Theories

UCLA Professor of psychology Ben Karney likens theories to maps during a lecture on Theories and Intimate Relationships. Just like maps, theories are highly compressed explanations of phenomena of the world that help guide our behaviors. Theories are more than just a collection of facts, it's organized knowledge that helps reduce the complexities of phenomena into more manageable and simplified parts.

During the second part of the lecture, professor Thomas Bradbury likens theories to drawings of cartoon caricatures where certain features are exaggerated; they depict reality in a distorted and exaggerated manner by taking away certain details and exaggerating certain ones. Exaggerating certain features and doing away with other details allows one to clearly see certain regularities in nature.

I'm often dismissive of theories because they tend to be flawed and contradictory. But I need to realize just as there are no perfect maps or perfect drawings, there are almost no perfect theories especially when it comes to social, psychological and philosophical theories. If you were to create a massive 3d map of the world with a 1:1 scale with all the details of the actual landscape, you'd have have the world. But what good would such a massive and detailed map be with helping to navigate a city or Machu Pichu? Compressing and simplifying the world into a smaller map allows one to navigate the world more easily.

Human nature is extremely complex and can be interpreted in numerous ways. We can never fully understand every single little detail of human nature, but we seek out patterns, draw inferences from observing human behavior and create theories that help explain aspects of human behavior. This flies in the face of the adage to never generalize. But if we never generalize, the pictures on the screen are mere random pixels, climate doesn't exist because weather is completely random and text in a book are just random characters with no meaning.

With all the information that exists about human behavior, all I can do is, "Absorb what is useful. Discard what is not. Add what is uniquely your own." as Bruce Lee said. Our minds are finite in its capacity to understand the world and we are prone to errors, biases and all sorts of faulty reasoning. But we can have  general theories with elements of truths about the world that can help us navigate it. I'm going to be more observant of my and other people's behavior and create my own theories about humans keeping in mind to not take them overly seriously and allow the theories to be subject to change. I'll try to not fall for errors of reasoning but will refrain from trying to create perfect theories (or I'll end up creating no theories).