A Case Study on Arrogance, Ignorance, and the Limitations of Data

Here’s the deal: in your heart, you’d like to be one of those minimalist travelers because you know that having to schlep around fewer bags would be easier. Alas, most of the information on traveling lightly was written by guys like Rolf Potts—young, single, able-bodied—and you’re a single parent with two young kids. While a few carry-on bags would be ideal, you’ve got nappies and onesies and toys and tiny shoes and a whole host of things to deal with. Kids, you see, require lots of accessories. They also require extra time. You’d like to be easy and breezy with your planning—the 20-something digital nomads have all of this advice about sleeping on trains and in train stations—but have you ever arrived at a new city, sans lodging, only to deal with a diaper blowout while unable to divide tasks with anyone?

In the past, you took Potts’s advice and brought a 35 liter bag, only to find yourself without a necessary item. YOU GOT LOOKS from others calling you irresponsible. “How can you call yourself a parent? Why isn’t that one in school? They need peers.” So while you’re not praying at the altar of consumerism, your life—compared to the men extolling the virtues of minimalism—simply requires lots of stuff. You’ve talked about this with some others in your boat and decide to finally write an essay: “Why Rolf Potts and minimalist traveling advice isn’t for single parents.”

Thousands of miles away, someone on the internet responds: “Is minimalist traveling advice for single parents?” The argument boils down to this: “It’s lazy and a huge stereotype to lump all single parents together and say that they all have the same needs… in fact, it’s racist. To bolster my point that all people are different, and that single parents are very diverse, here’s a study on the lack of differences between parents/childfree people on traits like extraversion and conscientiousness.”

Within a few sentences, it becomes obvious that this person has never tried to travel solo with a pair of kids. While it’s true that single parents differ in many ways, they have plenty of shared experiences based on all of the stuff that they carry around; as such, they are all tired AF.

What happens when white men use data to refute black women

Last year, Dr. Carey Yazeed published “The Dangers of Courage Culture and Why Brené Brown Isn’t For Black Folk.” Yazeed’s argument is what I write about here: advice from the privileged—blind to the details of other experiences—doesn’t always work for the rest of us.

Because immutable traits (in this case, being black) influence how our actions are interpreted by others, Brené Brown’s simple “be courageous!” message is as useful for black women as Brad Pitt’s dating advice of “just show up where there are women.” Brown’s privilege inoculates her from the nuance, complexity, and difficulty that so many other people face.

In response, Todd Kashdan wrote: “Is The Self-Help Industry for Black Folk? The Science of Racial Differences in Personality.”¹Here’s a link to the article; and a link to the PDF. Kashdan’s attempt at a rebuttal to her argument—and her lived experience—was to share the results of personality studies, like the lack of racial differences in extroversion.

NOTE: THESE HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH HER ARGUMENT.

The idea that “black people are treated differently than others” isn’t something that you need data for; all you need is an open mind and a brain. Alas, we do have some studies, one of the most depressing of which is the fact that white men with felony convictions are more likely to get job interviews than black men without a criminal record.

Black women are disproportionately more likely to be called “angry” for behaviors that would either get ignored or interpreted as “assertive” and “charmingly leadership-like,” were they to come from a white male. (It’s easier for our brain to interpret events in a way that conforms to our pre-existing beliefs.)

In Being Wrong, Kathryn Schulz suggests that we tend to make three assumptions when someone else is incorrect:

• The Ignorance Assumption
• The Idiocy Assumption
• The Evil Assumption

Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt.

How to tell when people misuse data to make a false point

Only using the part of the definition that suits you

Kashdan claims that Yazeed’s argument is racist:

“The assumption that an entire racial group thinks, feels, and behaves similarly is a near perfect match with the dictionary definition of racism.”

It’s the classic method of misleading and undermining: 1. making false claims (Yazeed never claimed that an entire group thinks, feels, and behaves similarly). And 2. misrepresenting the outside information: the definition that Kashdan linked to includes the phrase a belief that race is a fundamental determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.²Kashdan said it was racist of Yazeed to make a blanket statement about all black people, but the link he included defines racism as a belief about status differences.

Her claims aren’t racist or prejudiced, but a simple truth about her world. Kashdan’s dismissal of Yazeed’s experience—the dehumanization, the failure to accept her personal experience at face value, the fact that he’s essentially mansplaining and white-splaining the experience of being a black woman—is just another example of chronic stress faced by black women.

One study suggested that “U.S. blacks may be biologically older than whites of the same chronological age due to the cumulative impact of repeated exposure to and high-effort coping with stressors.”³Re: the minimalist traveling thing: the equivalent would be that while Kashdan claims to be offended by the idea of lumping single parents together, it almost seems like he stopped reading and then went out of his way to “prove” the diversity of single parents. First, while it’s true that single parents differ in many ways, they’re also united by the need to carry lots of shit around, to plan and prepare for the worst and be tired anyways, by the complete lack of privacy and free time and the general exhaustion, and by the hyper-critical responses of others when they do the same thing as others.

