fields of knowledge

Stay in your lane. Stick to your knitting. These are perhaps the worst cliché words of advice anyone can give in our interconnected, networked world.

For much of history, particularly since The Enlightenment, our societies have been quite adept at creating classifications and creating fields of work and study.

At the end of the day, fields represent a specific kind of research machinery: a collection of rallying cries, norms, funders, and bureaucratic arrangements that are designed to output new insights about the world at large. Fields rise and fall on the strength of their ability to deliver knowledge and useful ideas. Researchers – particularly the good ones – coalesce around productive fields because they are also the most effective engines for pursuing the questions they want to pursue. At the end of the day, that is what matters. —Field Essentialism

Fields are often created to be useful but they can also be used for power and control. I remember visiting the Apartheid Museum in South Africa and one of the rooms showed all the laws around race that had been in place during the apartheid regime. These started as a few laws but more kept being added as there was no way to make a complex field merely complicated.

The apartheid bureaucracy devised complex (and often arbitrary) criteria at the time that the Population Registration Act was implemented to determine who was Coloured. Minor officials would administer tests to determine if someone should be categorised either Coloured or White, or if another person should be categorised either Coloured or Black. The tests included the pencil test, in which a pencil was shoved into the subjects’ curly hair and the subjects made to shake their head. If the pencil stuck they were deemed to be Black; if dislodged they were pronounced Coloured. Other tests involved examining the shapes of jaw lines and buttocks and pinching people to see what language they would say “Ouch” in. As a result of these tests, different members of the same family found themselves in different race groups. Further tests determined membership of the various sub-racial groups of the Coloureds. —Wikipedia

Similar discussions and decisions about sex and gender are making sport more complicated.

DSDs [Disorder(s) of Sex Development] are a hugely complex group of conditions. These abnormalities challenge both our scientific and social understanding of what ‘sex’ and ‘sexual differentiation’ are. The management of DSDs is challenging; the traditional approach bases sex assignment around future reproductive potential, future sexual potential and the cosmetic appearance of the external genitalia.16 Recent neuroscience research suggests that sexual dimorphism of the brain may occur prenatally, implying that gender-typical behaviour may be determined prior to sex assignment at birth. A more flexible approach to DSD management, involving parental decision making and close liaison with a child psychiatrist, is currently suggested.

Sport has struggled with the issue of gender anomalies for years and the controversy regarding how to ‘test’ for DSD remains. Chromosomes can be tested but sex is not so easily determined – our upbringing and society’s attitude towards us plays a crucial role in defining sex. For those female athletes with DSD, it seems far more likely that they are doing their best to compete as the sex chosen for them at birth rather than attempting to attain unfair advantage through masquerading their gender. As such, compulsory gender verification seems unfair, humiliating and unproductive in the majority of situations, although vigilance must remain to identify those whose aim is to win no matter what the cost. —Intersex and the Olympic Games

I noted in hierarchies, experts, and dogma that established and institutionalized professional organizations too often lack the diversity of thinking necessary to deal with complex problems. In 2019 The Long Now Foundation stated that The Enlightenment is Dead, to be replaced by The Entanglement.

As we are becoming more entangled with our technologies, we are also becoming more entangled with each other. The power (physical, political, and social) has shifted from comprehensible hierarchies to less-intelligible networks. We can no longer understand how the world works by breaking it down into loosely-connected parts that reflect the hierarchy of physical space or deliberate design. Instead, we must watch the flows of information, ideas, energy, and matter that connect us, and the networks of communication, trust, and distribution that enable these flows … [going on to conclude] … Unlike the Enlightenment, where progress was analytic and came from taking things apart, progress in the Age of Entanglement is synthetic and comes from putting things together. Instead of classifying organisms, we construct them. Instead of discovering new worlds, we create them. And our process of creation is very different.” —The Enlightenment is Dead

Over-classification and the limitations of field boundaries may not be the best ways to understand complex relationships. In the personal knowledge mastery framework, diversity is key to sensemaking — diversity > learning > trust. Seeking knowledge networks, active sense-making, and public sharing, are practices that need to be widespread. This is how we can deal with ambiguity and complexity.