Ask The Big Questions

The idea for this post sat in my drafts for 16 months because I feared coming off as someone who doesn't understand the value of measurement or impact. On the contrary: throughout my 20s, I worked in no fewer than 15 labs—ranging in psychology from the social/emotional ("quantifying the experience of inspiration") to the neurobiological ("visuo-spatial representations in Alzheimer's disease"). When I moved to NYC, my first job as a newly-minted postgraduate was in a neurobiology lab in the basement of Mount Sinai where I was tasked with managing the data of mice. As a doctoral student, I cultivated a certain obsessive joy in transforming the qualitative into the quantitative— coding adolescents' arguments into numbers by the nature of their quality. My favorite class in grad school was HUDM 5059 - Psychological Measurement. The all-encompassing mantra that Only Findings of Statistical Significance Are Worth Considering spread into my life outside of labs, too.

The concept I describe in this post is like taking a tape measure to the Louvre with the exclusive goal of quantifying all paintings wider than 108”- failing to experience anything else as you go from room to room- emerging victorious and underwhelmed. As humans, we steep ourselves in feelings of superiority as expert judges of what’s meaningful. We pride ourselves in the advanced nature of our questions and the statistical fashionings of our results. Often, our scope is hilariously myopic; we rarely realize it. How have we convinced ourselves to be so wholly satisfied by the limits of our imagination?

It would be natural extension to use my experience in academia to quantify the impact of kelp on NYS waterways and that others want to know the answers- except that, when I try to map what I learned from those experiences onto growing kelp, I’m faced with the inconvenient reminder that the questions we (nonprofit and research sectors) are pushed to ask are too often fashioned by the drive to secure future financial prosperity and reputational gravitas. Those boring answers slide into the driver’s seat of our conversations, and we ride along complacently down endless, narrow roads.

I’ve watched Principal Investigators shove, whittle, and contort their passions into the narrow (often, completely adjacent) parameters of grant applications too many times to believe that the things we know about kelp today are resulting from passionate people asking all of their greatest questions, no strings attached.

Now before I ruffle any feathers out there any further: I’m not saying you shouldn’t measure the impact of kelp on waterways- positive or negative. Or the impact of anything on waterways. I’m not anti-research! I’m saying that (1) any single finding- or inability to secure a particular requested finding- shouldn’t deliver the ultimate referendum on whether something is generally worthwhile; (2) we should take care to recognize that we’re actively choosing what we do (and don’t) measure, and our selections represent a tiny sliver of all inquiries available to us.

I’m saying this: if you ask a small question, you’ll get a small answer.

Let’s zoom out. What about all the impacts of kelp on our waterways and ecosystems that we can’t- or won’t, in this lifetime- measure? How do you measure the positive feeling you get from growing something new with your neighbors? How do you measure how that inspiration spreads throughout a community across zip codes and generations?

What about all the impacts of kelp on our waterways and ecosystems that we’re simply incapable of measuring? Mother Nature has been in a 23-million-year relationship with kelp- she built the first superhighway with it which led to migration between entire continents. Mother nature is an absolute mastermind of balancing intricate ecosystems with kelp as her ride-or-die since the beginning, and here we have Kathy Hochul, behind her veneered wooden desk, to decide at this particular moment for all of us whether kelp has a positive, meaningfully urgent, place on this planet?

Please.

I’m just as puzzled by the normalized pressures of industry to tout our program's impact as I would be by a call to try and understand whether some marginal mount of fresh water or sunlight is more or less impactful on someone’s overall health and well-being than some slightly smaller quantity.

I understand how we got here. Organizations must jockey for money to survive. They're on a quest that determines their future (become bigger, stronger, more financially stable) orthogonal to the mission (which should be, in as many cases as possible, to efficiently utilize resources with the eventual goal of closing up shop because they solved the problem; I recognize that this goal can’t apply to all, but I think it applies to more out there than some themselves realize).

Yes, impact is important- except that the quest to measure and describe it must include an honest, soul-searching examination of the questions that frame the impact we’re chasing. Which questions are we leaving out? Which questions are of the most immediate urgency of all, but we’re afraid to ask them because when we peek ahead to the implications, it sounds hard and scary? We need to ask those and then chase them.

If you only listen at a certain volume, you will only hear what’s playing.