Stop Asking for The Studies

or, aimless rants on the Data Guy

1. There’s a type of guy I encounter, occasionally and memorably, on the internet. When presented with a piece of literary nonfiction, or perhaps an academic philosophy paper, or any of the other qualitative modes by which thinkers from scholars to entertainers share thoughts, this guy is skeptical. Where, he wants to know, is the data? The deliverables? Where are the studies on this? And, while we’re at it, why is this taking so long? It’s probably not that deep. Can we get this down to a few data points? A couple of essential takeaways? 

2. There’s a startup called Blinkist. Its website blares: Be more knowledgeable/Be more successful/Be healthier/Be a better parent/Be happier/Be your best self!” in a series of taglines suspended, syntactically, somewhere between a promise and a barked order. Blinkist “offers the key insights from top nonfiction in a made-for-mobile format,” which is to say, they summarize books. They’re quick to tell consumers exactly how long it’ll take to read the summary (usually somewhere in the 15-25 minute range), although of course, if you choose instead to listen to the audio version, you can multitask while you get your summary pumped into you.

   

   that’s over 0.45 key ideas per minute!

   Through Blinkist, listeners can acquire as many key insights as possible during their busy, key insight-lacking lives. Therefore, Blinkist customers will hopefully soon be possessed of a sufficient number of key insights, so that they can become more successful, or be a better parent, or whatever.

3. Many of my friends are big fans of astrology. I would also probably like astrology if my mother could remember what time I was born, but I have a bunch of siblings and you can never be sure, so I'll never have a full birth chart. My friends who like astrology mostly say that they don’t literally believe in it. They know it’s not true! But the machinations of fate, the inner workings of the human mind, the complexities of romantic compatibility, are so insanely complex, so packed with possibly important factors, that you’ll never make sense of it all anyway, and sense does demand to be made. So it’s helpful to reduce this infinite complexity to a series of guidelines, a cluster of insights. They do not need to be true. They need to be clear, consistent, understandable, and efficient.

4. For a while, I was very drawn to the idea of a capsule wardrobe, aka a very small wardrobe consisting of a few infinitely reusable basics. The whole thing, of course, has become a useful way to advertise incredibly expensive clothing, promising you that if you just get this specific trench coat and this pair of black boots, then you will no longer be plagued by the demands of a body that has to get dressed and be comfortable and be clean and be paid for and look pretty. The idea is to distill the business of getting dressed into the most efficient state, throwing out everything but the key insights—although it will take a lot of time and money to get there.

Ok, ok! I’m not just listing things I find irritating. I’m going to talk about the connections between these four phenomena, and why to my mind they’re different surface manifestations of a single worldview. We live in a world driven by tech-brain, STEM obsession, data fever. This condition fetishizes hard data and the aesthetics of empiricism. It is not the same as science, which is both useful and interesting. I think it’s a very good thing when scientists use the scientific method to answer the questions that science is meant to answer, which is to say, questions that concern empirical, measurable things happening in the world. 

However, the STEM-addled brain is not on board with the idea that, you know, different forms of intellectual and creative inquiry are useful and interesting for different reasons and in different circumstances. To the STEM-pilled, the arts and humanities are impoverished substitutes for statistics and hard data. Data Fever wants you to get to the point. This is at odds with a fundamental aspect of humanistic thinking, which is that the point is not always to get to the point as soon as possible. I don’t mean this in a trite, it’s-about-the-journey way, I mean that one of the joys of, say, literary nonfiction or critical writing is to travel through a series of ideas in the company of another mind and in doing so to gain an experience of how that other mind works. But this, the data guys think, is inefficient. It’s a lot of work! It hurts! Could we make this a bullet-point instead? Can we put it in a graph? Could we get it as a PowerPoint, and maybe play it at 2x speed, to increase the efficiency, so that we can absorb as much data as possible with as little work getting there as possible? 

I’m tempted to say that this is why a lot of these people, when they do read, read such painfully bad books, and write so badly. The idea of literary style does seem antithetical to the entire data-obsessed culture, because the objective of most good literary stylists is to say something well, and to the data-brained, this is an inefficient waste of time. Take repetition. In literature, repetition can create a propulsive or a lulling musical rhythm. It can convey obsession. It can slow time, letting us linger in a character or narrator’s mind; It can parallel two seemingly unlike things, nudging us to see the similarities. The STEM guy has no use for repetition. It’s redundant. 

