few people will read it. There’s no riffs about human scum, anti immigration, the enemy “free press,” or the stable genius and his great wisdom. You can’t educate these trump revenants, they love it the way they are and have their ideal as king. Nothing else matters. Per the woman, when recently asked in a CNN focus group, about trump killing someone of 5th Ave. Her brain dead response: What did that person do to trump to deserve it? The other women in the group immediately agreed. If there is a way around this idolizing stupidity, I am at a total loss to what it might possibly be. Unfortunately, education is not on their playlist.

Anything that becomes tainted and tilted is not good for anyone. Democracy is not an abstraction, racial prejudice is not an abstraction. We who have quality critical thinking skills can decipher what is real and what is not. We live in a dark time when stupidity is not an abstraction but a prized reality for many people who follow a cult. We will not allow democracy, freedoms to become an abstraction, we have the reality of the Constitution and we will follow it and that is called democracy once again p

Abstractions and the human race? Most of what passes for truth in human society is generalization; we pack particular cases into groups for a variety of reasons: It makes organization easier; it saves time; we simply lack the intelligence and methodology to recognize particular cases; and we resist recognition of the particular case because it's often the recognition of a painful and isolating truth. And if the human race laments its generalizations, blames them for war, division, inaccuracy, etc. it rarely moves toward greater particularization but tries to invent a transcendent generalization such as nation over groups of tribes, or universal interests, morality over conflict of nations and ideally speaks of the prosperity of the human race. What people seem to not want is increased recognition of individual case, decline of generalization and increase of recognition of the particular, for that seems to be increased division, atomization, fission rather than fusion in the eyes of many, just a more harmful state of the worst aspects of generalization, stereotype, a pinpointing of every last thing in its individuality and in its best and worst qualities. Who really wants to know themselves in all their separation from other human beings and everything else in the world? Therefore we can probably expect as technology continues to race ahead in all its potential for danger and good for the human race to devise politically and economically generalized truths for good of all.

Our Declaration of Independence and Constitution depend on abstraction. "Citizen" is an abstraction, and much more abstract than "consumer". Abstractions are necessary. Scientific and medical theories are abstractions. But there are good and bad, valid and invalid abstractions. Keynesian economics and Friedmanian economics are both abstractions. Ptolemaic and Copernican astronomy are both abstractions. What is concrete is my back pain. What is abstract is its cause. Treating the concrete will treat a symptom, leaving the cause free to kill or cripple me.

I once suggested to Andrew Sullivan that we ban the words "liberal" and "conservative" for the reasons outlined so well here by Dr. Wampole. He replied "We should, but we can't, for reasons detailed in my book." So I read "The Conservative Soul", but couldn't find any reasons.

This asks altogether too much of a poorly-educated populace. Inventory our beliefs? When what many, if not most of us, believe whatever we were told most recently?

Humans can't think straight when they are terrified and we are all terrified.

It will be interesting to see how deep fakes change the nature of abstraction. Abstraction at least has the promise of representing something tangible. But so much is abstracted in the digital universe. In a deep fake world where culture groks that *anything* seen on a screen or heard on a digital device is a likely forgery, digital abstraction will have eaten its tail. People will instinctively distrust abstractions and rely more on the tangible—what sits in front of them. Whether or not that's a good or a bad thing, I have no idea.

Imagine two super geniuses, IQ 260; both men, polymaths, well read in all fields, world travelers, "normal" childhoods, both professors of history. One is a Democrat, the other a Republican. Thought, conviction, abstraction, belief -- all originate in feeling, which has roots in childhood mental health or sickness. Beliefs, especially dogmatic ones, are likely to be delusional generalizations that protect the person from some core injury, and justify it. Almost all subjective thinking, no matter how substantial and inspiring it may seem, is a masquerade over hidden, personal truths of feeling.

'When politicians like Elizabeth Warren speak of “the generals” you can be sure they refer only partly to real people and much more to archetypes — the Generals — ...' Without more context, it is presumptuous to assume what Warren means. However, Warren is on the Senate Armed Services Committee, so she has indeed heard "real" generals. Anyway, that Warren quote is just political rhetoric. And Simone Weil is criticizing such political rhetoric, although she is hardly the first person to do so. The E. E. Cummings (1894-1962) poem, "next to of course god america i" (1926), brilliantly mocks political rhetoric for its stock phrases and meaningless abstractions.

