HALF TIME THOUGHTS, EPISODE 11: WHY IS SEEING THE BIGGER PICTURE SO IMPORTANT?

I read a job description last week that mentioned “sees the bigger picture” as a desirable characteristic.

This got me thinking.?Why do we say that??What does it even mean?

Option 1:?Artistic. In connection with large-format paintings – stepping back to see how a detailed section looked in the bigger artistic context.

Option 2:?Movies.?In the early days of multi-screen cinemas, where the more important film would be screened in the larger/largest theater.

Option 3:?Issues.?In the early 20th century, meaning to keep an entire situation in perspective, initially coined in the U.S.A.

The artistic origin makes sense but there are only a couple of literary references, from the late 19th century.?The movie explanation is nice but entirely unsubstantiated.?

Literary consensus favors the 20th century American connotation, encouraging us to make decisions that help the situation at large and not just the part that’s most pressing or right under our nose.

I think there’s more to it than that.

It starts with admitting that we’re not very good at seeing things.?

Our points of view are usually very biased. On many levels.

Our sight, hearing, smell, and touch are optimized for a certain field of view and a limited range of sounds and sensations.?

Thanks to modern science, we understand – if we’re prepared to accept it – that we’re surround by things beyond our sensory perception.

Let’s see how this impacts our day-to-day.

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The Length Scale

This is the one about the bigger picture.?We’re competent, though far from perfect, at seeing what’s within our field of view.

However, we love to think of ourselves – our physical bodies – as singular things, when in fact we’re sacks filled with billions of much tinier things, without which we couldn’t survive.?

Thinking on the length scale of microbes, viruses, and atoms is hard.?Small wonder (pun intended) that we struggle to understand how masks prevent the spread of viruses or shiny surfaces can still be harboring germs.

The same thing happens when we stretch the length scale out to states, countries, a planet, our solar system, our galaxy, or the universe.?

Systems of that magnitude are more complex and behave very differently from what we can see and manipulate.?

This makes us vulnerable to comparisons that don’t hold true, such as believing an ocean will behave like a bathtub of salty water.

The vastness of the cosmos also raises the intriguing potential of alien life.?

For those who can wrap their head around the statistics, the odds are real.?For many of the rest, who often adopt an anthropomorphic view of how and why the universe exists, it’s easier to believe that earth is just a unique blue dot at the center of it all.

The Time Scale

We worry incessantly about seconds and minutes.?We react in milliseconds, take actions over minutes and hours, and plan in days.

Days make sense because they represent a rotation of the earth – something that’s constant, as far as our daily lives are concerned.

But lots of things happen much faster than we can see or react.?Most of us can’t comprehend things happening at megahertz (millions of times per second) and gigahertz (billions of times per second), like computer processes or cellphone signals.

It’s hard to grasp an engine rotating at 6,000 rpm, or 100 times per second.

And confusion reigns when we talk about long time periods as well.

Our life will on average last about eighty years.?As children, we’ll have met people who are eighty or more years old, and as elderly people, we’ll see babies born with an eighty-plus year life expectancy.?So, our comprehension of extended time ought to be at least 240 years.

Yet we struggle to accept or explain changes over much shorter time periods than that and have real difficulty with trends in long-term data – some of which we’ve been gathering in rigorous fashion since the early eighteenth century (~300 years ago).

Even longer trends, such as climatological, oceanographic, and geologic phenomena are fraught because we can’t see the full picture even if we try.?

While the geologic record gives us glimpses of the distant past (a few inches of rock laid down over millions of years) even that picture is highly fragmented.?The ocean floor is consumed and reworked by plate tectonics every 150 million years, and only a tiny fraction of what has lived on earth died in a manner conducive to fossilization.

And then there’s the universe.?Our four-and-a-half-billion-year-old (approximately) planet lives within what we believe to be a fourteen-billion-year-old universe.?That’s a mindbogglingly long time.

The People Scale

We can easily relate to the people in our social circle – even using a pre-/post-COVID definition, rather than a restricted bubble.

Research suggests that the average American knows about 600 people (estimates and individual results will vary), though only about 25 well enough to trust them.

Thinking in terms of city, county, state, country, or world-scale population is difficult.?

We find it hard to appreciate that population is not uniform – and locally can be highly different – but that large populations act very much the same as one other.

Actions and decisions that affect more than one or two people are very different from actions and policies that impact thousands, millions, or even billions.

