On Sticks and the Capacity to Poke
I want to start with a little bit of table-setting here by way of an introduction to this piece and this blog both so you the reader know what to expect and so I can assure you I’m aware of the flaws here. This piece, as will be immediately apparent, is not an attempt at a rigorous academic synthesis. I’m going to be very light in my definitions and I’m going to make bold, perhaps unsupportable statements in the interest of building up a more comprehensive and digestible argument – if I’ve done my job right, you’ll have a new mental tool by the end for understanding situations you’re in, and maybe some starting points for your own exploration.
I believe the basic thing that humans do that gives us our power is symbolic abstraction and then symbolic manipulation. We take a branch from a tree and turn it into a poking stick, and then abstract that to taking any branch from any tree and turning it into an object that can poke things, and can now talk about the benefits of poking, and the characteristics of items for poking, and then conjecture about the use of many poking items in contexts that don’t include trees or sticks. Simultaneously, we can abstract from “take this particular branch from this particular tree” into “go into that collection of trees and extract a collection of objects for poking” and then build plans that would require many poking objects without having to dwell on which trees and which branches we’re using.
This immediately creates a tension, though. Every tree is different, every branch is different, and the characteristics of each poking object derived hence from is different. Some of these differences can be ignored, some of them cannot, and being a poking-stick-maker is understanding that difference – what is the essence of poking-ness that matters, and how do we conform a heterogeneous pile of poking sticks into the fundamental capacity to poke. Simultaneously, the variability of poking-stick making success and effort is wider than our normal estimates, and so the abstraction from “forest” into “capability to poke” is not as clean as we’d like it to be – we cannot always ignore the quiddities of the forest in our plans for poking.
However, being a poking-capacity-leverager requires abstracting away from the quiddities of the forest into a uniform capacity to poke, because what we’re doing then – the art of creating complex civilization – is taking that abstract capacity to poke and combining it with, eg, the springiness of a branch and the cut-iness of rock struck just so and turning it into the ability to poke things far away, and then taking that ability to poke things far away and turning it into the ability to Poke the Other without being Poked yourself, and then leveraging that ability to Poke without being Poked into the ability to make that group of hairless apes stay away from your food.
So there’s a natural tension up and down the ladder between poking-stick maker and poking-capacity leverager – the poking-stick maker must understand enough of the process of making a poking stick to be able to create the abstraction of poking from the raw material of a stick, and the poking-capacity leverager needs to be able to ignore all of that and treat the capacity to poke as a foundation upon which they can plan how much food the tribe needs.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that the ability to abstract from the concept of poking to the amount of food the tribe needs is the thing that’s allowed humanity to take over the world. Say what you will about the poking-capacity-leveragers, but food planning is why relatively weak and somewhat dim hairless apes are now the apex predator on the planet.
But, what the poking-capacity-leveragers tend to ignore is that every step up and down the ladder is exactly as complex as the prior – food-storage-planning is not actually a harder problem than poking-stick-creation, because poking-stick-creation involves understanding the stick, the forest, and the creation process well enough to take an enormously heterogeneous supply of sticks and create repeatable poking out of them. Just because we’ve abstracted the problem of making poking sticks into the capacity to poke doesn’t actually mean the difficulty of making poking sticks has gone away – it’s just as hard as it was before, the variability is still there, and without the large body of poking-stick creation science at hand, it’s impossible to look at a forest and understand how much poking that translates to. Knowledge of how poking maps to food does not provide knowledge of how forests map to poking.
Poking-capacity-leveraging is a fundamentally abstract process – such and such amount of forest translates to such and such amount of poking. Poking-stick-making is a fundamentally concrete process – a birch tree grown on gravel pokes less than an ash tree grown on clay, and that’s just a fundamental law of poking. No amount of abstraction lets a birch poker poke like an ash poker, no matter how much the poking-capacity-leveragers wish it would.
Poking-stick making is a craft, and that’s something that humans do very, very well. We learn by doing, and by experience, we learn with our hands and our bodies and our ears and noses and eyes, we learn the full character of poking-ness and the full character of stick-ness and how to find the poking in the stick. To paraphrase Michelangelo, we remove all of the superfluous stick to reveal the poke.
Poking-capacity leveraging is an art, and this is also something that humans do very, very well. We see the poking, we understand what it means to poke and to be poked, and we imagine what could happen were we to poke another, and how they might react to that poking. We look at a forest and understand it as the capacity to poke, and then dream of what one could do if one could poke the universe.
When these work in harmony, we really can poke the universe! We put a telescope in space that sees in light we cannot to probe the first microseconds of creation! We caught a virus and turned it into a vaccine in a weekend! We are as gods – we’ve certainly outdone the greek lot, and at our best, we joust with the Abrahamic. Our capacity to stretch ourselves up into the boundless infinity and down into the subtle interplay between quarks and to leverage the latter to guide the former is what makes us who we are.
But many of us get caught in the middle – when you’ve abstracted something out of your model, it’s hard to see why it matters. It’s a box in a chart, and understanding that box contains an entire universe to itself is difficult when it’s just one box in your universe. Similarly, being told that your universe, with all its majesty, complexity, and beauty, is just a box in someone else’s chart is dispiriting. The art of creating amazing things is learning to transcend and move between the layers – how to have each instrument in the symphony playing at its best while making sure they harmonize into the whole composition without losing the best of either layer. How to shape the box, what shapes the box can take, and how to make a universe out of a pile of boxes.
The other core skill for humans is trust. Learning to listen when the box tells you it is a pyramid and not a sphere, or that it is a 3ft sphere and not a 4ft sphere, and learning when a diamond is a square but a square is not a diamond, requires listening to the people for whom your box is a universe and understanding you can’t see what they see. Simultaneously, learning how to tell someone that your universe is load bearing on the sides and not on the corners, not that it all falls over when you tilt it to the side, requires understanding how people outside your universe see your universe and where they’re trying to put it.
The problem for most poking-stick makers is that somehow the poking-capacity leveragers have found themselves in charge of the food supply, which puts them in a very powerful position when determining how much time they spend understanding why your box is not a diamond when it really looks like it should be. It feels like all of the power is in the hands of the poking-capacity leveragers.
But here’s the secret: the abstract capacity to poke is nothing without actual poking sticks. The universe of possibilities that arise with the capacity to poke – the ability to poke the universe, and more importantly, the ability to feed the village – is nothing but a dream without the sticks with which to poke. The poking-capacity leveragers are playing with fantasies – big fantasies, important fantasies, but fantasies nonetheless. Without a stick to poke, it doesn’t matter what would happen if you poked the universe. Without someone to create the stick, you cannot poke, and a stick is not the capacity to poke, it’s a stick.
This is an important distinction in the modern world for two reasons. The first is that, by and large, we’ve become a people who prize the abstract and denigrate the concrete. The assemblage of abstract principles into higher-order concepts and capacities is, as noted, the basis of civilization. It’s also utterly, utterly reliant on the continued exercise and expansion of the rigor and craft we try to abstract away when we do so. Over time, we’ve come to shift more and more of society’s resources to the stick-capacity-leveragers, and over time, we’ve come to lose sight of the universe required to make a stick. Today, we’re pretty sure we can automate away making a stick, that we can ignore the world of the stick when planning how we might poke. This is a fantasy. The harder we push in this direction, the more we learn that everything we’ve written out of our models still exists – climate change, the current mental health crises, the collapse of democracy, and the ever-increasing sense of existential dread and ennui among the younger generations are because we’ve mistaken the map for the territory, because we ignored the needs of the trees when we came for our sticks and are finding we’re running out of trees.