Judging Machines
I hate to admit this, but If you ever see me passing you on the street, I am absolutely judging you. I’m sorry, I can’t help it. I’m a terrible people watcher. Truly, I am awful at it. It comes with being shy, I think. I want to observe and analyze the world, including it’s most fascinating occupants, but I am completely terrified of anyone noticing me do it. Eye contact with random strangers is my kryptonite. So I am left glancing at people out of the corner of my eye or pretending I’m looking the other way through my sunglasses. Still, you notice things.
The type of clothes they wear, the style of their hair, their peculiar size or shape, a crazy (or cool) tattoo, the way they walk, the kids trailing behind. The variety of human existence is infinite, when you look for it, even if you see a lot of patterns and similarities from place to place. All those little thing say something about a person, consciously or unconsciously. The hitch in your step may unknowingly betray some former pain or the edge in your voice some buried frustration, but you wear clothes and style your hair to make a statement. The statement may be you don’t much care about them, but no one picks out a shirt they think is ugly or requests a bad haircut at the barber. If you watch people enough, you will begin to notice some of these small cues. And you will start judging them. You probably already do.
It’s ok, don’t deny it. Everyone does. It feels wrong, in today’s age, to make any generalization or assumption about anything, no matter how innocuous. If I think for a moment that the driver of the little sports car honking at the stoplight, racing down the street, zipping in and out of traffic, is probably an entitled jerk, I pause to remind myself not to judge. He might just be late for an important meeting or rushing his wounded grandma to the hospital. Not likely, but you never know. If I catch myself thinking the mom in the store harassed by three kids and yelling desperate commands must be at the end of her rope, I scold myself for being harsh. It’s a terrible habit. Not the judging. That’s generally harmless. The scolding.
I might as well chastise myself every time I see a puppy and find it cute or a puddle and presume it wet. People are more complicated that any natural phenomenon, and when thinking about them, it is good to remember that everyone is unique, that I don’t know all the circumstances, that I also have strange quirks or undesirable characteristics, that the room for error in making our assessments is infinite, that grace and compassion should always be afforded. It would be wrong (even if inevitable in some degree) to treat someone you just met according only to their choice of clothes. It would be both a moral and a practical mistake to assume that a person’s worth was determined by what you saw them do as you walked down the street. But that’s not what we are doing at all. The truth is that our countless small judgments of the multitude of people we pass each day actually have nothing to do with the other person at all. It does not affect them in the slightest. They will never know it is happening (however much I worry they will). My thoughts on a random stranger have no more impact on them than my admiration has on a rainbow.
Our judgements do, however, have a very large impact on ourselves. They affect the way we move through the world. You have to first make these judgements, about everything at all times, in order to do anything at all. Before you can take a step, you must first decide where you want to go, and though we do it all the time, it’s no simple matter. You can breathe and digest and pump blood in a coma, but any conscious action requires an ethic, some conception of what you want or what is good and some understanding of what actions will move you toward that goal. Getting up from the couch would be impossible if you could not judge the merits of relaxing by the TV against the harm of pissing in your pants or determine whether walking to the bathroom is better than walking toward the kitchen. So a dog (or a kid) will pee on the carpet until you’ve clarified the costs of doing so. Your judgements about the people you pass on the street could be considered a part of the same process. You have to judge something in order to determine whether you should be moving toward it or away from it, whether you want to imitate or avoid it.
But it is more fundamental even than that. Before you can see anything, you must first judge the outlines of it. All the matter in the universe is made of the exact same stuff, just assembled in slightly different arrangements. The light reflecting off of it into your eyes doesn’t come with any metadata. It’s as flat as the pixels on a computer screen, a mess of color in varying intensity. How do you distinguish the clouds from the background of the sky or the cars lined up in a parking lot or the person from the chair they are sitting in? What makes one object distinct from another? It’s not as simple as separating colors. What makes a car, for instance, with its many parts and colors and shades, a single object despite changing shadows and glints of light and splotches of dirt? You could find an infinite number of differences in the shades of even the plainest ball, which you will realize if you ever try to realistically draw one. To call something an object at all is to recognize it as apart from all the other things with which it is infinitely similar and yet infinitely different. To see at all (or hear or feel or smell) requires a method of determining where one thing ends and the next begins, which means creating a hierarchy of which differences and similarities matter and which do not, which have value and which do not. You cannot see at all without first knowing what is important to see.
