In the end, it’s not the obviousness or the complexity of the matters that’s deluding mankind. It’s man himself.
Pawan Mishra, Coinman: An Untold Conspiracy
January 31, 2023
All technologies need an interface to the human, a set of controls. The interface could be a handle, knobs, votes, the words of a language, or the stories themselves. The importance of technologies for humans cannot be understood without acknowledging the significance of the interfaces.
Aaron Z. Lewis in this beautiful post explains interfaces with the example of a thermostat. The old-style thermostat most of us still have is the simplest of dials, you can push it up or down. Underneath it, never to be seen unless something breaks, are electric circuits, the boiler, the boiler’s fuel, the fuel’s geopolitics, climate consequences, and thermodynamics.
Interfaces must hide all that for a reason. Its job is to allow us to control the part of the system we’ve been given control over, the temperature of the room.
An interface is a way to pay attention to what is relevant and it hides the complexity of the whole system. It is anything that mediates our interaction with messy underlying structures. It imposes the illusion of simplicity. It hides the “truth” about how the system looks and works in order to make it easy for me to use. This sort of abstraction and obfuscation is core to how we navigate our physical world.
Lewis continues to explain the significance of this:
The more you expose about the inner workings of a system, the harder it is to interact with it. Nobody wants to control their computer with the circuit board. But there’s always a tradeoff between complexity, truth, and control. The more details are hidden, the harder it is to understand how the system actually works. (And the harder it is to control). The map becomes less and less representative of the territory. We often trade completeness and control for simplicity. We don’t want to have to think too hard.
The classic example of this is maps (with the classic How to Lie with Maps), and Lewis uses it well:
All maps are lies. Useful lies, but lies all the same. They don’t tell you everything about the territory. If they did, they’d be totally useless and impossible to read. Maps show you a highly simplified model of the territory—an incomplete version of the truth based on your goals, context, zoom level, location, etc. They’re helpful because they leave stuff out.
It is important to remember that science is also an interface.
Our best scientific theories are the best maps we currently have, produced by our scientist-cartographers who go out on data gathering expeditions. But we know it is all maps. The theory of today will be replaced tomorrow, as all theories always have been.
We know that a good theory is like a good map, the right trade-off between truth and control. They come with conditions of use. You have to know which map to use in which situation. You have to to look at the map regularly but also look at the real landscape around, your own feet.
Meaning is also the result of the interfaces we use, stories. Stories about the world, what is good and what is bad. Our stories are our maps to ourselves.
Neuroscience has a practical perspective on this. The brain’s job is to predict what comes next and shift the body to the state best suited to that new situation. The brain has no limbs but it can use emotions as tools. Stories elicit emotions and emotions move the body. They work like the brain’s limbs.
The stories that get handed down through generations or through TikTok function just like the thermostat. They spotlight a certain version of reality to simplify the world so we can function in it. It is never the "truth" because we cannot handle the truth, for totally practical reasons.
The catch is that we cannot see the whole system “naked”. We can only see it through that interface. The system includes ourselves. We can only see ourselves through stories, and the job of the stories is to trade off truth for control. We function in the world through our technologies and, in exchange, they shape our reality.