Models

Yesterday I came across a debate with Marco about how biological species have been through the years categorized in billions of groups and subgroups and subsubgroups and … How can we absolutely know that the border between one species and another should be where we pinned it? We can’t. Now, this is not a biology class, but this is exactly the same strategy we (humans) have been adopting since ever to understand everything and anything. What’s all this that I’m saying now?

Let’s go with the examples because the theory is usually more difficult to understand for people (usually!). Racism. Around Earth, say for humans, we have many types of color skins, hair colors/shapes, body heights/widths, eyes, noses, mouths… for what we can see. And so we decided that black people are different from white people. And after such a decision, we decided also that we would use our social skills differently for different skin colors: For those who are black-colored we will treat them bad and those who are white we will make them kings of the world. Fantastic. I’m actually quite in trouble because I’m pretty much in the middle of that so sometimes I’m part of the kings, and sometimes I’m part of the non-kings. Where is that line? Where is the border between black and white color to make people belong to a different “race”? Who says where the border is and so who invented the concept of “race”? The spectrum of skin colors is intrinsically a continuum on top of which we decided to pin limits. Once we pinned those limits, then we needed a definition of each resulting category so we picked a prototype of the category and voilà: The concept of a “model” was born.

Another example: Countries. Earth was just there, innocent of every transformation. Then we came and we decided that we needed to put borders on this continuum piece of land because we owned such land. And so we ended up discretizing such a continuum into small pieces that compose the whole planet, just like in a puzzle. The division of countries on this planet is justified in the same way that races can be justified. Who could have told us that such a division was needed and that the way we got was the absolutely optimal way of diving it? The same who told us that black people and white people belong to different races. And so after delimiting each piece of land we needed to also identify each piece of land with something, or create a concept that defines each piece of land. For this, we created many ways of representing such a country: A governor, a constitution, “political values”, a flag, a shield, an anthem, etc. Models.

How does that work?. We basically understand a category through its model. We understand the USA as “Donald Trump” and understand very dark skin and afro hair as “black race”. Yet, not all dark-skinned people are completely black or with afro hair and, luckily, not all the USA citizens are like Donald Trump. Also, not all beautiful women are like Miss Universe (whoever that is) and not all sexy men are like Brad Pitt (not that I think he’s super sexy, but alright). When we think about fashion models (either women or men) we are in fact referring to “models of beauty”, meaning that we classified people into “beautiful” and “not beautiful” and so since we needed prototypes of these two categories, we selected those units that were suitable for the such a category of being “beautiful”. A model of beauty is a product of our incapacity to think of the concept “beautiful” as a continuum so we discretized it into 2 categories instead.

Just like with “beautiful”, “black race” and “white race” were also categories emerging from our incapacity of think of people as just individuals and a continuum of genetic traits. We needed to classify them so we could understand what people were. The same incapacity to understand the planet as a whole and survive out of its resources. We needed to partition it into little pieces of land to make sense of it.

So we have a limitation. Just like our eyes are not able to see out of certain range of the electromagnetic spectrum, our mind is not able to understand phenomena as a continuum. The only way we can understand something is by making groups or categories of it. People are classified as introverts or extroverts, rational or emotional. Are we really only limiting our personalities to be in one of those categories?. We cannot understand “personality” as a continuous phenomenon, but we do have the ability to say if a person is one or the other or a little bit of both. The latter is our bonus card in our intrinsic mental incapacity.

Now, whoever has read until now, here’s the sensible topic. Religion. Out of everything that I think about the concept of religion, I will say here that one religion is indeed one model of what a system of values could be. Accepting that idea, just like education is not absolutely defined by schools and teachers, values are not absolutely defined by one religion. There are many possible systems of those values. The way we could structure and understand a system of this type, that governed our actions, was to enclose it in some specific religious ideologies.

“All models are wrong, but some of them are very useful” (attributed to Statistician George Box). And it’s true. We could not really claim that a model defines a phenomenon, but we can claim that it helps understand it.