Why data needs to be the garnish, not the main course

When you make Big Assumptions about people and behavior based on data—not actual experiences—bad things happen.⁴I’ve now been helping people and organizations communicate their data clearly since the release of my second book, Making Numbers Count: The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers.

For one, social science data has been weaponized throughout history, having been used to “prove” the superiority of whites, of men, of certain families, anchoring their arguments in data instead of looking at the whole picture. Trying to explain a life with data is like trying to explain a movie from a few pixels. It’s scientism at its best.

And then there’s The Fallacy of Ergodicity:

Ergodicity as a theoretical assumption posits that individuals are assumed to look like the group. In reality, however, the individual may not mirror the group.

From Development and Self-Regulation.

No one actually has 2.3 kids and has an average commute/salary. The GDP per capita rises, but most people are living paycheck-to-paycheck. Having data about a group doesn’t mean anything about the individuals in that group.

Hypocognition: Why Privileged White Male Professors Don’t Know That They’re Privileged

My dog Daisy loves to sniff the ground at the dog-friendly apartments near our home. She seems to sniff arbitrarily until it snows:

That’s when I discover that these locations have plenty of paw prints and yellow patches of snow, why they’re objectively fascinating to her. Usually, her world of information is entirely hidden from me—and without constant snow coverage, it’s easy to underestimate how different Daisy’s world is from mine.

In social psychology, a relevant idea is hypocognition—the fact that a chronic lack of experience stunts our ability to appreciate or entertain the “unknown unknowns.” From Hypocognition and the Invisibility of Social Privilege:

By social privilege, we refer to advantages that members of dominant social groups enjoy because of their group membership. We argue that such group members are hypocognitive of the privilege they enjoy… They have little cognitive representation of it. As a consequence, their social advantage is invisible to them.

Hypocognition and the Invisibility of Social Privilege

Everyone’s perspective is limited—and how easy is it to assume that other people are exaggerating their own problems, ones that you don’t happen to share? People in positions of privilege—status characteristics that grant them assumed dominance and expertise—are, by definition, immune to seeing the problems that other face on a daily basis.

Most of us assume that people who have read lots of data are experts, but these experts don’t even know that they’re not experts in whatever it is that they’re trying to teach: it’s like me saying that “Daisy is sniffing too much!” without realizing how different her experience of the world really is. Hypocognition gives us a framework to discuss the fact that, as per the paper, “socially dominant group members generate fewer examples of discrimination that other groups confront, remember fewer instances after being presented a list of them, and are slower to respond when classifying whether these examples are discriminatory.“

Kashdan isn’t evil or an idiot—as a white man, he simply doesn’t have the arsenal of experiences required to recognize how different other people’s experiences of the world really are. It’s easy for white men who grew up in a single parent household, poor, as a minority in their town, etc., to mistake these early experiences as a lifelong social disadvantage. Regardless of how well these men have emerged from their childhood trauma, being a white male in the United States is the dominant social position. Your current experiences shield you from the ubiquity of yellow snow. How we look affects how others interpret our actions, which changes our lives, and people at the top of the totem pole are oblivious to the difficulties of others.

What’s the motivation behind this attempt to correct someone’s personal experience? It seems like he wanted to create an alt-right-friendly teachable moment: hey! We’re actually more alike than you realize. Here’s a number. But that’s ignoring the fact that not every aspect of reality has been captured by data; sometimes, you just have to listen and accept the fact that everyone’s perspective is valid and incomplete.

White men have the right to talk about the experience of black women, but it’s a surprising one considering the obvious pitfall: not having any idea how wrong they are.

Takeaways

• Thinking that you can understand someone else’s life with data points is like saying that you can explain a movie by looking at a few pixels.
  • Data only makes sense as the garnish, not the main course.
• Whatever academia studies isn’t a reflection of what people actually go through: it’s a reflection of all of the properties of academia and publishing: what individuals are interested in; what they can get funding for; what publications want to publish
• If you know enough research and how to use Google Scholar, you can cherry-pick and make any point you want
• Professors have huge blindspots, and have decades worth of experience in an environment that celebrates those blindspots
• Real life is complex, and requires systems thinking to navigate—not the scientific method

• 1
  Here’s a link to the article; and a link to the PDF.
• 2
  Kashdan said it was racist of Yazeed to make a blanket statement about all black people, but the link he included defines racism as a belief about status differences.
• 3
  Re: the minimalist traveling thing: the equivalent would be that while Kashdan claims to be offended by the idea of lumping single parents together, it almost seems like he stopped reading and then went out of his way to “prove” the diversity of single parents. First, while it’s true that single parents differ in many ways, they’re also united by the need to carry lots of shit around, to plan and prepare for the worst and be tired anyways, by the complete lack of privacy and free time and the general exhaustion, and by the hyper-critical responses of others when they do the same thing as others.
• 4
  I’ve now been helping people and organizations communicate their data clearly since the release of my second book, Making Numbers Count: The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers.