Multi-tasking

I never cease to be amused at the multitude of inanities that are accepted hook, line and sinker. This morning I heard a fellow on the radio (on the NPR affiliate's little section which is sort of public access, where folks come on and blissfully demonstrate their inexpertise at one topic or another) make three statements of "scientific fact" that are, at very best, widely spread assumptions that have no basis in any actual scientific methodology.

While this sort of garbage is fairly typical, I almost threw something at the radio when he was announced as "a science writer." Good Lord, I can only guess what sort of publications would have this guy writing about science. Probably any daily newspaper.

We are no different from our ancestors in our inability, as a mass, to grasp complex scientific ideas. We tend to want answers, and they had better be general answers. Science often raises more questions, and the answers it gives are almost always specific. Excrutiatingly specific. So, we get chattering folks to scan the studies and come up with little generalities that can be repeated until they are so familiar that they must be true.

The difference between our Dark Age and prior Dark Ages (and I consider the vast part of the human experience since the Fall to be one Dark Age after another, differently disabled, yet united in their belief that NOW, unlike in those prior dim times, we are no longer in a Dark Age) is that we have had electronic media to saturate our culture with these silly and false generalities almost instantly. And, unlike the situation fifty years ago, we have become virtuosi in manipulating said media.

Take your pick of complex open-ended topics that have nowhere near a valid scientific conclusion: the causes of global warming, human sexuality, the link between various deviant behaviors and genetics, environmental toxicology, etc., and with a week's reading of any major newspaper, you will know the commonly held "scientific consensus." Of course it will be no more or less valid than whatever view the loafer on the courthouse steps held last Tuesday, but it will have incredibly pressing currency among the Chattering Classes.

I have decided to get into the scientific fact business myself. Now, sometimes I think that the sexes are equally disposed to getting carried away with faddish inanities, and other times I think that the fairer sex has such balderdash hard-wired into its DNA. So, in the spirit of the age, I have done a study. It was a scientific study. I am a writer. I have authority. There is no need to talk about my methodology in any depth, just suffice to say that I interviewed people.

Women are more disposed to this claptrap than men.

One of the beliefs that women love to talk about is "multi-tasking," usually followed by some ignorant discourse on human anthropology, often with outrageous assumptions as to the social organization and habitat of early hominids. Women believe that they are better "multi-taskers" by which what they really mean is that they are more apt to multi-task.

Today, driving back from Berkeley, I was at a stop light. The woman in front of me was putting on her makeup. The woman to my left was putting on her makeup. Behind me the woman was fumbling around in an oversized bag. I was basically watching my surroundings, staying alert for possible hazards when the light changed, which it did, apparently only to my knowledge. After a gentle tap on the horn, one of the amateur cosmetologists put aside her beauty tasks to give me an obscene gesture before finally getting to the primary task at hand: piloting a half ton of steel down a busy road. As we drove on, the site of the rummager grew smaller and smaller in my rearview mirror.

I have long suspected that these proud "multitaskers" of both sexes, are essentially robbing Peter to pay Paul who is being robbed to pay Emily who is being robbed to pay... I know that when I am reading and talking on the phone, the reading is the real task at hand. The talking on the phone becomes the distraction, usually indicated by slightly innapropriate responses:

"and then the cat was skewered by the drug addicted thug."
"ah, cat's. They are fun."
"Uh-huh. Are you paying attention to what I am saying?"
"Usually 'at ease' comes after 'attention'"
"Look, I'll call you back when you have time to talk."
"Oh, yeah. No hurry. Talk to you next month."

Certainly I am shortchanging one of the tasks, but in this case it is the intentional effect.

Cooking a multi-course meal is multi-tasking, and it takes considerable planning and practice, for both men and women. To go into a multi-course meal without the requisite planning and practice is necessarily to fail or to survive by Grace or dumb luck even.

So, I was particularly amused to find this article. Is it true? Who cares, but it will probably be the next accepted thing.

So, you make-up applying, cell-phone jabbering, book-reading while driving ditzes out there be warned: the tide is turning against you.

Posted by erik at March 28, 2007 9:46 AM