Politics is show. That's why we like it.

Yes, in a sense Trump has moved from abstraction to drama. Obama was "no drama Obama" and Hillary was boring... My own focus is on DEMOCRACY, but not in the abstract. I wish the Democrats would focus on a new DEMOCRACY wave. Trump is destroying DEMOCRACY, every day of the week. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Trump must not be allowed a second term, to end DEMOCRACY. I wish the Times would write about the DEMOCRACY song. Leonard Cohen sang, "Democracy is coming to the USA" (1992) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ideas and abstractions are most often powerful tools to keep people "in their place," disconnected and disempowered by empty words. Human connection can only begin by connecting, by our face-to-face willingness to risk connecting with the more than 10,000 potential variations of human facial expressions we have evolved to possess. Our facial expressions were successful evolutionary adaptations because they communicated deep and essential meaning. Our facial expressions spoke clearly to others, without having to yet evolve complex language and grammatical finesse. Yet, each of our technological innovations in communication--from telegraph to radio to tv and internet has brought us further and further away from the potential to actually experience another person and an actual human connection. Bytes are artificial representations--two bytes equals a "word"--just like the Trump character we were sold by hundreds of tv appearances and gilded towers.

John Dewey wrote of the Philosopher's fallacy. He also used the term "vicious abstraction." Abstraction is necessary but by definition it omits details. A " vicious abstraction" is one that is treated like a concrete reality and applied without paying attention to all that was left out in the generalization process.

"The world becomes a series of signs and numbers standing in for things themselves." Scientific theories are abstractions that encapsulate a plethora of facts. Yet they are extremely powerful in their explanatory and predictive powers. "... in the guise of statistics ..." The human mind is limited in the number of facts that it can comprehend. That is why there are shopping lists and databases. In some cases, such as population statistics, statistics are more informative than details. For example, the average age of various populations can tell us which populations are going to need education and which populations are going to need health care. "... to algorithmic commerce and the move toward cashless societies." Money is an abstraction. In principle, all commerce could be conducted by barter but that would be very inefficient. Money is an abstraction from concrete objects that could be exchanged. When money is used, it represents all possible objects that could be exchanged. That is why economists like to use prices as measures of value -- money is a universal commodity. "... consider how a move away from the abstract and toward the concrete ..." As I've shown above with several examples, that is totally impractical.

I admire Simone Weil but she was wrong. Abstraction is necessary for thought. Without abstraction, civilization cannot exist. In the political sphere, it is simply impossible to treat everybody as an individual. We need some sort of overarching narrative to make sense of people’s interactions and the deluge of events. And narrative implies abstraction and stereotyping. Some narratives are better and more efficient; some - like communism or Nazism- veer off into sheer fantasy and collapse when confronted with reality. But ultimately, abstract thinking is what makes us human. And yes, it does mean that in certain situations, such as war, individuals are sacrificed for an abstract cause such as freedom or democracy. And why not? Pacifism and humanism are abstractions as well.

I might actually argue that we live in the age of anecdote, where the emotional concrete has overwhelmed the abstract truth. For example, crime in the US is at an all-time historical low, yet people, who witness crime on TV every day believe that the country has become more dangerous. The anecdote, the concrete, has overwhelm the truth with it's emotional power. Anecdotes reinforce our preexisting bias. We choose the concrete which reinforce our pre-existing beliefs rather than abstract, statistical evidence. The truth becomes prisoner to our bias. There is certainly a danger in objectifying our enemies and disconnecting them from the reality of their humanness, but we also must understand that our experience is not the equivalent of truth, but a piece of the abstract whole.

Very interesting. I think of these problems in terms of symbol obsession, but I could see them as abstractions too. The only critique I'd have is, just as with symbols, levels of abstraction can also be liberating, just as expertise can be very helpful. I'd imagine that moderation and proportion are important here.