On Analysis

In my About blurb, I mentioned that I’m an analyzer. Mixed in with the other, somewhat more self-descriptive points, this may seem obtuse.

What I mean by analysis is the systematic—sort of—and spontaneous—kinda—process of looking at the world around you and breaking it down into its causality, its structure, its patterns.

Many moons ago, I read an article that discussed autistic savants, and was bitten by a memorable line: making a point I don’t recall, it observed that savants had a gift for “extracting the underlying rules that govern a system.” (An aside: because that line stuck in my head and by a stroke of luck, I just now Googled and was actually able to locate the aforementioned article; it’s in a 2003 Wired article, should you actually want to read it. But it’s not especially relevant.)

I remembered that line because it’s an apt description for my own tendencies. Whether I have a gift at it or not is up in the air, but it’s what I do regardless; I cannot help but observe, analyze, and parse for the rules.

Sometimes it works great. When I wrote my Banshee articles, I was relying fundamentally on this; I’d literally play the game a whole bunch, let my gears tick, then start writing, and the stuff that came out was the product of the mental “structuring.” Without that, it would have been totally impossible to present the material I did. How do you teach something that’s never been elucidated before, and that has no pre-existing format from which to obtain order, lexicon, relationships? You have to create it. (Maybe you can also teach by rote demonstration, but that’s impossible in text.)

Sometimes it doesn’t work as well, and by that I mean that it’s harmful—whether the results are “good” or not, the process itself produces too much negative impact to be worthwhile. This mostly happens when I analyze without trying to. At best, it can be a mild annoyance, something out of place, maybe even somewhat amusing. Popping loose in the IBO IRC channel with my latest theory on the social dynamics of the internet often, I’m sure, just elicits eye-rolls. Oh well.

A little worse is when over-analysis starts to earn me accusations of emotionless disconnect, taking a robotic, scientific approach to life. I mark this as only “a little worse” because while that kind of attitude is relevant and something I take seriously, I don’t consider this a cause of it, or at least not a critical one. It’s just a peripheral symptom.

The worst effect is when my automatic processes shed light on things I’d rather not see too closely. The best example is issues like death, where the overall picture is very bleak. You can argue that this unpleasant analysis is useful if it leads to progress, but in instances like this where the odds of significant progress are very low (i.e. whatever I can come up with, I will probably not come up with the answer to mortality in my lifetime), it just results in negativity.

Another problem, a more broad-reaching one, is that I sometimes have to question the authenticity of my models. There’s a certain sense in which you can create an infinite number of different interpretations of the same data; this is why there’s thousands of books out there on very old issues like productivity, and no expectation of the deluge ending. Quite possibly they’re all “right,” in that they present an internally coherent analysis of the issue which adequately reflects reality. But the fact that they’re all right also means that none of them are very meaningful. They may be useful if they let you organize your thoughts or get better oriented, but that doesn’t mean they have any direct link to reality. Perhaps there’s nothing wrong with that, but I would like to think that these elaborate conceptions I have of the world are something more than enjoyable fictions created to appease my thinking parts.

Scientifically, you can test models by seeing if they accurately predict future results, but most of these kinds of things aren’t predictive; they’re just descriptive ways of organizing data. Sure, I got better results in the Banshee when I gave more thought to how it moved, and some of my faux-scientific ideas can be compared against reality. But usually it doesn’t come to that.

At other times, I will seemingly spontaneously come up with a full-fledged explanation of something in my life (usually internal), and then I am forced to wonder whether it’s just a description of what was already there, mercifully elaborated at last, or whether it’s something I pulled out of my ass in a fit of imagination. Why does it matter? Because it’s cyclical: once I’ve described a format for something in my thinking, I will tend to follow it in future reckoning. So if I lay out some treatise on how my dick works, pretty soon that will be how it works, and if the original model was basically fiction, then I’m unknowingly directing myself in weird, arbitrary directions. You can call this “reverse modeling” (see how I name things?) and I have to look at most of the analyses on this very site with a wariness for it. However, there’s virtually no way to detect it, so it’s mainly just something to worry about.

Worse yet, the ability to analyze, combined with a strong imagination, is a dangerous tool for justification. I hate getting out of bed in the morning and always have. I can’t tell you how many mental masterpieces I’ve woven with my eyes closed, in the minutes after my alarm sounded, that presented indefatigable and compelling reasons why I didn’t need to get up and in fact might be better served by staying in bed. Later, of course, it was clearly perceivable as nonsense, but that doesn’t change the fact that it was brilliant self-deception, couched in the only medium I can treat seriously—logical argument. I’d rather not talk about how often this kind of thing happens during the daylight too, but the worst part is that it’s not like it’s an isolated evil; there are plenty of instances where I justify the wrong thing, but there’s no clear line between those cases and the cases where I’m making an accurate analysis. I can’t just throw them all out; that would make me a vegetable, not just “not an analyser” but also “not a homo sapiens.”

The irony of this page, wherein I am busily analysing the act of analysis, is not invisible to me, but it’s a good example of the state of affairs. Because whatever I might say about it—about its good features (a powerful tool for debate and examination of arguments) or its bad (an occasionally unpleasant or useless process that cannot be switched off)—this is inextricably a part of me. As far as characteristics that describe me go, it’s probably one of the most central; it’s not something I do as much as something I am. So amongst the vast range of things I’m interested in tinkering with or changing in myself, I don’t list this, despite its occasional downsides. I cannot imagine myself without this trait; to sacrifice it seems not only impossible, but equivalent to sacrificing myself. Maybe the “new me” would be superior, but who knows? What person would willingly discard their identity on the unquantifiable chance that they’d end up with something better?

In any case, hopefully this yields some insight, not only into myself but to the purpose of this entire collection of Thoughts. If any of these musings seem useless to you, rest assured that you may be right… but I’m going to do it anyway.