So
Randy Moss was fined $10,000 for
pretending to moon the crowd in Green Bay over the weekend. I can't be the only one wondering how much he would have been fined if he had actually done it.
Which makes me wonder about the proper proportion between punishment for doing something and punishment for pretending to do it. What if someone decided to do the (now banned, I believe) throat-slash celebration - what would the fine for that be?
Does the fine for pretending to do something depend on how likely it is that you would actually do it? Or on how disturbing a mental image it creates? Or just the current political climate? Or on the reputation of the person who committed the act in question?
Questions like this always bring me back to the same place - how absurdly complex even the simplest, most trivial things become when they involve human behavior and decision making. It makes me think we may never understand very much about why we act the way we do and we may never develop anything beyond the crudest analytical (as opposed to experience based) ability to predict how people will act in a given situation.
Every person is so unique and every situation so different, that any kind of repeatable experiment, or sample size large enough to analyze seems pretty hard to come by (especially with
Terrell Owens injured).
Isaac Asimov postulated, (
in his Foundation series) the development of 'psychologists' who, in his meaning of the term, were scientists who had developed an analytical framework for predicting what people would do and how society would evolve (their rules could only predict the actions of a sufficiently large group of people- they couldn't predict individual behavior).
On the other hand, Neil Postman argued in his essay 'Social Science as Moral Theology' (contained within his '
Conscientious Objections') that we are making a serious mistake by confusing science (along with ideas such as the scientific method and mathematical rules) with sociology, or any kind of human behavior. As he says in the intro,
"there is a measure of cultural self-delusion in the prevalent belief that psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and other moral theologians and doing something different from storytelling".
Postman's conclusion that all we can really do to try and figure out human behavior is to tell stories (his definition of storytelling includes 'studies' such as
Milgram's experiment on obedience) makes sense because stories are really just a recounting of our experience and - in the absence of a rule-based analytical framework - a carefully distilled look at our experience is our only option for trying to understand who we are.
At any rate, I think I lean more towards the Neil Postman view of the world than the Isaac Asimov one. So what's my point, what's the moral of this meandering post? Nothing, it was just a train of thought, that's all.
Labels: complexity, Isaac Asimov, Neil Postman, random thoughts