But to say that the data-brained love efficiency, and care little for style, is to give them too little credit, or, maybe, too much. These guys are obsessed with style! They live for the appearance of glossy, hyper-efficient minimalism. Style is a lot more important to them than substance. The STEM guy doesn’t just want you to back up your ideas with data—he would prefer data over ideas. In honest-to-god science, the information is the point, with the shaved-down modality of the scientific method functioning to ensure your information emerges as true as possible—here, the shaving-down itself is worshiped. Sorry to keep talking about “Blinkist,” but the thing about Blinkist is that its books are mostly very dumb. The point of the whole business model is to summarize books, but it’s not as if, through the audio summary of On Health & Fitness – The Bulletproof Diet, or of Peter Thiel’s Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build The Future, you’re taking in, and then using, and then benefitting from a greater amount of good, helpful information. This shit is not likely to make you a better parent or a successful entrepreneur or suddenly thin (at least, no more than anything else you could spend your time doing). The point of Blinkist is to make you feel very smart and efficient for absorbing as much information as possible as quickly as possible, all through the medium of your very sleek and efficient and expensively minimalist iPhone, and it does not matter if the information is true or good or meaningful (in fact, that would perhaps require complexity and nuance and fact-checking, which would only serve to slow the whole thing down, getting in the way of stylistic efficiency). The point of Blinkist, and of the entire bullet-point tech-pilled worldview, to turn you into a kind of super plus informational tampon in a lovely wrapper. 

I want to go back to the capsule wardrobe, which feels like the ultimate stylistic expression of data-brain in the sartorial, as opposed to literary, sense of the word style. The supposed virtues of the capsule wardrobe—freedom from the impulses of consumerism, the whims of the trend cycle, and the ethical entanglements of fast fashion—are, in many cases, subverted and perverted by the dumb consumerist version, which is basically a marketing gimmick for beige trousers. It claims to be about getting to the core of things and cutting out the bullshit, but this capitalistic adoption of the capsule wardrobe is mostly about fetishizing efficiency for the sake of filling up your closet with extra bullshit. I have felt the call of the capsule wardrobe before. I have a small apartment without a lot of closet space, and, also, I am attracted to the idea of a life consisting of clean, interchangeable, unimpeachable bits. Dear God, make me an iPhone gridded with sleek little VC-funded apps, with no duplicate photos clogging up my perfect little body. I want this too! It doesn’t change the fact that it’s stupid.  If the humanities essay is equivalent to a comfortable, colorful, hand-me-down dress, the powerpointable data point is the brand-new, sustainably made, neutrally-colored black t-shirt. You might have to throw away that idiosyncratic dress, but this shirt, you’re sure, will— once you have saved for it and planned a wardrobe around it and signed for the package—finally liberate you from mess, from inefficiency.

the scientifically optimized wardrobe

One major problem with the idea that every single thing should look like science—that is, reducing science to a series of aesthetic guidelines and then insisting that these aesthetic guidelines must be followed in all situations—is that you’re going to create a lot of things that look sort of like science without actually being scientific. We have a word for this, obviously: pseudoscience. Tech brain breeds pseudoscience, everything from phrenology to HR-ified personality tests to shoddy but very official economic predictions to, of course, astrology. I’ve heard people joke that economics is basically astrology for men, and I think this is true. 

People who say that they like astrology, despite its untruthfulness, posit that it offers some structure to your thoughts. But this arbitrary thought-structuring metaphysical scaffold is similar to the misuse of science in STEM-freak-land. In both cases, one vaguely pretends to be interested in information. But one is, sometimes pretty openly, more invested in the mode of presentation, which prioritizes quantifiability and categorizability— into zodiacs and houses and graphs and statistics. The point is not to think, to have the process of thinking streamlined at the expense of the thought itself. ¹

It is for this reason that Adorno wrote about astrology and the occult generally as being “a symptom of regression in consciousness,” and I apparently agree with him, though I’d add that STEM-freak culture is really occultism by another name. “By its regression to magic under late capitalism, thought is assimilated to late capitalist forms,” Adorno wrote. Demanding data to back up a non-scientific—actually, a fundamentally ascientific— set of ideas or observations or fancies or speculations or narrations is indeed a regression to magical thinking. It’s a desire for the incantatory, soothing power of the data point. If we fill the time between tasks with audio summaries of self-help books, we might manage to get through the day without ever being alone with our thoughts. And, if the summaries are reduced enough, we may reach a sort of technocratic nirvana, in which even the banalities of self-help are neutralized, so that we never have to endure the challenge walking the same mental ground as any other human being.

1. This means that the difference between astrology and data-fever is, again, largely an aesthetic one. However, if anyone cares, I vastly prefer the aesthetics of astrology over the aesthetics of the data guy. Give me celestial bodies and intricate tarot cards and cool animals over the miserable sludge of the fake-insightful consultant data visualization.