The value is based on utility. You separate things that have different uses, which you can interact with differently, which might either help or hurt you. You distinguish a cup from the table because you can drink from it and might need to. You distinguish a lion from the brush because it’s stalking and might eat you. So sometimes you see the people in the crowd and sometimes you see only a crowd. Sometimes you see a wall and sometimes the individual bricks in the wall and sometimes the cracks in an individual brick, depending on the reason you are looking at it. What you see and how you see it depends the purpose you give to it. Assigning that value is breaking down the seamless world into manageable parts that be comprehended and utilized.
Judging something, then, is simply the act of seeing it. To return to our original question, if you did not set the incident or person apart as something different or noteworthy or dangerous or useful, you would never have noticed it in the first place. Every time you do so, you reinforce your conception of what is valuable, what is the right way to live, what is the genuine purpose of something, what is the best way to go to reach your goal and avoid danger.
It’s very hard for computers to do this. Recognizing any particular part of an image, such as a face, requires the training an algorithm with millions or billions of similar images. But it’s a natural human ability. We are judging machines. That’s why proving you aren’t a robot involves perceiving the letters in a scrambled image. You can’t prevent yourself from doing it, no matter how much you scold yourself. If you ever managed to, you’d prevent yourself from doing anything at all. But you can imagine why people would want to.
The prick of guilt we all feel when we catch ourselves making some snap judgment about another person is itself a judgment against what has become (with some good reason) society’s highest sin: prejudice. This is a real danger. Because our judgments come naturally, it’s easy to take our them too far, to overfit our experience, and imagine that one instance of behavior or one quirk of appearance tells us everything we need to know about a person or group. Once we interact with someone on an individual level, our attention moves from an abstract value to a discrete person and relationship, where our behavior will have a direct impact. So we bear the responsibility to look at the individual on a deeper level, acknowledging in humility that our initial judgment may be mistaken, that we are missing most of the important information, that we are all complex beings with a variety of behaviors and motivations depending on our environment and circumstances. If you cannot move your attention from the general or the group to the specific and individual, then you literally cannot know or even notice them. You’ll miss the trees for the forest.
The danger arises not from the basic necessity of judging but from a misunderstanding of its nature and a careless denial of its purpose. You can’t fix the problem of discrimination by denying the need to make distinctions between things. Closing your eyes and pretending the world is perfectly equal is a great way to trip over the nearest rock. You won’t find your way out of the woods by believing any direction you take will lead you home. You have to first fix your eyes on the proper goal in order to discern which way to go. Not setting any goal—that is, never trying to discriminate between what is good and what is bad—will leave you just as disoriented as setting the wrong goal. You will inevitably head in some direction, have some prejudices, have some conception of what you want, have some standard with which you measure yourself and others, but if you do not consciously examine it, you will have no control over it, you will follow your whim or your appetite or your basest passions. Because you can’t lose the ability to discriminate. You can only lose the ability to discriminate well. You can’t stop seeing. But you can stop seeing the truth.
We’re familiar with the terrible consequences of overdiscrimination (or misdirected discrimination) throughout history. Now we are seeing the consequences of a lack of discrimination. We can’t see each other. We can’t hear each other. We don’t know where to draw the lines and we can’t tell when we’ve crossed them, so we rush headlong into opposite extremes. Because we are unwilling to say what is right and what is wrong except discrimination itself, we stumble around, blind and aimless, never able to separate people or behavior from their most general categories. When we have no value except that discrimination by race is wrong (and it is), we lose the ability to judge people by anything except race. When our only guiding principle is the expression of the self, we lose the ability to see anything else outside of ourselves. Looking inward is the surest way to become lost. You can follow your own passions forever in the same direction without anything to suggest you might be heading the wrong way.
The only answer to bad judgment is better judgment. Good judgment is the act of seeing things clearly, which means giving to each thing its proper value. It starts at the top. Know what you are looking for or striving toward, and you will be able to discern all that is necessary to rise to it, from the first step or thought. You will have a means to correct yourself when you run off course and the vision to avoid the obstacles in your way. You will have the clarity to see both the general humanity of people and also the unique individual in all of them, the evil in others to avoid but also the good to celebrate and nurture. Don’t close your eyes and so wander aimlessly in the darkness. Look first to the highest good and the whole world will be bathed in its light.