Field vs Point

As a cognitive activist (I think about how humans relate with language and ideas — individually, and in groups) I’ve noticed a gigantic uptick in a specific behavior that has become increasingly prevalent. It involves a foundational flaw with common habits as regards ‘analyzing a situation’.

The flaw? Generalizations that exceed all reasonable scope. It’s an enormously common issue, and it is often crippling to the »possibilities of understanding, forming ideas, and our responsive potential.

A »field is, most often in our experience, an incredibly complex array of unique local factors, vulnerabilities, opportunities and forms of analysis. It can be understood to have »layers that influence each other. This better resembles complex situations such as pandemics or demographics.

While some features may be shared by local experiencers, the individual will vary from ‘norms’ (i.e. generalizations) in all kinds of ways, many of which »cannot be captured by analysis of any kind.

Field-thinking »starts out by recognizing the uniqueness of locality, individuals, participants, responses, and so on.

Point-thinking discards all of that in favor of a convenient (but often lethal) ‘frame collapse’. It pretends that over-arching generalizations (nearly never appropriate) are ‘true’ or ‘are what is going on’. The short take? Almost never correct or intelligent.

Actual phenomenon are complex. More like fields. They are not ‘point-like’, the habit of ‘taking the point for the field’ is ruining our capacity to make sense of things.

This is why there’s so much wobble in public communications around the pandemic: media organizations, and people influenced by them are making ‘point-like’ declarations about field-like situations.

This move evicts from our access and awareness the actual complexity we must come to terms with; replacing all of that with a ‘blanket statement’ that effectively ruins sense-making. Seems convenient. Actual outcome? Usually catastrophic.

And this is one of the lessons of the Pandemic, that each instance of a situation or disease… patient or location… is, necessarily unique. These, taken together, form a field. Viewing it as a field in consciousness is necessary. Collapsing it to »a point is not merely wrong, it’s reckless and deceptive.