Anne Truitt Zelenka

Merlin Mann of 43 Folders has been exploring mindfulness and recently read Ellen Langer’s book on that subject. Though Langer takes a nondenominational approach in her book, many of her ideas overlap significantly with Buddhist principles, such as her perspective on categories, described here by Merlin:

The topic of “categories” is critical in this book, with the author suggesting that the child-like ability to re-label and re-categorize, even or especially as we age, is a key factor in continual growth — let alone things like creativity and, in a particularly colorful example, the tactic to lure Napoleon deep into Russia for his “self-defeating occupation of Moscow.”

Buddhists believe that getting stuck thinking in stale categories leads to duhkha, a term many translate as suffering but which might be more usefully thought of as disharmony or being out of kilter, following Steve Hagen’s ideas in Buddhism Plain and Simple. If you always cut up the world in particular ways, your mind grows rigid and you’re unable to take fresh views. You can’t adjust and fit your thinking to what’s really going on. If, on the other hand, you are willing to discard old ways of thinking when they no longer fit the situation, you can meet the world with flexibility and creativity.

I recently decided to quit blogging for BlogHer when I realized that covering women bloggers separately set up too rigid a division in my own mind between women bloggers and everyone else. I did gain something by focusing for a short time on women bloggers. For example, I discovered Christine Herron’s blog, where she covers VC issues and blogs a variety of interesting workshops and conferences. This week she’s been blogging the Internet Identity Workshop. Wrestling with the vast BlogHer Tech & Web blogroll made me question how anyone could question whether women tech bloggers exist. But after a while it felt old. It tasted stale. I was working in a box that wasn’t the right shape or size. That’s what relying on the same old categories can do. In this case, the category was gender, a category which is all too often used to define people. I should know, for as much as I’ve done it myself.

Web 2.0 is itself Buddhist in its approach to categorizing information and knowledge. Tags are the ultimate in tentative, nonfrozen categories. If categories are fundamentalist, tags are Buddhist.

Yet I’m loath to say that always being flexible and always remaining open to new categorizations or other new ways of thinking is the certain path to good judgment. Psychologist Philip Tetlock, author of Expert Political Judgment: How Good is It? How Can We Know? has researched human judgment extensively. In a 2003 paper on judgment, Tetlock notes that people who value open-ended exploration and avoid premature closure on decisions can be too flexible in their thinking:

…it is a mistake to suppose that high-need-for-closure experts were at a uniform disadvantage when it came to satisfying widely upheld standards of rationality within the field of judgment and decision making. There was one major class of judgmental bias—a violation of a basic coherence standard of rationality— that our more “open-minded”, low-need-for-closure respondents were more prone to exhibit: namely, the subadditivity effect linked to unpacking classes of alternative counterfactual outcomes. Respondents who did not place a high value on parsimony and explanatory closure often wound up being too imaginative and assigning too much subjective probability to too many scenarios (with the result that subjective probabilities summed to well above 1.0).

Always being willing to recategorize and look at a situation using a different framework can be too imaginative, divorce a thinker from what’s realistically possible. As in everything I confront these days, I see no simple answer. Hardened, stale categories lead to old-fashioned, rigid thinking. Infinitely imaginative categories aren’t realistic. Again, Buddhism offers a way through: the middle way, the avoidance of extremism. Just as it would be a mistake to keep your stale old categories even when they no longer meshed with your experience and the world at large, it is a mistake to completely discard categorization schemes that have some practical value.