Several half-related thoughts on my mind this week. First is an interview with political scientist/economist Scott E. Page in a recent New York Times [http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/08/science/08conv.html]. Page argues that organizations made up of socially diverse people are better at problem solving than are organizations with a more homogeneous makeup. By “diverse” he means people with different life experiences and different modes of thought. The interview was frustrating—too short, and it didn’t give enough examples—but the final two paragraphs are striking:
“What the model showed was that diverse groups of problem solvers outperformed the groups of the best individuals at solving problems. The reason: the diverse groups got stuck less often than the smart individuals, who tended to think similarly.
“The other thing we did was to show in mathematical terms how when making predictions, a group’s errors depend in equal parts on the ability of its members to predict and their diversity. This second theorem can be expressed as an equation: collective accuracy = average accuracy + diversity.”
Putting aside the questions of whether Page is right or how diverse people have to be to count as “diverse,” several other questions jump to my mind. First, what does Page mean by “solving problems”? What sort of problems? Seems to me that in order to solve problems in nuclear physics you have to master nuclear physics. (But then, I haven’t mastered nuclear physics, so what do I know?) And frankly, I simply can’t imagine what a creationist can add to solving problems in evolutionary biology. But that’s because the creationist is against the enterprise to begin with. A compromise here may be not someone who’s fundamentally ignorant of physics or biology and wants to stay that way but rather someone who’s potentially interested in it but comes to it from other activities. I remember reading Stephen Jay Gould once making the point that Alfred Wegener, who proposed the continental drift theory back in the early 20th century, was a meteorologist, not a geologist. Continental drift turned out to be true, but in Wegener’s lifetime it was rejected by geologists for the very good reason that they couldn’t see how continents could plow through ocean floors. It was only after the discovery of sea floor spreading and the development of the theory of plate tectonics that continental drift became generally accepted. But because Wegener was less committed to geology, the geological “impossibility” of his theory wasn’t the block to him that it was to geologists.
But what if, once you bring dissimilar people together to solve a problem, they get to know one another and to take on each other’s attributes, hence become less diverse? Doesn’t cultural diversity, like biodiversity, depend on a certain amount of isolation, so that dominant modes of thought don’t come in and wipe out everything else? As the world gets more cosmopolitan and people get to know each other’s ideas better, doesn’t it get more homogeneous as well?
An answer might be that there are ways to achieve social diversity other than isolation. For instance, if the culture provides a multiplicity of pursuits, then an individual can be broad enough to be diverse himself, apply different ways of thinking to different activities but on occasion bring in new ideas from one activity to another. If you’re skeptical—as I am—about individuals achieving such broadness, you can think of the culture providing such a multiplicity: almost everyone will engage in some pursuits that are foreign to at least some of his near neighbors, and he and they will have that foreignness as a resource to bring into their common pursuits.
I’m skeptical about this, too, but there are arguments in its favor. Although there are now fewer isolated pockets where everyone does things drastically different from those outside the pockets, that doesn’t mean there can’t be a growing number of specialties and subactivities within a culture, just as there can be a lot of different card games and a lot of different sports. But are there a lot of different card games and a lot of different sports compared to 100 years ago? Well, there probably aren’t, if you take the world as a whole, but there are a lot of different video games to perhaps make up for the fewer number of card games.
In any event, there is simply far too much “culture” for me to ever get a handle on. How do people find the time to listen to music and to watch TV and to play sports and to go to movies and to play video games and to, I don’t know, have conversations and friends and children, and go to sleep, and have sex, and, you know, send emails and even, occasionally, go to work and get paid and stuff like that? Even sticking to music, how does one find the time to attend to even a fraction of the various genres and subgenres? One gets the sense that there is an ever increasing diversity, and that worries about the culture becoming uniform are simply illusory.
I don’t think the worries are illusory—it’s the sense of variety that might be the illusion—but this is a topic I haven’t come close to thinking my way through. My guess for the time being is that culture overall is contracting, losing a good deal of its diversity, but at the same time our awareness of its diversity is increasing; so, though there’s less variety overall, we’re each seeing more of the variety. Our own individual worlds are getting more crowded with variants and subvariants, while the broader world is losing some of its variety. But how does one test this or even research this contention?
For instance, in popular music in the early Seventies there were three broad markets, rock, soul, and country with everything else in specialty markets like jazz or gospel or Latino. Whereas now rock has split off from pop or vice versa as well as breaking off into subgenres such as metal or any of the numerous varieties of postpunk and alternative and various hybrids like freak folk and alt country, and then there’s mainstream rock. And if you look further at metal, for instance, you see it broken into death metal and doom metal and dark metal and black metal and thrash metal and grindcore and who knows what else. (I don’t.) And then of course hip-hop is ever viewing itself as distinct from r&b, and includes crunk and snap and hyphy and indie rap and juke (see here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gd9kZ3PT74) and so on, while “dance” has come to mean something distinct from r&b or hip-hop or country or rock, and has developed numerous subcategories. Online interchange the other day, about Basshunter’s “Now You’re Gone,” which just hit number one in Britain: “RLY not impressed with this schaffle-bosh.” “The return of happy hardcore! Except crap.” “This ‘Basshunter = return of happy hardcore’ meme must be stopped! First of all, Basshunter are barely HH; secondly, it’s not like HH has gone anywhere anyway.” “This is true, it’s just galumphing hard trance innit, but I did rather like it anyway.” (My opinion: it’s just a pop tune, gets over on the basis of its melody and would have hit with any reasonably modern dance beat underneath.)
Anyway, I’m skeptical that all this represents diversity in the sense that Page is using the term. Which is to say that even if you can find someone who listens to snap but won’t go near hyphy, is he that socially different from the people who do listen to hyphy? It’s not like it’s a stretch of the mind or the eardrums to go from one to the other. And even if you’re someone for whom the last several sentences might as well be in Martian, and listening to any of this would be a stretch, are you that different from a Johnny Mathis fan in 1973 who’s got not one clue about glitter, glam, metal, and punk and wouldn’t know Black Sabbath from the Doobie Brothers? And in 1973 would you have known that Conway Twitty was one of the most popular performers in the United States?
My thought here is that today’s “diversity” is more than made up for by what’s been lost, not just various musical genres such as show music or non-Hispanic polka that are far less vital than they once were, but other activities that withered away when entertainment dollars began to pour into music and videos and cable TV and videogames and blockbuster movies. But then, I wouldn’t know how to test this idea, either, that there are fewer truly diverse activities and that you’re more likely to make yourself aware of the activities that are there (hence the feeling of there being a greater diversity).
I have no real stake in believing, one way or the other, that culture is more diverse or less diverse. I do think that in principle getting to know the variety of culture is a good thing. But I wonder about the effect on culture, that so little escapes appreciative scrutiny from a wider range of onlookers than ever before. Tom Wolfe’s first anthology, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, has twenty-two pieces, written in fifteen months in the early ’60s, on subjects that the intelligentsia of his day paid almost no attention to, that just weren’t on the screen of official culture (barely on TV, even): Las Vegas, stock-car racing, Demolition Derby, Murray The K, Phil Spector, the Teen Fair custom-car show. And Wolfe was certain that what he was seeing was art, was culture, was devotion. My question is, was a condition of this diverse, unknown art, that it was flying under the radar, part of what made it potent? Because, for better or worse, that condition is gone, never to be retrieved. Nothing is under the radar.
Keep the conversation going at koganbot(at)gmail.com