Smoke and Mirrors

Over the course of the past year, and more so recently, a particular thought has lodged itself in my mind. At first I didn't think much of it. It seemed nothing new, but it kept nagging at a corner of my mind until I paid attention, until I flushed it out and reached some conclusions. I haven't finished wondering about all the ramifications of this particular thought, and I'm still not quite sure what makes it so stunning, but as I keep coming across examples, and I keep finding it hard to hold onto, I believe it may be the root of something important.

The thought it this: Everything is run by people.

It seems mundane at first glance, which is why I didn't pay it much attention. Of course everything is run by people. But as I think about it more, I realize there are a lot of assumptions and trust and illusions wrapped up in this idea. I will try to explain.

As a child, I had very little idea how the world worked. I was aware that there were governments, and corporations, and companies, and organizations, and they all did important and complicated things to make things work (like schools and roads and libraries and houses and all kinds of other things). There were also immutable things, like taxes and insurance and laws, and these things simply existed and that's how things were. Not that things couldn't be changed, but the powers that changed them were other immutable things like executive offices and boards and councils. I of course knew that people were behind all of these things, but firstly they were important people and experts, and secondly there was also a sense that these things were really far outside the realm of everyday things like eating lunch and reading books and doing chores and playing and learning and working, and were thus not done by regular people like me.

I was told a lot as a child that I could do anything when I grew up, and that individuals could change how things were done, although the examples never seemed to follow this. Governments decided things, and so did corporations, and they decided things because they knew. There are experts in everything and they say what's best to do and then everyone else follows along. And I accepted this because governments and corporations and organizations are all big complicated things that function in complicated ways with lots of rules and regulations that must be there for a reason and it's all more than I could possibly understand, and they must know what they're doing.

I thought that when I grew up, I wouldn't possibly affect any of those things, I would just find my own little cog in the giant wheel and help make stuff work and hopefully enjoy my regular day to day things that had nothing at all to do with how big real things worked. After all there were plenty of things that seemed to make perfect sense but never got done, or things that were set up so ass-backwards that I figured there must be a reason, and I was too young/ignorant to understand such big complicated things. There were other forces at play. The experts could handle those things, with the committees and boards and councils.

Anyway I grew up and went to college and there I continued to think about things more or less the same. My only concern with How Things Worked had to do with cells and DNA and chemicals and organic compounds (and eventually dance), and the world of my interests was fairly small. This is not to say I was ignorant of Big Important Things happening in the world, or that I didn't care about wars and politics and news and the people involved. But I didn't have anything to do with those things, and I didn't see how anything I did would have much influence. After all those things are decided by Experts and Governments and the best I could do was vote, and have some fundraisers, and donate blood, and whatnot, so I did those things.

This past year I started to get an inkling that there was perhaps a little more to all this, or in reality, a lot less.

I guess the heart of it is that most people (including myself) imagine things getting done (or not) as a vague or complicated process and trust that what's going on is reliable, in some sense. We trust that there are laws and rules and they will be enforced, that there is a (mostly) stable government full of people who are experts and know what they're doing and will make the best possible decisions so that we can live out our lives. And obviously we don't believe there is no corruption, and we know there is more going on than we see, and information we don't have. And we believe that the information we don't have is what makes everyone who does know the expert, and that's why they're the people who decide things. We think that there are Powers at play that control things and tomorrow things will mostly be like they are today.

But the truth is that every decision comes from some individual who is as influenced by their life experiences as anyone else. That individual might have facts others don't, but that doesn't mean he is more likely than anyone else to make the best decision. And there are things getting done every day that have never been done before, for which there is no precedence, and there is an individual out there who has to make a decision about that thing, without any prior knowledge to help them out or "qualify" them.

When I state it that way, it seems obvious. I haven't told you anything new really. But it took me a long time to think of things this way, and to realize what this means in terms of living my life and making decisions. I'll try to give some more examples, since that's the only way I can think to demonstrate the idea I'm talking about.

When I first started my job, I gave a huge amount of deference to everyone else there. After all, I was a lowly intern with only a petty BS degree, and nearly everyone else I worked with was a mighty PhD with years of experience. I wasn't embarrassed or bashful asking for help or advice and I learned a ton. I assumed that everyone else was more equipped to make decisions than I was.

It only took me about two or three group meetings to realize how wrong I was. Our collaborators, regardless of years of experience and a dozen degrees, didn't know all about what we do, considerably less than I knew even after only a few months of experience. Which means that sometimes very smart people wanted to make very stupid decisions that would have meant days or weeks of extra work with little or no results to show for it. Luckily we could talk them out of it most times.

The other thing I noticed was that individual personality had way more sway in the workplace than I would have guessed. People don't leave their prejudices, quirks, stubbornness, ADD, hastiness, etc. at the door when they come to work. I guess I shouldn't have been too surprised about that one, but I work in science. I thought people in science were supposed to be impartial, curious, and smart. I am laughing now, as is anyone else who has ever worked with scientists. Being able to communicate effectively and make friends and have people trust you is way more important than actually knowing things a lot of the time. You don't really need to know more to convince people you're right, you just need the ability to convince people you're right.