The tension between individual freedoms (whether real, perceived, or constitutionally protected), local or regional mandates, and population-scale policy decisions may never have been so acutely felt as during the COVID pandemic.

Our affinity for what affects us directly clouds our judgement about the desirability, efficacy, and implications of what is tried at a much larger scale.

The Financial Scale

Most of us are intimately familiar, in near-real-time, with the price of common goods, our salary, the cost of a car, and how much we pay for housing.?

But we’re often painfully ignorant of what those things cost in other parts of the country or beyond its borders.

In the absence of better information, we subconsciously assume things cost more-or-less the same everywhere.

We struggle to manage the pennies (they add up) or to plan and save the millions required for a comfortable retirement.?

What about the billions and trillions transacted routinely at society scale, national scale, and corporation scale? ?Practically unfathomable.

Apple’s enterprise valuation today is a hair over $2.5 trillion.?The point is, that “hair” ($0.031 trillion) is $31 billion, worth more than all but 700 of the nation’s largest corporations, and greater than the annual GDP of countries like Estonia, Uganda, and Iceland.?One man’s rounding error is another man’s national budget.

When we hear the administration is proposing a multi-trillion-dollar relief package or annual budget, it sounds like “a lot of money” but we have no concept of whether it makes sense in the relevant context of other possible packages and budgets.

Instead, we default to political ideologies, becoming proponents and opponents of “big” government, social safety nets, and … drum roll … taxes.

Very few people understand the U.S. tax code.?Very few.?

Data and Dimensional Scale

This one is not for the faint of heart.

We are comfortable with two-dimensional (2D) things.?Flat objects, like pictures and charts that show us how things look or work.

The world around us is intrinsically three-dimensional (3D).?Objects have some sort of length, width, and height – and, consequently, volume. Sadly, although we're surrounded by them every day, we're not very good at estimating 3D things.

Nevertheless, most people are comfortable working in 3D, and the rise of virtual reality headsets is set to immerse more of us in simulated 3D environments.

Things get more difficult to visualize and understand in four dimensions – usually where things with three length dimensions change over time (the fourth dimension).

Our minds are blown beyond that.?

Yet, the highly interrelated data that describes – and is generated by – the world around us is massively complex.?Like physics problems, it can have many more than four dimensions.?Good luck with that.

So, how do we pretend to comment on machine learning issues, social media algorithms, or global COVID-19 case data?

More than anything, we have a fiendishly hard time understanding the difference between causality and correlation – and spotting which is which in our data.

Correlation means there’s a pattern.?For example, when A increases, B also tends to increase.?There might not be any connection between A and B but, for whatever reason, they track each other.?

You can find some wonderful examples on Tyler Vigen’s Spurious Correlations page.?(As a person who doesn’t care for cheese, I especially like the positive correlation between per capita cheese consumption and the number of people who die by getting tangled in their bedsheets – I should sleep easier at night!)

Causality means the increase in A is directly responsible for the increase in B.?This requires knowledge of the underlying relationship between A and B and how one influences the behavior of the other.

The media is full of awful reporting that attributes causality when there’s little or no evidence for it.?We need to get better at spotting and rejecting such nonsense.

What to do?

“Since we’re terrible at seeing things the way they are, we should probably start paying more attention” – Captain Obvious.

It’s important to remember that we see things within our sensory range and relative to what we’re used to seeing.?It’s often part of a much bigger (or smaller) picture.

Don’t compare planets and pebbles.?It's risky to observe something at one point along a scale and then assume it’s true at another (or every other) point along that scale.?Planets do things differently from pebbles.?Exercise extreme caution when extrapolating your knowledge beyond the range in which it was gained.

Understand that the actions required to measure, analyze, manipulate, and influence things at a very small or very large scale are quite different from where our normal experience and abilities lie.?Leave the extreme stuff to the experts.

Finally, be aware of your personal biases.?Stop to ask yourself whether your view on something is based on a thumbnail or the whole picture.?Do you have real experience at whatever scale the issue is playing out or are you extrapolating??

We can work to change our biases over the long haul but we can also become more aware of them and learn to override them in the moment.

Here’s what I think would be a desirable characteristic: seeing the bigger and smaller picture, the faster and slower, the global, regional, and individual, however much or little it’s worth or costs, and at whatever level of complexity.

That, my friends, is practically omniscience.?

Let’s just try to see the forest for the trees, assuming we can figure out what that metaphor means, too.

Photo by Bernard Hermant on Unsplash