One of my favorite parables is the story of the blind men and the elephant. It comes from the Indian subcontinent, and has been a part of basically all of the religions that came from that area. Here’s the basic gist of the story (forgive the androcentric nature of the story, as with nearly all old religious stories, it’s basically just dudes):
6 old blind wise men are told that there is an elephant on the outskirts of their village. None of them knew what an elephant was, and so they went over to see what they could find out by feeling the elephant.
“Hey, the elephant is a pillar,” said the first man who touched his leg.
“Oh, no! it is like a rope,” said the second man who touched the tail.
“Oh, no! it is like a thick branch of a tree,” said the third man who touched the trunk of the elephant.
“It is like a big hand fan” said the fourth man who touched the ear of the elephant.
“It is like a huge wall,” said the fifth man who touched the belly of the elephant.
“It is like a spear,” Said the sixth man who touched the tusk of the elephant.
They proceeded to argue with each other about what the elephant was like. Each man so sure of their characterization of it because they are so sure of how they perceived it.
In a way, they were all right, but they were also all wrong.
They were right in that their specific experience seemed to them like a rope, a tree, a fan, etc. But they were wrong in that they tried to take their experience and make a general conclusion about what the whole elephant was like. They overstepped the bounds of what they experienced.
The Two Components of the Problem
At work in this story are two problems that still have devastating effects in our ever-more communicative society. Lets examine them in turn.
The Duhem-Quine Thesis
You will often hear people say “the data tell us” — implying that the data do the work of telling us how things are. But that characterization skips a step. The data don’t tell us anything. The data are just pieces of information that we make into a story. We do this by analyzing it, and that analysis involves all sorts of preconceptions.
In the middle of the twentieth century, scientist Pierre Duhem and philosopher W.V.O Quine both criticized this way of seeing scientific evidence. Their thesis is complicated, but lying under it is the same problem we see with the men touching the elephant: they smuggle in their theories in with their perceptions. We do the same thing.
When we come into a situation and make what we think are just simple objective observations, we’re actually using our existing worldview to classify and label what we see, hear, and feel. So our characterization of observations are “theory-laden” — they are wrapped in the blankets of our worldview and our assumptions.
Realizing that this is the first step in becoming better at navigating disputes, debates, and disagreements. It will help you to ask better questions, and gather better information.
Dispersed Knowledge
Another component of this elephant story is something called dispersed knowledge. Originally written about by F.A. Hayek, the concept essentially says that no single person or entity has all of the relevant information to make a decision. Information is necessarily dispersed, pieces of it exist in different places, with different people.
For Hayek and his followers, this was the main reason why centrally planned economies failed. They did not have all of the necessary information to set prices, produce goods, and distribute in a way that kept an economy afloat. The hubris of assuming that all of the necessary information can be gathered in one place is just that — unfounded pride before the fall.
The men feeling the elephant are a classic illustration of dispersed knowledge. They each have vital information, but none has all of it. Rather than think of that as a possibility, they proceed as if they had the authority of full knowledge.
Ask yourself, how often are you acting without acknowledging the dispersal of knowledge? How often do you think that you — or your trusted sources have the full story?
What You Can Do to Be Less Blind
We do this all of the time. We fail to both:
- Resist the urge to take our limited perception and form a broader generalization from it.
- Give others the benefit of the doubt that they are at least partly right in their assessment.
We’re all blind, and we’re all feeling different parts of the elephant. All we have to do is open our minds to the possibility that others bring valuable experiences and ideas to the table — ones that can conflict with our ideas. If we can do that, we stand to learn so much more, and gain valuable relationships with others.
This is more than just a parable. It’s a framework for checking your own assumptions — to keep you from jumping from your experience to conclusions about how things are. Here’s how to overcome your blindness and gain better perspective — no matter what the issue:
I prepared the below worksheet to help get you thinking about things from 6 perspectives. Click the link below to access it:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B0Wt_3wbTW_3Rnh0azhBd05nOW8
Spend some time with it. Think about how you see things, and how others involved see things. See what you can come up with. How has your worldview or experience colored your observations? Have you thought about what knowledge you might not have? Answering these questions can be a huge help in getting you thinking about things from a wider perspective — and that can make all the difference.
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