I also quickly noticed that what counts as "fact" isn't necessarily fact. Part of my job involves reading dozens upon dozens of papers. Some of them are great. Some of them are incredibly obscure. Some of them make no sense whatsoever, and the conclusions drawn don't match up with the data provided. At first I thought I was missing something, or that I didn't know enough, or that I wasn't used to reading papers. Eventually I realized that sometimes things that are published are just pure bullshit. As good as peer review can be, it isn't infallible, and there are papers out there that are shoddy at best, and downright full of crap other times. (I am not the only one who thinks this: http://www.nature.com/nrd/journal/v10/n9/full/nrd3439-c1.html. They state, "There is...a bias towards publishing positive results, as it is easier to get positive results accepted in good journals. It remains to be studied further whether there are indeed hurdles to publishing results that contradict data from high-impact journals or the currently established scientific opinion in a given field, which could lead to the literature supporting a certain hypothesis even if there are many (unpublished) data arguing against it.").

Anyway all of this is to say that people who decide things aren't any smarter (necessarily), or more well-informed, or unbiased, or less likely to make mistakes or be lazy than you are, or I am.

For example, a few months ago I renewed my contract for my job to work another year. Unfortunately, this information didn't reach the right people somehow, and my account was shut down. I had no access to my e-mail, nor could I log in to any computers at work, and my badge didn't work. For some reason, the process of reinstating my account took a few weeks, during which time I was marginally more than useless. It made me wonder: Who is in charge of reinstating accounts? Hasn't this happened before hundreds of times for the hundreds or more likely thousands of NIH employees whose contracts get renewed every year? Isn't there a better way to get this done? It seemed like some big mystery, like there were papers that needed to be shuffled and signed and sent places and people who needed to confirm this and that and then some computer things needed to happen to get me back online. Wrong. What needed to happen was the one person in my division in charge of this to push one button to inform the person who did renew accounts to click the "active" button under my name. A process that should take about fifteen minutes, if you're giving bathroom breaks. In this case, what held me up was one person not knowing their job.

Recently I encountered another semi-example of this. I was at a meeting for some postbacs at NIH and met a woman whose name was familiar to me. I realized that her e-mail account had popped up dozens of times in my inbox, and she was actually the individual behind organizing a bunch of events, communicating dozens of opportunities for volunteering, working, networking, learning, etc... Most of the time, I ignored or deleted those emails without much thought (generally they take place on campus and I don't work on campus). However it was a bit of a shock to think about the individual who actually set all those things up. I just thought they were things that happened, and sure, someone organized them, but I had no idea who or how. Except that I did know. It was just one person getting stuff done.

There's another thought that goes along pretty closely with this idea I'm trying to get at.

It seems to me that often times people eschew responsibility. No one wants to be held accountable for anything; they don't want to be blamed if something goes wrong, and they don't want to take risks. This is as true for me as anyone else. For my first year of work I more or less did just what my boss asked, and it took me a while to learn that I could in fact try something new on my own, or take some initiative and start something. I'm still not comfortable with that all the time, and overall it seems like a rare trait. I think most people are like that, and they only do (more or less) what they're told. People want leaders, and they don't want to make decisions. There's often this huge assumption that there is someone else out there better qualified to decide what should be done, or what's best for everyone. There's a trust that there are indeed experts who know enough to make very informed decisions, and that there are plenty of people who are fine making those big important decisions. But that's not really the case.

Most people eschew the responsibility and make the safe choices, and meanwhile things remain undecided, or the decision isn't the best possible decision, but the safest, and buried as deeply as possible in vague terminology so that no one can even understand what has been decided at all. And there are few people willing to step up and risk looking like idiots and risk pissing someone off and risk losing some social standing and just decide something and make it happen. And yet we all assume that these people, these decision-makers, are everywhere, and they don't have our foibles, and they don't make our mistakes, and they will get things done as they need to be done.

There are some very qualified, very competent, and very confident people around, and many of them do run things. But I believe they run things because they are the kind of people who take the risks (one of the reasons they've been successful) not because they are necessarily any better qualified to decide things.

Maybe it is the ability to take risks and the confidence to appear unshaken and believe what you decide is best and right that makes someone competent, but I don't think so.

So what does all this mean? What does this have to do with how I live my life?

To me it's a reminder to have some more confidence in the things I do, and learn to at once believe wholeheartedly in the decisions I make but retain the ability to select another option if it is proven or appears even better. It means I won't necessarily trust what I read, or see on TV, regardless of who writes it or who says it. It's also a good reminder that the people we interact with, people on the other line of the phone, or e-mail list, or behind a counter at a grocery store, a DMV, an embassy, a CEOs office, or a toll both, are as fallible as I am, as real as I am, with no more or fewer qualifications to decide what is right.

I would love to know what you all think.